I recently booked a transatlantic return flight for Tony and me with Virgin Atlantic. When you view your booking details on the Virgin website, they include a link to their carbon offsetting scheme.

A while ago, I wrote a blog post (Carbon off-setting) in which I described my current view (or near lack of) of carbon off-setting schemes. When I booked the Virgin flights, I didn’t immediately go for the carbon off-setting option because it pointed to a company I’d not heard of and, in a world of dodgy carbon off-setting schemes, how do I know they’re any different?

So I did a bit of research. I remember last year the UK Government (specifically Defra) identified four carbon off-setting companies that were kind of recommended but kind of not. Which is a reflection of the state of confusion customers are in. While I used Climate Care last year because that’s what The Co-op uses (and, apparently, The Guardian too), Climate Care isn’t one of the companies on Defra’s list, which means that it doesn’t meet Defra’s guidelines. But are Defra’s guidelines really that good?

I came across an interesting article in The Guardian from last summer. At the end of the article, it mentions a not-for-profit Gold Standard method which accredits carbon off-setting projects (renewable energy and energy efficiency projects with sustainable development benefits). This rang a bell with what I’d seen on the Virgin website.

Virgin Atlantic have set up a scheme with myclimate, a Swiss not-for-profit foundation, that customers can use to offset their flights. myclimate have several projects, including some that have already achieved accreditation by the Gold Standard, which is supported by several groups, including Greenpeace.

You can be cynical about an air travel company providing this kind of service – obviously it’s great for their image – but it does look as if Virgin have spent a fair amount of effort on it. They even provide a page explaining how Virgin calculates the carbon emissions of their customers (we’re travelling Economy – hence my titular smugness).

So, having read around a bit about the Gold Standard method of assessing projects’ effectiveness, I decided to go with Virgin and myclimate’s service. And I’ll probably use myclimate in future too (although there are other companies and not-for-profits that have Gold Standard-accredited projects as well).

I’ve finally just got round to carbon off-setting our flights for this year. I did do it a year or so ago but after that I read in New Internationalist magazine about the down-sides of carbon off-setting, I was less eager to just go throwing money at some company to asuage my carbon guilt and felt I should do a bit more research.

While doing some filing just now, I found the latest issue of The Co-operative Membership magazine, which has an article about The Co-operative Bank and its ethical policy. The Co-operative Bank apparently uses the Climate Care scheme to off-set its carbon footprint of things like business flights. I figure that The Co-operative Bank is probably a reasonably reliable role-model in such things so I decided to just get on with it and calculate how much carbon I contributed to the world by flying this year.

I’m sticking to personal flights here and not counting my return flights to the US at Easter for business. I need to look into what IBM’s eco policy is for such things.

So, sticking to personal flights, I think I’ve done pretty badly this year in terms of the number of flights I’ve made. Tony and I went on holiday to Paxos, a Greek island, in May, which involved return flights to Corfu. Also, I flew from Southampton to Glasgow for a wedding in June, although I virtuously caught the train back (I couldn’t take the day off work to get the train both ways). And Tony and I have another three flights between us between Southampton and Edinburgh for another wedding. On the plus side, we went to Brussels for a weekend in February using the Eurostar both ways – which was not only greener but actually quicker and more pleasant in my opinion.

According to the Climate Care calculator, all that comes to the grand total of £8.96. Which doesn’t seem very much but I guess that’s because they’re all fairly short-haul flights. I can’t remember how much CO2 that was but I’ll get my PDF certificate within 5 days to remind me.

So do I feel less guilty about my flights? I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I still feel it was an excessive number of flights to take – especially when it is actually possible to catch trains to Scotland (although the 7.5+ hours it takes each way from Southampton does cause problems if you’re going just for the weekend). I try to imagine what I’d have done if low-cost internal flights weren’t available. I guess I’d have either taken more holiday from work or just not gone to the weddings. I don’t think the availability of carbon off-setting would have featured very heavily in my decision. My reason for catching the train home when I went to the wedding in Glasgow was that I wanted to try to be at least a bit greener. I’m quite happy to sit on a train for an afternoon with a book, and it was actually cheaper to catch the train than to fly. I actually wouldn’t mind paying a little more to catch the train than fly so I felt a bit smug that I’d proved wrong all the people who claim that flying is cheaper than other forms of transport to travel long-distance in the UK. I’ve recently discovered, in travelling more frequently between Southampton and Lancashire, that you can actually get pretty good train deals if you book far enough in advance.

So, my position on carbon off-setting isn’t cut and dried. I think I see carbon off-setting as the last resort, after trying to find greener methods of travelling. I like to think that I’m making a bit of an effort in that (catching the train and Eurostar when it’s possible) but I know it’s not really as big an effort as it could be yet.

Today, we went to the cinema not once but twice! I don’t think I’ve ever been to a commercial cinema more than once in a day (unless I was working there).

We had UGC cards for about 2 years but stopped going because there were very few films on that we wanted to watch. We watched Insomnia at our local Picture House cinema a couple of years back and liked the place. Partly because it reminded us of The Dukes and Filmsoc where we used to work/volunteer.

So today we went to see Who Killed The Electric Car?, bought a year’s membership, then went back after lunch to watch Clerks 2.

First of all, a year’s membership is well worth it. It cost us £40 for a joint membership (ie living in the same house) and, aside from other membership perks (like discounted tickets and exclusive screenings), you get 3 free films (ie 6 tickets – worth £39). We used our first pair of free tickets to watch Clerks 2 and there’s at least one other film showing at the moment that I want to see. The downside of going during the day is that we have to pay for parking but that’s free in the evening.

Who Killed The Electric Car? is a fascinating documentary about the development, death, and on-going lobbying for the electric car in the U.S.. According to the film, the majority of the earliest cars were electric; preferred for their lack of noise and fumes. The combustion engine, cheap fuel, etc won the battle though and became the dominent technology. Now, though, global warming and U.S. wars with the Middle East (which produces two-thirds of oil used in the West) are encouraging people to re-consider alternatives like electric. Modern hybrids like the Toyota Prius have become incredibly popular with celebrities (including Robert Llewellyn who drove his to IBM Hursley in the Spring).

Well, the film sold it to me; I want an electric car…something like the EV1 would be nice. I figure that it’d be perfect for the majority of our car journeys (we fill up our 1.6 Vectra less than once every 2 weeks) and, on the odd occasion when we need to drive further than the battery will allow, we can hire a petrol car (at least, until public rechargers are more pervasive).

There are obviously issues, in this country if not in the States, about the rising costs and availability of electricity and, also,whether it’s actually that environmentally-friendly to be making the emissions come from coal (currently the major fuel for electricity) instead of oil (though that would be less of a problem with hydroelectric or wind power). My other questions would be practical ones like: how much electricity does it take to fully recharge the battery? and how long does it take to fully recharge?

So, anyway, a film worth seeing.

Clerks 2 is also worth watching, though more if you are a Kevin Smith fan. It has the glossy brightness of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back but nicely starts out in black and white, showing Dante going to work at the Quick Stop and discovering the place in coloured flames – a cool effect. It then switches to colour as he and Randall start working their McJobs in Mooby’s (as seen first in Dogma). I found it a bit slow in places but then the original Clerks isn’t exactly speedy – that’s not the point of it. I think it’s a good sequel but (by definition!) lacks the originality of…well…the original.

I think my favourite Smith film is probably Dogma, mainly because each time I watch it I get more of it. Clerks also stands up well to repeat viewings; I guess time will tell whether Clerks 2 will too, although I will watch it again when it’s out on DVD. Clerks has a special place in my heart because we visited the Quick Stop when we were in New Jersey 3 years ago.

Last week, we replaced our old, 1970s Baxi back boiler with a brand-new shiny Worcester-Bosch condensing combi boiler. And thanks to the willingness of Sean Lidden, the boiler man who scaled our roof to install the vertical vent, the new boiler fits neatly into our roof-space storeroom.

When we first looked into it last year, we thought it would have to be mounted on an external wall. As we live in a narrow mid-terrace cottage, we don’t have a huge expanse of convenient external wall on which to unobstrusively mount a boiler. At best, we’d figured it would have to go in the computer cupboard (aka the server rack), which wasn’t really that ideal.

I guess it depends on the make/model of boiler but this is the make that Sean has used before because it’s easy to maintain and get parts, I think, and, for us, being able to vent it through the roof is definitely the best option. And being able to control the heating using a wireless thermostat/control means that we don’t have to make the trip upstairs just to override the timer settings.

So I worked at home for three days while it was all being installed. On the first day I had no heating or water (hot or cold) but a neighbour kindly lent me a key to use her facilities; after that, we had cold mains water but no heating or hot water. It was bliss on Friday evening being able to run the hot tap, and on Saturday morning have a hot shower.

The upshot is that we no longer have a hot water tank (and hence no airing cupboard), we have no cold water tank or header tank in the storeroom, and we have no ugly 1970s outset gas fire stuck to the chimneybreast. We have yet to decide what to put in the hole that the fire and boiler left behind but in the meantime, we can admire the pretty 1970s lime-green wallpaper that we discovered behind some formerly boxed-in pipes in the living-room:

It rained last night. This morning, when I checked my butt, it was about half full! This evening, I reckon there’s about 40-50 litres of water in there!