Entries by admin

At last THE SUM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”. […]

With the Dalai Lama

Anuradha Vittachi had a fascinating conversation with the Dalai Lama in 1994. He is emphatic about the centrality of his non-violent approach and is aware of the slow pace of progress in what he calls ‘the freedom struggle’. But what would he do if the people of Tibet chose a different path to independence?