Arcoarena

Carbon Credits

I went to the Eden Project whilst on holiday in Cornwall and it raised the whole Carbon Credit thing to the fore-front of my mind (again). I’d previously seen this advertised on the Newcastle metro. The reason I was on the metro was I was flying home (yes the nearest airport is Newcastle despite being a 2 hour train journey from my home). Flying home and hence being (partially) responsibly for all that fuel being burnt (sort of) added to my guilt.

Anyway. The idea is that you buy either carbon neutral fuels (wood because it only releases the amount of CO2 that is absorbed when it was alive) or the other more usual way is you pay to have trees planted to offset the amouth of CO2 you produce from your car, house etc.

My concern about this point of view is that (if you believe that we need to reduce the amount of CO2 and have a seat on the eco-bandwagon) it seems like an excuse to rid yourself of the guilt without any effort. The message seems to be ‘flying is ok because, even though there are more environmentally friendly ways of travelling, you bought some trees so that’s fine’. Surely people should be looking at how they live their lives. Anyone actually bothered would surely not fly wouldn’t they?

The reason I bring this up is because I saw a different way of approaching it. Electricity companies often offer Green Electricity, those either offset as above or (have an equivalent amount) produced from renewable sources. Ebico (found via Hippy Shopper) takes a different approach. They buy Carbon credits from other companies forcing other manufacturers to produce less. This way of doing things may actually result in less CO2 being produced in the first place.

After all Reduce is first in the oft-quoted 3 R’s of greeness (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle)

A fortnight of car ownership

I bought a car, a peugueot 106. Recently doesn’t appear to be a good time to own a car. Fuel prices rocketed by about 5p/ltr in less than a week. On a related topic I heard the organiser of the ‘go slow’ protests today on the radio. He said “I think most people are behind us”, that’ll be the big queue of cars he’s talking about or the population at large.

I was listening to the radio as I was on my way to pick up a new breadmaker from the DHL depot. The previous one broke so I phoned Morphey Richards to try to get it fixed but the sent me a new one and I don’t even have to send the old (broken) one back.

I had all this free time as I’m about to finish my 2nd week of holiday. Back to work soon, Sniff