CarbonTracking

2010 it is then. Here's a resolution : Enough warm fuzzy environmentalism, 2010 is the year for boring numbers. This is what the worlds NGO's and media were having us expect from Copenhagen, wasn't it ? All talk about "firm targets", "verifiable reductions" etc. Very straightforward, we all agreed. Didn't quite work out, did it ? Oh, the [...]

Forget GDP, GNP and all that economic blather. What's important is happiness, isn't it ? And some bright sparks in the New Economics Forum have been working on measuring just that. They've recently published the Happy Planet Index 2.0 which compares the, well, happiness of different countries. They use three indicators to measure this: Life Expectancy Life satisfaction Ecological [...]

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a commision some time ago to study the form that a carbon tax might take in France. That commission, led by former prime-minister Michel Rocard, presented its recommendations to the French government on July 27th. The heart of the matter is the introduction of a tax on all fossil [...]

Those Brits have done it again. One day after announcing their vision for a low-carbon future they now announce the beginning of a process to define a feed-in-tariff for renewable energy and its not too shoddy as the table below shows. A feed in tariff is the price the government will pay you if you put [...]

Aircraft fuel,kerosene, is exempt from tax. This is kind of odd as we see the advent of carbon taxes and also when petrol/diesel for personal use is heavily taxed (€0.40/litre for diesel). So how much of a difference would it make if the government were to tax aircraft fuel at a similar level ? Lets take a [...]

We've had the first generation of carbon-offsetting. You pay someone to plant trees, or you pay someone to generate green-electricity, maybe you pay someone to become a vegetarian. Its all a bit intangible sometimes, the time-period in which the offset occurs is sometimes unclear and the offset may be occurring on the other side of [...]

Carpooling is one of those universal green-loves. I mean, people share a trip in a car, less emissions all around, a bit of social-networking going on, its an all round winner of an idea. Since its such a good idea, there is a bunch of good people who have created carpooling websites out there on the web. [...]

There I was on the Oscar Wilde a few weeks back. Its the very nice Irish Ferries boat that links Rosslare,Ireland to Roscoff, France. With two young kids this is the comfortable way of driving from France to Ireland, forget that landbridge stuff and the extra 800km ( for me at least ). So I got [...]

The holy grail. Sometimes you need to be someplace quick, maybe its to see about a girl, maybe its to be at an 60th birthday party when you know you have to be 1550km away by the following afternoon. The offset scene won't be enough to fix that guilty conscience,I mean staying fat while paying someone [...]

Emissions figures are becoming pretty commonplace in our climate-change sensitive world. Every car ad will tell the the amount of grams of CO2 each kilometre produced by their latest beauty, albeit in really small text tucked down the bottom. The airline industry is getting up to speed as well, Air France, Lufthansa, BA, to mention [...]