10% in 2010

Lets face it the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference was a total COP out. It's time to ignore the politicians, get serious about climate change and do whatever we can with or without them. The 10:10 campaign is something that is tangible and totally do-able plus it will help reduce household bills too. Beat climate change and the recession all in one go - something every thrifty housewife should want to do!!

The 10:10 campaign is all about reducing your carbon emissions by 10% in the year 2010. The website gives all kinds of advice about how people can achieve that so go there now - no after you've read the rest of this because the 10:10 site doesn't say how as an individual you can baseline your carbon. There are a few carbon calculator sites the Transition House site reviewed last year.

If you really want to reduce your household carbon emissions you need to take notice of your electricity and gas consumption. www.readyourmeter.org is a site created by David Mackay (top geezer) and colleagues from Cambridge University. The site draws lots of nice graphs for you once you've added in your meter readings and it very kindly works out for you your CO2 emissions - very clever stuff.

By being interested in the charts it's almost impossible not to try and get those lines to go lower and lower (and horrible when it's winter and you have to turn the central heating and watch those lines rise (yes I am wearing several layers of jumpers)). Look out for electricity monitor free give aways too, the devices tell you which appliances are using the most electricity - some libraries have them to loan out to you like books ask your local library about them (and if they don't lend them out, suggest that they do!! :) ).

You can even compare your emissions against other houses, search for the "Transition House" stats. To check out how we are doing.

So join me and thousands of others and go for your 10% in 2010. Good luck and let me know if you sign up for the readyourmeter site so that we can compare charts.

Earth Hour 2009

Don't you just hate those people that when ever you try to talk to them about climate change or sustainability, they are totally convinced that what ever they do, somehow their actions don't count?

8:30pm on the 28th of March for just one hour, everyone can get to take part in a global demonstration that proves that individual actions do count. Earth Hour 2009. What's more you don't have to even leave your house and you could save money on your electricity bill. All you have to do is turn your lights off for an hour.



If you want some ideas about what you can do during that hour, with no lights or tv, watch the pandas...



Literally millions of people from all over the world took part in last years Earth Hour event. Even Google's home page was black for the day.

I wonder what Craig (Transition House) will want to do ...

Age of Stupid Premiere

We were there! It was fantastic.

We went to the people's premiere in Cambridge (the film was screened simultaneously in 60+ UK venues - world record!), with a couple of friends. The atmosphere was great.

The film was brilliant (I know, I would say that, but really it was).

I urge you all to go and see The Age of Stupid, when it reaches a cinema near you sometime after the 20th of March.

In the film, Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? All the footage from 2008 and before is actual footage, ie real, happened, not made up. It is very powerful. The main focus is climate change, but it also weaves in other issues like peak oil, poverty and consumerism by focusing on people in different parts of the world and their various struggles to make the world a better place.

After the film there was a live hook up with the premiere in London where Franny Armstrong (director) and Lizzie Gillett (producer) chatted with Pete and others in the film and everyone gave Ed Milliband a bit of a grilling about doing the right thing at the UN Climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Pete declared passionately that he would hand back his OBE and ask the Queen to disband the government if the government are generally "Stupid" about all things climate change related, like the giving the go ahead for the coal-burning power plant at Kingsnorth and the 3rd runway at Heathrow airport.

All of which you can see here:


The President of the Maldives got a standing ovation for his speech. He stated (via video) that the Maldives will be carbon-neutral within 10 years. Wow. You can watch the video now:

Message from the President of the Maldives from Age of Stupid on Vimeo
or at www.notstupid.org

The evening ended back in Cambridge where Rosemay Randall (Cambridge Carbon Footprint) and Tony Juniper (FOI director for 8 years) gave a couple of excellent speeches. Then Craig (Transition House) persuaded me that I needed to have my photo taken with Tony for this blog so here we are! (and yes I am wearing a dress!! well it was a premiere).