Entries by admin

in a word

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Anuradha has just come up with an excellent term – energy literacy. I guess it’s also what I’ve been trying to acquire in the last few weeks.

First Real Changes

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Signed up with Good Energy. Their system is very clear, although the comparisons with the present are more complicated. Their rate is going to be 8.73p for kWh for daytime usage. The compares with our current Powergen rates of 7.96, but with the first 200 units at 10.18. However this is based on a day/night […]

Small Steps in Resurgence

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This month’s Resurgence includes a new column on these issues written by Lorna Howarth. She refers to the Global Commons Institute (http://www.gci.org.uk/) and their notion of ‘Contraction and Convergence’. They have a much tougher calculation: that with a global population of 6 billion, the planet can only sustain 2 tonnes of emissions per person. That […]

Thinking about Air Travel

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Last year Anuradha and I travelled 83,000 air miles, causing a total emission of CO2 of 24 tonnes. Another wake-up call. Only half a ton was for holiday travel, which I guess is reasonable in the light of our new targets. We could justify the 23 and a half tonnes that we travelled for OneWorld […]

At last THE SUM

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Given that the car does 5,000 miles a year on average and the scooter mileage is around 500, we can finally calculate our current total emissions (hold breath)… And the answer is: 21.8 tonnes of CO2 a year. This comes 89% from home energy and 11% from transport. And we have to consider that: this […]

The Passion behind the Project

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The reason for doing all this was reinforced today when I read an application Anuradha is preparing to fund a mass blog on this subject under the OneWorld banner. She writes: “I had been writing about Climate Change with a generalised anxiety since 1980 – but, like many anti-poverty activists, I considered it ‘an environmental […]

Oil and Electricity

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First real numbers look horrifying: yearly use of heating oil (hot water, heating and pool) was 6245 litres yearly use of electricity (lights and gadgets) was 20,700 kWhs This computes to CO2 emisions of: oil = 19,476 kgs of CO2 per year electricity = 9,192 kgs of CO2 per year Giving a total of 28,668 […]

A Few More Key Metrics

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I found a good carbon calculator at the Safe Climate site. I won’t be able to get our own totals until I’m back home with the utility bills, but it does give some of the key conversion ratios: heating oil – multiply gallons of oil by 11.81 to get kgs of CO2 petrol – multiply […]

First Answers on Wind Energy

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I started at the British Wind Energy Association – www.bwea.com and supplemented this with some US-based information from Wind Energy Weekly – www.awea.org. The basic wind story looks pretty promising. If an average house uses around 10,000 kWh a year, then a 5 – 15 kW turbine can made a sigficant contribution to this. A […]

First Link

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Just found this interesting blog from Alan Durning. He seems to have very similar preoccupations but is already very advanced in the solutions.

Starting with the Numbers

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Before we can do any of the maths on how much energy we are using at the moment, I need to understand the best units to work in. Luckily my daughter, Devi, and son in law, Matthew, are on hand to make up for the physics lessons I failed to follow at school. It seems […]

Starting in Sri Lanka

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Colombo seems to be a good place for making resolutions. Twenty years ago I was here and decided to become a vegetarian after reading Gandhi. Now I’m inspired by Anuradha’s idea for a new way to campaign on climate change at OneWorld: seeing it as a commitment to the coming generations. That led us to […]

ARI

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Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne in conversation with Anuradha Vittachi. Affectionaly know as Ari, he is the inspiring founder and leader of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka. It’s a non-violent spiritual movement of local development working in more than half the villages in Sri Lanka. It’s goal is a “no poverty, no affluence society”. […]