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Climate Change
Dec. 9th, 2015 10:57 am There were some really interesting answers to my previous post on Climate Change. Thanks everyone.
The carbon footprint calculator I linked to turns out not to have been a very good one. I'm going to see if I can find something more useful.
Problems included:
Being very UK-centric. eg. Questions on heating, but not air-conditioning.
No credit for using electricity generated from solar or hydroelectric sources.
Broad-brush assumptions on the way heating is used. eg. No questions on how many rooms you heat.
Advice that ignored your answers to questions. eg. Cycle more when you already said that you cycle most places.
Not giving any credit to people without children (you may have a high carbon footprint yourself, but you're still making a difference by not creating new people with carbon footprints of their own)
Given that consumption and population are the two big drivers of climate change, reducing both is clearly important.
As soon as I've sorted out some stuff for the allotment society, I'll see if I can come up with some more meaningful questions.
(There's always a trade off between ease of use and how useful the results are - the best data on home energy use clearly comes from kilowatt hours, but this means taking the effort to look at your bills. Still, I may see who is willing to give it a go. One can give far more sensible advice if the data is more meaningful.)
The carbon footprint calculator I linked to turns out not to have been a very good one. I'm going to see if I can find something more useful.
Problems included:
Being very UK-centric. eg. Questions on heating, but not air-conditioning.
No credit for using electricity generated from solar or hydroelectric sources.
Broad-brush assumptions on the way heating is used. eg. No questions on how many rooms you heat.
Advice that ignored your answers to questions. eg. Cycle more when you already said that you cycle most places.
Not giving any credit to people without children (you may have a high carbon footprint yourself, but you're still making a difference by not creating new people with carbon footprints of their own)
Given that consumption and population are the two big drivers of climate change, reducing both is clearly important.
As soon as I've sorted out some stuff for the allotment society, I'll see if I can come up with some more meaningful questions.
(There's always a trade off between ease of use and how useful the results are - the best data on home energy use clearly comes from kilowatt hours, but this means taking the effort to look at your bills. Still, I may see who is willing to give it a go. One can give far more sensible advice if the data is more meaningful.)
