Fixing everything, really slowly

The Dilemma

It’s summer here in the Northern hemisphere, and evenings are perfect for grilling. But as you head out the back door with a plate of veggie burgers and kebabs, is it more sustainable to light up some charcoal, or use a propane tank?

via Sustainability Showdown: Gas vs Charcoal by Steven Skoczen – SixLinks.org.

Great bit of green geekery, I like the level and tone of the analysis:

The CO2 production in beef or pork far outstrips the CO2 you make cooking the food. So if you’re looking to be more sustainable, the most important place to start is with what’s on your grill.

Keen readers will recall this posting from last year about the petition to “levy a tax on energy inefficient light bulbs so that their long term financial and environmental cost is visible in their retail price”. I’ve just got an email telling me of the governments response: (my comments in line)

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has written the following message exclusively for people who recently signed petitions on the No10 website about climate change.

Why not share it more widely Hilary?

Mr Benn highlights the UK Government’s commitment to seeking international agreement on a post-2012 climate change framework, and encourages petitioners, their families, and friends, to use the new CO2 Calculator.

Message from Hilary Benn

I understand that you recently signed a petition on the No10 website about climate change.

As Government, business, and the public, we all need to work closely together to tackle climate change. Climate change poses the most urgent challenge to humankind – a challenge that threatens not only the environment but international peace and security, prosperity and development.

That is why the UK Government is committed to seeking international agreement on a post-2012 climate change framework and is showing leadership on how we can build the low carbon economy that such an agreement will promote. Our Climate Change Bill, for example, will make the UK the first country in the world to put our commitment to reduce emissions by at least 60% on the statute book. And the Prime Minister recently announced that we will ask the Climate Change Committee, once it is established, to review this target to see if it should be even higher.

I hope you will feel that the Bill demonstrates that the UK takes its responsibilities for reducing global emissions seriously. This challenge is for all of us as individuals too. That is why the Government is helping people to act on reducing CO2 emissions. Given your interest in this issue, I thought I would bring to your attention the Act on CO2 Calculator that is now available on Directgov: www.direct.gov.uk/ActOnCO2 (new window)

You can use the calculator to work out your own carbon footprint, and to obtain recommendations about how you can help tackle climate change.

I hope you will find this useful and that you might think about recommending it to your family and friends. As the carbon calculator has recently been launched, we would also appreciate your comments, using the feedback link on the site itself.

Finally, we are looking at ways in which we can keep people up to date with developments on climate change, and would like to do more using the web and e-mail. If you would like to receive e-mail messages and alerts on the issue in future, please click here and complete the form (if you cannot access this link, please type https://qbaseprojects.co.uk/defra/survey.asp?id=7 into your browser).

If you do provide your details, they will be used sparingly and solely for the purposes of communicating with you about climate change.

Thank you for your interest in this vital issue.

Best wishes

Hilary Benn

Secretary of State, Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs

Ok, Hilary thanks for the message, it seems like you’ve ignored the request of the petition and simply used this an a chance to market your online CO2 calculator. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for the mesaures you’ve highlighted, but you haven’t acknoledged the subject of the petition or explanined whether you think it is a good or bad idea, whether you think it is feasable etc.

Thanks for nothing!

Melanie’s Bean Sprouts blog makes for interesting reading if you are interested in practical things to help the environment. Having changed our electricity supplier last year to npower’s Juice tarif I had assumed I was buying electricity from 100% renewable sources. It turns out I’m not …

Bean Sprouts – Melanie Rimmer

[..]

… The electricity companies’ implication is that if you’re on a green tarriff, they input as much extra renewable energy into the grid as you use (making your use effectively “green”). But this isn’t the case. In reality, the companies generate as much power as they can sell to the grid at any given time, period. So your decision to go on a “green” tarriff makes no difference to the power generated – it’s still 4.2% renewable, and nothing has changed unless the supplier is bringing new renewable plant onstream with your money. And there’s the key; most of the companies offering “green” tarriffs aren’t doing that.

[..]

It’s not all doom and gloom though …

… if you want to change your electricity supplier because you’re concerned about climate change, it’s important to choose a supplier which invests in new renewable energy projects.

Fortunately there is a website to help you do just that. It is http://www.whichgreen.org/. I have included the latest figures from them as the image in the top left of this article. As you can see, Ecotricity comes top of the league by a long way.

[..]

Like Melanie I’m currently using npower, which actually wasn’t too bad a few years back, but now sucks. I just wish I didn’t have to fill in a load of forms and talk to people to switch suppliers.

Aaron Cohen

[...]
Following on from Australia’s pledge to phase out the usage of incandescent bulbs, the 27 leaders of the European Union have decided that all member states will have to use energy efficient lighting before 2010 (yes, that’s just 3 years away). The switchover, which will affect all of the EU’s 470 million+ citizens, was developed with the aim of meeting targets to reduce energy usage by 20 percent by 2020: to that end, a commission will be accepting proposals for enabling the switchover “for office and street lighting to be adopted by 2008 and on incandescent lamps and other forms of lighting in private households by 2009.”

[...]

Great to see that the low hanging fruit is finally being plucked. Aaron’s blog is well worth reading if you are interested in the enviroment and a perspective of what my employer (Sun Microsystems) is doing about energy efficiency.

Guardian
At the high court earlier today, Mr Justice Sullivan granted the environmental group Greenpeace an order quashing the government’s decision to build new nuclear power stations.

Greenpeace had accused the government of reneging on its promise to carry out “the fullest consultation” before making its decision.

It said the government failed to present clear proposals and information on key issues surrounding a new generation of nuclear plants, such as the disposal of radioactive waste and the financial costs of building new plants.

Mr Justice Sullivan said the consultation document gave every appearance of being simply an “issues paper”.

It contained no actual proposals and, even if it had, the information given to consultees was “wholly insufficient for them to make an intelligent response”.

The information given on waste was “not merely inadequate but also misleading”.

Sarah North, the head of Greenpeace’s nuclear campaign, said: “The government’s so-called consultation on nuclear power was obviously a sham, and we’re pleased that the judge has agreed with us … They’ve now been forced back to the drawing board to conduct a proper and lengthy review.”

I’m opposed to Nuclear power. Working day to day with computer systems I know that if technology can go wrong, it will. If that technology is inheriantly dangerous and there are safer alternatives we shouldn’t use them. Moreover if the safer technologies need improvements before they are efficient at larger scales then lets spend government money on improving them and selling them to the rest of the world!

I went to a really good event on Tuesday night to launch the results from Forum for the Future‘s Future leaders survey. I met several great people. One of whom, Sebastian Wood, told me about his new startup business Better Generation which advises on saving energy and generating electricity at home. They have a shop which sells energy saving light bulbs and the power saving plug I mentioned a while ago.

Great to meet people who understand there is a good business to be made from saving energy and the environment.

Happy new year all!

I’ve just offset all the carbon emmisions from my flights last year (London to Florida for work, London to Madrid for work and London to Croatia for holiday). You should consider doing the same. I used carbonneutral.com and it was easy and informative. They explain it far better than I can:

www.carbonneutral.com

One single shorthaul flight produces roughly the same amount of the global warming gas as 3 months worth of driving a 1.4 litre car. And we’re all flying more.

You can’t do much about the fuel efficiency of aircraft, but if you need a holiday or if you’re travelling on business, you can help reduce your personal contribution to global warming by making your flight CarbonNeutral. That means we organise for the CO2 associated with your flight to be ‘balanced out’ by forestry and climate friendly energy projects which save equivalent amounts of CO2.

Now if I could only find the courage to claim the offset costs for the work flights

As has been discussed in comments on my “light bulb action” posting devices such as TV’s, DVD players and set top boxes that are in standby mode rather than switched off waste power. This wasted power costs you money and generation of that power most likely released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The simple solution to this problem is to turn devices off at the wall socket (if your countries power socket standard includes a switch). The problem is this is a pain, and being lazy I rarely bother to do this. So I was pleased to learn about the following products which save me the effort of turning devices off myself:

And this one:

These devices have one special socket and then two or five normal ones. The special socket can detect whether the connected device is switched on or off turns and the other sockets are controlled automatically. I’ve set this up in our living room to test it. I was annoyed that the Cable TV box was always left on when the TV was turned off. I plugged our TV into the special socket and the cable box into one of the others.

I found it to be really good. It doesn’t matter if I turn the TV off using the remote (putting the TV into standby mode) or using the actual power on/off switch on the TV the one click device detects that the TV is switched off and turns off the cable box.

One word of caution is that our cable box takes about 2 minutes to boot up from power off (because it is the cheap one the cable company gave us). This can be really annoying if you turn on the TV wanting to watch something specific. So clearly you need to think about how you will use this device before you get one, but I think its a very simple and useful product.
I bought mine from QuietPC because I was buying other things at the time, but you can also get them from Maplins and no doubt other places.

To find out more about how it works the website is here: http://www.oneclickpower.co.uk/. For international readers this UK only product probably isn’t much use to you. I’ve found a similar product for the US market, I’m sure there are others (please leave a comment with a link if you know of one).

Here is a chance for us all to be heard!

Energy inefficient light bulb petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/lightbulbs/

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to levy a tax on energy inefficient light bulbs so that their long term financial and environmental cost is visible in their retail price

(International readers this is a UK only petition but I think you’ll appreciate the sentiment. If there are similar efforts in your own country leave a comment and tell people about it. If there isn’t why not start one!)

My aim was to write about one good thing a week, I think that was a little ambitious to be starting with. Having got the hang of this blogging lark I’d say once a month would have been a better target, but I’m not going to fuss over it. Lets just say I’m behind, and I owe you 11, ok?

Good thing #2: Reduce your snail mail (and recycle the rest)

Simple really, less mail means less paper manufacturing and less physical transportation of mail and that has to be a good thing. There are a few ways I’ve done this, but I’m sure there are others:

• Switch to online billing. Most utility (Internet, mobile phone, water, electricity, gas etc.) companies have an online billing facility, go to their web site and set it up. If your provider doesn’t have online billing, call them and ask them when they will and if its not soon switch your provider.
• Cancel solicited mail you don’t need. If you’ve bought from catalogues or companies that keep sending you stuff email them or call them and ask them to stop. Tell them you use thier web page. Tell them you’ll stop recommending them to friends or stop using them yourself if the don’t stop sending you paper. Yes, its nice to recieve a nice glossy holiday brochure, but if you booked the first holiday online, do you really need a paper version for next year’s break?
• Try and cancel unsolicited mail. In the UK you can use the Mail preference service to try to stop unwanted mail. There are most likely equivilant sites in other countries (take a look and leave a comment if you find one). One cool thing about MPS is it lets you enter old addresses, so you can get rid of junk from your old homes! Also consider that you can cancel mail to previous ocupants who still get mail sent to your home.

It obviously takes a few weeks to come into effect, but I’ve noticed a difference since I did this a while back. Once you have done this, make sure you recycle the paper that does come through your door. For confidential stuff, use a shredder and either compost the waste or put it into the recycling too.