BMW planning takeover bid for Volvo!! & greenie issues

T.J. wrote: I replaced the entire heating system at home with a new, efficient, well-insulated wood pellet system last year. And part of my motivation for selling M3 was that with a 10yr old 180k 525TDS and lightweight 38mpg Elise, fuel usage is dramatically reduced. Also, the majority of energy consumption with a car is in manufacture and disposal - my 5 series is just getting more and more kind to the environment!

Good for you TJ, that is the way to go, we were buying a house with OFCH and were going to change for a pellet burner, fell thru.

You can grow elephant grass its expensive to start €1k per acre but is seemingly vgood and grows well and fast. Dont know where you get it. There was an article in the Times magazine last year, i think a guy from SEI was growing it.

BMW and Ford are stating that Hydrogen cars are still a good few years off yet, there was an article in the Engineers Journal regarding this.

MArtin,

With regard to turning off the heating in rooms when not in use is generally considered good however if the temp in those rooms fall enough then you will be losing heat to those rooms therefore in theory heating them.

The Current BR states that any new house over 100m2 should be zoned for energy efficiency ie living, sleeping and HWS. This can be achieved by the use of thermostatic zoning, honeywell make them, when i eventually move house i will be getting them.

Although some people see elec as a clean source of energy SEI has stated that CO2 emmissions for elec is 880g/kwhr and for gas is 180g/kwr (approx).

Petrol emmits just over 2kg Co2 per litre goning from some car details. So by being frugal when driving ie higher is doing more for the environment than you think.

One question that is overlooked a bit in the driving aspect of the discussion is the CO2 cost of producing a new car.  I tend to drive cars that are at leat 5-6 years old when I buy them. 

• Would I actually help to save the planet by driving a newer cleaner car or add to its woes when there is a significant carbon footprint simply in its production? 
• For that reason am I actually doing more good by running the cars I do rather than asking a car company to build me a new one? 
• I do a relatively high mileage so how does this affect my argument? 
• What sort of a time period (or mileage) is required so that the relative reduction in carbon output from driving a cleaner car (compared to driving an older, more polluting car) outweighs the output from the production of the cleaner one?
• Has the car been designed to achieve the usable life necessary to achieve this?

I really don't know the answers to these questions but it does seem to me many of the "measures" being adopted to encourage us to reduce our footprint on the earth (whether its buying new cars, how we fuel them or heat our houses, etc.) are significantly flawed and support the notion of designed in obsolesence and the market economy principles more than sustainable ecology.  Worse again, when the measures to "encourage" us to be more green end up simply being cynical revenue raising opportunities for governments (for example a 10% increase in duties on fuels won't cause people to significantly alter their habits but will raise revenue where a 100% increase might alter habits but adversely affect revenue because it reduces consumption by a more significant degree) people will, correctly, be suspicious of the message.