Energy saving day

Nothing to Dream

Sadly. the information about eday must have been really well hidden as human beings with an interest in saving energy may have wanted to know about it. The principle is an excellent one yet with sad results so far.

So what is eday?

The bishop of Liverpool has urged people to give up a light bulb and turn off lights as an act of giving up something for lent. Usually people will choose chocolate or something else they feel they cannot usually do without. Giving up something is hard as any dieter will know and can put us in rebelling mode. Just like children stamp their feet when you take their favourite toy away, so too will we stamp our feet at giving up light, energy and peak oil.

On a personal level, I can observe changes in the conversations of my children. They are acutely aware of the situation. My oldest son had homework which demanded that the children work out their carbon footprint ( a difficult thing to do without asking your parents for exact figures on energy usage, car mileage). It gave us an opportunity to discuss why we do the things we do. Today he reported that although his footprint was lower than the average person, there were people in his class with double the average which was mainly caused by long haul flights.

My youngest son, remarked on the price of a gallon of diesel and wondered why it kept going up. Again, an opportunity to talk about energy and its use. We debated about gameboys, WII gamestations and how as children they found them very attractive and addictive to how wonderfully useful energy can be when you go for an MRI scan and have pictures taken of your brain.

For me it is not that we are giving up things but that we are creating differences with the choices we make ; yes they have an impact if you deprive yourself from them immediately such as crash dieting would do or giving up smoking immediately. If however you start to make different lighter choices, you suddenly find that you no longer crave electricity or whatever it is that is your energy addiction and you can find other pleasurable alternatives.

My youngest son realised that he could choose a game of cricket in the fields against a game about cricket and that in that way he would be saving energy and using a different sort of energy; a physical energy that would revive him and challenge him in a different way.

Eday....will it make a difference? See for yourself