Watch the latest video from Al Gore

Interesting video from Repower America, the environmental campaign group backed by Al Gore. More evidence that US organisations of this type are far ahead of their counterparts in the UK, where 1 in 3 of us still believe the whole climate change thing is bunkum. Watch the video, and look out for a cameo appearance by Alec Baldwin (from The Departed) and a few other celebs you know. Kris Kristofferson is in there too.

We are now a Social Enterprise

A couple of quick updates. First, our registration as a Social Enterprise is now official, under a scheme run for the Cabinet Office. Note the handsome new logo up above.

Second, a new design for the blog, just to ring the changes. You'll see we also now have proper "sharing" buttons on each post - to get this working, just hover over the word SHARE at the bottom of each post, and up will pop your options. Those with gmail can just click on the red "M" logo to send a link. OK, sorry if that was obvious - apparently this little gadget has been used 1 billion times already on the web.

So, onwards and upwards ... we will be relaunching co2census.com very shortly, more news on that soon.

Our electricity could be gone for months

Earlier this summer I blogged about High Impact, Low Frequency events, unlikely occurrences but which could knock out the power grid. It sounds fanciful, but it's a real issue - dangerous electro-magnetic pulses could be caused by solar flares, electro-magnetic storms or by man-made nuclear explosions at high altitude.

So, very pleased to hear  Radio 4's Today Programme covering this topic today, with an interview of Avi Schnurr at the EMP Coalition. It's a risk we face that didn't exist a hundred years ago. The interview has not been posted yet, but should appear soon on the i-player (but for UK internauts only I believe).

The oil is still there (under the sand)

A colleague in the US writes:

I was recently at a presentation of the damage that BP has done to the Gulf of Mexico. BP has spent $100 million on PR and is saying that the beaches are clean, that the oil has evaporated, been digested or otherwise dispersed.

However, finding the pollution is as simple as digging a couple of inches into the sand on the barrier islands, where you'll find about a foot of coagulated oil. [see photo] We're very concerned that BP is about to declare victory and avoid doing a full cleanup.

Well, I don't know exactly what to make of this - it certainly seems as though there's a lot of oil still out there. But in general I don't think bashing BP over the oil spill has helped a great deal - they drill for oil in the gulf because we buy it off them afterwards, so the problem of getting off fossil fuels (and away from the risks of drilling) is one that we all share responsibility for solving. 

Even so, the photos are striking. They are by Shawn Carey, a photographer who works for the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and who is campaigning to extend the clean-up. 

We should charge electric cars at petrol stations

Just a short post to link to my article on electric cars in the Guardian today. Seems to have caused a bit of a stir - in any case, it currently has the second highest number of comments on the environment pages, just behind "Live online: Post your questions to No Impact Man".

Hard to compete with that, I guess ... but let's see if we can catch up by tomorrow morning.

September 2010: Chart of the Month

For reasons that don't bear explaining I have found myself looking into the latest government data on light bulbs. It was quite an illuminating exercise. For instance, I learned that we have cut our energy usage for lighting by 4% in the last 20 years, although on average the light bulbs we use are 43% more efficient. Hmmm, something up with that. The explanation must be that there are more of us, and we have more bulbs each. I chewed through the data and sure enough, the picture is as follows:

(Click on the image for a full size view)

To me, the column of interest in this chart is the third. It shows that we're each using more light bulbs, which is weird. But sure enough, that's exactly what we're doing. Think of a classic kitchen refurb: you take out a 100 watt centrally suspended bulb and replace it with 8 or 10 halogen spotlights, at 35 or 50 watts each. So the total energy requirement triples, at least. Sometimes it quintuples. There are now 170 million halogen lights in UK homes, more than the total number of energy saving light bulbs in the whole country.


Some people hope to solve this problem with LED lights, but I am not convinced. A 4 watt LED from Philips costs £22, compared to 99p for a 50W halogen spotlight . The LED lasts 20 times as long, and at 10p / KWh I estimate the cost of ownership is 6 times less per hour the bulb is used. But since the halogen spot only costs 0.5p per hour, and produces nearly 10 times more lumens  than the LED version, I'm not surprised if most people just can't be bothered with the calculation.


As usual, the source data is here for anyone who wants to check the maths. But more interesting than the raw data is the moral of the story: to make the kind of reductions in energy usage that we are currently targeting, we need the third column of this chart to start working for us, not against us. In this example, we need to stop ripping out low energy solutions and replacing them with high energy solutions. It just doesn't make sense. Perhaps we should introduce a tax (or a pox!) on halogen spots.