I'm not one for subsidy, but this is a no-brainer for reducing fossil fuel use
Needs to be offset with the economic cost of reducing Fossil Fuel Use. For example the jobs lost directly and indirectly in the fossil fuel industry.
via Ebert
I'm on twitter @franksting I'm everywhere else too. Check my card.ly profile for details.
Needs to be offset with the economic cost of reducing Fossil Fuel Use. For example the jobs lost directly and indirectly in the fossil fuel industry.
via Ebert
Love Food Hate Waste is the ‘Waste Not Want Not’ of the modern day, providing handy tips, advice and recipes for leftovers to help everyone waste less food.
Reducing food waste is a major issue and not just about good food going to waste
If we all stop wasting food that could have been eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 4 cars off the road.
2011 is all about prioritising NEEDS over WANTS. I'll keep this one close
Just over a year ago, I started this occasional blog when I realised that sometimes even the smallest tangible action is the easiest way to have a real conversation with people on the topic of climate change, sustainability and the environment.
We decided that our next action (we had already used the Government's initiative to insulate our home earlier last year) would be to install a 3000 Litre water tank and connect it to the Washing Machine and Toilets. The objective was to reduce our overall usage of water by at least 10%.
I had a suspicion that, considering we have a very young family, we might exceed that however. The washing machine, efficient as it already is, runs three or four times a day two to three days a week. The Garden is thirsty, and the small 1000 Litre tank we already had was often empty.
In Spring Quarter in 2009, we used on average 417 Litres of water a day in our household. That's a total of around 38,750 Litres of Water a quarter or something like 150,000 Litres a year - allowing for some times of the year being less thirsty than others.
When I got our last Sydney water bill in September, our numbers were already looking good, but as you well know Winter is a less thirsty time due to less watering required in the garden.
Today however, we got the Spring Bill. And it matches almost exactly the Winter Usage. In the last 3 months we've used an average of 290 Litres of water a day.
Quarterly Usage Targets
That's a 30% cut Year on Year. And that's with the 3000 Litre tank we installed actually being empty reasonably regularly throughout the year. Even though we've had a fair bit of
rain in the past 6-8 weeks, the year to then often went too long without enough, or the proper type of rain falling on the roof. (When you have a first flush diverter, the downpipe has to have reasonable flow so light drizzle never reaches the tank.)
With the supposed Wet Summer continuing, we should then expect the tank to have water in it almost constantly for the next few months. And with that the next quarter should show even better results than to date.
Annual Usage and Rainfall
Next: Comparing the Investment with the NBN
Great Little Post by the Big Yahu.
Another big bend over by NSW. Time to end this short termism.
The cutbacks to the NSW Solar Bonus Scheme announced yesterday by Kristina Keneally are a step in the wrong direction for renewable energy, writes Daniel Kogoy
... the NSW Government "should have given a lower tariff for a longer period to ensure more stable growth of the industry".
Dr Diesendorf believes a payment of 40c a kilowatt hour over 15 years would have longer lasting benefits than the scheme just announced for the Australian renewable energy industry.
...
A 2007 study[23] (pdf) undertaken by Dr Chris Riedy of the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS examined subsidies to the Australian stationary energy and transport sectors, and found that total subsidies to these sectors were between $9.3 billion and $10.1 billion in 2005/06. A whopping 96 per cent of the subsidies provided support for fossil fuel production and consumption and only 4 per cent went to renewable energy and energy efficiency.
via newmatilda.com
On the one hand my immediate reaction this announcement was the scheme was a victim of its own Success.
On the other having read this article and read feedback on twitter by people who know better about this, I see there is a bit more to it than meets the eye.
Yes they set the rate too high initially, but there has to be a better price, or people like me who were considering this investment are now no longer going to bother.
Or perhaps this is what NSW Labor and their Masters in the Australian Coal Association want?
I decided to do Commitment 2010 to show what needed to be done to reduce our usage of Electricity, Gas and Water by at least 10% in 2010.
Some of you may remember that we got a Water Tank installed late last year, and now it's time to measure what impact that would have on our water use.
Because we already had a small water tank our usage was reasonably low despite having a reasonably large garden by inner suburbs standards. However you'll see in this post how much of an impact installing the 3000 Litre water tank connected to toilets and Washing Maching actually makes. Since installation the water tank was perhaps feeding the toilets and washing machine for perhaps half of the past 9 months. I've found a good fall which fills the tank can mean 5-6 weeks of washing and flushing without any further rain.
Despite the lowest amount of rainfall in the 9 months to September 2010 (green line in graph below) we also matched our lowest water usage of the past 5 years. This despite adding 2 more water thirsty humans to the household. Look at how Water Usage (blue line) soared in the same period last year as rainfall dropped.
Note: Usage has been multiplied by 10 to better show the relationship in the graph
But the overall target was to reduce usage by at least 10% this year. Which meant that for the 9 months to the start of September I was aiming for usage of 83.4 gL.
You'll note clearly from the graph that despite being behind target at the end of Q2, we reduced our usage by 20% in the year to date. We've used 75gL in the period saving more than 17.5gL on our previous average.
I have to point out that Q2 was an aberration. Despite having the wettest May in 4 years, April had less than 25% of average rainfall in the previous 3 years and March was also below average for the same period. Clearly we only saw the benefit of May rain in the June - August Quarter as it all fell in the second half of the month. It should also be noted that April and May saw some water hungry construction being done on the house.
A return to higher levels of rainfall at anytime in the next three to five years should mean even further reductions in our usage, despite an increasingly thirsty household.
In the next post on the topic, I'll deal with the economic benefits and costs of the installation of a rainwater tank.
Get the Facts: Extreme Weather and Global Climate Change
- Pollution from human activities is warming our climate. The 10 warmest years on record all occurred since 1990, and the last decade was the hottest recorded since worldwide record keeping began more than 100 years ago. The period between January and June of 2010 was the warmest six months on record.
- A warming climate increases the chance that we will experience extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and intense storms, and ramps up the risk that severe weather events will cause catastrophic damage.
- The floods, fires and droughts we're seeing in places like Pakistan and Russia are consistent with the effects of global warming, including temperature increases, increased precipitation in some parts of the world, and droughts in others.
Our challenge remains to reduce our own personal consumption. Not just our own direct energy use, but the indirect energy used to produce and transport the "things" we need and want.
Once we can show our own good stories and cost savings, we can start to evangelize to others.
My good news story on massive YOY reduction in electricity usage upcoming, plus a salient lesson on waste.
This morning I listened to Bob Carr open this event and was stimulated into revisiting this site which I have left fallow for some time.
I did a talk on what I've learned by this exercise. And will later write a new post which discusses the talk, what I learned from giving it and also why I've added to my understanding from some of the other sessions today
Meanwhile, estimates are I am already exceeding my target 10% reduction for Electricity and Water, despite the winter still not being open.
I'll update with the tangibles later
Food is completely compostable, yet we throw it out all the time. That's a damned shame because once it goes into landfill, it mixes with the other crap in there and turns into a toxic stew of cheese-topped keyboards and plastic bags filled with rotting meat.
This is a huge problem. Food, along with paper, makes up about half of all landfill--New Yorkers alone throw out about two pounds of food per person per day, once you factor in all the restaurants--and food is the #1 least recycled material according to the EPA.
To do my part for the environment, last year I began looking into composting, which can be tough whether you live in the city or country; it requires a vermin-resistant facility of a certain temperature consistency, not to mention the discipline to regularly agitate the mix and/or maintain a worm population, if you go that route. In short, composting is not an easy option for the time-pressed.
click to read full review
My Dad recently bought a Volvo C30 with DRIVe technology. I'm not going to evangelise it's features here, but if you go to the Irish Volvo Site and click through the DRIVe part of the website, you can see the details.
Now, I'm not saying I'm going to buy a Volvo, and the C30 wouldn't meet my needs, so I checked to see how far I could go on one tank of fuel in an S80, and noted it knows where I am, so I was told I could drive to Adelaide and Rockhampton on one tank.
Wow! Thought I, thats nearly 1200kms!
So I went to the Australian site and immediately spotted some subtle differences.
Can you tell?
How about you check the engine options on the S80 in the Australian Site with the Irish one.
So Volvo, or whoever own you now - simple question, at what point are you going to bring cars - already available worldwide - with this interesting, emission and fuel reduction technology to Australia?
