Green Moneysaving - Is this an oxymoron?

rhiwfield

Ben84 wrote: »

We do sometimes have hose pipe and garden watering bans here during the summer, so being able to water your plants can be worth the investment. They can also be a cheaper DIY alternative to fitting an outside tap and will give you a convenient outside water source. To consider the environment aspects someone will have to find a way to compare producing the plastic and transporting it to the potential water savings, which is somewhat subjective at best. However, many more frivolous things are made every day, so I would say buy one if you'd find it useful.

Planters, hanging baskets, greenhouse toms etc need say 100 litres of water daily over a period of say 120 days, so thats 12000 litres. You'll be paying maybe £2.50 per cubic metre so thats £30 pa saved if you are metered. 3 rainwater butts and connections say £90. 3 year payback

Ben84

I also have concerns about burning biomass. It depends on circumstances, for example turning used cooking oil in to fuel seems obviously good, but converting more land to grow fuel crops is not so clear.

Scaling up biomass raises lots of questions. To turn it around, small scale fossil fuel use would be much greener than large scale biomass burning. Low fossil fuel demand would allow us to extract from preferential sources, ones that disrupt the environment the least and provide the cleanest burning fuels for the least energy investment in extracting them. The wider negative effects, such as CO2 emissions, would be so diluted we wouldn't even notice them at small consumption levels because they wouldn't be having a significant effect.

Too often marketing of alternative energy sources confuses small scale sources with being sustainable. Just about everything starts to show its bad side when you scale it up. Initially small pollution sources start to have accumulative effects and demand pushes us to consume more and more destructive sources, ones that cost more energy to extract and deliver to consumers and ones that involve greater environmental disruption.

How many wood burning appliances do we have to install before demand outstrips sustainable supply and then large companies apply to cut down old growth forests in UK to supply consumers, followed by increasingly importing it at great energy cost from abroad. At even greater consumption levels I would not be surprised to see wood from rainforests finding its way in to fireplaces in the UK.

I think the OP's conclusion that saving energy is the best option is right, because I'm not convinced there is a perfect energy source that at high use doesn't have significant negatives. Using energy of in moderation and relying on multiple sources is the best option. Install insulation and buy efficient appliances appears to be good advice in all cases, while burn wood or buy solar panels as suggestions might be missing the bigger picture of how their impact increases and accumulates with greater use.

zeupater

Ben84 wrote: »

..... Scaling up biomass raises lots of questions. To turn it around, small scale fossil fuel use would be much greener than large scale biomass burning. Low fossil fuel demand would allow us to extract from preferential sources, ones that disrupt the environment the least and provide the cleanest burning fuels for the least energy investment in extracting them. The wider negative effects, such as CO2 emissions, would be so diluted we wouldn't even notice them at small consumption levels because they wouldn't be having a significant effect. ....

Hi Ben84

I really don't follow the logic in the above, based on the premise that "small scale fossil fuel use would be much greener than large scale biomass burning". Looking at the extremes I can understand that burning a single piece of coal would be greener than burning a couple of tonnes of wood, but at some stage beyond that the relative green merits cross over. The real issue is that a given energy demand cannot be equally satisfied by 'large scale biomass burning' and 'small scale fossil fuel use ', surely it can only be met in each case by releasing the same amount of energy from each source, ie large scale fossil fuel v large scale biomass (alt: small v small) ?.

HTH
Z

Ben84

zeupater wrote: »

Hi Ben84

I really don't follow the logic in the above, based on the premise that "small scale fossil fuel use would be much greener than large scale biomass burning". Looking at the extremes I can understand that burning a single piece of coal would be greener than burning a couple of tonnes of wood, but at some stage beyond that the relative green merits cross over. The real issue is that a given energy demand cannot be equally satisfied by 'large scale biomass burning' and 'small scale fossil fuel use ', surely it can only be met in each case by releasing the same amount of energy from each source, ie large scale fossil fuel v large scale biomass (alt: small v small) ?.

HTH
Z

What I'm thinking is that a lot of people believe fossil fuels are bad for the environment. I'm quite sure they are, but not for the same reasons others might. I don't believe fossil fuels are innately bad, I believe the problem we're having with them is the huge amount that we're using.

Imagine we could control world fossil fuel use easily and adjust anywhere from 100% of current use down to 1% and track the environmental impact by some scale. As we reduced it many things would happen, for example the pressure to extract fuel from more risky places like Antarctica would reduce to the point of being unreasonable, so would the need to transport fuels vast distances and so would the need to extract from resources that require high energy input to make them worthwhile. The environmental impact would not reduce in a linear trend, I would expect a curve as the most energy intensive and environmentally polluting sources become less desirable to use before others. We would also reach a point where most the environmental hazards such as CO2 and acid rain would be minimal.

Fossil fuel use on a small scale (for example delivering as much energy as biomass currently does in Europe) is in fact very green and this is because it's small scale. We would be able to pick ideal sources that don't disrupt the environment too much and extract energy for little evergy investment, while the other problems would be small enough to not worry about.

Biomass and wood are claimed to be green, but at least here in Europe they're currently very small scale energy sources and this I believe is the reason for their comparative green image more than anything else. Scaling them up will increase their environmental impact - and almost certainly not in a linear trend either.

zeupater

Ben84 wrote: »

What I'm thinking is that a lot of people believe fossil fuels are bad for the environment. I'm quite sure they are, but not for the same reasons others might. I don't believe fossil fuels are innately bad, I believe the problem we're having with them is the huge amount that we're using.

Imagine we could control world fossil fuel use easily and adjust anywhere from 100% of current use down to 1% and track the environmental impact by some scale. As we reduced it many things would happen, for example the pressure to extract fuel from more risky places like Antarctica would reduce to the point of being unreasonable, so would the need to transport fuels vast distances and so would the need to extract from resources that require high energy input to make them worthwhile. The environmental impact would not reduce in a linear trend, I would expect a curve as the most energy intensive and environmentally polluting sources become less desirable to use before others. We would also reach a point where most the environmental hazards such as CO2 and acid rain would be minimal.

Fossil fuel use on a small scale (for example delivering as much energy as biomass currently does in Europe) is in fact very green and this is because it's small scale. We would be able to pick ideal sources that don't disrupt the environment too much and extract energy for little evergy investment, while the other problems would be small enough to not worry about.

Biomass and wood are claimed to be green, but at least here in Europe they're currently very small scale energy sources and this I believe is the reason for their comparative green image more than anything else. Scaling them up will increase their environmental impact - and almost certainly not in a linear trend either.

Hi

Agree, it's a description of the problem, but in no way provides any glimpse of a solution. If burning biomass on a large scale is not seen as an option in europe (including Russia !), then it has no hope elsewhere either. Simply reducing the usage of fossil fuels by somewhere between 1% & 99% without replacing the lost generating capacity with something which is 'greener' is an idealists dream, less polution, no investment cost, no subsidies ... everyone's happy ..... until the TV, cooker & heating don't work when required !!

Burning biofuels on a domestic basis isn't a solution for all, it could be a particular nuisance in urban environments if the saturation level is too high, however, district or neighbourhood schemes could provide a possible biofuel solution if this happens.

By far the largest proportion of heating in our household is provided by burning wood. I see it as being an extremely 'green' alternative to fossil fuels and hydrocarbons. What is burned grew somewhere from between 40 feet and four miles from the stove, so the transport carbon footprint is low and when purchasing fuel I know that the money goes directly into the local economy with due tax being paid to the UK exchequer, this not being the case with other forms of fuel where supplies by/from multinational organisations and foreign sovereign weath funds effect the balance of trade and the exchequer sees comparatively very little ....

HTH
Z

Ben84

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

Agree, it's a description of the problem, but in no way provides any glimpse of a solution. If burning biomass on a large scale is not seen as an option in europe (including Russia !), then it has no hope elsewhere either. Simply reducing the usage of fossil fuels by somewhere between 1% & 99% without replacing the lost generating capacity with something which is 'greener' is an idealists dream, less polution, no investment cost, no subsidies ... everyone's happy ..... until the TV, cooker & heating don't work when required !!

It's a thought experiment that explores how environmental impact relates to how much we use a resource. It's too abstract to be a plan for the future, but it does hopefully highlight the difference between being innately green and just being small scale and avoiding most the significant problems. These are too often confused. My analogy to fossil fuels being surprisingly green at low consumption levels shows how we could be mistaken to think any source is innately green when we're not yet using a lot of it.

zeupater wrote: »

Burning biofuels on a domestic basis isn't a solution for all, it could be a particular nuisance in urban environments if the saturation level is too high, however, district or neighbourhood schemes could provide a possible biofuel solution if this happens.

By far the largest proportion of heating in our household is provided by burning wood. I see it as being an extremely 'green' alternative to fossil fuels and hydrocarbons. What is burned grew somewhere from between 40 feet and four miles from the stove, so the transport carbon footprint is low and when purchasing fuel I know that the money goes directly into the local economy with due tax being paid to the UK exchequer, this not being the case with other forms of fuel where supplies by/from multinational organisations and foreign sovereign weath funds effect the balance of trade and the exchequer sees comparatively very little ....

HTH
Z

These benefits to wood burning are still a property of it being small scale rather than innately green. If lots of people in the UK started burning wood all of these aspects would progressively change as demand grew. Increasingly centralised distribution would appear with your wood travelling further, and at really high levels we'd probably see a commodity market like we do with fossil fuels and after that you could pretty much give up on being able to identify where it was coming from and through the demand for lower prices increasingly unsustainable sources would fill the market.

The green aspects to your wood burning are unlikely to scale up well. Big consumption either needs and/or encourages big companies and they work very differently.

We need another solution for everyone else. Energy conservation and using multiple sources helps more than jumping from one energy source to another without questioning how the benefits may change as we start to consume more of it. It's short sighted to say wood is environmentally friendly when that encourages more people to use it, but the more people who use it the less environmentally friendly it becomes. The wood was never good or bad for the environment, it was just a matter of how we used it that made it have whatever impact it did.

zeupater

Hi Ben84

I see exactly where you're coming from, but the basis of the thought process is flawed.

The proposal is that anything on small scale is green and therefore better than the same thing on a large scale, whereas it's really just the same thing .... just on a smaller scale. The real solution is to reduce demand for energy to a sustainable level then displace the fossil or hydrocarbon energy source with a sustainable, and therefore greener, alternative.

The key is to reduce demand, not reduce production or 'green-wash' production to meet current demand ..... this is exactly the mistake in the government thought process, being highly influenced by corporate bodies and related academic parties with their own vested interests in maintaining an energy intensive society ....

HTH
Z