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Due to a lack of publicity, colder weather over the past few days and general inertia E-Day was a total failure.

Here is a quote from the E-Day website:
E-Day did not succeed in cutting the UK’s electricity demand. The drop in temperature between Wed 27 Feb and Thurs 28 Feb days probably caused this, as a result of more lights and heating being left on than were originally predicted. The National Grid refined their assessments, based on actual weather data, during Thursday afternoon but I am afraid that E-Day did not achieve the scale of public awareness or participation needed to have a measurable effect. I will do my best to learn the relevant lessons for next time. Thank you to everyone who helped me or left something off specially as their contribution to E-Day, and this Leave It Off experiment. Please enjoy E-Day’s solution, video and science sections which all worked well. Warmest regards, Matt

According to the BBC News website E-Day started as Planet Relief an awareness raising programme – that was to contain a significant comedy element. The BBC decided against this though due to the low audience figures from the Live Earth concert also viewer feedback suggested that people prefer documentary programmes about climate change.

The hope for the day was to try and get a 2 – 3% reduction but in the end there was a small increase in consumption +0.1%.

Even with the lack of publicity and the slightly cooler weather the result does not surprise me it could be an example of how people think that someone else is going to sort out the world’s problems.

How can a consumer purchase sustainable, environmentally friendly and ethical products when it is almost almost impossible to know who owns or runs a company and which company directors have links or sit on the boards of other companies that one might not want to be associated with?

For example some people might be concerned not to inadvertently buy products from companies that manufacture weapons, tobacco, alcohol or other ‘non-ethical’ products but how will they know who the parent company is or what spin-off companies they own and sub-contractors they use?

Take a simple thing like going on holiday overseas by plane. Apart from the issues of C02 and climate change it’s not really possible for most people who fly to choose the aircraft manufacturer. Those who are not fond of warfare could be forgiven for not wanting to fly on Boeing Corporation aircraft. For example Boeing has recently entered into an agreement with iRobot Corporation to build what is described as a next-generation small unmanned ground vehicle called the SUGV Early.

If that’s not bad enough how about the question of sending your kids to university. Imperial College London has a long history of developing military equipment and ITWeek recently had a report that Carnegie Mellon University had won a contract to develop a fully autonomous battlefield robot.

OK, how about a drink? Fancy a Coke? Then check this out:
Contributions from Coca-Cola and its enterprises to federal candidates and parties rose as much as 31% between 1998 and 2004, with the greatest concentration of funds during the 2000 election, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics. Seventy-one percent of those contributions, or $2,483,283, went to the Republican Party and GOP candidates. Relationships between the soft-drink giant and Bush’s chums have indeed gone sweeter since many issues affecting Coca-Cola’s assets are at stake: soda consumption in schools, environmental standards, bottled water labelling, and human rights concerns overseas. (India Resource Centre)

Now who out there has a car? Not just a car but a Ford. Ford drivers (as well as most other car brand drivers) are firmly in bed with the military as much as Boeing is. Let’s not even go near pharmaceutical companies!

The internet was originally a military innovation and software companies still work very closely with the military. Most Fortune 500 companies and many, many others have links with each other and with many organisations that some people would not enjoy having a customer relationship with.

These are just a few examples out of many thousands of course. It would be interesting to see if it is really possible to live an ethical lifestyle. How to do this though is unclear mainly because finding out about companies, their subsidiaries and directors is not easy.

Enjoy your sugar coated Frosties they’re Grrreat!

It’s not all doom and gloom when it comes to climate change there are things that can be done to turn the situation around. For example:

1. Don’t drive a car
2. Don’t fly in an air-plane
3. Don’t buy produce or products from overseas
4. Don’t buy food grown more than 5 miles away from where you live
5. Don’t buy petroleum based products
6. Don’t go to the Olympics in Beijing
7. Don’t buy newspapers
8. Don’t use products that consume electricity unless it is generated naturally (see Iceland)
9. Don’t go into space
10. Don’t build buildings
11. Don’t build roads
12. Don’t cut down trees
13. Don’t grow agricultural produce
14. Don’t manufacture anything
15. Don’t build steel mills
16. Don’t dig coal
17. Don’t catch fish
18. Don’t go to war
19. Don’t print books
20. Don’t build nuclear reactors
21. Don’t live in big cities
22. Don’t have children
23. Don’t flush the toilet
24. Don’t use a computer
25. Don’t shoot movies
26. Don’t run trains
27. Don’t go to the mall
28. Don’t make ceramics
29. Don’t make paper
30. Don’t keep farm animals
31. Don’t cut limestone for buildings
32. Don’t dig tunnels
33. Don’t manufacture glass
34. Don’t dig quarries
35. Don’t mine oil shale
36. Don’t support repressive governments
37. Don’t take illegal drugs
38. Don’t use plastic carrier bags
39. Don’t overeat
40. Don’t play computer games
41. Don’t eat sugar
42. Don’t kill wild animals
43. Don’t throw things in the waste bin
44. Don’t take medication
45. Don’t burn anything
46. Don’t build chemical manufacturing plants
47. Don’t buy cosmetics
48. Don’t change water courses
49. Don’t manufacture alcoholic drinks
50. Don’t run power stations

There’s probably more that can be done but that’s a start.

A pictorial representation of the list.

If the climate is changing due to the activities of human beings then the human race and many other species are in real trouble. To date there has been a lot of discussion, newspaper column inches, movies, talks, DVD’s, magazine articles, blogs, business reports, conferences on Corporate Social Responsibility, local authority policies, design innovations, discussions about low environmental impact fuel sources, congestion charges, low carbon this and low carbon that, white papers, global conferences, international agreements, lots of good sounding words and hundreds of other outputs telling us that our current lifestyles need to change or our species will be in danger of extinction.

All this activity seems to have resulted in…business as usual. People in the developed world are still taking as many if not more overseas air flights, consuming more oil and natural gas than ever, making more car journeys, buying more unsustainable goods, eating unsustainable sourced foods and 10,000,000 other activities that are the equivalent of eat today while there is food on the table and don’t think about tomorrow because technology – or someone else will sort out all of the planets problems, which for many individuals are not their problems.

Of course there is always the possibility that climate change is not happening at all and the fluctuations in the weather are just part of global patterns that we are not aware of because the planet works on extremely long timescales that mean any changes are just part of a natural cycle.

If this is the case then anything that humans do probably won’t make a hill of beans of difference. On the other hand if human activity has caused changes to occur then process that is changed by humans probably will not fix the problem due to the complexity of the weather and the unintended consequences of any actions that are taken. It is probably not possible to return global weather systems to how they were 200 years ago or before the industrial revolution started.

If it were would people be willing to put up with a standard of living that would be about equivalent to a low level third world country or lower? This would not just mean not being able to purchase the latest Sony Playstation but also not be able to have access to top class medical equipment and treatment.

In reality there is probably very little that can be done to reverse (man-made?) climate change even if everybody does something. The bottom line is that plant Earth will always be bigger than the sum of it’s parts and more complex than the human race can understand.

Maybe, just maybe in 10,000 years there will be a technological solution that will iron out these problems or maybe we’ll all fly off to a new better managed world and let this one simmer down until it’s sorted itself out, or maybe just maybe it’s all too little too late…

I wanted a book to read for a long train journey (5.5 hours) and bought this after a brief look at the first page. I finished it in about 7 hours which is good going for me and definitely a sign of an excellent book.

If you are interested in Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution but find his Victorian prose an obstacle then this book is definitely for you. It is written in a slightly quirky style (almost conversational) but manages to clearly communicate the complexity of Darwin’s ideas to the non-expert but not at the expense of making the theories simplistic.

The author turns a potentially dry subject into a real page turner (yes, really) and it manages to keep the reader interested through to the end.

When I got to the end of the book I felt that it had really changed my perspective and helped me understand the subject matter properly for the first time. I would recommend this book to all those who support Intelligent Design it might just make them see how wrong they are.

I recently started to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins but I think reading this book first will give the reader and excellent foundation upon which to understand where Mr Dawkins is coming from, especially if not fully aware of natural selection and evolution.

In future if I am invited to be on Desert Island Discs I would definitely take this book with me – and would leave behind the Bible and Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Darwin’s Nuts
Author: Jim Alexander
ISBN: 0955485029
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 186
Year Published: 2007
Publisher: Zidane Press