Wise after the event

You know that interview question, 'what is your biggest weakness?' Well here's mine: finding something out or getting to the right answer just a little bit too late for it to be of any use to anyone. It happens all the time (one example that springs to mind is finding out about the St Luke's natural birthing center in NYC just too late to have my baby there so I had to have here in the utterly horrendle, natural-birth-unfriendly Beth Israel hospital instead, another finding out about green renovations about a week after we finished doing this place up, but trust me this stuff happens all the time).

The latest (and admittedly fairly egregious) example begins with a confession: yesterday, we booked a holiday. Involving flying. To the Bahamas.

I have an excuse for going: Dot just LOVES being naked (let's not let this worry us till she's 15, people), and since a frigid Pennsylvania winter is not terribly conducive to sitting round in your birthday suit, I've been dying to take her somewhere where she can wriggle round starkers to her little heart's content. Our tax rebate is due next week so we thought, what the hell, we'll only have our first baby once, let's just bugger off somewhere sunny.

But what I don't have an excuse for is not booking an ethical holiday - except that in the excitement of the whole thing (and of actually having enough money to do anything at all, let alone go on a holiday, for the first time in a while), I got swept up in the moment and only came down to earth with a bump once the credit card details had been exchanged and I was reading some article or another which mentioned ethical holidays.

At which point I thought, dammit.

Out walking with Dot today I pondered how it was possible that I'd managed to forget this and yet I can remember to rifle through a bin of dirty nappies (wearing a rubber glove, of course) to pick out the wipes and to buy two lbs of worms for my wormery without any problem. Especially since flying is the eco crime sine qua non.

And the conclusion I came to? I'm just a bit simple. I know it looks like I'm an inconsistent hypocrite but really, that isn't it. I'm just a bit dumb. And I'm kicking myself. Hard.

Here are the issues with our holiday: our hotels are neither locally owned nor run (to my knowledge, at least); although one is in a nineteenth century house, the other renovated rather than a new build, neither appears to be an eco-resort (no renewable energy, no sustainable materials, although both claim to use only local food); and we are flying there.

On the plus side: I will offset our flights; the Bahamas is a much shorter flight than more eco-friendly places we could have gone, like Central and/or South America; we won;t buy any new stuff to take with us; and he Bahamas is mentioned in websites like this one as a reasonably eco-friendly place to go because the local community benefits from the tourism.

But who am I kidding? This is pure, hedonistic, planet-trashing naughtiness.

Please don't hate me. We will find a way to limit the damage once we get there, promise.

PS no post tomorrow. The hubby's valentine's pressie is actually getting to talk to me after dinner. That, and Dot. She's his catch-all pressie for the next 20 years.

Retracting my previous statements

Oh dear, my appalling math skills have let me down again. Basically when I wrote about switching to wind power recently I said it was cheaper to go direct to Community Energy than to go through ConEd. However now I've done the math, I think I was wrong. Here's my new reckoning, in answer to an email received via the Bowery Babes email group list as to whether NYC peeps are better off going direct to Community Energy or through ConEd:

"From the research I've done I think it's a pretty close run thing but in the long run you're probably slightly better off staying with ConEd and switching to their wind power option. Your alternative is to go direct to community energy, which is the company which supplies ConEd with wind power, but ConEd offers a good deal with them.

Basically, if you go direct to Community Energy, they charge $2.50 per block of 100 KwH (min 2 blocks) and if you go through ConEd they charge 2 cents 50 per KwH - i.e. exactly the same. Both charges are on top of your current electricity charge as renewable energy is more expensive.

However ConEd also offers a $25 sign-up rebate and NY state taxes are waived once you've signed up (this might also be true going direct to Community Energy but am sure would be a pain to organize). You also pay for exactly what you use with ConEd as opposed to having to buy blocks which might be innaccurate.

So from what I know, which of course is not loads, it seems ConEd might be cheaper over the long term (when I wrote my blog on this I actually thought the opposite - but think I was wrong). Community Energy are very nice and easy to deal with, though!"

Sorry. Repeat after me, 2+2=4, 4+4=8....

Offsetting our carbon

The good thing about having this blog is it's making me feel compelled to actually do all those worthy things I've been thinking and talking about doing for years but hadn't. For example, we flew to the UK last night (lots of fun, flying with a 3 month old baby. Actually she was doing just fine till we had to sit on the tarmac at Heathrow for an hour with Dot restrained by a seat belt, poor little love). I found out it's 3,458 miles one-way from NYC to London, so this morning I went onto carbonfund.org and paid $20 to offset 20,000 miles-worth of carbon emissions. You get to choose how they offset the carbon, so I chose reforestation - it's the easiest to get your head round and I like the idea of planting trees (actually I've just realized that I thought I'd totally overbudgeted but that's because I forgot that was a one-way trip till I wrote it down here so I'm about 700 miles short - will plant own trees when we get home to make up for it. Doh).

I really can't believe how easy and cheap it was to do this. Makes me wonder what took me so long.

Right, I have a very important date with a pile of back-issues of my favourite UK gossip mag Grazia to keep before the jetlagged bubba wakes up. Don't worry, they're ones our friend Sally has finished with. So technically this counts as recycling and as such could be considered greening.

Oh, by the way, if you were thinking of getting me the carbon offset for Xmas, no worries - there are plenty of other bad things i do which need offsetting too so it won't go to waste.