I'm confronting my issues at home with regard to climate change.
Firstly, I want to grow vegetables. To do that, I would have to clear away a few huge eucalypts in the public reserve behind our garden. The council is adamant; no way. Trees are never removed, even at sixty foot high with branches so big that when they fall they'll squash houses.
My quandary is that I love the trees too. They give shade, which in summer is good. They brings birds. I love birds. But.. in climate change terms how do we equate the reduction in carbon emissions I can facilitate by growing all my own greens (and I eat LOTS!) with the effect of three trees?
If I could promise to plant trees as a compensation for removing the ones outside my fence, I'd talk to council about it, but they made it clear; policy is - trees are sacred. And dammit! I agree!
So that's my first CC beef. How to be a 'locavorian' eat locally produced (in my case at home) food and therefore reduce the negative effects of the mad transport juggernaut that trasnsports foods from afar and spews diesel CO2 into the air for hundreds of miles?
My second beef is my hot water service. It was there when we came.. and we rent. But it operates at a temperature so high that we waste power.. and if we did have kids it'd be downright dangerous. Cassie rang the hot water manufacturer who suggested we call a plumber, but assured us that our model 'only worked at one temperature anyway'.
I'm trying to work out some sort of temperature sensor device I can gimmyrig from electronics store parts that I can retrofit myself, but the fundamental problem is not just the temperature; it's the ridiculously long reaches the water has to flow to get to most of the house. To wash a dish in hot water we have to waste almost a minute of cold water to get to the hot. Dumb.
Now it's my new electric bike. I felt so superior whizzing past fellow pedal-impeded cyclists on my way to work. Smug even.
It worked superbly for a month and now the Chinese batteries seem to be failing. The problem, it seems, is that if you are miles from home and the batteries flag, (there's a little handlebar indicator) you can't keep going until you stop because that's really bad for the batteries. Draining them is apparently deadly.. and that is, of course, what I did - cos no-one told me different!
We just shelled out for more batteries last week, and loaned the bike to our son. Late last night he rang us. "The light has turned red! What should I do? It's raining and I'm a kilometre from home." So do I tell him to keep going, avoid getting wet through, or do I tell him to get off and wheel the bike a kilometre through the rain? You guessed it. He rode it home and now the batteries are iffy. Such is life in the CO2 age.
I'd love to hear some of my readers' issues. Or don't you have them yet?
1 comment:
I have the same problem. I recently converted my business to instantaneous high efficiency gas hot water. Heaters on the roof so they're safe, adn only come on when we use the water. Now I have to figure out how to keep the water in the pipes hot so that water doesn't get wasted between the heaters and the rooms. Bottom line, changing to a pollution free planet is going to cost money, that's going to generate industry, jobs and all those people who the oil companies claim will be "out of work" (what rubbish!) will have lots of work to do. Crisis always generates economic movement, like the proverbial constipated system, it's like a good bowel movement that generates new life and gets the system moving again. The world is constipated and we need to change our diet not take laxatives! It doesn't need to be painful :) just take your time and realise that it's an opporunity to release yourself from something you've been holding on to for far too long, and it's stagnating and it needs to be got rid of. Dependance on oil. Transport is a good thing. If we stop buying vegies that are transported, we hurt the farmers, the truckies, and many others. If those trucks ran on hydrogen converted diesel engines (easy to do) and that hydrogen was either generated on board with some new technology, or pumped in and generated from solar and wind electricity - would it be so bad? There is enough energy to boil all the worlds oceans in a square inch of quantum space. We don't have an energy problem with have a technological problem, we need innovation and we need it 50 years ago. Put the right minds to the task and all our worrying and fiddling about with the small things will be senseless, pointless and unnecessary. If you just put 30% hydrogen and oxygen gas mixture into a diesel engine, the hydrogen is such a permeating rapid moving gas that it basically acts as a kindle for the diesel, with they hydrogen molecules wrapping around the diesel particles and upon ignition enhancing and increasing the efficiency of the burn of deisel. You then burn all the diesel, plus the hydrogen + oxygen together and the result is far less or NO unburt fuel coming out the tail pipe - pollultion is just unburnt fuel - WASTE. Without that waste, you have more energy, less fuel use, and no pollution. How to get that hydrogen - since you only need 30% or less to get the desired effect from the hydrogen, it's not like you need to power the whole vehicle on hydrogen, this kind of quantity could be safely and easily stored on board with current technology and simply and cheaply converted.
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