It had to be April 1st, didn’t it, but it was no joke. I doubt if anyone noticed, but yesterday morning while updating this site to enhance your viewing experience, some finger trouble on my part caused a WordPress widget to go berserk and bring down the hosting server. It took about a day to restore from a backup and recreate the subsequent posts. And that merry prankster post I spent hours on has passed its sell-by date, and will have to be put on ice for next year. If it’s still topical.

None of this has done anything to improve my mood. I was in a dark place for a while, and seriously considered giving up this blogging lark altogether. However, my mate Nick at Dream Hosting helped me through it and here we are again. In one of my blacker moments I considered moving to a new hosting service, preferably one that has a position on envionmental issues. A quick Google shows there’s a load of options out there. Here’s a random sample.

“Give your carbon footprint the red card!” say www.greenwebhosting.co.uk, who claim to be an affordable earth-friendly service, 100% solar powered and Fairtrade friendly.

NSDesign Web Hosting say they “recently became one of the few web service companies to become carbon neutral, by completely offsetting our carbon footprint”. NSDesign has partnered with Tree Appeal to offer a tree planting carbon offset service. The presence on the Tree Appeal home page of two photos of that ghastly, misguided old duffer ‘Professor’ David Bellamy doesn’t tempt me to pursue this option.

Eco Web Hosting “provide carbon neutral web hosting and green web hosting throughout the UK”. They offer “individuals and companies a carbon neutral web hosting service. We carefully calculate the carbon emissions of our servers, and offset them by planting trees in Ransom Wood Business Park.”

A swift glance suggests that the majority of ‘green’ web hosting services justify their claims by using carbon offsets. Outfits like Greenwebhosting that invest directly in renewables to power their data centres seem to be pretty thin on the ground. Careful research is needed to make sure you get the right service for your own personal ethical stance. Another complicating factor is price; I pay £9.99 a year for my current site, I would have to pay seven times that amount for a basic solar-powered service with Greenwebhosting, offering a fraction of the web space and bandwidth.

Decisions, decisions. Why does everything have to be so difficult?

The Observer reports that Britain is running out of renewable energy, as a surge in demand from businesses has outstripped the supply of electricity generated from ‘green’ sources. Firms’ interest in reducing their carbon footprint has far exceeded new capacity coming on-stream. This leaves companies which have pledged to become ‘carbon neutral’ with a sizeable headache. EDF is ‘prioritising’ existing customers, Npower says the amount it can supply depends on how much customers can pay, and Good Energy, a renewable-only electricity supplier, is turning away very big orders.

What some might consider a surprising popularity of renewables in the business fraternity is being led by large companies, who are obliged to pay the climate change levy on electricity from fossil fuels. The situation isn’t helped by the snail’s pace of the UK planning system, with wind energy projects which could supply one in six British homes mired in bureaucracy.

So much for the power of the market.

‘Business runs out of green energy supply’

As a student of the Open University, I receive a quarterly copy of the magazine Sesame, “reaching the OU community worldwide”. The Winter 2007 edition flopped through my letter box the other day, snugly wrapped in a plastic bag. Now I’m not usually one to complain, but this struck me as a remarkable waste of resources. The OU publishes an online edition of Sesame, a PDF duplicate of the paper edition. I would be quite happy to read that, yet nowhere can I find an option to opt out of receiving the paper copy. But that’s not my main point.

Using a plastic bag to send this thing out is, well, a bit crap really. Being a meticulous sort of bloke, I weighed the thing. Several times. One bag weighs sometimes 5 grams, sometimes 10, our kitchen scales don’t get more precise than that. Let’s call it 5 for cash. Sesame goes out to “over 180,000 OU students, tutors and staff worldwide”. So that’s 180,000 x 5 grams = 900kg of plastic every quarter, 3.6 tonnes every year. All of it will end up in landfill, as there’s nothing on the bag to indicate what kind of plastic it’s made from or whether it can be recycled.

Now I understand that the OU is under pressure to keep costs down, and they’ve probably opted for the cheapest tender. But why use a bag at all? We get an endless stream of catalogs which survive the postal process quite happily without any protection. Just print name and address on the cover, frank it and send it out, and give people a chance to say they don’t want the thing. It’s not rocket science.

The use of “bland and ineffectual promotional language” puts organic food at risk of becoming “just another commercial brand”, concludes a study by the Open University’s Centre for Research in Education and Educational technology (CREET). Their report ‘The Discourse of Organic Food Promotion: language, intentions and effects‘ says that retailers and campaigners are failing to focus on the core selling points of organic food. They tend to use “poetic, vague and emotive” language in their marketing, with an “emphasis on story-telling rather than facts”. According to Guy Cook, Professor of Language and Education at the OU:

“Buyers are not as easily manipulated as marketeers seem to believe. They reacted negatively to extravagant descriptions of ‘succulent sausages’ and animals that are ‘free to root and roam’.
“People see organic farming and its benefits for the environment and economy as promoting a sense of community. Supermarkets by their very definition are not interested in the idea of small community and so cannot sell that ideal.
“Our studies [of organic food promotion] show marketing and PR departments and their received wisdom can often be patronising and out of date…. this is a key moment for the organic movement. Does it want to remain distinctive and politically committed, or go down the road of becoming just another commercial brand?”

Now I’m no academic, so I’m probably missing the point. However, I would have thought that the massive growth in demand for organic produce was the sign of a successful organic movement. Moreover, it seems to me that placing organics at the core of shopping habits is the way to go, rather than differentiating. If organic food becomes an automatic choice, rather than one that the consumer has to mull over for every buying decision, then that must be regarded as a success.

Talking of green cars … as you’d expect from an event taking place in California, the greenest place on the planet, the 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show is packed with models that would be powered by various combinations of alternative fuels or hybrid drive-trains, if only the motoring masses could get their hands on them.

Volkswagen unveiled the latest and most advanced member of the up! family of concept cars. The space up! blue is powered by a pioneering high-temperature fuel cell linked to a set of 12 lithium-ion batteries. A bank of solar panels built into the roof allow the charge in the batteries to be topped up by available light. Many of the surfaces are constructed out of recycled materials – the instrument panel and the door mouldings are made out of organic plastics or biopolymers.

The space up! blue has a range of around 65 miles on batteries and 155 miles using the fuel cell, giving a maximum range of 220 miles. As for performance, on batteries it can reach 62 mph in 13.7 seconds, with a top speed of 75 mph.

I wish I could drive. Sadly, a production version won’t evolve before the end of the decade.

New York Times on the Auto Show

The Guardian newspaper has contacted The Coffee House to promote its “Tread Lightly” project, not to be confused with Eurostar’s emissions reduction initiative of the same name.

Guardian readers are urged to adopt low-carbon lifestyles, share hints and tips, and make weekly pledges to change their habits. Suggested pledges include that old chestnut low-energy light-bulbs, and other favourites such as turning appliances off standby, washing clothes at a lower temperature or using the car less frequently. Exactly what you’ve been told to do on the ethical living page of women’s magazines for years. Is there really anyone left who isn’t doing all these things? Yes, I know …

Sign up to Tread Lightly and make a pledge before the end of November and you’re in with a chance of winning a G-Wiz electric ‘car’, featured by The Coffee House a few months ago (“Wall.Street.Crash”). I’d love to join you guys, it’s only the prospect of actually winning the thing that’s holding me back.