Caring about the planet doesn’t have to be about making life harder. It can be easy. Take this clever little gadget from The Carbon Neutral Company for instance; the Intelliplug looks like a standard 3-way adaptor, but behaves very differently indeed. You plug your PC into the “master” socket on the plug, and two peripherals (monitors, printers, speakers, etc) into the “slave” sockets. When you turn off your computer, the plug will automatically power down the peripherals. Easy peasy, and electricity saved for £16.99.
And how about making Mother’s Day green and easy this year? The Carbon Neutral Company have put together a Mother’s Day Green Box containing Green & Blacks mini-chocolates, a heart-shaped key fob made from recycled leather, and a month’s worth of carbon neutral driving. £12.50 well spent.
Comments:
Hey, I saw that you had mentioned offsets and I wanted to let you know that there is a new report published this last week on the offsets industry, The Carbon Neutral Myth - Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins. Free download from http://www.tni.org
Carbon offsets are the modern day indulgences, sold to an increasingly carbon conscious public to absolve their climate sins. Scratch the surface, however, and a disturbing picture emerges, where creative accountancy and elaborate shell games cover up the impossibility of verifying genuine climate change benefits, and where communities in the South often have little choice as offset projects are inflicted on them.
This report argues that offsets place disproportionate emphasis on individual lifestyles and carbon footprints, distracting attention from the wider, systemic changes and collective political action that needs to be taken to tackle climate change. Promoting more effective and empowering approaches involves moving away from the marketing gimmicks, celebrity endorsements, technological quick fixes, and the North/South exploitation that the carbon offsets industry embodies.
Thanks for visiting Eco Street and for your comment Kevin. The report makes for very interesting reading, and it all makes sense. How unfortunate that it’s such a Catch 22 situation. Either nobody’s doing anything, or those who can’t do the most are doing something, and that’s not enough.
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