Earth Hour

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We did it.

But then we always have a candlelit dinner on a Saturday.
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Pro Carbon Tax Rally - March 12th

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Margaret and I are in there somewhere.
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Solar systems

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We threw caution to the wind and put in a couple of solar systems. Above, is the solar collector for hot water. Now, it has been pretty cloudy since they went in (figures!) but the temperature water in the tank is in the 40s. (That's deg C. It's in the 70s for those of you who still use ancient units.)


Attached to the storage tank is a small gas heater that boosts the water temperature by the required amount as it enters the house.


Meanwhile, up on the roof are a dozen panels for electricity. They work (so I'm told) but cannot be connected until a 'bidirectional' meter is installed. AGL, if you are reading this, I am waiting, waiting...

Combine all that with a hybrid car (4.9 L/100km on a trip to the country and back last weekend.), a new 6 star fridge, four water tanks and a vegetable garden, we are doing pretty much as much as we can.
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Hybrid thoughts

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Chairman Bill was asking about the hybrid and whether it really saves fuel.

Hard to tell because my 'normal' cars never gave me mileage details and I was too disinterested to figure it out.

The daily run for the car is only about 10km each way to work. Abt 6miles. And I have found that that is not really enough to get full benefit as petrol engines use less fuel once they warm up. It tends to run out at 7.2 litre/100km (abt 39 miles to the imperial gallon, 32 miles to the US gallon.) On a longer freeway sort of run it is down at about 5.5 litre/100km (51/42).

It doesn't use the engine to charge the battery. When the car is coasting, down hill say, the charger hops in a little and it participates strongly when braking. Acts as a type of engine brake.

The electric motor assists during acceleration.

The wierdest thing is that the engine stops when you do. Stop at the lights and the engine turns off; when you take your foot off the brake, it restarts and is up and running before you get to the accelerator. I am assuming that it is the electric engine that powers this start up.

The engine shut down is OK at the lights. It is wierd when you are waiting to turn against on-coming traffic. There you are in the middle of the intersection, waiting to turn, and your engine turns off! An act of faith that it will start and get you oput of there!

Has so far.
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Colour co-ordinated

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My new-ish car. Five weeks old.

A jeans blue, green-ish car. The Honda Civic Hybrid.

Does it save the planet? Probably not.

But if you have to drive something, you could do worse.
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Earth Hour

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Did the Earth Hour thing tonight and sat drinking coffee and talking to Margaret and Simon by candle light for a while and then went with a walk.

Couldn't be sure if we saw anyone else doing it. Lots of houses with their lights on. Those with the lights off --- were they home and doing the Earth Hour light's off thing or were they off visiting someone else?

Oh, well. The thought was there.
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Cabbage moths, butterflies, whatever.

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This here is a cabbage moth. Or cabbage butterfly. Or cabbage butterflymoth.

The 'experts' seem vague on the terminology. I prefer to think of them as moths.

I like butterflies.

But I get lots of them fluttering around the garden and, I grant you, they look very pretty.

Except...the little blighters lay eggs on my cabbages and Chinese greens; the next thing I know I have multilegged green stomachs devouring my garden.

Now, on one of these oh-so-green gardening sites, someone gentle soul suggested spreading broken eggshells around the cabbages because the moths are short-sighted and socially considerate and, if they think some moth got there first, they will stay away.

Pigs.

The favourite hiding place in my garden at the moment is the broad beans; the flowers bear some considerable resemblance to both moths and broken egg shells.



I have been using derris dust but I am told this is environmentally dodgy. I believe there is a bacterial soup you can use and I will investigate that.

Soon.

In the mean time...


I play moth tennis with a plastic sieve.

Low impact on the environment, high impact on the moth.
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Recycling - Part II

OK, no-one seems to have had any serious problems with the idea that we are a bottle garden.

What is on this planet, is what we have. It all just stays here and gets recycled.

Now that, logically, must apply to the total amount of carbon on the planet.

Carbon on the planet is found in three places: The ground (oil, coal, gas, carbonate minerals), the biomass (plants and animals) and the atmosphere (carbon dioxide).

The biomass stores carbon. Plants take it out of the atmosphere and convert it to wood or leaves. Algae also extracts a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A certain amount breaks down to constituents or is consumed by animals who store carbon as flesh but also exhale carbon dioxide. On a larger time scale, plant and animal matter will produce oil, coal and gas when conditions are right. Algae especially is a source of hydrocarbons as, when it dies, it falls to the seabed where pressure and time and geological luck convert it to oil, gas or coal. It is not a quick process.

Currently we are extracting and burning the ground-stored carbon at a rapid rate, where it transfers to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, a by-product of combustion.

Concurrently, we are also clearing forests, often accompanied by burning of the felled timber.

So we are putting the stored carbon into the atmosphere while simultaneously reducing the mechanisms that remove it from the atmosphere. The level present in the atmosphere must increase.

Nothing I have said so far is guesswork or assumption. It all follows logically from what we all learned in school about plants and animals and from the notion that we are a closed system.

The only item that I must take on faith is "what is the effect of increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?" The scientists say it leads to warming. I have no reason to doubt them.

When I posted earlier in the year about the ongoing drought in southern Australia and suggested that it was a consequence of global warming, I was poo-pooed by various climate change doubters.

I wonder if they still feel this way.
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Recycling - Part I

It is a fascinating, and a little sobering, realization that we live in a bottle garden.

True, there is the occasional meteorite that adds to the collective mass of the planet and the occasional satellite leaves it but, by and large, we are a closed system.

Anything that is here now, was here then.

Conservation of mass.

Each and every one of us contains atoms that have previously participated in the make up of dinosaurs, ancient forests, Neanderthal man, woolly mamoths and the earliest plankton.

Every time we breathe, we inhale atoms of nitrogen and oxygen that were also inhaled by Caesar, Michaelangelo, Machiavelli, Hitler and Jesus.

It is, if you like, a giant Lego set. People, animals and plants are being constantly constructed and deconstructed from the same set of parts.

Quite amazing when you think about it.
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Second sip from the bottle...

People are getting the wrong idea. When I said that for every five litres of water you consume you consume one litre of crude oil I wasn't meaning that you physically drink the crude oil.

What is the bottle made out of? Crude oil.

What powers the vehicles that ship the water around the planet? Crude oil.

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People seem to forget that we use crude oil for far more than just running our cars.

All our plastics are made from crude oil. As are our paints, resins, pigments, synthetic fibres (nylon, polyester etc), most pharmaceuticals, many building products and laminates, glues & adhesives, pesticides, asphalt and rubber.
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Going down the gurgler.

For every five litres of
bottled water you drink
you consume
one litre of crude oil.
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