Brexit and the coming Climate Crises

On the day we enter the third decade of the third millennium, I am reflecting on the causes for which I have worked and campaigned in the previous decade. 

This morning I read “Slaying Brexit Unicorns” by Edwin Hayward, which comprehensively reviews the politics and economics of the last four years in Britain.  I also continued reading David Wallace-Wells “The Uninhabitable Earth”, a deep exploration of climate change and mankind’s responses to the unfolding crises that we have wrought upon ourselves and our descendants.

The overwhelming impression from both these works is that the battles have been fought and lost. 

In the case of Brexit, the result of the General Election last month put paid to any and all arguments for revoking Article 50, or putting the question back to the people in a confirmatory referendum.  Our “Vote Leave” Tory Government put it to the people and the Government won.  We lost and we’re getting used to it.

The parallel with the climate crisis is uncanny. 

While campaigners call for system change, the system is battening down its hatches and continuing with business as usual.  Greta Thunberg may be the leader that our young people have been waiting for.  Like Gandhi and Jesus, she confronts the questions we have ignored and challenges nations to act.  Like them, she is pilloried or ignored by those in authority.  She will have a powerful influence but, in the end, Greta is unlikely to stop our toxic addiction to combustion.

Wallace-Wells observes that the human species will not end in imminent extinction but our numbers will be massively diminished as the tropics become uninhabitable.  We will confine our moral response to the immediate tragedies – losses of island nations and then coastal metropolises – without confronting the five hundred year inevitability of 80 metre sea level rises and mass extinction in the Tropics. 

This collapse will require extreme blinkering of our empathy, to ignore the suffering and death of our fellow men, women and children around the world – along with the extinction of most biodiversity in the oceans and the tropical lands – while we secure our borders, our energy supplies, our food and water.  Islands like Britain, Greenland and New Zealand will become lifeboats or arks, leaving most of the Earth’s people to face annihilation in the once temperate but ultimately uninhabitable places we will lose from our consciousness.

We come back to the clear-eyed prescience of James Lovelock, who wrote “The Vanishing Face of Gaia” in 2009.  He predicts that the human population will peak in mid-century at 9 or 10 billion and then fall to 200 million by the beginning of the twenty-second century.

So what are we to do?  What matters enough for us to do it?  With Brexit in the last decade, the most important actions were to unite, communicate and demonstrate – to friends, communities and politicians.  Now the battles are over, and the war lost, our role is to come to terms with our inevitable departure from the EU.  We may find new purpose in holding the Government to account but preventing Brexit is no longer possible. 

The same applies to our current climate crises. 

The harm to humanity, and to all life on earth, that is happening now is a consequence of the greenhouse gas emissions of the past three decades.   

The catastrophic destruction of coastal and tropical communities and biomes that will follow after my lifetime will be the result of our growing greenhouse gas emissions in this decade and the next.  This is what Greta and our young people are campaigning to prevent.  This is what Extinction Rebellion protestors and activists are fighting in the streets.  They will not stop but they are unlikely to succeed because what they are combatting is the combined self-interest of millions of shareholders in the profitable companies that are causing the ecocide that future generations will live and die in.

So Brexit is an allegory for the climate crises that will face our grandchildren’s generation.  We can’t stop it but we must find new purpose in holding Corporations and Governments to account.  That is what we are for now.  That is our purpose in the twenties. 

Actions

1.    Vote with your wallet.

a.    Divest your energy supplies from fossil fuels.  Buy 100% renewable electricity and look for providers with biogas generation, to minimise your fossil fuel emissions from heating.

b.    Divest your savings from fossil fuels and lobby your pension providers to do the same.    

2.    Fly less.  Nothing can be done to make flying green so don’t do it willy-nilly.  A short haul flight once a year and a long haul flight once a decade is probably our fair share.  More flights are an example of eco-nihilism: consumption like we just don’t care.

3.    Eat less meat and dairy.  Greenhouse gas emissions and habitat loss from livestock cultivation are the biggest cause of climate change after fossil fuels.

4.    Hold Corporations and Governments to account, to end our addiction to fossil fuels within the coming decades.

If greenhouse gas emissions begin to decline in the twenties, we have a chance of averting three or four degrees of warming this century.  If not, Greta and XR will lose their war in the same way that we lost the war on Brexit in 2019.

Peter Archibald

cutyourcarbon@gmail.com

1 January 2020

Get more by using less

I have been meaning to post some tiny tips to help things go further, thereby reducing the environmental impact of making stuff.  Each small act of resurrection or reduction gives me a sense of fulfilment, even pride, that no retail therapy can match.  Here are three!

1 Go halves
We are lucky enough to have a dishwasher, which lightens the burden of keeping house and - some people say - uses less energy than running enough hot water to do the same amount of washing up by hand.  Recalling my postgraduate process engineering at UCL, cleaning is a function of temperature, time, chemical strength and shear.  This last is the physical work done by a brush, or a water jet, to dislodge the soil from the surface being cleaned.  Several years ago, I ran the dishwasher with a tablet in a plastic packet that I believed would dissolve to release the chemical.  At the end of the cycle, I was amused to discover the intact tablet, still in its durable wrap.  What really surprised me was that all the dishes were clean!  The lack of detergent had no perceptible impact on the wash - the mechanical cleaning factors (temperature, time and shear) were sufficient without any soap.

Unilever's business model depends upon you not knowing that we can run our dishwashers and washing machines without detergents.  Of course, the reality is more complex than this.  The sophisticated chemistry of a good quality dishwasher tablet keeps your glassware, crockery and cutlery sparkling after every wash. But I learned that we need LESS of these cleaning products than we are told and I have proved this by repetition over several years.

I now chop each wrapped dishwasher tablet in half with a large blade, on a chopping board - with care because the tablet is hard and the chemicals caustic - and use half the tablet for a full load, on the ECO setting to reduce the electricity needed to run the cycle.  I normally use a dirty knife which then goes back in the dishwasher, rather than making more washing up!

2 Re-enlightenment
As earlier posts in this blog will show, I have been an early adopter of LED lighting in my home.  This has cut my family's electricity use - just for lighting - from 2200 kWh in 2007 (half incandescent, half fluorescent) to just 760 kWh in 2014 (half fluorescent, half LED).  A big factor has been the switch from halogen to CFL to LED.  I won't dwell on the relative merits of fluorescent vs LED halogen replacements but the brightness and colour of GU10 LED lamps are now more than adequate to replace 50w downlights, at around £4 a pop.

These cheap and cheerful lamps run on mains voltage but the LED chips require a constant current at 12 - 18v DC.  For instance, a 12 watt LED lamp needs 1 Amp at 12 volts (W = A x V).  This direct current is delivered by a cheap inverter, housed in the white plastic base.  This is the Achilles heel of the current generation of cheap, bright GU10 lamps.  The state-of-the-art diodes have an expected lifetime of a quarter of a century.  They are mounted in exotically beautiful, machined alloy heatsinks.  Their emitter surfaces are encased in plastic lenses that focus and disperse the white light into the required pattern.  Yet their power supply is cheap and failure-prone.  I have had three fail within a year of purchase - one within a day.  I get replacements under warranty from my supplier but am unwilling to throw away this pinnacle of twenty-first century technology for the sake of a burned-out power supply.

So I turned to Amazon and bought a separate 12W constant current LED driver for a fiver.  This powers the LED lamp beautifully, so now I can fit it in a ceiling lamp, where the exposed low-voltage wiring will not be a problem.

This design flaw in such cheap GU10 LED bulbs is actually an argument in favour of low voltage MR16 LEDs.  These replace 12 volt halogen lamps directly but you MUST exchange the halogen power supply (black box) with a suitable LED driver (white box) in order to achieve the long lifetime anticipated for these new photon factories.


3 Shut down MVHR in summer

When I worked in Pennsylvania in 1990, one of my colleagues in R&D used to lampoon the company's aggressive asset management strategy by saying, "You don't rip your central heating out in summer".  This is, of course, true - but you DO shut it down in summer.  A Twitter exchange with Sofie Pelsmakers at UCL alerted me to the fact that the same can be true for whole-house mechanical ventilation.

I had this fitted in 2007 because we need fresh air in the bedrooms at night but live right under the Heathrow fliightpath and so are woken at 4 or 5 am when the long-haul flights from the far East come in to land.  It uses electricity to pump fresh air into the bedrooms and living room, while extracting stale air from the bathrooms and kitchen.  The energy used to move air is offset by the heat exchanger, 90% efficient, which retains warmth in the house.

Heat-recovery ventilation (HRV) or, more specifically, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) depends on the building being airtight - all pipework penetrations must be sealed with expanding foam, airbricks must be filled in, and so on.  In hot weather, it is preferable to throw open the windows and let any breeze blow through the house.  In this situation, MVHR is a complete waste of energy, like running a fridge with no door!  At the start of this season's hot weather in June, I switched off the MVHR.  Since then our electricity consumption has fallen to its lowest level in the 10 years since I began to record it - just 60 kWh a week in July.  We are a family of four adults in quite a large, detached house but this frugal electricity use would be more typical of a 2 - 3 bedroom flat or terrace.

The message is clear - to save money, cut carbon and reduce energy use, shut down mechanical ventilators when the central heating is off and the windows are open!

Wrapping it all up
In conclusion, much of sustainability is about avoiding waste.  These three little tales of saving - soap, energy or things -  show the lengths to which we can go to avoid waste in our own homes.  I am fortunate to have time to examine things in such detail.  If you have read this far then you too have time to repair and reuse things that fail, to cut down on consumables and to find small ways to save energy at home, at work or in your community.  There is great pleasure in making the most of the things that we find, to quote the Wombles.

Time to change

When I started this blog, I sold my much-loved Honda Civic because I was commuting to London by train and we didn't need two cars in the household.  In 2009, I began volunteering as an expedition supervisor and assessor for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme.  This required a decent sized car, to carry 3 or 4 participants and their kit, together with my own camping gear, to and from the expedition sites.  I chose an old Honda Accord with 80,000 miles on the clock and it has served us admirably - we have driven to the south of France in it, four times in five years, and it is a comfortable long-distance cruiser that gets 40+ mpg.

Now that the Accord is 10 years old, I feel it is time to pass it on while it is still an attractive proposition for a new owner.  That leaves me with the question of what to replace it with.  I need a large boot for my outdoor activities and to take my daughter and all her gear to and from university.  I also want to minimise my contribution to fossil fuel emissions - both CO2 and black carbon, which is accelerating the loss of ice from glaciers and ice-sheets around the world.

The obvious answer is a plug-in hybrid, to achieve zero tailpipe emissions on local runs while still ensuring that we can complete a few hundred miles in remote country, without access to electricity, for Scout camps and DofE expeditions.  However, it would be false accounting to buy a new car, with Tonnes of embodied carbon (the CO2 emissions commissioned by its manufacture), in order to cut the emissions from driving just a few thousand miles a year.  In this scenario, an older car makes sound environmental and economic sense.

A third solution would be to rent a large car for the times I need it and use a low-emission town car for the rest of the time.  I tried to do this when we wanted to drive abroad in 2009 and it was actually cheaper to buy the Honda Accord, so that's what I did.

Now, The Scout Association have partnered with "Go Ultra Low" to promote ultra-low emission vehicles. I have entered their competition to trial a plug-in hybrid for four months.  If chosen, I will be able to demonstrate the capabilities of a clean, state-of-the-art vehicle for outdoor activities like Scouting and the Duke of Edinburgh's Award expeditions.  If it works well for this lifestyle, I will champion this vehicle to others in the Scout Movement and will find it very difficult to go back to a conventional diesel or petrol engine for my voluntary activities.  Fingers crossed!

Give just one thing

I confess that, since running the Sustainable Living Area at last year's Egham Royal Show, I have had nothing new to say on the subject of everyday sustainability.  That changed this morning when I came across a link from Ariane Sherine, the comedy writer and journalist behind the Atheist Bus Campaign, whom I admire greatly.

While there is nothing to be gained from mixing religion and politics with low carbon living, I think Ariane has created the most inspiring guide to sustainable living that I have come across in the six years since I started this occasional blog.  So I would ask you to put aside your Party affiliations, suspend your belief and have a look at this new and uplifting guide to giving of yourself, for the benefit of others.

The only caution I must add, which Ariane has splashed liberally across the website for this new book, is that there is a lot of (for want of a better word) schoolboy humour.  So, if you're up for some impolite language and plenty of light-hearted phallic banter, click away!  Please explore the website as well as downloading Ariane's book, for absolutely no cost whatsoever.

Give Just One Thing

Smarter Living is here!

No new posts for a couple of months because I have been working flat out, pedal to the metal, nose to the grindstone, persuading lots of kind and intelligent people to exhibit and talk about sustainability at this year's Egham Royal Show.

I have succeeded!  It's all happening in Egham this weekend.  British Gas have kindly sponsored the sustainability exhibition and have named it the Smarter Living Area.  I'm pleased with the name because it avoids many of the pitfalls of selling sustainability - witness the Government's difficulties marketing the Green Deal, where it seems that the public don't like the words "Green" or "Deal".

Some bright lights in the sustainability firmament have generously volunteered to come along and speak to our visitors about their work and their visions for a better world.  Our Programme of distinguished Speakers is shown below.

If you have time, please come along to the Egham Royal Show this weekend, visit the Smarter Living Area, catch some of our excellent speakers and say Hi to me!  Admission is just £7 (£4 for under 16s) or £18 for a family ticket.  Egham rail station is a short walk from the showground, so you can enjoy low-carbon travel from London and the South-East.  Full details on the Egham Royal Show website.

Hope to see you there,

British Gas Smarter Living Area

Speaker Programme

Saturday 25 August

11 am              Gearoid Lane, British Gas New Markets
“Smart, Connected Homes: A vision for Britain in 2020”

12:30 pm         David DeChambeau, Southeast Power Engineering  
“Hydro power for Windsor Castle”

2 pm                Dr Paula Owen, Paula Owen Consulting                               
“How to save energy, water and money by living smarter”

2:30 pm          Neil & Michaela Allam, makers of Norbury Blue Cheese
Cheese-making demonstration in the Smarter Living Area marquee

3 pm                Gareth Swain, SITA Surrey
                        “Recycling: Giving waste a second life”

Sunday 26 August

11 am              David DeChambeau, Southeast Power Engineering  
“Hydro power for Windsor Castle”

12 noon           John Condon, the Prince of Wales’ START Initiative
 “Eco Driving”

2 pm               Neil &Michaela Allam, makers of Norbury Blue CheeseCheese-making demonstration in the Smarter Living Area marquee

3 pm                Clare Flynn and Hilary Bruffell, Make it and Mend it
“Thinking outside the bin”

All our distinguished speakers are kindly volunteering their time.  British Gas and the Egham Royal Show would like

to express their gratitude to every speaker, for their valuable contribution to the Show.  

These timings are all approximate: presentations may be delayed by loud events in the main arena.  

Sustainable living exhibition

After several years of thinking, doing and blogging about sustainable living, I have been granted the golden opportunity of organising an exhibition on the subject!


The Egham Royal Show is an annual agricultural and community event that is now in its 154th year.  This year, for the first time, the show will feature a Sustainability Exhibition and I have volunteered to organise this.  The sustainability page on our website explains what I am trying to achieve.  I am contacting companies and community organisations in Surrey, Berkshire and London that are proud of their sustainable businesses, products and activities, to invite them to spend a weekend at the Show, engaging with the 8,000 or so visitors that will attend.


Please pass the word around and get in touch with me if you would like to participate as an exhibitor or a sponsor at the sustainable living exhibition on 25 and 26 August.  You can email sustainability@eghamroyalshow.org.uk or call me on 077 1000 6626.  I look forward to hearing from you!

A secure and sustainable energy future?

In a week of news on sustainability, and on a day of news on our future energy supply, I am reflecting on the British people's awareness of what we use energy for and their expectations of where it will come from in future.

Eric Pickles launched the Government's new National Planning Policy Framework this week, retaining its "presumption in favour of sustainable development".  While its intention is to empower local authorities to implement local plans, the new planning framework risks both commercial development of environmentally sensitive habitats and incoherent implementation of national infrastructure imperatives. The problem is that sustainable development means different things to different people and, when it lies in the hands of local planning departments, consistent interpretation seems unlikely.

The "Planet under Pressure" conference has also taken place in London this week and has today published its "State of the Planet Declaration" . While the passion and concern of the 3,000 delegates in London and the further 3,000 online participants is beyond question, I think the turgid and inaccessible language of this declaration is a missed opportunity to create widespread awareness of the challenges we face in maintaining a sustainable habitat for humanity and all life on earth.

The next piece of today's news is, to my mind, a good thing that could be better.  DECC has published provisional figures for Britain's greenhouse gas emissions in 2011, showing a welcome reduction on 2010 figures.  Home heating emitted 22% less carbon dioxide than the previous year - but just look at the weather we had in those two years!  December 2010 was the coldest December in recorded history, while 2011 started and ended with truly extraordinary warmth.  As DECC notes, the mean temperatures experienced here in the first and last quarters of 2011 were 2.2°C and 4.1°C, respectively,  warmer than the previous year.  This fall in domestic heating emissions is great but is no more sustainable than the weather.  As the Americans say, we have to invest in "winterizing" our homes, businesses and public buildings.

Emissions from electricity generation also fell from 2010, by around 6%. This is attributed both to lower demand (3% less than 2010) and to greater availability of our nuclear generating capacity: the consequence was a 17% fall in gas usage for power generation and an 11% rise in nuclear power.  Some interesting statistics are buried in the Tables (remember that these figures are provisional).  In 2011:

• Coal accounted for one-quarter of our electricity supply but two-thirds of our CO2 emissions from power stations.  
• Renewables generated more than 5% of our electricity supply.

CO2 emissions from transport (including domestic flights) were almost flat, falling by just 1.4% from 2010 and remaining within half a percent of 1990 levels.  A growing share of a diminishing pot.   

In this morning's latest headline, Eon and Npower's owner, RWE, announced their withdrawal from the UK nuclear new build consortium, Horizon.  Amid cheers from respected environmental organisations including WWF (an organisation I have supported since their inception over 40 years ago) and Friends of the Earth, who see nuclear power as an unmitigated environmental disaster, there should also be caution.  Our demand for electricity in this country will certainly grow in the coming decades, as population and consumption (the march of the gadgets) both increase and as heating and transport move from fossil fuel combustion to low carbon electricity.

But where will this low carbon electricity come from?  So many concerned nature lovers tell me of their abhorrence of wind turbines, which they see as despoiling this green and pleasant land.  Even offshore wind farms are described as an intrusion into coastal views that have been uninterrupted since the dawn of time.  What I need to know is where these custodians of our beautiful landscape imagine we will get our energy from in the coming decades - a period that will include the rest of my life and the best years of my children's lives.

Youth negotiators asked a critical question at the international climate change negotiations in Bonn in 2009:  "How old will you be in 2050?"  That's the date by which Britain has committed in law to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 20% of 1990 levels.  The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has set a trajectory to meet this commitment, in our national carbon budgets.  This requires us to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2027 and effectively to decarbonise our electricity generation by 2030.  This is seen as achievable through a combination of renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage (CCS).  Yet the National Trust and almost everyone who has a window with a view opposes further deployment of wind energy, energy and engineering companies are walking away from new nuclear construction and the Government remains unable to invest its promised £1 billion in a CCS demonstration project because no power generator believes it is affordable, achievable or that there will be sufficient return on investment.

It is for this reason that DECC's new Minister sneaked out his announcement, at midnight on Friday 16 March, that investors in new gas-fired power stations will be able to run them unabated - ie., without CCS - for the next 33 years!  The Committee on Climate Change wrote this week to Ed Davey asking him to reflect on the CCC's carbon budgets, in the light of DECC's granting of these "grandfather rights" to gas generators, and to set clear decarbonisation objectives in the current Energy Market Reform.

What is missing from this story of shortsighted squabbling and failure to act when we must?  Leadership, that's what.  If you manage to read that far, page 6 of today's State of the Planet Declaration includes the succinct phrases, "We must show leadership at all levels.  We must all play our parts".  In Annexe 2, Ban ki-Moon declares his intention to appoint a chief scientific advisor on global sustainability.  Let's hope he picks someone who is not only a scientific virtuoso but also a master communicator.  Without an eloquent and attention-grabbing figurehead to spell out the choices we must make, the squabbling will continue to cover our inaction and the public will continue to believe that their iPads, Sky boxes and microwaves run on pixie dust that won't hurt a fly.

Challenging misperceptions around clean energy Part 2

Mercury Falling (apologies to Sting)

You may have read Emma's incisive comment on my previous post, questioning the relevance of US mercury emissions from power generation to the safety of CFLs here in Britain.  I agree!  The objective of my post was to put the case that the climate change resulting from (global) greenhouse gas emissions is a much greater threat to our safety than the trace amounts of mercury present in compact fluorescent lamps.  However, I used American data that didn't answer the question of how CFLs contribute to mercury pollution in Britain.

To put this right, I have examined the mercury emissions arising here in Britain from the Government's Carbon Emissions Reductions Target (CERT) programme, that funded the free distribution and subsidised retail sale of CFLs.  Rightly or wrongly, I am excluding any mining and manufacturing emissions of mercury in the production of these bulbs, since that took place outside the UK.

Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) of up to 20 watts contain under 5 milligrams (mg) of mercury, the metal vapour that emits ultra-violet light when the bulb is running.  This U-V light excites the white phosphor coating inside the tubes of the CFL, causing the phosphor to fluoresce, and that's how fluorescent lighting works, in a nutshell!  The typical quantity of mercury in a modern CFL is around 4mg mercury, commonly described as "enough to cover the writing tip of a biro".

Up to 350 million compact fluorescent lamps were distributed under CERT between 2008 and 2010, containing around 1.4 Tonnes of mercury in total.  Each is expected to last up to 10 years and to be recycled appropriately at end of life - in which case there is no mercury leakage from CFLs.  In practice, some of these lamps break and many are thrown in the bin when they stop working, releasing their trace of mercury to the environment.

To estimate the release of mercury from these 350 million CFLs, I have assumed that (1) 10% of them fail each year, for 10 years, giving an average working life of 5 years, and (2) HALF these CFLs are broken or binned, rather than being recycled properly.  In this case, 17.5 million of those CFLs supplied under CERT will be broken each year, for 10 years, releasing around 70 kg of mercury a year to the environment.

How does this compare with other sources of mercury emissions here in the UK?  The 2009 National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory  shows that 7.35 Tonnes of mercury were reported to be released in that year.  Some of the sources were: 3.9 T from manufacturing and chemical industries, 1.5 T from cremation and clinical waste incineration, 1.3 Tonnes from power generation and 360kg from landfill.

So the amount of mercury released each year from the CFLs distributed under CERT represents just under one percent of the total annual emissions of this toxic metal in Britain.  We are all exposed to this pollution, principally through our diets - because mercury enters the foodchain - and particularly if we eat the top marine predators like tuna and swordfish.  But the quantities we ingest are minuscule and the risk they present to most of us is, frankly, trivial in comparison with the certain dangers of manmade climate change for us and our descendants.

We live in a 4-bedroom detached house.  Shockingly, it has around 120 bulbs installed!  I first surveyed the energy use of lighting in our home five years ago, when we had 34 energy-saving CFLs and 92 incandescent lights - including halogen lamps.  We now have about 80 CFLs fitted and have replaced almost all the remaining incandescent bulbs with clean, bright LED lighting.  Our electricity usage has halved over the same period, largely through fitting energy-efficient appliances including lighting.

I also have a small, medical thermometer containing mercury, that we used to put in our babies' mouths when they were unwell.  The thermometer contains 2 - 3 times as much mercury as all the CFLs in my house.  I am sad to say that climate change is a far greater threat to my grown-up babies' wellbeing than that thermometer ever was.

Challenging misperceptions around clean energy

Which are the greater threat, heavy metals or greenhouse gases? 

Most people are happy to agree that LED lighting is clean, efficient and the way forward - when the balance of quality, performance and price becomes acceptable for mainstream customers in our high streets and retail parks.  Until then, we can get along with the current generation of energy-saving lights, known as compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs).  In recent years they have been given away by energy companies, and sold for pennies in supermarkets, under the Government's Carbon Emissions Reductions Target (CERT) programme.  Those days are gone, however, as you will know if you have had to buy any CFLs recently - they cost anything from £2 to £6 each, which is pretty much what they should cost - they last many years and save many times their own cost in electricity over their lifetimes .

There are some downsides with CFLs:

• they can take a long time to reach full brightness
• their colour rendition is usually less attractive than that of old-fashioned tungsten incandescent bulbs and halogen lights
• their brightness can fall substantially over their lifetimes
• they contain traces of mercury and, at the end of their life, they need to be disposed of through suitable recycling facilities.

These issues have led some green campaigners to argue that we should not have banned traditional bulbs, or subsidised distribution of CFLs in recent years, because it was the wrong technology: instead, we should have waited until now - or even until 2014, when the performance and price of LED lighting will really be ready to compete with incandescent bulbs.  Their feeling is that long warm-up times and poor quality light from CFLs have turned consumers against low-energy lighting, so that the adoption of great LED lights will be held back by people's bad experiences of CFLs.  

More concerning, they oppose CFLs because of the presence of trace amounts of mercury in these bulbs.  Some bulbs will be broken in the home, exposing families to traces of mercury vapour, and many will be disposed of through household waste, potentially venting their heavy metal waste to our atmosphere or soil.  In response to this, should we all be so concerned about mercury in our CFLs that we insist on keeping our incandescent lightbulbs, stockpiling them from online retailers before they run out forever?  Well, NO.  That would be a disproportionate reaction to a misunderstood threat.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website sets out the origins and consequences of mercury contamination, here.  The principal manmade source of mercury contamination is from burning coal.  The coal is burned in order to generate electricity, to power our homes and businesses.  In Britain today, lighting accounts for about 20% of electricity demand (source).

Here's a decent analysis of the mercury released through using a traditional, incandescent light and an energy-saving compact fluorescent lamp.  The CFL contains about 5 milligrams of mercury.  Generating the power to run it for its typical lifetime of 7,500 hours releases a further 3.5mg mercury.  That gives a maximium total mercury release of 8.5mg, if the bulb is not properly recycled when it stops working.  

How about the old-fashioned, tungsten incandescent lamp?  It will only last 1000 hours.  Powering a succession of these bulbs, with the same brightness as our CFL, for 7,500 hours will release 13 mg mercury from coal.  From this, we can conclude that (a) it's important to recycle CFLs (and all fluorescent lights) properly and (b) old-fashioned lightbulbs cause much more mercury to be released into the environment than CFLs, through their inefficient use of electricity.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are much more significant for our future wellbeing than traces of mercury.  Dr James Hansen of NASA has written, in "Storms of my Grandchildren" (2009), that the greenhouse gases emitted from a large coal-fired power station over its operating lifespan of around 25 years will be responsible for driving 400 species to extinction, through climate change.  

CFLs have been available for about 20 years and, by using them since the mid-nineties, we have reduced emissions of both mercury and carbon dioxide from Britain's power stations.  They have been unarguably a good thing in the battle against manmade global warming.

There is no doubt that LEDs are a cleaner, greener, brighter solution for the future of lighting but they are only now beginning to challenge CFLs as the low energy lighting solution of choice, in terms of performance, quality and cost.  I have adopted LED lighting in my home as widely as I can but the great majority of my lights are compact fluorescents and I still depend on these to keep my energy bills and carbon footprint low while providing warm, welcoming lighting in almost every room of the house.  The LEDs to replace these are nowhere near competitive yet and I shall be loving my CFLs until the new lighting technology can beat them on performance, quality and total lifetime cost.  

The thorny (or should that be bony?) subject of what we eat

I was recently told by a colleague that, "we were born to eat flesh". As a biologist, I would beg to differ.  Our dentition, evolved from an omnivorous diet, combines cutting and grinding actions.  While our canines and incisors can tear into meat, our molars enable us to chew fibrous plant material in much the same way that ruminants do.  We are well adapted to a diet of fruit, vegetables and grains - supplemented with meat when we can get it.  Our short alimentary canal indicates that, rather than being born to eat meat, we were born to cook.  The combination of farming and fire provides plentiful calories in our diet that are much more readily absorbed than the resistant flesh of raw animal and plant tissues.  Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College, London, observes wryly that anyone trying to live exclusively on raw food would die of malnutrition within 90 days.

This led onto the subject of fish because my colleague felt "more strongly about the waste involved with eating fish than with cows, sheep, pigs, chicken, etc."  On the day of this exchange, I happened to be cooking sea bream for dinner.  Whenever we buy whole fish, I boil up the leftovers with a few vegetables and a drop of lemon juice or vinegar to produce a richly-flavoured broth.  Left to chill, the broth sets to a loose jelly which forms the base for another delicious meal, such as risotto or paella.  The only waste is the guts and a handful of sharp fishbones that can be composted.

Of course, there can be waste a-plenty in the supply chain.  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's "Fish Fight" campaign has raised our awareness of the appalling practice known as discards, where perfectly edible, dead fish are thrown back into the sea because the vessel has exceeded its fishing quotas.  At the same time, Greenpeace campaigned against the use of purse-seine nets and Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) to fish for tuna, as these methods result in carnage for other species including shark, dolphins and endangered sea turtles.  This incredible campaign resulted in the immediate end to these fishing practices by all the major producers and retailers of tinned tuna.

No such consumer revolution has yet been sparked against the rape of tropical peatland rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia, which are home to all three species of orangutan, in pursuit of the latest gold rush.  Palm oil is present in about a quarter of all grocery products.  It is widely used in toiletries and cosmetics.  Most insidious is its inclusion, by law, as biodiesel in our transport fuel, under the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO). Liquid biofuels, including palm oil, produced from clearing virgin rainforest have a carbon intensity that is many times that of the fossil fuels they are intended to replace.  Yet that is not stopping Eric Pickles and his Department for Communities and Local Government from granting planning consent for palm-oil fired power stations in Britain, under the deceptive claim that biofuels are a central component of Britain's plans to decarbonise our energy infrastructure in the coming decades.

Industry moves to secure sustainable supplies of palm oil, through the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) are a figleaf, however well intentioned, that is allowing the continued destruction of remaining orang-utan habitat.  Most of the major retailers and brands supplying our consumer goods have pledged to use only sustainably-sourced palm oil by 2015.  In the meantime, deliveries of RSPO-certified sustainable palm oil to the UK remain unsold because so few of the major players are yet prepared to take the competitive hit of paying more for this ethical ingredient while they can still get the cheap oil, whose by-product is deforestation, leading directly to gargantuan greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and the deaths of our few remaining cousins, whose name comes from the Malay language and means "people of the forest".

So what are the most sustainable and ethical foods in our diets? Allotment-holders, by their toil, earn the right to eat fresh, healthy, seasonal vegetables with no food miles whatsoever.  Those of us with less time, talent and tenacity continue to depend on the supermarket for our weekly shop.  The best we can do there, I believe, is to buy locally-grown food that is in season, avoiding the need for fossil fuels to heat greenhouses and to fly ripe produce to our tables from around the world.   Meat and dairy products are among the most carbon-intensive foods we can buy and so it makes sense to eat less of these foods.

Instead, consider the point made by Colin Tudge in his excellent study of the history and future of food production, "So Shall we Reap" (2002).   Traditional combinations of staple foods (carbohydrate-rich grains and roots) with vegetables or pulses have developed as regional cuisines around the world.  The blend of proteins in each of these combinations provide all the essential amino acids we need to remain healthy.  Tudge's examples include rice and tofu (bean curd) in the Far East, rice and peas in the West Indies, tortillas (maize) and frijoles (beans) in Mexico - and even baked beans on toast (wheat)!  We have all experienced other, traditional combinations of carbohydrate and vegetables, from pasta and beans to potatoes and peas.

The message to take away is that meat and dairy products are not the core of a sustainable, ethical and healthy diet.  That role is reserved for the rainbow varieties of peas, beans, pulses and vegetables which we can combine with our staple foods, transforming them from monotonous carbs into delicious, nutritious and aesthetic cuisine.  And if there WAS a take-away serving that, I'd be the first to order a home delivery from their carbon-neutral rickshaw service!

Why we need to use energy more sustainably

My guest blog on the British Gas Customer Newsroom website.
http://www.britishgasnewsroom.co.uk/2012/01/why-we-need-to-use-energy-more-sustainably/

Two photographs illustrate the article.  The first depicts my schoolfriend, David Kidd, fitting a Navitron solar thermal heating system on my roof.  He's standing safely in a long, horizontal valley between two pitched roofs so no need for a harness.  The second shows the excellent downlights that I fitted into the bathroom cabinet recently, replacing 60 watts of halogen lights with 7.2 watts of warm white LED cabinet units from www.ledcentre.uk.com

Many people argue that we can best engage the public in climate change action using positive terms, such as money to be saved, rather than evoking fear and other negative sentiments by describing the threats of unmitigated warming.  A recent scholarly analysis of climate change communications by Jacqueline Stewart, of George Washington University, gives examples of effective and counter-productive attempts to communicate climate change but concludes only that success depends on the specific message, messenger and circumstances.

I believe people need to hear the truth about our situation - how can we care about something we aren't aware of? - but agree that this needs to be coupled with positive messages on what we can do about it.  

This guest post is my attempt to communicate the big picture on consumption, carbon emissions and consequences, together with clear proposals for personal action to reduce all three.  I am pleased that British Gas have agreed to post it on their customer website and hope that it will reach a wide audience.

Numbers not Adjectives

In the words of Professor David Mackay, we need "numbers, not adjectives" to compare, understand and manage our country's energy supplies and our own energy demands.  In this spirit, here are two charts.

The first shows my family's energy use at home each year from 2006 to 2011.  For reasons I have made clear throughout this blog, we used 52% less energy in 2011 than in 2006.

The second chart shows the costs of this energy.

Sticking to Prof. Mackay's injunction, I will simply note that, despite increases in the unit costs we pay for energy over this period, our total bill for energy in 2011 was 38% smaller than we paid in 2006.

There are all sorts of issues, from fuel poverty to carbon emissions, that this comparison does not address.  The simple point that it illustrates well, however, is that individual efforts and investments to use energy more efficiently have a real impact on our energy bills.  If my family had used as much energy in 2011 as we did in 2006, our bills would have risen by 17% over this period - despite switching to a cheaper supplier at the end of 2008.

And the carbon emissions from our energy use?  I calculate that, in 2006, these amounted to 8 Tonnes CO2.  In 2011, our annual emissions were down to 3.6 Tonnes CO2.  The total reduction over five years (2007 - 11) amounts to 15.7 Tonnes.

This may not sound much compared with, for example, long-haul flights, but we haven't taken any of those in the last five years either.  Cutting carbon makes each and every part of life more sustainable, from holidays to heating, from commuting to computing and from diet to DIY.  Oh dear, I've forgotten the Professor's advice and slipped into rhetoric so I'd better stop and leave you to do the maths.

Warm winter, green Christmas and other stories

This time last year, I wrote a post for this blog called "What Colour Christmas are you Dreaming Of?"
I covered food, pressies and the merits of real vs. artificial trees.  It's all still valid so I won't harp on about these things again but I just want to add this BRILLIANT picture of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future from Best Foot Forward!

What was most memorable about last Christmas was the weather - we had the coldest December on record in England, with snow on the ground from the beginning of the month almost until Christmas Day.  This year, in southern Britain, we had such a long, warm autumn that trees were coming into bud and flowers blooming in November!  Even December has hardly been cold and the Met Office have confirmed that we're in for a green Christmas.

The extreme winter of 2010 meant high consumption of gas to heat homes, with scare stories of "just 7 days supply" held in Britain.  This year's mild winter has enabled my family to keep our home warm with much less gas: so much so that our consumption for 2011 is down more than 30% on 2010.

This dramatic decrease is due to weather rather than my home's efficiency or my family's behaviours relating to energy use, so should be reflected across the region.  None of us know what temperatures we will face next week, next month or next year and I take no credit for the weather.  However, I imagine that our country's 2011 carbon emissions will be lower than 2010, because of this climatic variation.

I have continued to cut my home's electricity usage, by replacing even more halogen lights.  A couple of years ago, I replaced the fluorescent under-cabinet lights in my kitchen with LED link-lights but was left with overhead halogen lights totalling 350 watts.  LED lights with the colour and brightness needed to replace 50 watt halogen downlights are now becoming available and I have fitted two Edison GU10 bulbs, each with 3 X 2 watt CREE LEDs, above the kitchen sink.  Even these are not as bright as the MR16 halogens they replaced, so I am holding off on replacing the two most critical lights in the kitchen, above the oven and kitchen table.

However, the room's main illumination is a mirrored cluster of 10 watt and 20 watt halogen bulbs, totalling 150 watts.  The power supply in this lamp recently burned out, giving me the opportunity to replace it with a suitable LED driver and to fit warm white LED lamps and G4 bulbs in place of the halogens.  I purchased these from http://www.ledcentre.uk.com/ and they were delivered the next day - in the middle of the pre-Christmas rush.

The chrome lamp units have a really high quality feel and I am amazed that the light they provide is simply BETTER than the illumination we got from the halogen bulbs they have replaced.  What is more surprising is the feeling of warmth that this bright light creates.  The mirrored cluster has 12 light fittings and the whole thing now uses the same amount of electricity that a single one of the halogen bulbs used to consume!  I have bought another three of these lamp units, to convert the bathroom lights from 60 watt halogen to 7 watt LED.

I worked really hard to cut my home's carbon emissions by 10% last year, to deliver my 10:10 promise, but the bitterly cold weather scuppered this for me.  This year's mild winter has enabled me to reduce my home's CO2 by more than 20% which more than makes up for missing last year's target.  The effects of warm weather and more efficient use of electricity have combined to save almost a Tonne of CO2 emissions from our home's energy usage in 2011 (3.6 Tonnes), compared with 2010 (4.6 Tonnes).

Why my (or your) carbon footprint matters

At the Ashden Awards in June, I was lucky enough to meet Emma Murphy, one of the founders of the green PR outfit, Life Size Media.  She combines great technical understanding of climate change mitigation with a creative flair for communicating the subject.  I mention this because they are now running a poll on the question, "Do you think it's important to know your carbon footprint?"  Quite apart from the audience selection bias of their followers, I suspect that very few people have a clear idea of their own carbon footprint and almost nobody can be sure of their own direct and indirect contribution to humanity's greenhouse gas emissions, the scale of which is illustrated beautifully by a post on Karina Rubiera's blog:

Here are some of the confusing carbon emissions measurements that I have come across today:
1) My local leisure centre used 6 million kWh of gas last year and its carbon emissions were almost 1500 Tonnes CO2e.  I go there once every few months: how much of that carbon footprint has my name on it?
2) The local boys' secondary school, that my son and I both attended and where my wife is a governor, had publicly reported emissions of 984 Tonnes CO2e in 2008.
3) Intensively reared lamb in the USA causes CO2-equivalent emissions of almost 40kg for every kilo of meat.  Some of this is due to methane emissions from the ruminant gut but much is due to the agricultural feedstock: lamb raised on hill-farms in Britain would, quite literally, embody much less carbon emissions than their grain-reared cousins imprisoned in American feedlots.
4) Duncan Clark, of 10:10 and the Guardian, has reflected deeply on the question of short-haul flights in his blog post today.  He concludes that our personal carbon emissions matter much less than the effect that our awareness-raising can have on those of others.

Of course, I agree that communication and awareness-raising are at the heart of the matter.  Duncan and Emma are both leading exponents of sustainability communications and yet even they, I think they would agree, have limited ability to reach out to the wider public, at home and abroad, and engage them in the battle against dangerous climate change due to fossil carbon emissions from unsustainable behaviours and practices in so many aspects of our contemporary lifestyles.  The clamour of commercial concerns, urging us to consume and spend so that they can grow and profit, is usually too loud and incessant for quiet voices of restraint and reflection to be heard.

This is one reason why I think it matters that each of us considers our own carbon footprint and makes sure to reduce it over time.  If you will excuse the clumsy analogy, it's the ethical equivalent of a medical thermometer for my environmental conscience.  The 10:10 campaign grabbed the attention of 100,000 people last year, along with 1000s of businesses and institutions, and focused them on the challenge of cutting their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010.  Positive, purposeful progress - what an amazing achievement!  It's still full steam ahead for the good ship 10:10 and their challenge to each of us now is to cut 10% every year.

However, it's not enough to know the amount of indirect emissions that feature in my personal carbon account simply for being a citizen - including healthcare, education, defence, government, transport and other infrastructure.  I cannot influence these through my own efforts.  The direct carbon impacts of my activities and decisions are much more important to me in measuring my personal responsibility for human-induced climate change.  I want to know, and reduce, the carbon footprint of my personal consumption - such as transport, diet, shopping, entertainment and home energy use.

Useful books and online tools abound to help me know my numbers but, where possible, I favour direct measurement.  It's simple, accurate and reflects my improvements every year.  At home, just put regular meter readings into a basic spreadsheet and, with a couple of standard conversion factors, you can see directly what progress you are making towards cutting your carbon year on year.  This graph shows our home's total energy use for the calendar years 2009 -11.

The next one is smoothed using Moving Annual Totals (MAT) for electricity and gas use, and carbon emissions, over the same period. You can see that the green line has been bumping along just above 4 Tonnes/year CO2 emissions since May 2011: by contrast, our home energy use in 2006 emitted more than 8 Tonnes CO2.

These direct measurements and graphs are not to everyone's taste but they motivate me to remain focused on our home's energy use.  If you don't want to make your own spreadsheet, Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute (ECI) have already done it for you!  Just sign up to iMeasure and they'll prompt you to type in your meter readings every Monday.  Over time, iMeasure shows you your home's energy consumption, and its carbon footprint, in a variety of ways.  The two features that I find most impressive are the weekly energy performance rating (A-G) that it gives your home and the rolling competition with neighbours in our local Carbon Club - we're nothing if not competitive!

Similarly, I keep a little logbook in the driver's door pocket of my car, to record my fuel consumption.  I multiply the litres of diesel purchased by 2.68 (kg CO2 per litre) to calculate my direct driving emissions. I have to make some estimates for maintenance and embodied emissions in the car's manufacture: these last go down for every additional year that I keep the car on the road but do they offset the direct emissions from a newer, more efficient vehicle?  Mike Berners-Lee wrote this excellent piece in the Guardian, from his book, "How Bad Are Bananas?".  There was also a great decision tree for keeping or replacing an older car - I'll post a link if I can find one.

For travel by public transport, eating, reading, holidays, gadgets, etc., the Guardian's quick carbon calculator, posted by Duncan Clark in 2009 and created by Small World Consulting, is the best footprint calculator I know.

To sum up, I think it does matter that we each care about our individual carbon footprint, gain some idea of its size and become engaged in whittling it down over time.  It's not going to stop dangerous, manmade climate change in its tracks but it is an ethical, personal response to the moral challenge of treading lightly on the Earth and the living world that we continue to share it with.

A sustainable summer

A summer to remember!  The joy of rail.  The beauty of Italian cities.  The weak pound.  Endless blackberries.

We haven't flown abroad on holiday for several years, for rather obvious environmental reasons, yet we love the experience of European travel and are loathe to give up our annual immersion in other languages, cultures, climate and cuisine. This year, despite the poor exchange rate, we decided to travel to Italy for our summer holiday, to see places we haven't seen before and to give our 16-year old daughter a more memorable European experience.  We invested plenty of time up front in planning our itinerary and accommodation, so that we could book the right trains on Rail Europe as soon as they became available, 3 months before travel.  All our plans bore fruit, every train throughout the holiday ran on time and we loved the adventure of watching countryside, seas and mountains from our panoramic windows.  Our hotels in Paris, Rome and Venice were all well situated for exploring these great cities on foot and by underground or river bus.  Our most relaxing break was in an apartment overlooking the small village of Argegno, on the shore of Lake Como, which we reached by ferry and bus.

Last year, the carbon emissions from our family of four travelling to the Tarn region of southwest France and back, by car and cross-channel ferry*, were around 670 kg - or 170 kg CO2 per head.  According to Best Foot Forward, in their study commissioned by Rail Europe, the equivalent emissions for this year's holiday by rail for the three of us were about 135 kg - a mere 45 kg CO2 per head.  Conversely, if three of us had flown to Rome and back, our journey's climate change impact (including radiative forcing, due to the altitude of the plane's emissions) would have been 1,660 kg - or 550 kg CO2 per head, according to the Carbon Footprint calculator.

So, a European family holiday by train results in less than a tenth of the carbon emissions of the same holiday by plane.  The same holiday by car results in 3-4 times the emissions of the train but only a third of the plane.

Scaling this up, I have just returned from a fabulous week at Scout camp in Belgium.  22 of us travelled by Eurostar and 5 leaders took our kit across in a car and a van.  The GHG emissions from our 22 return rail journeys were just 57 kg CO2, the same as those from one single passenger making the same trip by plane!  Adding in the car and van journeys (475 kg CO2*) gives a carbon footprint, for 27 of us and our kit travelling to and from camp, totalling 530 kg - only 20 kg CO2 per person.

And the blackberries?  I'm not talking about the rioters' social medium of choice but rather the extended harvest of wild fruit we have enjoyed this summer.  Spurred on by the hot, dry spring, all our apples, blackberries and other wild food are offering a prolonged and bountiful harvest of succulent fruit.  Even the mushrooms seem to be coming out early this year - if you know what to collect and eat safely, you are in for an outstanding season of delicious, free food!

* Modern cross-channel ferries emit around 8kg per passenger (return journey), according to the Best Foot Forward study reported on the SeaFrance website.  I have included this amount in all the driving calculations shown in this post.

Inspiring Energy Events

The annual Ashden Awards for sustainable energy enterprises were presented in London this month and I was lucky enough to be able to join their seminar at the Royal Geographical Society.  The morning session, chaired by Jonathan Porritt, focused on UK projects and the international session in the afternoon was chaired by the Guardian editor, Madeline Bunting.  During each session, the five finalists in their category screened a film summarising their project's achievements and the representative of the organisation gave a short speech about their work.  In the case of the UK finallists, this was posited as an "elevator pitch" to Chris Huhne and David Cameron, to persuade them what needs to be done to make Britain a great place to invest in sustainable energy technologies.

The films themselves are one of the Ashden Awards greatest achievements.  I look forward to screening them to the right audiences when the opportunities arise but you can view them yourself on the Ashden Awards website, for both the UK and international finalists.

After the films and pitches, the Chairs facilitated a couple of really useful discussion of pertinent issues - in the case of the international session, Local Clean Energy for the Poor.  This brought in technologists, regulators and investors and considered some of the artificial obstacles raised by institutional backers, aiming to verify the outcomes achieved with their support.  This discussion also highlighted the merits of grid vs. off-grid energy systems, with all parties agreeing that mini-grids, as seen in Peru and Ecuador, are often the best way to bring efficient, low carbon energy to poor rural communities.

As in previous years, I was greatly inspired by the overseas projects, which seem to exemplify courage and creativity in meeting the needs of - literally - billions of under-served people in the developing world.  I was privileged to chat at length with Suraj Wahab Olugburo, the founder of Toyola Energy Ltd of Ghana, who explained his elegant business model that provides work and income for over 500 entrepreneurs in making and selling the Toyola stove, which allows families to cook on half the charcoal needed for traditional stoves.  His simple credit scheme allows the local sales agent to give the stove to a family, with a collecting tin: each day that the customer does NOT need to pay for charcoal (because the stove halves their usage), they put their charcoal money into the tin.  After a few months, they have saved enough to pay for the stove!

The UK projects were also an inspiration this year and I was delighted to learn that one of the finallists, Radian Housing, was about to open a flagship project in Windsor, where they have built 9 new houses in Tinkers Lane - one is Code 6 (essentially zero carbon) and the others are all Code 5 dwellings, which are highly efficient in the way they use energy.  I was delighted to attend the opening ceremony last week, where our Mayor cut the ribbon and some of the residents opened their new homes to all the visitors.  We were a distinctly non-technical audience and the main take-home message was that these houses are very attractive, liveable homes that require no special skills from their residents.  Sure, some behaviours can be learned (for example, with a huge solar PV power station on the roof, it's worth running the washing machine when the sun is shining) but all the buildings' clean technologies simply run themselves itself without placing any responsibilities on the household.

It was a great pleasure to learn that these two finallists, Toyola and Radian, received the two Gold Awards at the Ashden Awards ceremony, on the evening of the day after the conference.


The other inspiring energy event that I have attended this month was, surprisingly, the RBWM Sustainability Panel at the Town Hall in Maidenhead.  After a slow start, discussion moved to the Government's disclosure requirements for greenhouse gas emissions.  The responsible officer outlined the framework of Scope I, Scope II and Scope III reporting but focused on the costs and complexity of data-gathering and analysis.  The councillors set a different pace, however, reminding the panel that residents expect leadership from their council and that time is of the essence in moving to meaningful reporting of these GHG emissions.  This decision was passed unanimously.  Good on them!

The same tone was maintained when considering energy reporting, with annual overviews by invoice described as insufficient and unsatisfactory.  The vice-chair, Councillor Sharp, called for electricity and gas usage by site to be reported "at least monthly".  On Energy Action Plans, the Chairman called for focus on the significant few actions, to make real progress.  Lastly, proposals for solar photovoltaic installations up to 50kWp on council buildings were reviewed and the vice-chair, Cllr. Sharp, now well into his stride, said, "We must do it now.  Must do it now!"  The Chairman concurred, saying "We want it and we want it tomorrow."

Having sat through a few of the previous administration's Sustainability Panels, which I felt were typically bogged down in politics, I found the new council's can-do mentality so empowering.  In the closing words of the Chairman, Cllr. David Coppinger, it's time to move from talking to doing.  Amen to that.

A change is brewing

Last week, our Bosch kettle died.  We bought it in March 2009, 26 months ago, with a 24 month warranty.  I stripped it down but could not get close enough to the sealed electronics to to find the fault.  It just blows the 13A fuse in the plug every time we switch it on.  I called Bosch customer service, to find out what could be done.  They told me to send it back to their workshop, with a cheque for £9, and they would investigate the fault and let me know what needed to be done to repair the kettle.  I might just do that, to see if we can keep this  otherwise high quality appliance in service rather than having to recycle it.  However, I can't imagine that many people would be prepared to throw good money after bad to prolong the life of stuff that has become essentially disposable.

In the meantime, we need a kettle.  Making tea and coffee with a saucepan is all very well on the odd occasion, such as a power cut, but we're all used to brewing up a hot drink in a matter of minutes.  I have been trying to track down an old-fashioned kettle with a heat exchanger skirt, for use on our gas hob.  My Grandma used to have a Simplex kettle like this and I found the company's website but there has been no response so far from their Contact Form.

I'm fairly clear, however, that the rest of the family won't tolerate life without an electric kettle that switches itself off when it comes to the boil.  I have long been fascinated with the Eco Kettle, which combines an onboard water reservoir with a clearly-calibrated boiling chamber, designed to make it consummately easy to boil only the amount of water that you need.  I decided to get one from Ecotopia, because they offered the best price and the fastest service, and I was pleasantly surprised to take delivery of a chrome Eco Kettle 2 the following day.

Having lived with the new gadget for a couple of days, I am happy with almost all aspects of its performance.  It's very quiet because it uses a less powerful element than most ordinary kettles.  This makes no appreciable difference to boiling times for one or two cups but must take slightly longer than a regular kettle to boil a teapotful, I suppose.  It's certainly heavy because it's carrying a full tank of water even when you're just boiling one cup.  However, the weight is not a problem for my family and the Eco Kettle is very well balanced and pours cleanly.  It also lives up to its promise, making it truly effortless to boil just the amount you need.

The one thing that makes no sense is that the kettle is terribly slow to switch off, once the water has boiled.  The power stays on for more than 10 seconds after the water can be seen and heard to be boiling vigorously.  When boiling a full charge of water, the EcoKettle moves around violently and seems ready to jump off its base.  It hasn't actually spilled any boiling water yet but it seems likely that this aspect of the design needs to be refined, so that the Eco Kettle doesn't waste electricity raising steam while the boil detector makes up its mind to turn the power off.  More importantly, any possibility of scalding from spitting liquid or even a spilt kettle is a serious safety issue.  I'll share my concern with the manufacturer and report back any response that they offer.