Monday, January 08, 2007

Hypocritical?

I know that it's hypocritical to preach what you don't practice. I am trying not to preach, but just to record what I am practicing.

I want to make it clear that I have a huge carbon footprint. Last year I flew a lot. I'm afraid to do the calculations.

I live in a city where all the best jobs are in the oil industry, in a province where a large part of the public dollar comes from the sale of oil and gas. My own comfort is based on the continued well-being of the oil and gas industry.

Having said all that, here I am trying to make some changes to cut down my carbon footprint. Is that hypocritical?

I don't know. Maybe it is. But you know what? Two wrongs don't make a right.

If we all stopped trying to make a good change because it would be hypocritical of us, where would that lead us? I am less afraid of being called a hypocrit than I am of living through a world-wide drought and all the other horrors of continued global warming.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Meter reading

Meter reading has the same cadence as Train Spotting, but no one's made a movie about it yet that I know of.

I walked around and read the meters at the start of the year. Here's where we begin:

Van odometer - 311026km
Car odometer - 219540 km
Water meter - 3997
Gas meter - 0366
Electricity meter - 29015

The two odometers show exactly what they mean. If I drive one km, the meter goes up by one km.

All of the other meters use calibration constants. A lot of scientific instruments are like this. The meter goes up by one when you use some of the gas, or water, or electricity, but it isn't necessarily going up by one unit when you use exactly one unit.

There's nothing fishy going on, as long as you trust the utility companies to keep the instruments properly calibrated. We have no control over that. All we can do is take next month's reading, subtract the starting reading, and multiply the difference by the calibration constant. I can read the constant from my bill. When the bill comes I'll give a real-life example.

Friday, January 05, 2007

How the kettle and the hot water bottles save energy in bed

The lowly kettle is mightier than the furnace when it comes to heating the part of the home that really matters.

I get cold in bed. My feet are cold. When my feet are cold, the rest of me soon follows.

For Christmas Santa brought me two hot water bottles. I heat water in the kettle, put it in the hot water bottles, take them to bed and like magic, I'm warm all night.

It's more pleasant than heating the room and feeling stuffy. I like to breathe cool air. Under warm blankets.

Energy savings? I don't know but I bet it's worth 5 degrees on the thermostat. That's a lot.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

A reply from the David Suzuki Foundation on carbon offsets

Thanks to Paul Lingl of the David Suzuki Foundation who replied to me today on the question I had about buying carbon offsets. (See my earlier post, "I flew. Now what? George Monbiot vs. David Suzuki and the "carbon offsets" question"). Like Monbiot, it turns out that the Suzuki people also have concerns about carbon sequestration. They prefer other approaches to carbon offsets.

Their website has links to the carbon offsets the Suzuki people consider to be good. I infer that all carbon offsets are not created equal.

Further exploration of carbon offsets to follow. There is a lot of information on the Suzuki Foundation's website. I'm almost afraid to start using their free carbon calculators to see how bad I've been, but avoidance is no solution. It's not about what I have done in the past, it's about what I do now and in the future.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

The shower is leaking.

After yesterday's revelation that I waste about a bucket full of water every day in my shower (but no more! I'm catching that water in a bucket and using it to flush the toilet), today to my dismay I found out just how much water the shower is leaking every day.

I left the bucket in the shower all day, with the shower head inside it. We know the shower has a bit of a leak. My husband, who is a pretty handy guy, has repaired it several times but there is just a tiny nagging drip we can't get rid of.

That tiny nagging drip filled the bucket.

I don't know whether we can ever properly fix that drip, but for now I'll leave the bucket in place and get a second one to catch the shower water.

It feels like one step forward and one step back today, but with two pails, I'll be two steps ahead every day.

Monday, January 01, 2007

Blogging and learning about polar bears

In my blog of evidence on the effects of global warming, today I wrote about some of the problems polar bears are having.

Catching wasted shower water

I know that the little things I do to cut down my personal environmental impact are small, trivial, even silly.

I know that I don't care what everybody else thinks about that.

Today I put a bucket in my shower and caught all the water I had to run before the shower got warm enough for me to step in. (I hate standing in cold water). I used the water to fill the toilet tank. There was enough for 1 flush. I'll have to measure the actual volume sometime.

If I do this every day, I will save about 6 litres (if I guess that's the volume of water in one flush) X 365 days, or 2,190 litres of water. In fact, I will probably save almost double that much because I don't have a low-flow toilet. Guess what else is on the list of home improvements?

The City of Calgary (where I live) wants us to reduce our household water consumption from about 340 to 240 litres per day. In the UK, the average is closer to 150 litres per day.

By reducing my personal consumption of water, I reduce my carbon footprint because it takes energy to process the water I send down my drain. How much carbon per litre? I don't know... yet.