Dog Days

And so a new month finds us. Behold July 2023! What surprises and challenges do you bring? What delicious secrets lie buried just below your surface, waiting patiently to be discovered? A gold coin perhaps? A magical artefact? The potatoes I planted?

Yesterday morning I awoke with a start following a dream our dog had been lost somewhere in the highlands of Scotland. There was no way she could find her way home. She was out there, alone, fending for herself. It was horrible. 

It wasn't like the dream of losing a child, like in a big city, which I've also had, and which was also terrible. But my child is at an age now where he has a pretty decent understanding of the lie of the land and how to communicate and get around. Our dog has only been in this world seven months. She's cute and cuddly, yes, but her communication skills are a little lacking. Opposable thumbs are few and far between. Using a credit card, even contactless, may be outwith the bounds of her skillset.

For these reasons having a nightmare about a lost puppy seemed to hit, not harder, but in a slightly different, more sensitive area, where one is not accustomed to be hit.

Upon returning to reality I felt such a wave of relief wash over me, it was indescribable. But let me try. Big. 

Even though it was still an hour before she habitually woke me up, I went straight downstairs to reassure myself that she was safe and sound on the sofa, and there she was, oblivious to the torment I had just suffered at the hands of my subconscious. "What are you doing here?" she seemed to think. "You still have an hour." Needless to say, cuddles and tummy rubs ensued.

Need someone to write mildly amusing doggy blog posts? Hold my beer.

How to Live a Low Carbon Lifestyle

In other news, I was pleasantly surprised seeing the numbers of our June energy usage, which I check the 1st (week) of every month. It being the middle of summer, they are naturally low, but due to our solar panels and the selling of the car, our carbon footprint is way, way down. Like silly small.

Red means winter, green summer. Far right column is year's CO2 output to date.

If my calculations are correct, in June 2023 we output less than the weight of our dog in carbon emissions. 20kg.

This is not including any land-based public transport usage by family members, as I consider the additional weight of a human on a vehicle which is traveling overground somewhere anyway negligible.

I'm talking about the energy for which we are directly responsible.

The gas we use for central heating and showers.

The electricity we use for lights, the kettle, the cooker, the fridge.

The petrol and carbon debt of the car, spread out mile by mile throughout its lifespan.

Note yellow line representing half of solar generation (estimated unused and going back into the grid) which is negative.

20kg of CO2 in a summer month is the lowest since I started taking records of our energy usage going to back to 1st Dec 2018. The closest is 44kg in July 2020 in the midst of the Corona lockdowns. In the winter of early 2019, when I regularly commuted by car to Edinburgh, it was as as high as 533kg. Half a tonne.

I'm not telling people how to live their lives and I know some folk depend on their private vehicles but damn, if you want to rid yourself of carbon guilt and feel better about the planet, sell your car. Tremendous mental health relief. Get a decent road bike with rack and panniers for shopping. Re-acquaint yourself with the sociability of public transport and sharing lifts. Normalise a slightly less convenient, smaller, slower world. Use the capital to install solar panels on your house.

You know it makes sense...

Hydrocarbon Hangover

Since selling our Toyota on Friday the 9th June, it's been a week of utter carlessness. 

Over the years our hybrid accounted for a third of our carbon footprint. I used it a lot for work, driving all over the country to film weddings and such.

But it has slowly become obvious it's now time to at least attempt a footloose and car-free existence for the following reasons.

• We as a family can no longer afford a car. It would cost £600 to repair the intermittent brake sensor problem, which we don't have. To me that's a signal to sell the car. Yes the Toyota gave 53 miles to the gallon, but our lifestyle sadly cannot stretch to that. Wise man say: live within your means.
• We as a species can no longer afford cars. You may or may not believe in human-caused climate change. But to me it's staring us in the face. It's a logical result of us burning a whole load of fossil fuels and cutting down a whole load of trees. Less rain, record temperatures every year, receding ice caps. Wild fires. Water shortages. The time to make sacrifices is here, if not past. We have to make changes on a personal, local, national and global level. Burning fossil fuels was a mistake at first, then a lie. Now it's unsustainable. The truth is, we were never meant to fly in jet planes. We were never meant to drive gas guzzlers. Those things were temporary luxuries. The golden age of burning oil willy nilly is over. We need to get back to cycling, horse-riding, hang-gliding - something, anything else. We need to accept that our worlds must shrink back to the smaller, slower way they once were.
• I've lost the taste for driving. Fighting to keep my eyes open while weaving home after midnight post-filming an event. Cars veering in off the slip-roads expecting you to move over. People not using indicators or driving on their phones. Feeling sick at the wheel. Being encased in a glass, metal stuffy coffin, hurtling along at break-neck speed. Back pain. Everyone complaining you're driving too fast, you're driving too slow, you're driving too badly, you're driving too well. Actually no-one's ever complained that.
• There are too many cars on the road. The days of cruising down the open road are long gone, because every other person and their lover are doing the same. It's nose to tail. Instead, you can undertake long lines of cars on a bike at the lights while inhaling their noxious exhausts and feeling the heat bouncing off their chassis.

I realise the hypocrisy of what I'm saying. I spent many air miles flying around the world. But shirking life changes due to fear of being called a hypocrite is just another excuse.

Yes, I overindulged carbon like there was no tomorrow. But now I've woken up and it is tomorrow. And must face the hydrocarbon hangover.

Case in point. Yesterday I traveled by train to visit my mum. Usually it takes 47 minutes one way in the car. It took four hours round trip. Instead of getting in the car in the driveway I had to walk a mile to the station with a heavy bag. Rather than focusing on the road, straining to hear music over the sound of the wind and worrying about drivers behind and cyclists in front (we need more cycle paths!) I sat at a train table, wrote the first half of this blog and did my accounts. I gazed out the dirty window at the passing scenery. I thought about life. I drank tea and guzzled an empire state biscuit. That leg lasted an hour. 

At Glasgow I got out and relieved myself in the (now free to use) Glasgow Central toilets, after almost going into the Ladies. I got on the train to my home town. It was too hot. I drank water.  Things cooled down a bit once we got moving. I looked out the window and pondered my next novel. I napped. I drooled. I spotted a missing playpark of my youth which had been turned to grass. This leg was half an hour. One leg shorter than the other. Strangely I was exhausted and beginning to realise I'd vastly overestimated the number of books I would read on the train. I climbed the last incline to the family home, lamenting the fact it was on a hill and has been for the past sixty odd years. Two hours later I'd arrived.

On the return journey I was too exhausted to even read on the train, and took the time instead to deal with the possibility of my phone getting hacked when I'd responded to a scammer's text to download a link, too late realising something was amiss. 

Changed trains again at Glasgow Central, where someone was expertly playing the free piano and bringing joy to a father on Father's Day. In the carriage, two older women dressed to the nines in pinks and yellows sat down at my table and ate a MacDonalds. Through the windows in the adjacent train a group of young girls were dancing and singing and waving at us. They stuck their 'American Catholic Trip' tickets to the windows to communicate where they were going or had been.

Because I had a wooden mug rack attached to my bag the two women at my table asked if I'd just moved house. I said no, I was clearing out my Mum's and this used to be mine. "You make assumptions, don't you?" the woman next to me said chattily. I wasn't chatty. I was tired. My back hurt from too much sitting. I realised they would have been old even in the 80s. But they were nice. I made minimal courteous replies hoping they wouldn't try to seduce me.

At a station on the way home, we stopped at a platform with significant police presence. I fought the urge to alight with my wrists out to confess. "It was me officer, I did it!" "Did what, son?" "I don't know. What's been done recently?" 

I walked home thanking my stars we live downhill from the station.

Life without a car is hard, but not impossible. Dare I say it, it's healthier and better for the planet. 

And more interesting.

Two Birds, One Dog

Another Sunday befalls us.

It occurs to me that if I take gardening gloves on my 7am walk with the dog and pick up a handful of garbage before each bin, and drop it in, my life on this earth is not entirely wasted.

A good feeling is born, which mingles with the dew and dawn, and makes the surrounding nature more aesthetically pleasing. Just a little each day, and oh, how much easier on the eyes is the undergrowth. 

A crushed Monster can gives way to new-born nettles. A plastic Golden Wonder wrapper makes way for baby trees. A rusting tin can from aeons before, somehow disgorged from the soil since yesterday, succumbs to human hand and creates a safe space for fresh, green, dew-drop laden blades of grass to reach for the carbon enriched air, and, by merely doing what it does, convert it, molecule by molecule, to oxygen.

What if we are just aliens on an alien planet with alien problems?

Overcrowding, pollution and over-consumption of food and raw materials. It must happen to every species in a confined space eventually.

But for the meanwhile, it truly feeds the soul to cast one's gaze around the nature-scape and find it litter-free, reminded not of humanity's foibles, but of Mother Earth's simple beauty.

More Trees In West Lothian - For Free (An Open Letter To West Lothian Council)

Dear West Lothian Council,

All around West Lothian we see houses sprouting up like pop up books, turning green fields into carbon factories. While housing is of course necessary, and the addition of solar panels on all new builds commendable, I don't see many trees going up. In fact I see many mature ones coming down.

While out walking this morning I was struck with a simple idea for increasing the number of trees and bushes in West Lothian for free, and thus improving air quality, water retention and temperature moderation in the upcoming floods and heatwaves of all the winters and summers that loom before us.

If we decide to take climate change seriously, and I believe West Lothian has declared a climate emergency, we need to act as if it's an emergency and make changes large and small, as soon as possible.

My small idea is this: Instruct grass cutters to avoid the perimeter under the branches of trees in parks.

And no more pesticides at the base of trees either. This will allow wild grass and flowers to thrive, providing more habitats for insects and pollen for bees, but more importantly, allow seeds that each tree drops every autumn a fighting chance to germinate and grow little by little beneath the parent tree. By regularly cutting the grass under each park tree for the sake of appearance or tidiness, we are prematurely decimating the naturally occurring young trees before they get a chance to crop up.

If this new policy is adopted, cutting the grass in parks and public places would save time, and therefore council funds. Trees have been linked to the improvement of  local air quality and therefore not only the mental health, but also the respiratory health of the local population. The tree and bush sections in Howden Park in Livingston are an ideal example of this.

The first year: slightly longer, messy circles of grass beneath each tree.

The second year: circles of untidy, wild grass

The third year: Wild flowers and tree seedlings start to appear

The fourth year: The stronger tree saplings grow, alongside those of any other seeds carried there by the wind.

The tenth year: a circle of adolescent trees and bushes, with the parent tree in the centre.

There may be complaints of untidiness, but as was seen during lockdown, I think most people will understand the situation and accept the longer, wild grass, flowers and tree saplings sweeping the towns and villages, and most may even appreciate the boost to local wildlife.

Implementation of this policy across West Lothian will, I firmly believe, have a long-lasting positive impact on local health and well-being, land stability, and insect populations, not to mention provide natural carbon sinks to help fight the battle against CO2 emissions. West Lothian would be taking the lead in carbon retention and other counties might even follow suit. All, basically, due to working less and saving time, fuel and money.

If this suggested policy could be discussed by the council at the next convenient opportunity I would hugely appreciate it.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Young

Rename Sunday Earthday

On Sundays we used to rest. Nap. Potter around. Remember? Spend time with family. Because nothing was open. Perhaps the reason for this has changed, as beliefs change, but the effect was kind to the planet. And us. It gave the planet one day to breathe. And us a chance to relax.

As you may have heard, 97% of peer-reviewed scientists who studied climate change "endorsed the consensus that humans are causing global warming."

This is a problem for us on Earth, but not so much for the sun.

The sun can look after itself. We need to protect the earth. For this reason I propose we change the name of Sunday to Earthday, and on this day

• close shops and businesses
• limit non essential travel
• pedestrianise suitable roads
• encourage cycling, skating and other non fossil-fuel burning activities
• encourage local protests, demonstrations, talks in aid of the earth
• encourage meetings in local parks or halls for music, storytelling, poetry
• discourage non-renewable energy use
• plant trees locally
• celebrate our planet

Knowing our current situation is unsustainable, we should and eventually must change our ways as a tribe, country, people, species. It's that simple.

Better late than never. But what if late is too late? Imagine the good it could do.

Add your support to this cause by signing the petition. This petition is to the People Of The World. This means you. Because we don't need to ask anyone's permission to rename Sunday Earthday. New words are added to the dictionary every year. Because language changes. So we can just start doing it. 

Image credit https://www.hdwallpapers.in/planet_earth_stars-wallpapers.html

White Christmas, Green Year?

It's a brand new decade! I hope you all had a great Christmas & New Year and wish you a safe, healthy, happy and green 2021.

   Why green? You mean like the Grinch? Not exactly. With everything that's been going on, the fight against carbon has kind of taken a back seat. But the climate is still changing. We used to call it the Greenhouse Effect back in the 80s, before someone decided that was not a very politically correct phrase, and after all, who could prove for sure that the climate didn't just change of its own accord? Of course it does, just a lot faster with our help.

Click to enlarge this graph from Climate.gov

   As you may know, I like to record our monthly energy usage data, put it in a spreadsheet, calculate the CO2 emissions associated, and draw up a graph. Because I'm a bit of a nerd like that.

   How? It's simple. On the first of each month I go round and record the readings from our electricity, gas, and solar meters, and record the mileage of my car. Next I put them in a spreadsheet. Then I do the same the next month, and subtract the difference. After that I researched on various websites how to convert electricity and gas into kg of CO2 emissions (CO2e/KG)*. Finally, in the last column, you add it all up. Looks a bit like this:

   Nice, eh? Red represents winter, green summer and blue is spring and autumn. 

   Here are our CO2 emissions for the past two years from 1/1/19 to 1/1/21.

   The orange line is our electricity, green our car usage, blue is gas, yellow is solar and brown is total.

   The CO2 emissions for car take into account the mile per gallon reading (56.3) and CO2 emitted during the car's manufacture, spread out over its projected lifespan per mile. Because cars don't just grow on trees.

   The electricity usage 'should' be lower than if we didn't have solar panels. But since we've always had solar panels since a couple months after we moved in, this is hard to gauge. 

   The solar reading is negative because it represents the energy we put into the grid (50% after what we use in the daytime) rather than take out. 50% is pretty accurate I guess. (I have no idea really. The guy who put the panels on told me, so that's the best I got.)

   As you can see for the graph, our total carbon emissions are dropping year on year. Electricity and gas remain relatively unchanged, but car emissions are on the decrease. This is because in 2018 I often drove into Edinburgh for business meetings, which ceased in around spring 2019, bringing it down to normal levels in winter 2019. Then 2020 brought Covid-19 and with it lockdown and working from home. 

   This is all moot anyway now as we take our electricity and gas from Bulb, which is a renewable energy company providing either gas from anaerobic digestion, or offset by supporting carbon reduction projects around the world. This just leaves our car. But happily Bulb provide a carbon footprint calculator and payback scheme which allows you to offset your additional carbon emissions using a monthly payment. We pay about £3 per month on top of our energy bills. 

   Why just £3 per month? I guess because the electricity and gas is all carbon neutral to begin with being from Bulb, and the car is a hybrid which we hardly use that much due to lockdown. We hardly fly any more and don't eat much red meat. Don't get me wrong, I like a long-haul flight to Japan to eat steak as much as the next person. Just haven't done it since 2018. (Technically I should have added that on here, but I've also planted a tree or two since then so I'm hoping they cancel each other out).

   Try the Bulb Carbon Footprint Calculator here. Go on. I dare ya!

   I know this is beginning to sound like an advert for Bulb, but it's not product placement. It's in our species' own interest to record, reduce and offset the CO2 emissions we produce. The more people who do it, the better the effect on our planet, the better future our kids and their kids will have.

  My Personal Plan for 2021: Continue to reduce emissions by:

•    Improving home insulation
•    Switching from hybrid to electric vehicle
•    No flights
•    Working from home
•    Increasing plot size and growing more vegetables 
•    Charging batteries in daytime to use at night
•    Going to bed earlier? Would this help?
•    Accelerating and braking gently while driving
•    Wind turbine?

   Any other suggestions welcome.

   Here are some other ideas on how you can have a green year:

• Switch to Ecosia search engine who use their profits to plant trees.
• Switch to a renewable energy provider such as Bulb, Good Energy or Ecotricity.
• Set up a direct debit with WordForest.Org, a charity which plants trees and helps communities in Kenya.
• Fly less
• Use your own private car less
• Move away from red meat to a vegan diet
• Sign & share petitions
• Write letters & emails to politicians 
• lobby private companies that engage in dirty energy practices or investments.

   You could argue, "I'm just one person in billions - a drop in the ocean. What difference will it make? Why should I bother?"

   But we are all drops in the ocean...

*These are the formulae I use, but don't ask me where I got them as it was two years ago now...

Formula to convert electricity (Kwh) to CO2 emissions (CO2e/kg) : CO2e/kg = Kwh x 0.2773

Formula to convert gas (ft3) to gas (kwh): gas (kwh) = gas (ft3) x 31.513

To convert gas (kwh) to CO2 emissions : CO2e/kg = gas (kwh) x 0.18

Gallons of fuel spent = mileage/mpg

Car emissions calculated by Car CO2e/kg = (0.051+10.6/mpg) x mileage + (1.968 x mileage/mpg)

Please let me know if you spot an error. 

Thanks, and happy greening!

Carbon

Been thinking a lot about carbon today, as it's the last day of February when I check our car mileage, gas, electricity and solar meters. I do this on the first day of each month and have been for the past 14 months to monitor how much energy we use.

Above is a graphical representation of this data. The wine-coloured line is total emissions, which is the sum of gas, electricity and car usage, minus the emissions avoided due to our solar panels.

To calculate the emissions from using our hybrid Toyota Auris, I've taken into account manufacture of fuel and production of the car as well as the combustion of the fuel, per mile as described here (http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/calculate-your-driving-emissions). According to the dashboard display the fuel efficiency rates between 56-58 mpg.

For gas usage I first had to convert ft3 to kwh using the following calculation from here (https://www.businessenergy.com/business-gas/gas-bill-calculator/):

Here's how to convert cubic feet (ft3) to kWh from your gas meter reading. 482 unit used X 2.83 to convert to cubic metres X 1.02264 X 39.2 calorific value divided by 3.6 provides 15,189 kWh. At 2.84p/kWh provides an estimated bill of £431.38. 482 x 2.83 x 1.02264 x 39.2 ÷ 3.6 = 15,189 x 2.84 = £431.38.

Then I multiplied it by 0.18 as described here (carbonfootprint.com)

For electricity usage I multiplied by 0.2733 as used by the same carbon calculator website. For solar, the same, except negative.

If my calculations are correct (doubtful) then the above graph should be representative of our family's CO2 emissions in kg for the past 14 months.

Some things to note: I cycle more in the summer months when the weather is better, and the mpg rating of our car is also better in the summer months.

We went on holiday to Legoland in August 2019, which may explain why that reading is so low across the board.

Interestingly the 1/8/19 readings reveal that we generated so much solar power that it offset the use of car, electricity and gas combined.

Here's a pie chart:

As can be seen from this, car usage is by far our worst means of CO2 emissions at about 57%. And it's a hybrid.

Looking again at the above line-graph, the difference between summer and winter emissions is quite shocking. From 75 kg in August 2019 all the way up to 525 kg at the start of data collection in Jan 2019.

So what can be done? It's cold in winter and there's more sunlight in summer. There's not much I can do about that. But the car is screwing everything.

Big time.

Back to the 90s

Well, it's been an interesting week. I've still had my ear blocked – that's about ten days now. I went to the doctor yesterday and he peered inside and said my ear was full of wax and that I should continue putting in olive oil and Otex on a daily basis because it seems to be working and might solve the problem. But if not, it will make it easier for the nurse to suck it out when I get it syringed on the 5^thNovember. Matron!

In the social news – we are shitting plastic. People all over the world have had their poo studied and micro plastic has been found in most of them. So micro plastics are already in the human food chain. Via what? Must be sea fish. That must be the main one. Surely it can't be in fruit and veg or in meat from vegetarian animals, because they just eat grass and seed, right? Is there micro plastic in rain water? Can it be carried up into clouds? Is it sucked up through the roots of plant systems? Surely not. It's the sea fish – it must be. Lazy buggers drifting along with their mouths open taking any old crap that drifts inside. Some animals may dispose of the plastic better than others, in which case we should eat them.

So where do we find fish that have no plastic in them? Fish farms? River salmon? Grow our own? Some day I would like to try to go down the aquaponics route. I have a fish tank, I have a place to grow tomato plants. All I need are the tilapia, some pipes, a solar powered water pump, and to make the greenhouse into a water system. But I think I need more tanks.

Warning : May contain fish

We got a new fridge freezer today, which I'm looking forward to going home to. Not sure what else I can really get excited about it for. I expect I'll just open and close it a few times, enjoying the lack of having to bend down to get milk for the foreseeable future. Then after the first day I imagine it will become hum drum. Mundane. Just another boring old fridge freezer that takes up the whole kitchen and that we can't really afford. Appreciate your fridge freezers ladies and gentlemen! Don't take them for granted! Go out on a date once a week to keep the spark alive.

I wish we could go back to the 90s. That was the best decade for me. Before Bush, before 9/11, before Facebook. I was in my pre, during and post uni days. I drank, I studied, I read, I philosophised, I traveled, I met a variety of interesting people, I wrote, I did judo, played music, and could hear though both ears.

Maybe I should start a petition : Back to the 90s! When people weren't addicted to cell phones, trolling each other on social media, or shitting plastic.

Sign the petition here.