#youmightbeanatheist if you prefer to be informed rather
than have blind faith in something (DylanBrent) etc.

Meanwhile, despite TV ads from DECC’s Act on CO2, we still don’t  believe in climate change and we’re still not treating climate change as the emergency it is.

You might be an climate skeptic if:

• You’re waiting to see if the government ban domestic / long-haul flights rather than choosing to fly less
• You think driving over the speed limit increases your personal safety risk, but not global climate chaos
• “Clean coal” doesn’t strike you as odd
• You still haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth
• You think DECC is a computer manufacturer
• You recycle but don’t compost
• You fly for pleasure
• …

Colleagues in the office were just talking about mobile phone contracts.
“I have seen one for £27 per month that looked reasonable”
That’s three hundred and twenty four pounds per year.

Earlier this month I downloaded my bank transactions and put them into Gnucash. It was easy to calculate how much I spent on my pay-as you go phone last year:

£50.00

That’s four pounds and sixteen pence per month.

I’m shocked.  It feels to me as if mobile phone contracts are contrived to encourage addictive and exploitative behaviour. To get value from free minutes, free SMS and free Internet, one must use them all up. I have a pay-as-you-go phone with no free minutes, no Internet and no free SMS. I pay for everything: 5p per text, 15p per minute for all calls. Paying for everything  I use discourages me from using my phone.  I use it less, and I pay very little.

I wonder whether if we actually paid for the real cost of our use of ecosystem services, we might use them less and ultimately have less to pay in terms of damage to the environment, climate biodiversity, resilience, etc.

Guardian Juxtaposition

A luxury kitchen advert opposite hundreds of Filipinos forced from their homes by typhoons. I wonder if the Guardian Weekend editors do this deliberately? The article about  climate-conference negotiator Bernarditas de Castro Muller gives a great inside view on the COP15 conference in Copenhangen in December.

Three things we can do together to help:

Sign the petition: Friends of the Earth petition to world leaders at COP15.

Join the Wave:  Peaceful protest in London 5 December

Find out more: about COP15: Copenhagen Question Time in Cambridge 27 November.

Windoze 7 Advert on The Tube

In a surprising departure, these adverts for Windoze 7 do not contain the word “Microsoft”. The web address at the bottom is windows.co.uk which redirects to www.microsoft.com/uk/windows. Is this to disassociate the corporation from the mysterious “They” who “improved security” at the bidding whoever’s voice the advert is in — presumably the guy in the picture?

Sarah and I are trying to do our bit. In Downing Street, we are composting, recycling, using energy-saving light bulbs and buying locally-sourced and sustainable food whenever possible. It’s little things like this which will make a big difference if we all do them.

David Miliband is less practical:

There will have to be compromise, but there cannot be compromise on the ambition

They both encourage us to back the UK bid in Copenhagen. They are writing as part of Blog Action Day on Climate Change. So am I.

The Prime Minister comes right out and says it:

Climate change is the biggest threat to all our futures

So just what can we do about it? Here are two local initiatives I am involved with:

• Cambridge Carbon Footprint empowers individuals to make personal changes to reduce their carbon footprints
• Cambridge Climate Change Charter supports organisations doing the same.
  

“I know how to make a solar dryer”, I said. For I did. Back in Kenya, I drew up this diagram for my friend Megan:

Megan had been putting together Instructions for making and using a solar food dehydrator. Kenya has lots of sun and an abundance of mangoes and papayas in season. Megan pitched up at my house one day with a bag of delicious dried papaya chunks and asked me to draw this illustration for her instructions.

Nic and I fetched cardboard boxes from various places round the house and took a “free sample” of black wallpaper from the local DIY store — no, we don’t like it on our walls and have recycled it in the heat-catcher. A colleague lent me a digital thermometer and, on a sunny evening when the air was 28C, inside the box, just under the top shelf the air temperature was 45C. The lavendar and petals dried beautifully in one sunny day.

The name of this site is a kind of spoonerism of Jitterbug: another name for Lindy Hop, the original Swing Dance.

Below is a video, by Jules Kerssemakers, that I have been toying with the idea of posting here for a while, of myself and Sam Flint mucking about at The Speakeasy in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago.

Thank you Frankie, you will be much missed

The night before last, it happened here in Cambridge.

“That’s interesting”, I said as I was plunged into darkness while cooking a curry.

The curry continued to cook on the gas stove but the gas central heating boiler, however, went off. We had a candle-lit curry supper.

After a couple of hours there was a flicker from the lights and beeps from various parts of the house but it didn’t turn into anything. Looking out of the window, the neighbours who had been blacked-out with us were, mostly, showing lights in their windows again but a few houses including ours remained dark.

In Kenya I’d spend my dark evenings writing in my journal with a candle, sometimes listening to  music by batter-operated radio. Preparing blogs to post here was part of what made life meaningful for me there. Biggest problem was that I had an electric fridge but, in fact, I didn’t keep much in it.

Nic and I sat on the sofa, under a quilt. It was so quiet. I read aloud from The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe which I’d been reading aloud at bed time for a couple of weeks. Then we turned off everything that might beep when the power came back on, and turned in for an early night. The heating had been on for a while and our home is well insulated so we weren’t cold, despite it being frosty outside.

In the morning the lights were on in the kitchen.

A sobering premonition, perhaps, of how we might have to adapt when fossil fuels start to run down.

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Whence Oil? by Bitterjug is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. You may use these images for any purpose so long as you cite Bitterjug.com as the original creator and include a link back to this page.

Previous Next

Whence Oil? by Bitterjug is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. You may use these images for any purpose so long as you cite Bitterjug.com as the original creator and include a link back to this page.