We were so moved to come across this tiny piece of evidence that greening has its own power - in spite of everything. And reminded of the lines from Yeats:
While I stand on the roadway,
or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
An interesting factoid from Green Futures.
I was amazed when I first read it and did some quick calculations. We are lucky enough to have around 350 mature trees (mostly beech as it happens) in our plot here at Hedgerley. Some are growing quite close together, so I took 200 as a round number to be […]
A very helpful reality check on my original figures comes from a comment on the blog questioning the original figure of 20,700 kWhs per year. He couldn’t believe that we could be using four times the national average for domestic electricity use. This sounds right. The figure was based on electricity bills that were […]
Delighted to receive an email today from Key Travel, who specialise in working with charities, announcing their carbon calculator.
This is just what we need to offset the irreduceable flying that we have to do. So for my upcoming flight to Nairobi and Lusaka, they report that I will be producing 4 tons of CO2. To […]
Two very interesting outcomes from our Birthday shramadana.
My present from Devi and Matthew was a carbon sequestering tree that they had paid to have planted. More details to follow.
Looking into the issue of carbon sequestration led to an interesting page from the Union of Concerned Scientists - Ten Personal Solutions. One striking example they give […]
The Boston branch of the family have come up with a great quote this morning from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:
“If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t […]
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 doesn’t allow for […]
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 […]
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 gallons by […]