Mr Ethical missed a trick

Newsnight’s ‘Mr Ethical’ missed a trick last night. To set the scene a journalist has gone ethical and filmed his experiences with the problems that this brings up in his day to day life with his wife and two young kids. By ethical he means he has made changes to his life wherever possible to minimise his negative impact on the planet and society. So he only buys fair trade produce when it is available, he has insulated his house, he is actively recycling, he is conserving electricity water etc you get the idea. Last night the article covered him getting rid of his car and making do with public transport. There were clips of him struggling back with shopping from the supermarket and another of his wife being annoyed when she couldn’t nip out and get polenta or whatever middle class need they had I forget. There was a clip where his wife made him admit that he missed the power he felt being behind the wheel of a car (even though it was a really dull family car he got rid of). All quite amusing. They covered the alternatives like strictly PT only, car sharing, electric and hybrid cars, and he had a brief piece on a chap who was running a diesel landrover on unprocessed vegetable oil. There was an expert who pointed out that the hybrid and electic cars still generated CO2 but that the emissions were better for the urban environment and another guy who pointed out that a large portion of a car’s carbon footprint was in its initial production. He didn’t take a proper look at biodiesel however which is not the same as unprocessed veg oil. Unprocessed veg oil becomes wax at 10 degrees Celsius which makes it usless in the winter unless you invest in a heated fuel tank. Biodiesel is basically the same as regular diesel and can be used in current unconverted diesel engines. Because producing biomatter absourbs CO2 from the atmosphere when you burn biodiesel the net amount of CO2 released is zero. When you consider that an average car produces its own weight in CO2 every 6000 miles and you look at the number of cars on the road. The benefit of going to biodiesel is obvious.

Paxman came up with a cracking fact in the discussion at the end of the report however. In the next 50 days the growth in China’s economy will account for an additional output of CO2 greater than the total output for all transport in the uk last year. Basically we’re all doomed.

For those of you who like to point out that temperature has varied by dramatic amounts without man’s interference I include the hockey stick. Note the 3 or 4 mini ice ages. Frost fares on the thames and bitter cold winters attributed to a massive volcanic eruptions. Tiny tiny effect compared to the industrial revolution and the advent of the internal combustion engine.
Millennial Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature reconstruction (blue – tree rings, corals, ice cores, historical records) and instrumental data (red) from AD 1000 to 1999. A smoother version (black), and two standard error limits (grey) are shown. Source: IPCC Third Assessment Report