Pasha protest

Last night Greenpeace used the coal ship Pasha, which is beached near Newcastle due to violent storms, as a venue for a protest against Australia’s continued commitment to using coal for electricity. They beamed the words “This is what climate change looks like” onto the side of the ship using laser lights, and “Coal Causes Climate Chaos” as well. I think it’s an innovative way to protest: it doesn’t harm people or property, but is interesting and to the point. (The linked news article has the only decent photo I can find).

In other Greenpeace news, activists have also been charged with trespass and malicious damage for chaining themselves to a conveyor belt at a coal-loading dock, which stopped them from loading coal for a whole two hours.

Seems kinda retro compared to the Pasha…

Carbon Cops

Carbon Cops is a new show on the ABC at 8pm on Tuesdays. I thought it might be too similar to SBS’s Eco-House Challenge, but it has a different format, more like “Green Eye for the Carbon Guy” than the long-term challenge of the SBS show. The show sends in two “Carbon Cops” to audit a family’s energy use, help them make their house more efficient, then challenge them to cut their carbon emissions by 50%.

This week’s family, the Barries, thought their emissions would be average, or better than average, but found out that they create more than 4 times the emissions from an average Australian family. They switched their lights, made their fans more efficient, used a compost bin instead of the “insinkerator” (what the kids call the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink), walked to school and shopped locally. I thought the father didn’t change much of his lifestyle – I would have liked them to recommend teleconferencing or video-conferencing to him. But maybe his job wouldn’t allow it.

They found they weren’t going to meet their challenge target because of the father’s previous air-travel – but they got around this by using carbon offsets for his travel and car. I’m a little concerned that they just bought their way out of that problem, but it would have been a disappointing show if they hadn’t met their targets! They also switched to GreenPower, which is a great move. At the end of the show little graphs show the reductions of emissions and the money savings.

I thought the show was more serious than Eco-House Challenge, possibly because they don’t show the personalities of the family since there’s a new one each week. If that’s the case, maybe the presenters will grow on the audience. The website is pretty good, with fact-sheets for each episode, a carbon-emissions calculator, a quiz and summaries of each episode.

Sustainable Energy Expo

On Saturday we went to the Master Builders HomeStyle Show & Sustainable Energy Expo at the Perth Convention & Exhibition Centre. We learned 3 things:

1. It’s very hard to get to the PCEC carpark when you are coming from Riverside Drive.
2. There’s a bit of greenwash going on at the Sustainable Energy Expo.
3. The greenwash wasn’t nearly as scary as the affluenza and excess consumption going on at the HomeStyle Show in the other half of the room.

We chatted with some lovely people who sell bamboo flooring and low-VOC paints, and with people representing the Sustainable Transport Alliance and the state government’s Sustainable Energy Development Office. We also got a quote for a solar hot-water system.

We were a bit puzzled by the promotion of curtains as eco-friendly – I mean, yeah, they’re good at regulating the temperature of your home so you don’t waste energy heating and cooling it, but most people have them already. And we were a bit annoyed that some of the vendors wouldn’t let you get away without giving you a dead-tree brochure – those just went straight into the recycling box when we got home.

We boggled at the saunas, enormous home theatres, and useless kitchen gadgets in the other half of the expo. There were some truly wasteful products being pushed.

On the whole, it was much the same as last year – a few new things, some friendly people demonstrating their eco-friendly products, a few hard-sellers pushing things of questionable value. We did get some really useful information and some products to look for when we get to various renovating projects in our house, though, and it was a nice enough way to spend a morning.

Shower timer

The other day I was at The Body Shop to return my empty moisturiser containers (yay for businesses who recycle their containers!), and they were having a cross-promotion with the Australian Conservation Foundation about climate change and the drought. I bought a shower-timer for $1.95: it’s a little sand-timer on a suction cup, and it’s got 4 minutes worth of sand in it.

I’ve always taken long showers… really long showers! But I wasn’t worried about not being able to get showered in 4 minutes, since most of my time in there is spent pondering the state of the world, what I’m going to wear to work, and why shower curtains never stay put. And it has been nicer to get out of the shower while the water is still hot, instead of waiting until it’s gradually cooled down and left me shivering.

Peter Garrett recommends singing a 4-minute song as a way to take shorter showers, but I don’t think my husband really wants to hear my off-key warbling first thing in the morning. If you too are a terrible singer who takes long showers, consider getting a timer instead.

Cost: $1.95 and the willpower to actually get out when the timer is done.

Water savings: 20L per minute shower for 10 minutes = 200L of water; 20L per minute shower for 4 minutes = 80L of water; therefore I’m using 120L less water every day, which is quite a lot really.

Next step: getting a water-saver showerhead so I’m not using 20L per minute! I’ll report on this as soon as we get one installed.

Book review: The Rough Guide to Climate Change

I picked up a copy of this a few weeks ago from Planet Books. It’s a guide to the science of climate change, part of the Rough Guide series which are known for their travel guides, but are now branching out into different topics. People who want to gain a solid understanding of the science and solutions will find the Rough Guide to Climate Change useful and easy to understand.

The sections are: the Basics, explaining the greenhouse effect; the Symptoms, describing what’s happening now and what might happen in the future; the Science, telling how we know what’s going on; and Debates and Solutions, which covers political, technological and personal ways to beat the problem.

Even though the series is called “rough” guides, the scientific detail is well-explained. They use the sort of reasonable questions a normal person would ask, such as: “how do we know the temperature is increasing?” and “what if there’s some other cause?”. It’s written in a conversational style that’s easy to follow and doesn’t assume you’re a professor.

The graphs used to help explain difficult concepts are clear and easy to understand. The photos aren’t of such good quality – they’re small and in black and white only. If you’re after large, glossy photos of environmental damage, I’d recommend the coffee-table book version of An Inconvenient Truth instead

Also included are extra side-bars on related topics. I’m a Perth resident, so a short section on how changing weather patterns have caused lower rainfall here was very interesting to me. Another good one was about Micheal Crichton’s novel, State of Fear. There’s also a good section on climate-change deniers, describing what they believe and why.

Overall, this is a clear and easy to understand explanation of how our climate has gotten to it’s current state. I’d recommend it to anyone who would like to know the facts and figures of climate change, and will probably end up referring back to it often. The authors sent a copy to every British MP with a survey, and published the results – apparently they’re going to do the same thing in the US and in Australia, so I look forward to seeing what responses they get!