Check this out – Global Rich List shows you how rich you are compared to the rest of the too-many-people-in-the-world. It turns out I’m rich beyond my wildest dreams – in the top 1%. Get in!

By the way, I have failed to draw any moral lesson from this. And in the spirit of Christmas, I have donated a whole £0.00. It seems to me that the greenest thing to do is not to do anything to encourage all these people to be alive in the first place. I always said that being green and being tight go together (not to mention being unpleasantly smug)…

Hat tip: Green Thing

Anyway, enough of Copenhagen, here’s another gadget – the PEG or personal energy generator. You walk along and it generates electricity – cool huh? Of course, it’s a tiny drop in the ocean but the fact it exists gives me a massive sense of totally unjustifiable wellbeing.

My intention ages ago was to make my millions out of installing little waterwheels in everyone’s arteries, which would generate power that could be stored in a battery inside you. Every now and again you’d go and download into the national grid, like a cow getting milked (except it’d take less time). To save money you could just put them into people who already needed operations so were already in hospital, but over time you’d have phased them into a good proportion of the population. It would be great.

The downside is you’d have to eat that bit more food to get the extra energy to turn the wheel, which itself has environmental implications – but that’s negligible. That objection would also apply to the PEG of course. Still, good on them. I wonder how long it takes to offset the carbon it takes to make them?

I know I should have written something proper about Copenhagen but it’s all just too depressing.

I normally give conspiracy theories very short shrift, on the basis of Occam’s razor (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem), but in this case I make an exception.

I can’t help but feel there were some pretty shady politics at work – that really it was all about American v China, with the two of them vying for who could limit the other’s economic competitiveness by the back door, rather than a serious effort to sort anything out. Ho hum.

Arnie pulls a JFH

Here’s Arnie pulling a tight smile, something that is very close to my heart. But that doesn’t make me feel any better about his message: “Schwarzenegger said that people worried about climate change should pay more attention to companies, universities and “ordinary folks” and not put so much emphasis on a multinational consensus.”

I tend to think the reverse. People worried about climate change are looking to governments to pull their fingers out at Copenhagen, not to be told that it’s all up to the little people. There is so little we can do on our own. An example off the top of my head: we can reduce the amount of electricity we use…the politicians can ensure our electrcitiy comes from greens sources – if they want to.

Here we all are, blogging pointlessly away to ourselves. Wouldn’t it be better for the environment if we all just shut up? Or, more accurately, turned our computers off? Running computers accounts for 2% of global emissions, which is about the same as the aviation industry. (It’ll only get worse too – Moore’s law says that as a rule of thumb computers get about twice as good every 2 years – and the same is true of the power they consume). And the ever-expanding internet’s information is held on an ever-expanding number of servers, too.

Once this blog is all-conquering and attracts a million comments a day, I will propose that all commentless green blogs should be banned in order to save power. But for now, something more practical: I suggest that we all “offset” the fact we have got our computers on by putting them to good use when we’re not actually using them: Climateprediction.net lets your computer get on with calculating climate change models in the background – that’s while you’re not pestering it by checking your email or blathering on about green issues, that is. Do it.

I really don’t get why everyone’s getting to excited about the emails on faked climate change evidence. Anyone would think it meant that all the evidence on climate change has been faked. Whereas what it actually means is that some people at UEA got a bit over excited about things.

It must be very exciting for the deniers to be able to grasp at this straw, but I don’t see how it affects the overwhelming scientific consenus to the contrary. Still, the way the media are going about it you’d think that the whole thing had been exposed as a scam and we coudl now proceed as we were before. All a bit sad.