It's getting hot in here...

For most of my life I've been considered a "greeny" by a majority of my family and some friends. I've never thought of myself as such, even apart from the fact that in my experience "greeny" has become a dirty word over the last decade or so. I have always been aware of our environment, I've certainly always found the beauty in it and made some effort to do my part in protecting it.

From the age of about 9 I was the water police in our household, turning off dripping taps and berating the last known user for not being more careful. Turning the water off in the bathroom while whoever happened to be in there was brushing their teeth. It was also about this age when recycling became important to me. It didn't make sense to me NOT to recycle. Although from memory it took a few more years to get councils of the same thinking and I wasn't driven enough to make any attempts in changing that. Then of course I would also walk around the house switching off unnecessary lights, never quietly I always had to make it known that someone was wasting electricity by leaving it on for no reason.

None of this seemed extreme or unreasonable to me. If anything it was mere logic to minimise our impact on our planet, even if only a little in just our one household. We were being told, even then, about global warming and it simply made sense to me. It still does.

It amazes me that even today people are still debating whether global warming, climate change or whatever you want to call it, is even happening. It scares me that some politicians, notably our own PM, are yet to even acknowledge it as a real issue. Sceptics like to use the whole "it's a normal cycle" argument. That we have come so far as a civilisation in the last 100-150yrs, speaking technologically and population wise, it only follows (at least to me) that our impact on this planet would be greatly increased. Obviously, so has our knowledge of what kind of effect that has, and could have, on the planet and us as a whole.

I'm not trying to make some mind blowing point with this post. I simply felt a desire to share where my thinking lies on this particular issue after reading this opinion piece today (and some of the resulting comments). For those not wanting to click, it talks about the hypocrisy behind the actions of "candle-burning, compost-loving, carbon-eschewing contemporaries" and one Colin Beavan in particular. I also went over to Colin Beavan's website and blog and had a short look around. Again for those not wanting to click, he lives in a Manhattan apartment and has decided to spend a year living as "impact" free as possible. Which measn no cars, trains, planes, no shopping, only local foods etc etc. While I don't believe for a second that Colin has altruistic motives behind his "No Impact Man" changes and experimenting, I do give him credit for trying something. There may well be a lot of faults and hypocrisies in how he is going about things but he is among the first to admit that, from what I saw. He has gone from one extreme to another and invited the media along for the ride with the hopes of big financial gain at the end, but in the process he is finding his own balance of living well with as little impact on the planet as possible.

The original opinion piece also mentions Al Gore; "That said, I would be broke within a week if my household's energy consumption bill was anywhere near yours, which, at nearly 221,000kW/h last year, was 20 times greater than the average American family's.

Ever the politician, you refused to take the challenge to get that figure down to something approaching normal, ...."

While I'm not going to speculate on Al Gore's electricity bill (I'm actually pretty sure he'd have, at least in part, green power and buy offsets anyway) I will comment on An Inconvenient Truth. I only bought and watched this movie a few weeks ago and I will freely admit that before that I knew very little about Gore. Of course I knew he'd run for President and lost to Bush in 2000 and at the time I thought he would be the better man for the job, but that was just an uneducated instinct on my part. I watched the movie as a so-called believer and it still scared the hell out of me. The biggest thing I came away thinking about though, was just how different this world would be if that election in 2000 had gone the other way. I've since made Little Boy watch it and while most of it went over his head he did watch the projected images of where could go under water if Greenland was to melt and as he watched Shanghai go under he uttered in horror "but then there'd be no Shanghai race track!"

I've prattled on at length in this post with very little point so I'll wrap it up now. I guess my only point is that so many continue to believe that one person's changes will make no difference when it comes to global warming/climate change. I on the other hand choose to believe that if I make the changes I can and so do others then eventually politicians and those in positions of power will have no choice but to begin to make the changes that are really needed to make the big differences. So what am I doing? I'm in the process of switching to 100% green power through my energy supplier. I've already changed my light bulbs to the energy savers. I don't drive and although environmental reasons were not why I've not got a license and car before, they are a big part of the reason I will not now. I continue to recycle and conserve water. I feel like I'm doing my little bit to make a difference and I hope that it doesn't take too long for the big changes to come into play. If that makes me a greeny then I'm okay with that...