As I’ve observed organisations that are successful in reducing their carbon emissions in an on-going way I’ve noticed that they all have three things in place before they begin to significantly cut their carbon:

1. Leadership commitment. More often that not the most senior level managers will be on the environmental steering committee.
2. A system in place for accurately measuring and tracking their emissions. They measure what they treasure - in this case their carbon savings.
3. Wider commitment in their workplace to emissions reduction.

With these three pre-requisites in place these organisations are more likely to move forward to actually cut their carbon pollution.
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Carbonetix has developed a website to assist its certified Mirrorlux installers and distributors with sales, marketing and installation activities. Mirorrlux provides an opportunity for Electrical Contracting and Facility Management businesses to build additional business by offering Delamping Services which can halve their customer’s lighting energy use.

The site has been developed to assist Mirrorlux distributors maximise the sales opportunities that exist to halve the lighting costs of their existing and prospective customers.
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A comfortable office temperature doesn’t depend just on the temperature, there are other factors that come into play. These include the relative humidity, the temperature of surrounding surfaces and the speed of any air movements.

Craig Ryan of Johnson Controls has prompted this second posting with some good observations about humidity and comfort on my first posting on a comfortable office temperature.
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I received yesterday a powerpoint about food security and climate change from Dr. Julie Cliff, a friend of mine who has worked in tropical medicine in Mozambique for the last 30 years. Her powerpoint had a dramatic image of cassava plants grown in laboratory conditions at different atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (shown below). Cassava is a staple crop whose tubers are consumed across southern and central Africa. The plants grown at higher concentrations of CO2 produced tubers with less than half of the useful food of the plants grown at lower CO2 concentration.

Cassava tuber growth at different CO2 concentrations

Yesterday I also met an economist who showed me some modelling that predicted the effect a $50 per tonne carbon price would have on the cost of employment across a range of sectors, such as manufacturing, banking and insurance, etc. Typically the cost was around $2,000 per employee – or in other words the modelling was predicting that business expenses would increase by $2,000 per employee if we had a carbon price of $50 a tonne.
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Last weekend six solar tube skylights were installed in our office, which occupies the top floor of a two storey building. The skylights have eliminated the need for artificial lighting in thirteen of our work spaces.

It was amazing watching the reaction of staff as they came in this morning, many couldn’t contain their excitement. “Its so much brighter.” “The quality of light is fantastic.” “We don’t need the lights on at all.”
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