Going Green

From Ezee.co.uk

[edit] Is the usual routes to go green really that green.

I am not a green nor am I anti. My house runs 100% on CFL's because I was fed up of the RCD tripping everytime a bulb blew. CFL's don't do this. I am installing battery banks and solar panels for financial reasons. I am looking at ground source heating simply so I can retire earlier without having to worry about huge electric and heating bills eating my pension. I drive less than 2,000 miles a year due to working from home. My environmental impact must be smaller than average. I have no axe to grind with either the pro greens, the global warming people or anyone with a strong view on the subject.

My position on this basically boils down to you don't piss in the stream you want to drink from. We are in effect doing this to our planet. We really should be cutting down on all pollution of the atmosphere as a matter of common sense. In addition we should be looking at ways of being 100% self sufficient in energy over the long term. Re-opening coal mines may be a short term solution to middle east oil in some respects but it is not a medium to long term solution. Nuclear I am OK with providing enough investment is made in improving the reprocessing of waste products.

[edit] CFL's

Sometimes doing the right thing does not actually pay off. On Sky News today Johny Ball pointed out that swapping your 100watt light bulb out for low power 20Watt bulbs means that in winter you may actually have to turn the heating up in your house. That extra 80Watts of electricity in a normal incandescent light bulb is all going out as heat?

From what I can make out 90% of the electricity consumed by the incandescent light bulb is output as heat ie 90watts. After 11 Hours thats almost 1Kw worth of heating lost from a single bulb. 1 liter of heating oil is equivalent of 8KWatts. So 3 hours of having 4 100Watt bulbs on is the same as 1Liter of heating oil?

[edit] Toyota Prius

On an episode of "Boston Legal" they argue against a spurious case brought by a green that the Prius is more environmentally damaging than a Hummer. Quote:

Hybrid batteries contain nickel that is mined and smelted in a plant in Sudbury, Ontario.
A plant that has caused so much environmental damage and acid rain that NASA uses the 
so-called dead zone around the plant to test its moon rovers. ... That nickel then has 
to be shipped via massive containers to a refinery in Europe. Then off to China to be 
made into nickel foam, then to Japan to be manufactured, then finally all the way back 
to America. All that, just to put a single hybrid battery into a car. When you combine 
all the energy it takes to built and drive a hybrid it adds up to almost fifty percent 
more that it does to build and drive a Hummer.

Now the show is meant to make you laugh but this must be silly? I did some googling and yes it has been pretty much discredited. BUT: how does the Prius compare to a small fuel efficient car?