Green Ireland » Carbon Footprint

Home Energy Saving scheme!

admin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:56:03 +0000

While I think that the Home Energy Saving scheme, is a good idea I do think a better investment would be to update the building code and make it harder for builders to get away with not properly insulating the houses that they built in the first place. It seems that Eamon ryan in his wisdom, will be offloading the cost of re insulating and upgrading of houses to the taxpayer, is two fold, The Grant money is taxpayers, which will probably only cover 1/3 or at best 1/2 the cost of the job, and then the rest of the money will have to be paid by the taxpayer(Home owner).

My experience with builders and contractors is that they will try and get as much money for themselves. Ripping off the taxpayer once again (The grant is almost free money to them).

Will this become another (smaller) building bubble, I’ve never seen so many builders advertising insulation contracting before. Having the tax and insurance clearings will not mean that the contractor is any good at his or her job, I suppose there will be cowboys in this business too.

While I support reducing heating bills and in turn reducing C02, I’m not 100% convinced that it will work, I hope I’m wrong!

EU makes tought decisions

admin — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:25:45 +0000

It’s about time that governments took a hard line in regards to CO2 Pollution. It turns out, even given the fact that Europe and even the world might experience a recession. I’m for once, am glad that the EU has not made a U-Turn in policy, I think given the long term effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere it’s good that European Parliament’s Environment Committee has continued to support such strict emission targets. It easy for industry to call foul, it will stop us from being competitive.. there will be loss of jobs etc.(smoke and mirrors to me).

The transport sector accounts for a high proportion of CO2, It seems that in recent years car manufactures have gone the reverse of improving efficiency in the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), producing largest and large cars, Sport utility vehicles (SUV’s). So making the car industry accountable for it’s product is a good measure, and I hope that with many other sectors, the tough CO2 emissions regulations will spur Industry to produce more greener products, consumers to think before buying inefficient products.

Even the food sector can reduce their CO2 emissions, bar the production and manufacture of food stuff, Flashy food packaging, Refrigerated, 100,000 air kilometres cesar salad, these have a tremendous CO2 emission record. I would imagine that as the CO2 (tax) is applied to these products, the cost of buying local (farmers markets) will seem cheap in comparison.

So bring on the tough decisions

The use of patio heaters

admin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:01:30 +0000

I’m really disappointed with how people have reacted to the “No Smoking ban” in Ireland. There has been a massive increase in the amount of pubs that have built beer gardens and installed patio heaters to keep the punters warm while smoking. While I don’t think there is any problem with having a beer garden,heating the open air in an attempt to keep punters happy is wrong. If people have to go outside to smoke then they should take a jacket with them, or at least wear clothes that keep you warm! In todays environment of global warming, Crazy weather patterns; we should be doing our best to reduce our carbon footprint. Just one pub in Kilkenny has 18 x 2 KW/h bar heaters,which comes out at 36 KW/h Calculating the average CO2 emitted by power stations in Ireland, Approx 650 gram (I used an average of coal 900grams and Natural Gas 400grams). So these heaters would output 21KG/h and this is just for the heaters. If I did the calculation correct Depending on the tarrifs obtained from the ESB, ranging from 0.12cent for the first 1500KW/h. It does not take into account the carbon footprint yet!.

I can imagine that as prices for electricity increase, as per the cost of generating electricity pubs will have to look hard at the use of patio heaters, or put up the price of Beer, spirits. which at €4.40 for the average pint in Kilkenny is is getting very costly to have a night out! I think this will be a good thing in the long run as with the cost of heating a smoking area will keep getting more and more expensive, and in times of “recession” we generally watch our wallets.

These are two pubs that have a major use in patio heaters in kilkenny:

Langtons (Gas)

Kytlers Inn (Electric)

The left bank (Electric)

I singled out these two Pubs in Kilkenny because of the amount of heaters that they use to heat their beer gardens. I will add to the list as i find them.