O.C. Heaton's Blog, page 7

The rise of the machines…

Earlier this week, I blogged about the sad loss of Steve Jobs and my green guilt about whether or not to upgrade my iPhone to the iPhone 4S.

Oh dear: I cringed while writing the last half of that previous sentence! However I'm not the only one wedded to my gadgets. According to The Economist, sales of connected devices – specifically smartphones – will reach nearly 700 million by 2013.

Source: The Economist, Beyond the PC

The upward curve in gadget sales is clear to see.

What's...

Steve Jobs' legacy: how green is Apple?

Perhaps it was fitting that when I read of Steve Jobs' passing on Wednesday morning, I did so on my much-loved iPad. Like many others I was saddened by the news, for all the reasons that have been blogged and tweeted over the last seven days. I have and will remain a huge admirer – and I have to confess there is more than a little of Mr Jobs in Ethan Rae, the reclusive billionaire who Uma Jakobsdóttir approaches in The Human Race to launch her device that will stop global...

Is the path to enlightenment paved with e-books?

Michael Hart had a grand vision, which he named Project Gutenberg: e-books for all, for free. He aimed to provide "a million e-books each to a billion people all over the globe".

Hart was the founder of the e-books industry and, in the week that The Human Race came out on Kindle, I read about his passing. Had Michael Hart lived, he planned to achieve his goal by 2021: fully 50 years after his light bulb moment when, as a student at the University of Illinois, he first...

How to become a carbon-free writer

I was horrified to discover that writing the sequel to The Human Race had produced – and even more horrified after I found a way to visualise that number. Determined to reduce  my carbon emissions, I have drawn up the following plan of action:

1.       Following in the footsteps of Ray Anderson, I'm aiming to cut my business emissions to zero over the next ten years. I plan to do this while minimising the impact upon my lifestyle. This could be tricky. As...

Do you know what one tonne of carbon dioxide looks like?

Yesterday I calculated the carbon cost of writing the sequel to The Human Race. It came out at a shocking 11.91 tonnes of carbon dioxide. I fell to thinking about what I could do to reduce this.

My youngest daughter asked me what I was doing and, after I had explained it to her, she asked me what a tonne of carbon dioxide looks like. It was a great question – and one for which I had no immediate answer. All I could tell her was that CO2 is odourless and colourless – but this...

My name is O.C. Heaton and I'm a polluter…

After posting about corporate environmentalism, it occurred to me that I should be practising what I preach. Even writers generate a carbon footprint, but I have never taken the time to analyse how much CO2 I spew out into the atmosphere.

When my eco-thriller, The Human Race, was published, I traded in my Grand Jeep Cherokee 4.7L V8 engine for a Brabus (a Smart car). I hasten to add that this had nothing to do with the publishing advance I secured for the book! Instead, it was ...

Fracking hell! Why hydrogen isn't happening.

Last week the UK's first public hydrogen filling station opened in Swindon. This news item slipped through the net somewhat, as all the media attention seemed to be focused upon the discovery of a natural gas field beneath Blackpool. However I believe that our new hydrogen filling station is just as significant a development, if not quite as "sexy" as 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas.

The hydrogen filling station looks like a conventional petrol station, and it takes a...

The Human Race – now on Kindle!

There has been a lot of excitement in the Heaton household this weekend: my publisher has just launched the Kindle edition of The Human Race! It's been a while coming and, as you can see, this new edition also has a new cover. I like it a lot. I like the original cover too, but some readers found it off-putting. Since it was first published the book has found a wider audience, and the decision to review the artwork was taken.

It also seems fitting for an eco-thriller to be...

My writing progress: I'm a summer writer!

Earlier this year I blogged about my obsession with my writing progress. I am scrupulous about recording my "writing statistics", and either beat myself up when I fail to meet my targets or celebrate with high fives when I hit them.

Having just finished the second book in The Human Race "Thrilogy", I am taking a short break before starting the third and final instalment of the series. This week, contemplating the best time to put pen to paper, I decided to compile statistics...

Carbon reduction: is it good for business?

Are big companies altruistic? And by "altruistic", I mean the sort of altruism portrayed by Ethan Rae in The Human Race. Ethan gives away 25 per cent of his annual net profits to good causes such as carbon reduction, which, over a two-year period, amounts to more than £250 million. It's a lot of money, but Ethan has his reasons and, importantly, the wherewithal to do it. His company, Rae Holdings, is private so he can pretty much do what he wants. In other words, he isn't...