Taking Climate Change Seriously.. Seriously

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?