Offmessage

Two links doing the rounds of Twitter today bear a striking similarity; so much so that I was pretty sure I was going to end up at the same page when following the (un)fashionably shortened URLs:

• What the media’s not telling us about Somali pirates, and
• The world’s rubbish dump

What both stories tell are frankly horrifying tales of uncontrolled dumping of toxic waste of varying kinds in unpoliced waters.

Comment is hard; the degree of damage already done and the huge task of stopping it (even if anyone actually wanted to try) makes me just want to bury my head… How do you say? Stop the world I want to get off.

Coming firmly into the “you learn something new every day” category.  Bright Green environmentalism; environmental sustainability through technological change and advance. As compared to Light Green (personal lifestyle change) and Dark Green (socio-political change).

The global tobacco industry is responsible for 1.7% of each year’s deforestation. If all 5.5 trillion cigarettes produced each year were smoked they would produce the same emmissions as half the vehicles on the road in the US. 40% of beach litter is cigarette butts.

Not only choking our lungs, but choking the lungs of the planet too, apparently. Blimey.

So…  Having a third child is “worse than having a patio heater“, is it?  In an age when this country’s birthrate is dropping rapidly and where the under eighteens are outnumbered by the over sixties for the first time it seems to be to be highly disingenuous to suggest that population growth is a problem in the UK.  In fact, much opinion suggests that exactly the opposite is the case.

Not only are many couples opting to have either no children or only one child, we are also having our children much later in life.  These two factors combine to cause a genuine risk of Britain not even achieving the “lowest low” (a birthrate of ~1.3, where population halves in 45 years and the decline becomes unrecoverable) let alone the “replacement rate” of 2.1. Countries like Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain and Greece are already below 1.3, while the UK is at 1.65 and falling.

I may be biased (Claire is expecting our third child in January), but I can’t help feeling that a country at least maintaining its replacement rate can’t be anything but healthy.  I can’t even persuade myself that this is controversial view, surely?

This article on the topic of birthrate at the New York Times is long (10 pages), but well worth the read if you’ve got 5 minutes.

at which point some starving, flu-ravaged fundamentalist pulls the plug

I do like a good bit of flamboyant doom mongering (however close to the bone it may be…)

Must admit that I didn’t notice this story when it first broke (despite having over 4,000 diggs!), but there’s an interesting thought that if Google were to invert the colours of it’s pages (with a black background) it would save approximately 750MWh (Mega Watt hours) of energy per year.

This sounds fantastic (it sounded more fantastic before the migration from CRT to LCD got factored in and the savings were 3,000MWh). But. A note of caution. The average electricity consumption of a UK household is just shy of 4MWh per year, meaning that even Google can only save the electricity of 192 UK homes. Rather stops you worrying about energy consumption in your web design. Still, black is the new green makes for a nice slogan. Those interested in the power consumption of different colours (on CRTs) can find out more from the US Gov.

Interesting that blackle (a black page Google custom search) has gained a lot of traction among the eco/ethical crowd. If I’m honest it looks like a fairly cynical ploy; host AdSense on a standard version of Google and tout yourselves as ethical. Given the energy savings that such a site offers in reality it’s just another way of getting traffic to your ads – nothing more, nothing less. 469kWh saved to date (as I write this post). Approximately 10% of one UK household. I’m betting the ad revenue would pay for a whole lot more electricity (or solar panels, or wind turbines) than that.

An old friend, Natasha, has gone into business. Apple Tree Clothing is organic environmentally friendly clothes for kids. She’s only been going a few weeks and it seems like it’s going really well.

My interest (other than the lovely clothes, obviously)? I’ve just helped Richard redo the website. Go there, buy things (and be impressed by the HTML, of course. I’ve not even managed that level of perfection on my own site!).

Apparently.

Environmental groups claim the music industry’s transition from physical to digital has no discernible benefit to the environment and, in the short term, is actually causing more harm than good.

Apparently it wasn’t just the humans that deforested Easter Island.

Daylight saving exacerbates global warming