I just read that a woodburning stove is carbon neutral. I immediately thought “what rot!” so googled around a bit. The argument is that a tree removes as much CO2 from the atmosphere as you release when you burn it. So I agree that, in a stable, long-term cycle, wood burning is CO2 neutral.
But we do not have a stable cycle. We have a planet that was full of trees and now has far fewer. They’ve been cut down and burned.
For an individual to be short-term carbon neutral on this, he would have to grow the tree rent a car bulgariafirst, then cut it down and burn it. How long does it take to grow a week’s fuel? Longer than a single tree-week. I don’t know the figures here, but let’s say a two year old sapling provides enough wood to heat your home for a week. That means you need to maintain a spinney of 104 trees, planting one every week. Who has this much land? Not I.
But we don’t all have to be smallholders, we can industrialize wood production. Hint: this already happened with cattle, and the land required to grow the feed for the cattle consumed in europe is seven times the size of europe. How much forest would europe need to keep all its citizens in fuel?
Why can’t the smallholder above first burn the wood then plant the tree? He can, but he still needs that land in the long term. Now we’re getting into carbon neutrality on the never-never. If everybody did this, they would burn all the wood they wanted, then somewhere down the line, the price of tree-planting land would rocket as people needed to plant trees to offset the previous decade’s use.
Put THAT in the industrialised context, and we’ll have a system analogous to the credit markets of 2003-2007. There is plenty of wood out there to deliver and profit from. “Innovative” practices will evolve (Much cheaper to sell someone some wood and SAY you’ll plant a tree than to actually bother doing it.) The crunch won’t be when the reserves (rainforests) run out. It will be when severe climate change events escalate on account of the fact we have not been stabilising carbon emissions AT ALL.
While I lie in bed, blogging, My Topfield is downstairs, watching a Newsnight article all about the ecological cost of server farms (”the back end of the internet”), and my Wattson is telling an empty room how much power that’s taking. Now if I could rig up a webcam to watch the Wattson, I could cut myself out of the loop altogether.
Guh-fwuh?
The thing is, if it KNOWS how to do it, why doesn’t it just do it that way?
Please Wait WHILE I DO SOMETHING REALLY IMPORTANT
Please, people, show mercy when rendering sentences. Each is a newborn—formed and nurtured at your fingertips. Each is completely at your mercy. Sentences don’t deserve the treatment they have been receiving on the internet. Take this opener from the Cambridge UAV project:
CAUV stands for Cambridge Autonomus Underwater Vehicle, it is a student developed autonomous submarine, with multiple capabilities. The initial design criteria was for a small ROV to inspect the underside of pancake ice flows in the arctic.
Okay, these are technology students, not literature students; but what’s the excuse for illiteracy in engineering?
CAUV stands for Cambridge Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. It is a student–developed autonomous submarine with multiple capabilities. The initial design brief was for a small ROV to inspect the underside of pancake ice floes in the arctic.
Criteria is plural. Either your criteria were, or your criterion was. Criterion is poncey, so I substituted brief.
Come on, people! Let’s look after the language. The beauty of the internet is you can find top grammar tips in a matter of seconds. If you revised one grammar rule each week, then that would be like too everey fortnight or somthing.
Chicken. Tikka. Lasagne.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that I can’t find this anywhere on Iceland’s website.
Maybe it doesn’t exist, and it’s only in the Kerry Katona Iceland ad in order to make me go look on their website. If so, it worked. But I digress:
Chicken.
Tikka.
Lasagne.
Some time ago I bought some timbales and I’ve spent lots of the last three years trying to get people to jam with me. I’ve been to some latin jam nights, but I wasn’t good enough to feel confident, and I got a group together a few times to try to get some rhythms going, but it is such a niche that York can’t quite make critical mass. I can name 1 person who is definitely interested in forming a salsa band, two who are sort-of up for it, one who would be up for it but isn’t allowed and a couple who are amicable enough but not prepared to put any work in. That gives us a salsa band specific gravity of 2.3, when really you need about 4 to make anything sustain.
This year someone said to me “nobody can stop you from doing things” which hit home; and so I’ve started doing stuff unilaterally. I bought a metronome and hired the studio next to my office for 1 hour every wednesday lunch time. Sometimes someone comes and jams, usually not, but I go there regardless.
It’s been brilliant!
I’ve almost mastered rim shots and 2- and 3-stroke rolls; and I’ve got into all sorts of dodgy cross-rhythm territory that is probably unlistenable except by mathematicians…
I’ve always preferred houses with a bit of character, and looked with horror on the estates of cookie-cutter housing that sprung up in the ’70s. They used to look like LEGO houses to me. (Though I notice the LEGO minifigs are comfortably-off these days.)
What with the country being full and all, not everyone can live in a place with spires and multiple staircases and a greenhouse on the roof. So I live in a house pretty much exactly like 80% of my neighborhood, which was designed just short of my standards (e.g. there is no natural light or ventilation to the bathroom).
My idea of a garden is similar: a garden should be thorny and green, full of spiders and butterflies and hidden corners and brambles and berries, and in the summer should be full of floating seeds and scent, and in the autumn it should smell all wet and rotten. It should be a place where fairies live, not the pink flowery sort, but the hard-as-nails sort who have to scratch out a living in the woody undergrowth.
Since I have this bathroom to fix, and since it’s a bit hard (i.e. we don’t know how we are going to get clean while the facilities are all ripped out) I’ve been spending a lot of time in the garden.
I’ve been going completely against this direction, looking after the lawn in the prescribed manner, digging in poo and sand to improve the soil, and buying interesting things from garden centres to put in. I’ve even straightened the edges of the lawn to line up with the paths.
It’s the sort of garden that I should despise, but I’m loving it more and more! A LEGO garden to match my LEGO house.
LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this siteWhen we got the fiesta, and fixed the alerntator and replaced the battery and changed the sump and replaced the starter and got the ignition key barrel replaced and got the brake unseized, it worked perfectly apart from the stereo. Most of the time the left speaker didn’t work, and the CD player didn’t work at all.
After fiddling for ages trying to get the bezel off from around the stereo so I could slip it out of the DIN hole, I decided to just go ahead and remove the fascia from the dash. I learned two things:
1) fords really are easy to work on! Pull off some knobs, remove ashtray, remove three screws, and the fascia is off!
2) The bezel doesn’t remove.
The car’s wiring for the stereo finishes in two neat connector blocks - one for speakers and the other for power and shenanigans like an electric antenna.
The stereo’s connector consists of an extremely neat connector block having all power and speaker stuff all in a tidy package.
Unfortunately, between these two was a morass of bullet connectors, two fuses, and an immense black box with a coil in it (I think it was an RF suppressor or some such). All this was gobbed up with electrical tape and shoved in the gap behind the stereo.
Having removed the passenger door panel (7 screws and a clip) and checked the passenger speaker and wiring, suspicion fell on this eldritch horror from beyond the nether pit of the dashboard. So I pulled it all apart, untangled it, reconnected it all nicely and then…
Then the difficult bit: getting it all shoved back in the space behind the dash. It was physically very close to the can of worms analogy.
Anyway, it’s all wrestled into place now and we can listen to the radio on both sides of the car now!
This site expresses my opinion nicely regarding the current financial situation. It’s pretty much as applicable here as it is in the USA. I’ve reproduced the message here only because their layout is distracting.
…A bailout requires responsible Americans to pay for the acts of greedy bankers, mortgage brokers, flippers, and over-extended home-borrowers. In other words, the government wants you to pay for the blunders of others who knew, or should have known, better.
Equally as important, a bailout would permanently price out of the housing market all those responsible Americans who have been patiently saving to buy a house that they can actually afford. The current housing correction is necessary to remedy the historic run up in housing prices over the past decade. By bailing out the housing market, the government will prevent housing prices from returning to affordable levels, thereby ensuring that renters will not be able to buy a home and current homeowners will not be able to upgrade.
A government bailout of the housing market is both fiscally and morally irresponsible; it is an unfair subsidy being paid to the wealthy (bankers), the greedy (mortgage brokers, flippers, and yes some homeowners), and the incautious (some homeowners), with little or no benefit to those paying the bill (taxpayers).
Why should responsible Americans be
forced to pay for the mistakes of others?
A bailout is morally irresponsible because it encourages reckless and irrational behavior. Here is a short list of the many “moral hazards” that a bailout enables:
- A bailout sends the wrong message about personal responsibility. It tells Americans in no uncertain terms that their financial decisions have no consequences; the government will pick up the tab.
- A bailout tells responsible Americans that they are suckers. If responsible American had been smart, they would have overextended themselves, purchased homes they could not afford, and taken out home equity loans based on the paper value of their property. Then, when the bill came due, they could just pass it to the government.
- A bailout allows banks, mortgage brokers, speculators, and refinancers to benefit from their abuse of the system. By doing so, it encourages these people to act irresponsibly in the future.
- A bailout will force Americans who acted responsibly to pay for those who did not. The average American — who saved and scrimped for years to buy a house, but could not because speculators and over-extenders boosted home prices beyond affordability — will now be forced to pay for the homes of those who were less scrupulous.
- A bailout will have a disproportionately negative affect on the minorities and the youth. Minorities and Americans under 35 (scroll down the link for 2007 data) are disproportionately underrepresented among homeowners. While non-hispanic whites enjoy a 75% homeownership rate, less than 50% of blacks and hispanics own homes. Similarly, only 42% of Americans under 35 own homes, compared to 80% for Americans 55 and older. A government bailout will perpetuate this race and generation gap by propping-up inflated house prices, thereby permanently pricing minorities and a generation of youth out of the market. And in a Kafkaesque irony, these folks will actually have to pay to prevent themselves from buying homes (i.e., taxes).
A bailout is also fiscally irresponsible:
- A bailout props up over-inflated housing prices, thereby putting homeownership out of reach for young families and responsible Americans who recognized that there was a bubble. The housing market needs the correction that the bailout seeks to prevent because the average American cannot afford to purchase a home. “You cannot be both in favor of affordable housing and in favor of propping up home prices!”
- A bailout creates perverse incentives. Rather than punishing their behavior, it encourages fiscal irresponsibility among bankers, mortgage brokers, speculators, and refinancers. These folks made money hand over fist in the past nine years (remember, homeborrowers who tapped their home equity received cash money to pay for Escalades, vacations, and stainless steel appliances; now they want you to pay for it!). Why change your behavior when you benefit from it?
- A bailout shifts the risks of falling market prices from financially secure banks to the American taxpayer. As a result, either taxes or the federal deficit will skyrocket! This is a government handout that we simply cannot afford and, moreover, it is wrong!
- A bailout is contrary to the free market principles upon which our economy is based. It jams a huge wrench into the market correction, with negative effects that will be both severe and long-term.
It will truly be a sad day in America when our politicians vote to bail out the few from their irresponsibility to the detriment of the many who were responsible.
Vexingly, I knew this would happen, but couldn’t figure out how to be optimally irresponsible. I guess I can sit in the stagnant housing market at least feeling a little bit smug that my caution over the last 7 years is finally paying off.
Of course, the only way to come out on top from all that has been going on for the last decade was to take home a fat bonus and spend it on neat stuff. The poor overextended homeowners aren’t really going to feel like they’re being bailed out at all.