Trying to be a green parent

I have had so many people tell me that there’s no point – I can cut my energy useage as much as I like, but there’s such a huge growth in energy useage around the world (China and India always take the blame – even though their per capita useage is far far lower than ours) that what I do is irrelevant.

This is absolutely true on one level. But I can’t start telling others what to do until I’ve got my own house in order – and I need to test what works before I can advise others. Still we do need to start having regulations, international treaties that mean something etc to sort this out.

One group campaigning for just that is Avaaz – click on this link for their climate change petition: http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_leaders/

Meanwhile I’ve written a letter to one of the shops in Kingston that had 50 or more 20 W dichroic lights on at 11 pm the other night. 10 unnecessary hours a night were costing them £1 per day – the fact that that doesn’t matter shows that electricity is still far too cheap. I also pointed out that in the summer it seems crazy to have a 1 kW electric fire on in their shop 24 hours a day. Ironically they were a beauty shop based on “natural” products. Will my letter make any difference? Probably not, but it’s always worth a try.