Guest Editor: Ben - Used Car versus Brand New Hybrid - What is the Greener Choice?

At first glance, the above choice seems pretty straight forward. A new hybrid, like the Toyota Prius, gets much better mileage, so how can it not be the greener choice? A recent article on Cut Your Carbon Footprint says that in many cases buying a used car is actually better for the environment.

How is this so? What your everyday mileage numbers don’t take into account is the amount of energy used up in actually building your car. If you buy a new hybrid, you drive it off the lot with a carbon footprint equivalent of burning 1000 gallons of gas. With a ten year old Tercel, for example, you don’t have to add that to your carbon footprint, giving you an instant advantage. It could take you years and thousands of miles to overcome that initial handicap before your ‘Eco-Friendly’ car is actually the better choice for the environment.

Certainly, this is simplifying the argument. There is something to be said for buying a hybrid car where the money you spend supports further products and investment in fuel efficient cars. As bad as most car manufacturers are for the environment, the truth is that if they didn’t make any money then we would be even further from having the more efficient and electric cars that are so badly needed to stop global warming.

Ultimately, the decision has to come down to the individual and there is no ‘right answer’ for everyone. But don’t get trapped by looking only at the mileage of a car when there are in fact so many other aspects of the car that contribute to your carbon footprint.

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Be green, get rid of your car

One of the greenest things you can do on a personal level is to stop using your car. Yes, wouldn’t that be nice. It all works out in that green version of reality I aspire to. Incidentally this is the same version of reality where a horse delivers my vegetables from a local farm.

Recently on the way back from holiday in Cornwall, my car’s engine died. The repair quote, £5800. I love my car, for one reason only, it emits 121g/CO2 per Km and I get 61 miles to the gallon. That’s 550 miles (approx 880 km) for £40. I don’t have £5800 lying around, and if I did I wouldn’t want to spend it on a car.

After a bit of research, I worked out that for the cost of my monthly fuel and insurance bill, I could go to work by train for the same price. Food shopping would be possible by using local shops and on-line shopping. My CO2 footprint would drop, my mountain bike would be given a new lease of life, and my doctor would love me for my new exercise regime. I had turned a nightmare situation into something positive.

But all was not well. With exams to sit, and a house move on the horizon, I couldn’t get away from a niggling feeling in the back of my mind. How I would cope without a car? I should add that during this time, someone I knew was also admitted to hospital, and the inconvenience of not having a car also became emotional. Not having a car was not going to be easy.

But then the answer came. I could resurrect the car with a second hand engine. Alleviating my guilt by the fact that I was still recycling (albeit still feeding my addiction to oil) I scoured the internet. My lifeline came from a engine part recycling website called 1st Choice Spares. Thanks to a good friend, before I long I’d worked out t that I could buy a recycled engine and get it fitted for a total of £1500. Less than it would cost me to get another used car of the same efficiency.

The engine took a while to arrive. It took a while to fit. During that time I lived out my green commute dream by train and cycle. The days were a lot less stressful, no idiots on the road to contend with, and I even caught up on my reading. My thigh muscles burned for the first couple of days, but all round I felt good and virtuous.

Fortunately I was never sold monthly ticket, because South West Trains were planning to strike. (This was subsequently called off). Daily tickets got me by, until a couple of weeks later, I got my car back. The price of diesel had risen, but it was nice to have it back.

I had a lot of time to think about the decision I was making. The fact that I was reading George Monbiot’s book, ‘Heat’ made my decision all the more poignant. Was it the lack of cheap reliable public transport, or the lack of clean cars that annoyed me? Who should I blame for the corner I found myself in. I felt disenchanted with the government for not doing enough to make public transport cheap and I felt angry that car makers for not doing enough to force me to buy a greener vehicles.

So what did I do? Well I channeled all that anger. I lobbied the EU parliament along with thousands of members Friends of the Earth to ask them to impose tough CO2 limits on the production of new cars, and made myself a note to talk about the train ticket price issue with my MP next time I saw him (this would have been another thing difficult to do without a car).

In reality we can all turn the lights off, buy green goodies and follow the grassroots movement for environmental improvement, but we still have to convince those that can make changes to the national grid or make deep structural improvements. With all the good will in the world, we still have to convince our leaders that there is no further wiggle room, otherwise everything we do today will be nothing but tokenism. It’s going to take governments and international agencies to make bold, unpopular decisions to save humanity from disaster.

Today I got stuck in a traffic jam.

Yours,

A guilty car owner.

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Consume Less

Recently I had been sent a e-mail with a link to this wonderful video that explained that as consumers most of us don’t see or see too little of what the big picture has to tell us about what the real cost of what it takes to produce a product in terms of money, content and pollution to create and make a item we see in a store.

There are five steps in the process of creating product. First there is extraction of natural resources next comes the process of production made from the natural resources, chemicals etc. then comes distribution at your local stores which leads people to consume or buy a product and finally the disposal of the product. This short video digs deeper into these five steps in making and distributing from life to death of a product. The short movie with Annie Leonard is about 20 minutes long which you can see at The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard also on their web page you can watch, download the video which is about 55mb in size, or you can even buy a DVD with this video for $10. I recommend this video for everyone to watch especially for the real consumers that keep buying products more than what the average person may buy in a given month or year. Spread the word about this video it may even get you thinking about what you even buy for the holidays, birthdays party’s or even things you buy for your own self.

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Guest Editor: Richard Rhodes - Shocking: Why won’t airlines let you clean up your C02 pollution?

Here at e-photoframes, UK photo frame retailer with an ethical twist, we recently produced a shocking report on the response of the worlds airlines to climate change.

They have a penchant for big boys’ toys jammed packed with high tech gadgets; They’re a by-word for safe travel and their concern for your well being is so sincere that they’ll even get a pretty girl to show you how to secure your belt. Why do you think so many guys like to take the plane rather than use the conference phone? And despite the heavy conscience and wizzy technology, they’re helping to fly us to
oblivion.

Airlines are responsible for 3% of global C02 emissions (per the European Commission) and yet of 374 listed airlines in the English speaking world, only 24 offer passengers the opportunity to buy carbon offsets. Self service cleaning (i.e. being responsible for your own CO2 emissions) would be a start but most airlines are happy to clean the gangway and indeed the toilet, so how about the air we breath? Only one single airline in the English speaking world has taken the plunge: A seaplane operator from Canada.

The survey looked at the carbon offset policies published on each airline’s websites in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and India. In total 374 websites were reviewed. All airlines without a policy were e-mailed to verify that the data was correct. Only a handful responded. The most amusing of which, gave a full list of duty free products available in flight! Take the US with 175 listed airlines (with websites). Now make sure your seat is upright and you’re strapped in: Only 2 of those airlines sell carbon offsets! The UK is currently top of the class with 16% of airlines offering offsets (including all the big ones) but still fails to attain the pass mark, which should be set at 100%. India has 18 airlines listed without a single offset policy among them. Frightening when you consider the growth in air travel that is now taking place in the developing world.

So what to do? Consider the response to cigarettes, another luxury good that pollutes the air and can have a long term impact on your health. Perhaps labelling aeroplanes with images of pending catastrophe is going too far, and “no flying” signs would pose practical problems, but taxing luxury goods is standard fare for governments. Can it really be that that difficult?

Follow this link to read the full Airline & Carbon Offset report

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Global Warming what its really about

Global Warming is about a lot things that us humans have done to the earth due to past resources such as gas that runs our cars and it is found in the materials in our plastic bags.So blame the ones who overuse or who rely on this power to much of this power when we should be preserving for when we really need it.

To understand this we will have to look at one element that makes life well alive. Carbon is the central element that makes us move and to have energy to do things. We are a Carbon-based life form. Carbon is a very special element because it can be found practically anywhere it’s in pencils, paper, plants, coal, the food you eat and even in you and down to the smallest cell in your body. Carbon is even unique because of it’s strong force known as a bond. When a Carbon bonds with another element that bond between them has a very strong force holding them together and with in that bond there is stored energy. A professor at MIT says that even when something dies the Carbon bonds still keeps its energy even with death. In fact if you went back a long time ago you would have found a sea in what we call middle east in this sea there were zooplankton and many other creatures that lived in the sea and when they did die there corpses piled on top of corpses compressed over several thousands of years to form this mush we call today Oil which is fossil fuel or ancient life just liquified. Coal is fossil fuel but in a solid form.

Now back to Oil. Oil is used in most anything from Cars to plastic. The only way to break this carbon bond is to excite the carbon and this can be done by a spark or a flame or a some other way. for example if you were to light a piece of paper has carbon with in it and the heat coming off is the excitement of the Carbon, when you eat a apple you break a carbon bond which converts into energy for you to use, when you turn on a gasoline engine the spark ignites and excites the Carbon atoms to break apart and off you go. When you break a carbon bond it almost immediately finds a new partner and whats better than having a stable element such as Oxygen but not just one but two Oxygen. When you break a bond it doesn’t matter if it is a piece of paper, gas or a apple you release CO2 in to the atmosphere. CO2 is a colorless and a odorless gas. CO2 or known as Carbon Dioxide is one of several greenhouse gases which makes about 75% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Most of the greenhouse gases are from cars and industrial plants and power plants. yourself may release CO2 but its in a smaller form so humans are not really part of the problem. When traveling from here to there either using cars, planes, buses, boat to many other things like mowing the grass and shipping items thats when us humans effect our environment. So you could blame the Oil industry for polluting the environment, and they were the ones that killed the electric car but they only wanted to make some money or you could blame your self for not being educated on how the things we do each day effects our atmosphere. Whatever it may be we all effect this atmosphere either in small or big way.

There are things we can do now that will help because there may be a point in time where there may be no point of no return to a better environment which we don’t want to happen right? and think about our future generations to come. Something we can do now to limit our carbon emissions can come very simple as transport. you could cycle to where you have to go, you could walk, you could roller skate/skateboard, you could carpool instead of driving alone you would be transporting one to about eight coworkers/school mates. For food you could buy organic foods that are within 0-100 miles of where you live, buy foods that don’t come in plastic containers unless it has a recyclable sign, you could support your farmers market and don’t have to wonder if your food came from new Zealand or some odd place, you can bring your own canvas bag for items bought from the places where you buy your food.

There are a lot of things you can to limit your carbon emissions but there are so many things that I may not even know about yet but I try to tell you about most anything I find out or have come across with each week and will post about it with a tip of the week.

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Tip #1 (Travelling)

For the past few weekends I’ve slept in one Motel and one Bed and Breakfast. Which is my great grandpa’s barn that he had built. It was quite something to experience for me and learned quite a bit about the barn and what to bring when travelling.

After spending two nights at the motel and bed and breakfast I have learned something. When travelling always bring a sleeping bag to sleep in and to bring some towels. Most Motel you stay in usually uses so many chemicals in cleaning their sheets and towels and not to mention all the water needed to wash them. The sheets and towels at our Motel last week smelt pretty bad and decided next time when we go travelling to pack some towels.

Many Motels in the morning have breakfast and they usually serve you with styrofoam plates and cups and plastic silverware. I suggest that next time bring your own plates, mug for your liquid, silverware and cloth napkins (or you could reuse napkins from restaurants and fast food that you have eaten from.), etc.

Many of these things you may need when travelling but when I had stayed the night at the Bed and Breakfast it was different. They had used real plates, silverware, glasses the whole bit. even the sheets and towels didn’t smell at all. This was the first bed and breakfast I had stayed in so there may be other Bed and Breakfast that use non-renewable items such as silver wear and plates so packing a mug, silverware and cloth napkins wouldn’t hurt much.

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