I went to see Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" mainly to see if I could pick up any new presentation tricks to make my talks better. Anyone that does a talk 800 or so times must have picked up a few neat things.
And I'm happy to say I've nabbed a couple of tricks from him, that I hope to try out soon.
I also realised, seeing it, that now I'm paying my own electricity bill it's about time I at least compensated for the carbon used powering my apartment and PCs.
I'm also going to have a stab at seeing if I can justify "neutralising" my flights as well. Along with getting an apartment where I have an underground station on the same block and so no need for a car, that at least takes care of my ongoing carbon budget (well, except for respiration, but I'm not sure how to calculate that).
Of course this doesn't take into account all the stuff I have to buy to fit out this apartment (fridge, washing machine, furniture) not to mention work equipment (laptops, desktops and so on). I do try to at least limit the things I own (I'm quite like the minimalist style, much less to clean) and the number of machines I run, although in the computing case that's as much because I am the World's Worst Sysadmin. Hardware and I haven't got on very well since University.
I ended up going through a third party (accredited) carbon credit trading group to buy my energy. The math of carbon trading gets a bit complex admittedly, but I've taken for an option where 25% are forced to be sourced from new Australian accredited Green Power wind and 75% sourced from New Zealand Gold Standard wind energy carbon credits (which are currently about half the price of domestic green energy credits here at the moment).
So after all the math is done, in effect I'm directly donating a reasonably small but appropriate amount of money each quarter (plus big chunks if I can afford to absorb the carbon cost for flights to the US or UK) to help build new wind power capacity in Australia and New Zealand, and I'm cool with that.
Personally I find the wind power generators quite pretty, in a sort of sci-fi or Total Annihilation way. They demonstrate the sort of engineering beauty you get from structures where the form perfectly follows their function.
I went with third-party carbon credits in the end because it was simply too hard to do it through the power company, primarily because they are so incredibly coy about what it will cost.
You can get your power costs (at least roughly) in cents per kilowatt hours, but the additional premium for green power is measure in "dollars per week for the average home".
How the hell am I supposed to make an informed judgement when I can't just make a simple comparison and see it costs 25% more, and go ahead on that basis.
It's no wonder that most of the people signing up for green power in this country are doing it at lowest (10% green power) level. I've gone with 100% from the third party group, but I'd sure as hell hesitate to take 100% option with my power company, because I have no idea how much extra changes I'm in for.
Beaurocracy and this sort of crazy math just plain suck.
But what about you (assuming that you can afford it of course).
I'm now at least doing my part to cover the basics, what about you guys?
(Let's ignore the stale "does warming exist" please. It legally exists here now, so I'm obliged to believe in it) :)
Hm, while we've got a regular contract with our local power dealer (electricity and gas (for heating and cooking)), at least the electricity should be mostly "green" (i.e. C02 neutral). Most of the power in Austria is generated by water power plants.
I haven't got a car (or a driving license...) and do nearly all of my daily traveling on my bike (about 50km per week, most of the year (unless it's raining very heavily or there is fresh snow on the streets). The rest is done with public transport.
I try to avoid airplanes and very much prefere trains (especially overnight-trains). Unfortunatly the last few YAPC::Europes where very hard to reach by train (from Austria). But the next one (2007) will be easy
Oh, on a related note, we had national elections a few weeks ago, after which the Green party turned out 4th with only a few votes behind the rightwing antiforeigners FPÖ. Now they finished counting all the votes (namly those from Austrians living abroad), with the final result that the Green party is 3rd (11%) (with ~500 (~0.01%) more voters than the FPÖ). Yay!
Re:Cool!
Alias on 2006-10-12T02:08:15
Well, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to go quite as far as you guys...:)
Because I'm in an apartment, I can't really compost or air-dry clothing (since the latter is against the rules, no hanging of clothing outside) and the farm thing is out (central city location).
The apartment comes with flurescent lights already (not normal lightbulb shape).
And the appliances are new, but it was the only reasonable choice in this particular situation.
As usual, I'm just trying to keep things in mind, while making it as easy as possible for me to do good. I already have enough things to do, and if I had to remember to do anything regularly, I know I'd just forget.
Add to that if I can fix at least the obvious things, and then generally try to do the right thing if given easy enough options to, then I'm working WITH human nature and encouraging upstream providers to make the greener options easier.
I wonder if the used-goods thing might be something of a false economy though.
Things wear out eventually, and get disposed of.
If you ammortise the environment cost of used appliances over the lifetime of the appliance, then purchasing used goods doesn't fully offset the need to buy new goods.
On the other hand, I DID try to buy new things with very long warranty periods. I figure that this encourages the manufacturers to build in higher levels of permanence, and reduces the environment overhead on an ammortized per-year basis.
Not to mention also making it cheaper for me.
Re:GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX
Alias on 2006-10-21T12:37:24
The trouble with nuclear power is that it isn't a renewable resource either.
At some point, we are fundamentally limited by the total solar radiation hitting the planet.
These wind power initiatives generate genuine long term results, they do it immediately, they can be developed incrementally with low lead time, have none of the safety issues, use almost no land (since you can continue to use them as farm land in the NZ example), have no waste products whatsoever, don't require any water for steam, and since they require almost no manpower are likely to be more efficient once the wind power technology develops to the same degree as nuclear is today.
The new turbines going in to the New Zealand projects for example now rate at 1 megawatt each, and the next generation of turbines will head up into multiple megawatts each.
The price for wind power has dropped 80% between 1990 and 2005. I'm regurgitating statistics here from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power.
That doesn't make them necesarily useful as base load generators, but that could be where something like the solar tower power stations (assuming they end up working properly, and I promise to send photos once the one here gets built) could come in.
Also, for a 25% cost increase, you can link buffering systems (like pumped hydro) into the mix and steady the output.
As things stand now, all the world's wind projects combined generate 60 gigawatts (2005), projected to double to 120 gigawatts by 2010.
So by all means lets do nuclear, but every gigawatt of installed wind capacity is a gigawatt of power that is effectively available to us forever, with the turbines itself replaced every 20 years or so.
And that installed capacity is going to keep rising indefinately, until we start to hit the limits of land area that is windy. Which I'd imagine is going to take quite a while.
As one (very small) additional bonus, the energy harvested from the wind would normally have been released as friction. So wind energy also contributes to cooling down the planet directly!:) (although by such an incredibly small amount as to make no difference)
Re:GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX
Aristotle on 2006-10-21T15:45:32
Another indefinitely renewable resource: geothermal. The drawback is that it’s harder to exploit than wind as it requires digging up the place. On the other hand, it’s not subject to seasonal or meteorological variations. For a great instant introduction read Malcolm Gladwell’s post about it.
Of course, the ultimate source of energy would be The Other nuclear power: sustained H fusion. It too is fundamentally more limited on Earth than tapping the solar output, of course, but it’s also so efficient and we have so much easily “minable” fuel here that that wouldn’t be a worry. None of the toxic leakage issues of fission, either. And in the long now, mastering sustainable fusion will be imperative, since there’s plenty of hydrogen but no wind or geothermal power in space.
Re:GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX
pudge on 2006-10-21T16:42:05
The trouble with nuclear power is that it isn't a renewable resource either.
It doesn't need to be. It will last us a very long time.
These wind power initiatives generate genuine long term results, they do it immediately, they can be developed incrementally with low lead time....
And they provide only a fraction of the energy that other methods produce, and while they take up "almost no land" they WOULD have to take up a TON of land in order to provide the same level of output. I am not against wind power, but it's only a supplemental solution.
That doesn't make them necesarily useful as base load generators, but that could be where something like the solar tower power stations (assuming they end up working properly, and I promise to send photos once the one here gets built) could come in.
Right. But that is the future. Nuclear is here now.
As things stand now, all the world's wind projects combined generate 60 gigawatts (2005), projected to double to 120 gigawatts by 2010.
So right now, it could power two New York Cities. Except on really hot days.
Anyway, my point was not that the things you were talking about are not worth anything; my emphasis was on the "green" nature of them. Reducing carbon, carbon trading, that sort of thing. Wind and hydro and maybe even solar are good things to help supplement our energy needs moving forward, but because they provide energy, not because they are green.
