So after pondering how heat-efficient my house is (at least for summer), and my water consumption, I was thinking about the rest of my energy use.

Since I don’t have air con, I’m hoping the house is fairly efficient, despite heavy use of two computers. Recent bills show usage at around 8-10 kilowatt hours per day, throughout the year, with a peak of 11 kWh per day in July 2006.

That makes around 3300 kWh a year. Apparently the national average is around 6000 kWh, but 3500 kWh in cities like Perth which aren’t super-hot and have natural gas available for hot water (which is what really burns up the watts for those who have to use electricity for it).

Most of my lights are now CFLs, but there’s probably more I can do on this front, such as setting things up to be able to easily turn off most appliances at the wall instead of leaving them on standby power. Solar electricity is an option, though quite expensive, even with the current subsidies.

Cooking, hot water and central heating for me is by natural gas. Recent bills show usage at about 21 megajoules per day during summer, but a whopping 230 MJ per day in the coldest part of winter. Not sure how that compares with other homes.

Solar hot water (gas-boosted) is reasonably affordable with the rebates, so I’m seriously looking at the options there. But given the bulk of the gas is probably central heating, better insulation may be more effective in the short term.

What I’d like to see from the federal government is commitment to help people reduce their energy needs. Better public transport will help a lot. (See the PTUA’s evaluation of policies). And for buildings, more money for household and commercial solar installations could be the way to go.

For all the talk about nuclear and the myth of clean coal, both of these will cost years and billions and billions to develop (if they work at all). And in the mean time, solar technology is available now, and mass production for Australia’s sunny cities should see the price drop. So how about the right mix of subsidies and rebates to get solar panels up on more roofs?

Get the states mandating better building designs (hint: if you must have huge windows, don’t have them facing the summer sun), and we’ll be going a fair way towards reducing our energy use, and generating more of it sustainably.

The No Junk Mail sticker is very effective. I rarely get anything — notable recent exceptions being an ALP brochure about the local candidate, and Coalition brochures with lots of red ink slagging off the ALP. I wonder if electoral material is exempt?

(Local sitting member Andrew Robb looks a bit like an older Kevin Rudd, doesn’t he.)

But these aren’t as objectionable as a personally addressed letter from the Coalition which included an Australian Government Coat of Arms and text that implied it was about my electoral enrolment. Oh, of course some junk mail sneaks in with the local papers, but even the local papers are sporadic now; perhaps half the distributors think they’re Junk Mail.

Admittedly I miss some of the catalogues a little bit, and so end up reading them when I go over to my mum’s place. But I just discovered the Catalogue Central web site where you can browse a wide range of catalogues online — and those they don’t have on their own site, they link to official sites if they exist. Very cool.

(Note to the Americans: in Australia we don’t have a big issue with catalogue mailing lists, which Buzz Bruggeman recently noted can be stopped via CatalogChoice.org… though some claim it doesn’t really work. Junk mail AU means unaddressed brochures.)

Speaking of junk mail, Hummer UK spammed me. Seriously, apart from the fact that I’m on the wrong continent, is there anybody less likely to want to buy a Hummer than me? So not only do they they make those hulking great Enviro-Bastard tanks (No, a Hummer is NOT greener than a Prius), burning up the planet’s resources… they also spam people. Evil gits.

Next they’ll be sending me junk mail.

What did you do in the war, grandad?

Sunday is Remembrance Day, when we pause to remember the generations of young soldiers who went away to war to fight for the freedoms we enjoy today, many of them paying with their lives.

Those of us young(ish) adults no longer have the threat of world (or even local) war upon us. Soldiers going to war now choose to do so, rather than being compelled to do so.

No, we have another war to fight for the sake of future generations.
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