Last weekend I flew from Cork to Stansted to see my mum for her birthday. The feeling of being a ‘climate criminal’ was worse than ever and the disparaging looks from various friends since has been quite interesting…. But - I’m paying back for my crimes!

No daft carbon sequestration nonsense round here. I simply haven’t lit a fire for four days. The (three year old) council house we live in has open coal fires (…don’t get me started - that’s a different post…). In an average winter week we burn about 50kg of coal. I used Resurgence’s carbon calculator to work out that this is about 121kg CO2 released per week. In a previous post I estimated that the return flight to Stansted uses about 25 litres of fuel per person. This is about 67kg of CO2 released according to the Resurgence calculator.

I reckon that by not lighting the fire for half a week (I’ve been wearing 4 layers and a think hat whilst working on the computer and Ruth and the kids are away) I’ve saved about the amount of CO2 that my flight gave out. OK - I know that aeroplane emissions are more damaging per kilo and all that… but you can’t tell me that Ryanair would get away with the sulphur dioxide and a million other nasties that come out of our chimney. (On a still day our estate is shrouded in smog - and we burn smokeless - who knows what that’s doing to some Polish community somewhere…)

So have I nearly done my time yet? Or should I do another 8 days without the fire on? My point is that the aeroplane has become to climate change what the fox became to animal rights: They’re both not good things to do for the persecuted but we’re all focusing on the fox whilst the battery farms carry on regardless, or the aeroplane whilst we’re all driving around every day and not insulating our homes. OK - I’m off to put another jumper on….

This research from Google on hard disk failure rates really surprised me:

The report said that there was a clear trend showing “that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates”.

An axiom is a self evident truth. The wonderful Richard Heinberg has written 5 axioms of sustainability. This is a much needed reclaiming of this abused term.

(I shared an early taxi back from the SA conference dinner with Richard - he was very jetlagged but his quiet and modest intellect still shone through as we discussed the impending mass ‘re-ruralisation’. He’s a shining light of brilliance from the US.)

A couple of weeks ago I went to Cardiff to the Soil Association Conference. I meant to write a comprehensive report. Time has meant I only managed a brief review for the Organic College students.

The main thing I want to do here is congratulate Rob for being part of the inspiration for the conference and for inspiring people with a practical and visionary way forward.

a few people have mentioned recently that they can’t play certain video’s or audio files on their computer. (mpeg4 video files and certain avi files seem to be a problem for people using windows media player.)

if you need a multi purpose player for virtually any platform that will play most file types, then get the excellent free open source vlc player. there’s a portable version too.