Solar-powered LED lights. Yawn. Seen them everywhere: home improvement stores, fuelling stations, supermarkets, pound stores and don’t even talk to me about eBay (3,200 listings when I checked). Background In theory, solar-powered LED lights make a lot of sense. LEDs consume very little power so even a small solar panel can keep enough charge in […]
Tag: sustainability
The Original Sin of Sustainability
Were you born into a lifestyle in harmony and equilibrium with your environment? It’s unlikely that you were, whatever your background. Most of us were already being unsustainable before we could spell it. Think about that for a minute: You have never experienced a sustainable lifestyle. Very few people still alive today have. None of […]
The Sustainability Misjudgements We're Programmed to Make – Part 2
Continued from The Sustainability Misjudgements We’re Programmed to Make – Part 1 5. Herd Mentality Herd mentality is the tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict. I’m going to explore this one in more detail later: personally I think that herd mentality is […]
The Sustainability Misjudgements We're Programmed to Make – Part 1
I am constantly inspired and enthralled by the ingenuity, compassion and creativity of the people around me. For upright, naked apes we’ve come an awfully long way. Our collective model of the universe (our knowledge) spans orders of magnitude and scales which our minds can only barely imagine, let alone experience. Our technology is profoundly […]
Contraction and Convergence
The climate change policy platform that’s floating just under the surface of negotiations I was privileged to attend COP15 in Copenhagen this week as a member of the Global Commons Institute delegation, headed by Aubrey Meyer. During our attendance, I spent a fair bit of time talking about C&C theory with Aubrey, and felt motivated […]
Google or Tea? Introducing the Carbon:Value Ratio
I’m not even sure this is worth blogging it seems so obvious. I guess the thing that crystallised this concept in my mind was that whole two-Google-searches-is-the-energy-equivalent-of-boiling-a-kettle nonsense, precipitated by a journalist from The Times doing some bad research and choosing a sensationalist headline which ensured that the story did the rounds for weeks online. […]