alternative look at alternative fuels

Do you know what size your carbon footprint is?

On average,dependant upon which calculator you use,its between 8 and 11 tonnes of CO2 per year in the UK a lot more in the States.

If you want to calculate more precisely there is a link on Links pages that will take you to a list of the best five calculators.

So we all have to do our bit and reduce our Carbon Footprint, become Carbon Neutral unless we want to change our countryside to:

or if the sea rises as much as they tell us its going to look more like this:

Green Books

For all things environmental

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C lick here for details of how to save money and reduce your carbon footprint

How do we save the planet then?

By turning Green of course.

Friends of the Earth's top tips include:

    * Invest in energy saving light bulbs for your home - they last around12x longer than normal bulbs and use 75% less     electricity, saving you around £65 over the lifespan of the bulb.

    * Insulate your home to save energy and reduce your bills. Insulating your loft can save £180 a year. You may also be         able to get an energy saving grants to help with the cost.

    * Be a greener driver - and opt for a fuel efficient car. Tests show it would costs around £1,250 in petrol for a six-litre                 Bentley to cover 6,000 miles - compared to just £280 for a Citroen C3 with a diesel 1.4 litre engine.

    * If you normally add cold water to your washing up, try turning down the thermostat on your boiler to 60 degrees                 centigrade and save up to £10 a year.

    * Switch off appliances when not in use and save up to £11 a year. TVs, videos, stereos and computers left on standby can     use between 40 and 70 per cent of the energy they use when switched on.

    * Turn your central heating thermostat down by one degree centigrade and save up to £30 a year on your heating bill.

    * Walk your children to school. A fifth of cars on the road in the morning peak period are parents driving their children to         school.

    * Recycle your rubbish and, if you have a garden, start a compost heap. We throw away our own weight in rubbish every         month, but bottles, cans, paper, card, plastic and aluminium can all be recycled which saves energy, while fruit and veg             peelings make good compost for your garden.

    * Buy locally produced organic food - supporting local farmers and avoiding the transport emissions which contribute to         climate change.

    * Try leaving the car at home for one journey a week, cutting pollution and reducing your level of carbon dioxide                 emissions - one of the gases responsible for climate change. Try cycling or walking and get fit at the same time.

More tips and advice are available online at Friends of the Earth's new website - foe website
Notes

[1] Research by Dr David Reay, University of Edinburgh compared the hypothetical emissions and the cost of two contrasting lifestyles over the course of a life time. Dr Reay is available for interview to talk about his research.

[2] UK carbon dioxide emissions by end user 1990-2020, published in Climate change: the UK programme (DETR, 2000)

All very fine points but:

Energy saving lightbulbs are not as bright as the "normal" ones and not instant,so we have to wait for them to warm up and settle for a much dimmer light probably leading to increased eyestrain and a bill for new glasses. So far not so good

Be a greener driver!!!! dont know about you but my Bentley has to stay at home---what a ridiculous example.

And you can no doubt come up with similar comments about all the other points.

But does going greener solve our CO2 problems?

NO!!!!!!

If we all use a bit less electricity then maybe we wouldn't have to produce as much, because according to
to the experts its not the lightbulb that creates the CO2 its the generation of the electricity that creates it. So if we reduce waste then there will not be a need for so much electricity to be generated so less CO2. BUT what would probably happen is that the generating companies would put up their prices to maintain their profit margins and although we use less we will pay more.

Whilst we talk about waste have you thought about street lights. According to the Campaign For Dark Skies street lights cost us a fortune.

"The damage done by excessive street-lighting: There are 7.5 Million street lights in the UK, mean power 100W (ILE figures), that typically waste 15% of their light directly upwards, above the horizontal. Up to a further 15% of the light is spilt where it is not needed or not wanted. This amounts to about 131 kW hr of wasted energy per year per streetlight. Since a coal power station generates 0.9kg of CO2 per kWhr, a single streetlight generates about 120 kg per year of CO2 more than it needs to. Multiply this by the 7.5 Million streetlights in the UK, and a total of 830,000 tonnes of CO2 pollution is produced for the energy wasted by streetlights alone.
The total amount of power wasted above the horizontal is 110 MW, and if the further 15% of wasted light is included, some 220 MW is wasted in total per year. Since the mean generating capacity of a power large power station is 1Gwatt (1000 MegaWatts), and the typical running generation rate is 0.5 G Watt (PowerGen figures), this wasted electricity is equivalent to about half a power station.
If other sources of lighting are included (e.g. floodlights, etc.), this is a far greater number - over a 1 power station worth of energy, money and atmospheric pollution is wasted via lighting."

( http://www.britastro.org/dark-skies/environmental.html )

If you add to that all the other wastages from leaving lights on all over the cities of England it makes the recommendation to switch my lights off a bit nonsensical.
We need to be thinking outside the box. Start pushing your politicians to explore other avenues besides taxing usuage.

So from what was said earlier we need to generate electricity in a clean way.
Which seems to point at few options

Nuclear
Wind
Wave
Solar

Why not include coal and gas and oil? Well the point is that they are running out , hence the panic.
And afterall its been reliance on these that got us in the pickle in the first place, that and the inability of anyone to see the big picture.

Global Warming--It's all your fault | Global Warming--its all your fault part2 | Global Warming--It's your Fault Pt3