What about our environment?

I have my hybrid. I think, here at least, these green energy deals are just a advertising con. I try to reduce my energy useage as much as possible,

If I could ask one thing..

If anyone is serious about doing one thing to help the environment.

If you each could make a positive change that would help its this.

Give up fireworks.

The heavy metals and chemicals used to give us those bangs and pretty colours are poison. They settle in rivers and the soil they dont fade like the pretty colours, they stay there doing harm.

Then there are the more obvious damages to people with conditions like COPD,  after any event with fireworks the fine particles in the air increase sometimes to dangerous levels for anyone with reduced lung capacity or heart conditions.

They cause damage to property.

They cause damage to pets and wildlife. Each year there are terrible stories of horses so scared the lacerate themselves on barbed wire fences , sheep that drown running blindly into rivers and this weekend a beautiful dog called Lara-Beau died. She had been rescued from Spain where she suffered such abuse that her leg was amptuated. But she had been saved and adopted. Her owner had done all she could with pills and calm music thundershirts and calming noise but a random firework scared her so much she jumped from an upstairs window and ran headlong onto a motorway where she was hit by a car and left at the side of the road like rubbish.


If anyone wants to do one thing that would save all this misery , all this suffering, all this pollution in one go.. Just stop using fireworks.

Indeed, and I am going to start considering the distance travelled by my foodstuffs.

We are also going to cut back on buying glass. Apparently, manufacturing releases a lot of fumes that are particularly bad for copd sufferers.

I didn't include light bulbs and such in my original reply. I replaced them years ago, and I've forgotten about them. Last year, we replaced an old ceiling fan in the bedroom with an integrated, dimmable, LED fixture. My other fixtures use regular bulbs which I've replaced with CFLs. The bulbs are pretty old, and I'm looking to replace those bulbs/fixtures with LEDs as well. I've also forgotten that I have a rain sensor for the sprinkler system we installed in '95...way before the utility company was offering rebates. The first thing I bought for this house in 1992 was a programmable thermostat. I've since had the furnace replaced and added air conditioning (EnergyStar rated, of course) which also came with a new programmable thermostat. I've replaced the water heater twice, each one more efficient than the last (to be expected). It was last replaced in 2003, so that will be due pretty soon. I'm sure any water heater sold today will be more efficient than the 18 year-old one I have now. I've also replaced both toilets with low-flow devices, but will probably replace those with even more efficient fixtures when I have the bathrooms remodeled.

We have double flush systems here too. Another thing that I am aware of is that some cistern internals can be adjusted for diferent flush amounts. I think that it is a plug of some sort on the works.

Our bulbs are low energy and I am steadily changing them to LED as they fail. One thing that I find though is the low light level. I tend to buy high light output bulbs but they are still better than the old tungsten or halogen.

We are swopping them over to led as they die. But they are already low energy bulbs.

Cherry's post reminded me of this: www.cnn.com/travel/article/celera-500l-business-aircraft-future

I saw it a couple of days ago...looks promising.

It actually looks rather cute too. Sort of friendly.

Normally, we would have had our first good snowstorm in the first half of October. Walking in to work on 10/26, a few cars in the parking lot sported evidence of a snowstorm, but the roads were bone dry when I set off to work. I looked up on the Peak, and it was white for the first time this season. Due to high winds, it was short-lived. Today, I took a picture of the Peak from the parking lot of my doc's building, and one can still see traces of that snowstorm. Normally, "Old Baldy" would be white by now.

imgur.com/iG0eGR5