Be Eco Friendly

What they don’t tell you: If you burn the wood in an open fire, the majority of the energy in the wood will be lost up the chimney.

Assuming it comes from properly managed forests, however, wood is a green fuel because the CO2 released when it gets burned will be sucked from the air by the trees planted to replace the felled ones. The inefficient burning typical in a fireplace also creates plenty of soot.

Like CO2, soot warms the atmosphere by absorbing heat from the sun – and it can also travel thousands of miles to settle on Arctic ice, where it accelerates melting by darkening the surface. A much better option environmentally is a log-burning stove.

These capture most of the heat from the fuel, greatly reducing the amount of wood required, and they slash soot emissions too. Some modern stoves are so clean-burning that they can even be used in smoke-free zones.

via Top 10 green living myths | Duncan Clark | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

What they don’t tell you: It makes sense for individuals to use less electricity to help reduce the emissions of British power stations.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that the total amount of CO2 that can be released by power plants and other industrial facilities across the EU between now and 2012 is fixed by the European Emissions Trading Scheme.

This means that if the UK power sector reduces its emissions, extra carbon permits get freed up for use elsewhere, such as German power stations or French cement plants. In other words, the same amount of CO2 will be released, just from different sources.

If you want to ensure that your electricity savings do make a real environmental difference, join Sandbag, a charity that will remove CO2 permits from the EU scheme to stop your good work being traded away on the carbon markets.

via Top 10 green living myths | Duncan Clark | Environment | guardian.co.uk.