According to the news on NYE, despite letting off a gazillion fireworks, Sydney's NYE celebrations were carbon neutral. Ummm! Not entirely sure how they worked that one out. I wonder if everyone walked into town and home again.
However, the Airmiles site has gone all eco-conscious and have now got a carbon calculator to work out how to offset the emissions of any flights you might take by making little changes to how you run your household - changing to LE lightbulbs, insulating everything, using A rated electrical goods, not leaving the telly on standby for 18 hours a day. Going down the list and ticking all the things I've done (I don't have a dishwasher, so I can't really claim I'm saving energy by having an A rated one), it seems I can reduce my carbon emissions by 2.674 tonnes per year. My flight to NY in the summer will produce 1.341 tonnes. So it seems as though I'm more than offsetting my flight.
The thing is that I do all these things anyway. So the way to reduce my carbon emissions more would be to NOT fly to NY in the summer.
This is one of the issues I have with all the people who claim to be carbon neutral. It's not the neutrality we need to worry about, it's reducing the overall carbon emissions in the first place. OK, we're not all going to stay at home and never go on holiday, but I'd really like to reduce further the amount of expensively produced energy I use in the first place.
I have a little device that tells me how much electricity I use in a day/week/month. I use between 8-10 KWh a day, depending on whether I'm in all day or not. If I had a PV solar panel to generate electricity and shove it back into the grid, even if I only generated a couple of KWh a day, it would be at least 20% of my overall usage. Regardless of any actual cost saving this is to me, this is 20% less electricity that the energy company had to supply to my house. And if every household had a solar panel and cut their electricity requirement from the grid by even 10%, isn't this a better way of doing it than banging on about carbon offsetting or being carbon neutral?
But solar panels are expensive to install because they can only be done by qualified people who work for companies that have contracts with the local councils. Our council offer grants, but it would still cost £2-3 grand to have one installed. If, instead of the government having given the banks £2-3 grand per person in the country, they'd given anyone who had a solar panel installed an interest free loan over 3-5 years, they'd get their money back and we'd all be using less expensive electricity. And if we had another solar panel that heated the water, we'd be using less gas, too.
At this point, as my carbon emissions v savings seem to be in credit, I'm not going to worry too much about flying to Leftpondia in the summer, but I'm still looking at ways to reduce my energy consumption because the prices are too damn high.
The other thing I've noticed recently, while looking for a replacement telly for the bedroom I use at Ma's is how much power LCD TVs seem to use. The 19" LCD telly I was looking at the other day said it used 55KWh per 24 hours (that's pulling more than 2KW, or more than most vacuum cleaners!). That seems an awful lot. If my current 28" CRT telly used that much juice, I'm pretty sure I'd be looking at some much higher bills.
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mellow
Stupid DC weather!![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
'cause this project was BIG.
thankful