O.C. Heaton's Blog, page 6

Save money while saving the environment

Last week I switched my electricity supplier to Good Energy, the only company in the UK to generate energy from clean and sustainable sources. The company uses wind, small-scale hydroelectric and solar power, but no fossil fuels or nuclear. The price of making the switch was miniscule – by my estimates, I will only pay about £350 per year more. This isn't an insignificant sum, but it's a lot less than I anticipated for emissions-free energy.

Prior to the switch, I was already f...

Is Apple still rotten?

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Let's give praise where praise is due: a new Greenpeace report seems to reveal Apple is greener than I thought. In my recent blog, 'Where's the Green in Apple' I looked into the fact that it had refused to participate in The Carbon Disclosure Project. Add in the alleged poor safety record and well-documented environmental issues within their supply chain, and a rather different Apple appeared to emerge, somewhat in contrast to the innovative and progressive brand image that...

CO2 free

I was recently horrified to learn that I consumed 13.62 tonnes of CO2 while writing the sequel to The Human Race, which is ironic, given that the book is an eco-thriller. As a result, I decided to do something about my carbon output. Namely, to cut my business emissions to zero over the next ten years without impacting on my lifestyle, just as the environmentalist Ray Anderson did.

Gulp. It felt foolhardy when I started and very quickly, I ran into problems…

My greatest use of c...

Leonardo da Vinci and the future of the human race

An important exhibition is about to open in the UK. It features a man who was first and foremost an artist, but could also credibly claim to be an accomplished sculptor, musician, mathematician, cartographer, geologist, inventor, engineer, scientist and philosopher. I'm referring of course to Leonardo da Vinci and the Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition at The National Gallery in London, where nine of his 15 surviving works will be on show between 9 November 2011 and 5...

What a falling sequoia tree can teach us about Mother Nature

I recently visited The Natural History Museum in London with my eldest daughter and was thrilled to discover, on the uppermost balcony overlooking the main entrance hall, the trunk section from a huge sequoia tree felled in 1892. I was immediately reminded of the tree that Reynolds' Grandfather chops down in The Human Race to make the infamous 'power table' for Reynolds Air headquarters. When I got home I went through the photographs I had taken in the museum and felt...

Are companies the new countries?

Earlier this week I concluded that globalisation is bad for the environment. I also considered how geographical boundaries are becoming increasingly less relevant in a world that demands global solutions to global problems.

If individual countries are becoming powerless to respond effectively to problems such as global warming, who can help?

One answer, unlikely as it sounds, lies in the large corporations that have become prominent as the push towards globalisation has...

A world without countries

I have always believed that globalisation is bad for the environment.

Individual states, when left to their own devices, tend to protect their national interests. They look after number one instead of the greater good. The more a state dominates the world, the more it looks at the world through its own filter. Even the coming together of nation states creates problems. Think of the Eurozone crisis. Such financial crises become global problems because of globalisation, and they ...

What is the real cost of a plastic bag?

While many billions of plastic bags are used each year, their contribution to climate change is actually minimal. In his book Carbon Detox, the environmental writer George Marshall calculates that on average, our annual use of plastic bags produces only 5 kg of the enormous 12,500 kg of carbon dioxide we pump out each year.

So the environmental impact of our use of plastic bags is tiny in comparison to everything else we get up to. True, they don't disappear quickly and tend...

The best of the blogs

Since finishing the sequel to The Human Race, I've taken some time out of writing to catch up with life in general. And for me, that has meant reading. A lot of reading…

Regular readers of A Rush of Green will know that my own posts tend to focus on developments in science and technology and the environment, or look at how I'm fairing with my writing. So with this in mind, I've decided to pull together a list of my favourite blog posts over the last few months, each of which...

Blood in the Mobile

As I was putting the finishing touches to my blogs on Steve Jobs and the inexorable rise of smartphones last week, I picked up on news of a new documentary due to hit the airwaves: Blood in the Mobile. Created by Danish filmmaker Frank Piasecki Poulsen, the doc is eerily relevant to these two previous blog posts as it considers the problems caused by electronic gadgets.

Blood in the Mobile reveals how the extraction of certain minerals in the Congo has been responsible for the ...