Do you personally do your bit for the environment?

[Zac Naloen]

I probably don't do as much as I should, I'm not as careful as I should be with my electricity usage for example but my bills are very low so I can't be using that much.


I have a PC on most hours and I don't think i have energy efficient lightbulbs but I do switch them off everytime I leave a room. (rented property, lights came with it and haven't gone yet).


But I do drive a small car, and I do recycle everything my region lets me. And I use public transport everytime it's practical.


I don't know how environmentally friendly this is but we do get our vegetables and meat directly from local farms via the riverford.co.uk farms network cutting out the middle man there.

[Plekhanov]

We do what we can we've chosen not to have a car, are vegetarians, recycle & compost everything we can, use fabric shopping bags, have energy efficient appliances, try to use as much 2nd hand stuff as possible, try to only replace things when they break not to upgrade (though as this means my desktop is now an increasingly obsolete Athlon XP 1700 so I think I'm going to have to get a new one soon even if it doesn't break & donate it to one of my nephews).

[Alferd Packer]

Let's see. Our county has a robust recycling program in which we participate; we utilize CF lightbulbs throughout our house, and we keep the thermostat below 70 in the winter and above 75 in the summer. This was the first growing season in our house, so I tried my hand at raising tomato plants with reasonable success. Next spring I'm going to convert a good chunk of the backyard (that with the southern exposure) into a vegetable garden. Dunno exactly what I'll be growing; I'll probably try a bit of everything and see what happens.

Unfortunately, our house is old and the insulation isn't terrific, so I'm sure we bleed off a lot more heat/cool air than we should, but there really isn't a ton more that we can do about it, so we usually just sit around with blankets on in the depths of winter.

[charlemagne]

I'm "trying to make the effort".

- We recyce of course, which is no big deal since there's seperate containers for trash, paper, plastics and aluminium anyways here in Germany.
- We're slowly making the switch to energy saving bulbs as old ones wear out.
- We unplug pretty much every device that only comes with a standby mode instead of a real off-switch. I even disconnect the wifi router and DSL modem over night or when out of the house for a couple of hours.
- I can't remember the last time I used plastic bags when grocery shopping.
- I only buy local small-brand beer I think the biggest distance any brand I normally drink has to be transported is 20km (besides the occasional six-pack of Kilkenny or Pilsener).
- There's photo-voltaic panels on the roof of the house we live in, that's got to count for something, too.
- We use rechargable batteries instead of buying disposable ones.

But there's some areas where we could do better - and most of them have to do with being more costly. Like buying local or "green" meat - it's simply more expensive. Buying bottled water in reusable glass bottles instead of disposable plastic bottles - more expensive. Some of that will change once the wife and me are starting to make more money, though.

And then there's simple comfort reasons why I keep on doing some not-so-environment-friendly things; like long hot showers when it's cold outside, or driving instead of taking the bus. We also use a "capsule-based" Nespresso coffee machine that generates quite the amount of trash over time, but the coffee is just so much better than plain old filter coffee.

[salm]

Buying bottled water in reusable glass bottles instead of disposable plastic bottles - more expensive.

Disposable plastic water bottles? I´m quite sure that´s illegal.

[charlemagne]

Disposable plastic water bottles? I´m quite sure that´s illegal.

Yeah, I'm getting mineral water from the Mafia, you know?

Nah, they're returnable bottles, but not the kind that's being cleaned and reused. That's what I meant by "disposable", the bottles get recycled, not used a couple of times like glass bottles or that thicker plastic PET kind.

[salm]

Disposable plastic water bottles? I´m quite sure that´s illegal.

Yeah, I'm getting mineral water from the Mafia, you know?

Nah, they're returnable bottles, but not the kind that's being cleaned and reused. That's what I meant by "disposable", the bottles get recycled, not used a couple of times like glass bottles or that thicker plastic PET kind.

I allways thought that these PET bottles actually were reused. I thought they collected them, ground them up and then made new bottles out of them. After some research it turns out that most of them are used to be burned in waste incineration plants.

[Winston Blake]

I answered 'no', because I generally disagree with the idea of 'doing one's bit for the environment'. I don't 'do my bit', not because I don't think there is a problem, but because I think the problems are so severe that only great scientific and engineering efforts will be able to avert a 'long depression'.

I think the current surge of environmental interest is largely a farce. The IPCC reports are what spurred me into relating most of my thoughts to solving the future problems caused by PO/CC. The research I'm doing now will hopefully lay the foundation for my tentative mitigation ideas.

However, I think most people's response is that they genuinely think that if they turn off their pointless lifestyle gadgets at the powerpoint, and buy their pointlessly expensive exotic foods in paper bags (instead of plastic), and walk (instead of drive) to the hyper-mega-entertainment-o-plex, then all the world's problems will eventually turn out OK. I'm not saying everyone should scream and go live in cardboard boxes and work 12 hours a day on PO/CC and eat nothing but baked beans, but really, the old environmentalists' dreams are a drop in the ocean.

The place I rent uses fluoro bulbs and I use re-usable shopping bags etc, but I don't think it matters one jot. Look at Earth Hour. It's completely goddamn pointless. But it makes people feel good about themselves; it makes them feel like they've 'done their bit'. So they can never really feel the severity of the problems, and don't feel any need to do any real change themselves. It's a big fad. It's about showing off; sitting smugly and saying 'I do this and I buy this and it makes me better than other people'.

The challenges the world is facing are not going to be solved by small lifestyle changes. This is going to take something more closely resembling a cold war.

[AniThyng]

The challenges the world is facing are not going to be solved by small lifestyle changes. This is going to take something more closely resembling a cold war.

What does that mean, to resemble a cold war? It's only been 20 years since the last cold war ended and except for the IT revolution, not much else has substantially changed (in non-communist countries).

[Winston Blake]

What does that mean, to resemble a cold war? It's only been 20 years since the last cold war ended and except for the IT revolution, not much else has substantially changed (in non-communist countries).

As in 'a long, deep, subtle effort on a global scale'.