Guilt trip TV...

Mea culpa. On Friday I bought a new TV. A 32" flatscreen telly to replace our 25 year old set that had gone on the blink and was too small to watch modern programmes without pressing your eyeballs to the screen. 32" looked modest in the shop and with a toddler in the house we don't get to the cinema much and watch a lot of movies on demand, but since we've got it home it's given me a massive guilt trip, dominating a corner of the room - a big, black, earth-crushing monolith of consumerism...

Except it's not really.

Its power consumption is 100W - a traditional light bulb's worth. OK that's almost twice its teeny predecessor, but it also includes a digital receiver which we'll need in a couple of years when analogue signals are switched off - that cuts out using 38W of digibox and unlike the latter it has an easily accessible off switch, avoiding even shortish stints on standby. And we don't leave the TV on in our house unless we are actively watching it (hint: check the TV schedule first before switching the thing on). So the difference between this and our old set up quickly disappears if we redouble our efforts to switch off unnecessary lights through the winter.

I'm not trying to paint this as a green move - it is a carbon sin, but on the grand scale of things it's a teeny-weeny one. Yes, we could have stuck with our tiny old flickering picture, we could have bought a smaller set, we could have tried to go without (tried that, OK for a while, but wait until you're ill and/or shattered and just want to veg out), but we decided differently.

So, why do I still feel so damn guilty? Where do we draw the line in luxuries? Deep green living in a teepee, or light green life-as-usual with a green electricity tariff and ecover at the sink? It's the space in between that's much more difficult, if you, like me, want to benefit from the joys of modern life but want to make a difference to the planet. I've insulated the loft, replaced the windows, walk and cycle for most trips, work from home, eat local and organic food, use manure on the allotment, feed the birds, work to cut emissions from 100s of clients, avoid foreign holidays - can I not have the TV? And the DAB radio? And...

The guilt trip continues...

Petrolheads go green...

Interesting TV (in the UK) last night if you are a green...

A cyclist beats an F1 driver to Sports Personality of The Year on BBC1 and then over on BBC2 James May on Top Gear calls the hydrogen powered Honda Clarity "the most important car to be developed in the last 100 years". Even Jezza Clarkson enjoyed the Tesla electric sports car until it started running out of juice - the practicality of recharging it was what made him dismiss it as 'doesn't work', not the frightening torque an electric engine will produce.

But looking back, Top Gear has been showing a green tinge for a while - the three petrolheads raced across Europe on a single tank of fuel a couple of weeks ago and the top two drivers in the 'Star in a Reasonably Priced Car' are Jay Kay and Kevin McCloud - two avowed greenies...

Times they are a changin'

Great Global Warming Swindle - knuckles rapped

The UK's broadcasting regulator Ofcom has published its views on Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle.

The verdict in a nutshell:

1. The programme did misrepresent several eminent scientists.

2. While the gist of the scientific argument was 'wrong', it was within the rights of Channel 4 to broadcast it.

Point 2 brings out a real tug-of-war in my head - normally I welcome freedom of speech to a degree which would make many others blanch, but this programme has been used by so many as 'proof' that climate change is just a massive hoax to raise taxes that I start spitting with rage.

It is not Ofcom's fault, it is a matter of our attitudes - if Channel 4 had insulted a person, a 'race' of people (eg Celebrity Big Brother) or a company, it would have been rightly condemned. But the concept of 'insulting' the plight of our life support system is just to big and complex for our little minds to cope.

Cradle to Grave - our lives laid bare

In the novel How The Dead Live by Will Self, the dead protagonist is in limbo followed around by a number of ghosts including three blubbery humanoid shapes which consist of all the fat she gained and lost again while she was alive. I was reminded of this while watching Human Footprint on the UK's Channel 4 last night. The programme went from birth to death for the average Brit, showing you how much stuff we consume and produce.

The makers amassed our life of consumption together, piling up carrots, potatos and apples, racked up empty wine bottles and emptied a bin lorry full of packaging waste. The sight of two kids tumbling over a huge pile of nappies reinforced my view that cloth is best.

The stuff that comes back out of us was a little more modest - only five buckets of vomit? I got poisoned by dodgy Russian vodka once and thought I produced that in one day. The pile of poo was a little smaller than I expected as well. But the best bit visually was when they ignited the equivalent methane that we fart over our lifetime producing a reasonable mushroom cloud - now if we could only capture that...

Green TV

If you live in the UK, you're spoilt for choice on TV tonight.

On eco-living, Panorama (8:30pm BBC1) has Justin Rowlatt living greener for a year. For those who miss it, or for our non-UK readers, the programme should be available on-line for a week afterwards.

Clashing with this is Dispatches: Greenwash (8:00pm Channel 4), where George Monbiot tears into the UK Government's Climate Change efforts (no doubt with some relish). You can read the gist of this in the Guardian: the headline article and a piece from Monbiot himself.

Later in the week is a documentary entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle (Channel 4, Thurs, 9:00pm), which I'm sure will stimulate some debate. The central argument is that the warming effect is due to solar activity and CO2 emissions are following temperature and not the other way around. This is a common argument, but why isn't there a body of peer-reviewed scientific papers to back it up? Surely the achievement of proving global warming is a natural cycle would make 'Science', 'Nature' or one of the other most prestigious journals? We'll just have to watch & see...