What behaviour is best for the enviroment; don’t be busy fool

You can spend a lot of time being a busy fool, speculating about the number of angels that can dance on a pin head, or on the point of a needle, and you can waste a lot of thermal printing toner as well a much ink and bandwidth in trying to formulate rules of environmentally correct behaviour. Doing this will make you miss the big picture.

In the papers this week I read about environmental holidays, and about such tortuous decisions as to whether it is better to use your dish washing machine or wash the dishes by hand, or whether you should use returnable milk bottles or decomposable cardboard milk cartons. The answer is…

… that depends. I shall take the washing up example – I just do not know; sometimes it will be better not to use electrical power in the dish washer and use your won muscle power. It depends also on how much washing up there is, how dirty it is, how you heat your washing up water and also, I suppose, what you would do with the time you saved when the machine does the washing up.

Of course it is good that people should be thinking to ask these questions but in the asking should understand that there is no simple environmentally correct behaviour that can provide an answer to all the small questions.

The big questions are easier to answer. If you live a fairly normal life in the United Kingdom you will have two major activities that will be bad for the environment. The first activity is the actual process of living in a home. Leave the washing up in the sink for a moment because the home will produce significant carbon emissions in almost all cases by burning fossil fuel or occasionally non fossil fuel (both create greenhouse gases) or by using nuclear energy made power.

I think a fairly average family in an average home in the UK would be simply by living in that home normally be responsible for four and a half tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

I know that washing up is still in the sink, but it is not the washing up, or the televisions or the computers that are causing the biggest problem right now. Around 66% of the energy use will be on space and water heat. Usually space heat accounts for two thirds and water heat for the remaining third.

So you will be behaving far more environmentally effectively if you turn down the central heating thermostat in winter, and install solar thermal panels than you would ever be by agonising over whether it is right to turn the dish washing machine on.

That of course is not a reason to use the dish washer in a wasteful way, or leave lights on and plugs in with appliances on standby; you should be doing all those things as a matter of course, but the biggest environmental savings in the home will be made if you install insulation, solar thermal panels and an efficient heating system.

All of that costs money but the expenditure would be far more justified than trying to figure out too deeply what the precise environmental effect of doing the washing up would be. Now you can get on with the washing up because I shall turn to environmentally bad behaviour outside the home

The second activity is the process of transport for you and your family. Most UK families emit around two or three tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from using their cars.

You do not need a detailed offset calculator to figure out your own approximate car caused carbon dioxide emissions. Most cars have an emission rating per kilometre which you can easily find out. The rating will be in grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre so find out your average mileage, convert it to kilometres, multiply by the rating and divide by 1000 to get a figure in tonnes.

It will not make happy reading and you have to do something about it. You can sell your cars and buy bikes. It may not be practical, or even practicable; the sight of an elderly or disabled person trying to cope on a bike in traffic is not one I relish, nor do I personally appreciate the dangers of cycling in urban environments. The way that cities and towns and villages are planned these days makes not having a car simply unfeasible for the vast majority of people.

One of my colleagues recently started to cycle to work every day. For him it is and eight mile journey and he can shower in the office when he gets in. He used to use public transport to get in. He is young and an experienced cyclist. He saves money, saves the awful experience of the London Underground breaking down in high summer with temperatures exceeding 40 Celsius down there, and he gets fit. This is not an option for everyone. There will be many people who still have to use their cars.

However, they probably do not have to use them as much as they use them now; they can use them less, drive more slowly and carefully, and when they need to change their car they can buy smaller cars that use less fuel.

Some may want to buy a hybrid car, like the Toyota Prius; I think that they will save more fossil fuel by buying the smallest petrol car that Toyota sell, rather the Prius which, like an electric car, gives you the feeling that you are doing your bit for the environment without actually doing very much at all.

So I think it is a mistake to dwell too long on the small things, like the washing up; leave those speculations to busy fools; it is in the big things that we cause the most damage and which must repair first. It is obvious. We will do the environment the most justice by lessening the largest impacts we make on it. Let us not miss the obvious.