Happy new year .... may we all have a good future.

Well happy new year.
Ah, yes that time of year ... where we all wish each other a great year ahead!

While I generally am feeling quite positive, I find myself noting with some sense of irony that here we are wishing each other better and better new years whilst going about our lives in ways that pretty much ensure life is going to get tougher for us all.  We are definitely not wishing our kids a happy future!

Like many people, this summer, I got into my car and drove a few hundred kilometres using up fossil fuels and putting more carbon into our atmosphere. Travel is one of the biggest part of western carbon footprints as you can see from this breakdown of US carbon consumption. I note also that New Zealand's emissions per person were one of the highest in the world according to the Ministry for the Environment.

In the meantime, over the same period, news pours in from weather pundits about how things have been over the last year.  One of the hottest on record in Australia and in the USA and other places in the northern hemisphere, we hear that things have been rather more cold than usual because the polar vortex is changing  as a result of climate change.  High force hurricanes like Typhoon Haiyan continue and that across the world, 2013 was one of the hottest on record.  A report has been released about my home town (Christchurch) highlighting which parts of our city will go under water as sea levels continue to rise (and of course given sea level rise the City will also become much more prone to flooding which already happens periodically).  Not only that, it is clear that the oceans will be affected by acidification, changes to currents and by heating up (which is one of the reasons why hurricanes are becoming more forceful).

So my holiday and the holidays of many who travelled around the country or across the world have continued to contribute to the changes in our climate, which are already wreaking havoc across the world.  AND this is really only the beginning.

The arguments that NZ can do little to cut carbon emissions are clearly untrue, particularly on an individual basis.  There ARE things that we as individuals can do.  I was intrigued by this TED talk that highlights some work which shows that changing people's behaviour in ways that are not difficult can really make a difference to our carbon footprint and to things like the need for new power stations.  In 2009 I spent some time looking at my energy consumption and found it was quite easy to minimise with a bit of attention.

These days I use about 4-5 kw-hrs (or $NZ1.25) per day for all my cooking, water heating, and computing (and I work at home).  This drops a little in the winter when I use about a cubic metre of wood to heat my house and do some cooking/ water heating.  I used about 500 l of petrol which is about 35 litres about 14 times over the year. This amounts to $3.05 per day. This included all my business trips away and car running around town (I do most of my running around town on my bike).  I'm probably pretty inefficient as someone who lives alone rather than with other people.  Families and couples can almost certainly do a lot better per capita than this.

Food is the next thing to look at in terms of food miles, water consumption, fuel and methane emissions used to produce and transport it. This is a biggy and even more complex.  Watch this space!  

So I wish you a happy new year and hope that we might all wish the next generation the same thing - enough to take some individual action to lessen our energy consumption now.  It's no use waiting for our government to do anything  ...and why would they?  There is little to show them that anyone really cares.