Big Monday Thoughts [Blog Action Day]

October 15th, 2007

so this is a post for Blog Action Day, “what’s that?” i hear you cry. well it’s a bit of a shout for a good cause that is being made by lots of bloggers on the world wide web and the cause is the environment – yep, the hot topic at the moment.

so what do i think about the environment? i think it needs to be there for a lot longer than we are going to be here that’s for sure. i also think it is stupidly easy to stop or change the majority of the things that we are doing to harm the planet [tree hugger moment alert], but we are just the little people, it’s businesses that are doing the lions share of the polluting at the moment and they are the ones that need to shift direction. fortunately this ‘being green’ look is pretty fashionable at the moment and many companies want to look as green as possible and certainly greener than the competition – have you noticed the amount of companies that are starting to advertise the fact that they are carbon neutral!

but there is a flip side to this coin.

did anyone see the fascinating documentary about the other side of the argument for global warming? entitled ‘the great global warming swindle‘ it was shown on channel 4 here in the uk about 6 months ago, little has been heard about it since, but some of the theory’s and explanations for the rise in the earth’s temperature made a lot of sense and in some cases a lot more sense than al gore and his inconvienent truth – which is something that i have yet to see. Many of the scientists involved were highly respected in their fields, a lot of them working for some of the largest universities and institutions around.

I really don’t think that it’s completely black and white – it just can’t be that simple. You know?!

So, what do I do? Well, assuming that I go along with the argument that we are helping to ruin the earth I recycle a lot and I buy recycled products where possible, we have started to use recycled paper and card for many of our printing services at work, I don’t use the car for unnecessary trips, I walk to work daily and I have used public transport for the majority of my life – I’ve only learnt to drive very recently. We use energy efficient light bulbs, we turn off stand by switches and power plugs when things aren’t in use and we try to stick another jumper on before whacking the heating up!

You see, the thing is, a lot of the things that you can do to help the environment will actually save you a fair amount of money – when added up. And that’s where I think a lot of advertising could be going wrong, the marketing and advertising people are trying to tug at our heart strings and the majority of people don’t care enough to make the changes, but if the angle was that it will save you ‘x’ amount of pounds, dollars, euros, yen or whatever then the little ice cube could start to snowball, quite literally!

btw, the photograph used at the top of this piece is “true energy” by Suat gursozlu.

Tags: blog action day, energy, environment, money, observation, saving