Recent Comments

1. Slow Down, Calm Down (Stick to the speed limit) - 15 Aug 2005

   Since we got married Annie has done a fantastic job of slowing me down! I’ve even got to the point where I drove part way back from Cheltenham the other day at BELOW (!!) the speed limit!

2. Slow Down, Calm Down (Stick to the speed limit) - 15 Aug 2005

   Put on some relaxing music whilst driving.

   Or wind down all the windows – that should slow you down – unless you have extremely short hair! (which therefore won’t get messed up if you speed up)

3. Wear Your 'Make Poverty History' Band - 15 Aug 2005

   Yeah, it does work as a hair tie… just!

4. Switch off and unplug appliances and chargers - 25 Aug 2005

   Can you run a laptop with the battery absent? (I don’t have a laptop so I can’t tell you the answer!). If this is possible then I reckon that it might be a good idea – but I don’t know for sure. I have a power meter that I could try it on when I next ‘see’ a laptop.

5. DIY vegetables! - 06 Dec 2005

   I was really chuffed in the summer ‘05 when some potatoes that I stuck in the ground grew into more potatoes. So this coming year I want to maximise the use of our small patch. Easy stuff preferably – carrots sound good, always loved corn on the cob though!

6. Slap a Ticket on an Urban 4x4 - 05 Mar 2006

   This action does seem a bit judgemental. And a bit of a generalisation. We have an 18 year old LPG powered Range Rover (I guess that makes us urban 4×4 owners – although we live in a rural town) which cost us £1,300 (so we are responsible for only a small amount of the energy of manufacture, unlike a new car buyer) and we only drive about 6,000 miles per year. We don’t have a second car. It is also reliable and doesn’t have loads of expensive modern bits which take loads of embodied energy in the manufacture of replacement bits (I’ve even let the petrol system go to rack and ruin rather than repair it).

   Of course, the day I bought it I took the bullbars off!

   Whilst I wouldn’t want to spend too much on my motoring (I reckon that spending is a fair indicator of damage when it comes to motoring) I’m not out to go out of my way to criticise total strangers!

7. Offset your Airmiles - 02 Aug 2006

   Further to Malcolm’s comment:

   I’ve just had a read of the New Internationalist edition (391 – July 2006) that concerns itself with carbon offsets.

   Basically it is stating: 1. There is no logic that temporary carbon storage (trees) can make up for withdrawals from permanent carbon storage (gas, oil, coal). i.e. who knows what will happen to the trees in as little as a few years after they are planted. 2. Carbon offset companies sometimes take credit for trees that are going to be planted anyway (so your money makes no difference). 3. If we plant trees to ‘offset’ our carbon then we are expanding our ecological footprint and increase the amount of land we remove from indigenous peoples. Bear in mind that our transactions with the people in that area might be limited to just the governing or business elite, at the expense of the poorer sections of society. 4. Sometimes carbon offset companies take credit for energy efficiency programs that would have happened anyway. 5. Biofuel programs may just tend to take land from the poor, which in turn may push those poor into more energy intensive lifestyles instead of sustainable ones that they might have been living using that land. 6. That keeping the carbon in the ground is the only known, proven way of keeping the carbon out of the shorter term (thousands of years) carbon cycle in the environment. 7. Carbon offsets are largely a scam to justify society in keeping on extracting more and more fossil fuels.

   To the above I would add: 1. Carbon offsets by implementing energy efficiency may just lead to the money saved by energy efficiency being spent on other energy consuming products or processes. 2. Removal of carbon credits from the energy generating market may not completely reduce carbon emissions by the corresponding amount due to price elasticity of supply and demand and the presence of oil, gas and coal purchasers outside of the credits regime. (However, I do believe that carbon credits do have a positive contribution to fossil fuel exploitation reduction.)

   There may be other stuff I have missed.

   Some links from the mag: http://www.sinkswatch.org/pubs/carbon%20offset.pdf http://www.sinkswatch.org/pubs/Market%20failure.pdf www.carbontradewatch.org/durban/durbandec.html http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/CDMsouthafrica.pdf http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/CarbConv.pdf There are more links that I haven’t put on.

8. Offset your Airmiles - 02 Aug 2006

   So, as a positive contribution, it might be worth considering Ebico’s Equiclimate scheme which trades in carbon generation allowances: http://www.ebico.co.uk/equiclimate/equiclimate.htm

9. Switch off and unplug appliances and chargers - 14 May 2008

   I was just looking back at this thread when I remembered that I wrote some info about laptop batteries (which relates to some degree to laptop charging): http://www.markporthouse.net/faq/?p=43