How HeatingSave Helps Businesses | Page 18

Company bosses were warned not to take the issue of global warming lightly. This year’s CBI Climate Change Summit highlighted a US survey where consumers ranked climate change bottom of a list of 21 problem issues facing their country. Irwin Lee, vice president and general manager of Procter & Gamble’s UK and Ireland operations, has committed that 30% of the power used to run its factories comes from renewable energy sources by 2020.

Energy saving has received a blow as various organisations were assessing how hard they would be hit by the £250 million of cuts imposed by the coalition government.

On the market are many energy-saving gadgets which are claimed to be making a big difference to the amount of energy you use in your daily life. Among them is a Radiator Booster, which circulates the hot air that rises off your radiator much more quickly around the room. It claims to reduce energy costs for households by about £10 per month because it saves the boiler from doing as much work.

Digital waste is an unknown but huge quantity – almost everything we do online increases our carbon footprint. Antivirus company McAfee has measured that the electricity needed just to transmit the trillions of spam e-mails sent every year is equivalent to powering two million homes in the United States and generates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as that produced by three million cars.

Climate change has hardly been mentioned in this year’s general election. Four parties – Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green – were represented in the capital on a panel (chaired by The Independent newspaper) called Ask The Climate Question, a coalition of nine environment and development charities and pressure groups, which has been trying to bring global warming back to the forefront of the election agenda.

Shell and BP have both announced colossal profits but seem slow to reduce fuel prices. Shell’s chief executive Peter Voser gave growth in production and exploration of new oil fields as reasons for the company raising its profits for the first quarter to $4.9bn, almost 50% up on the same time last year.

First it was the likes of BP and Shell. Now it is the turn of oil company Total to report much-improved profits for the first three months of the year. Net profit came in at $3bn (£2bn), a rise of almost 10% on the same period a year earlier. Total are under-fire, as a French judge filed preliminary charges against the company earlier this month, accusing it of bribing Iraqi officials while Saddam Hussein was in power in order to secure oil supplies.

Those who have pension funds or other investors must act now to make up for the falling BP share price. More than £56 billion has now been wiped off the company’s market value, since the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, killing 11 men and causing the huge oil leak on April 20. BP was, until this crisis, Britain’s biggest company.

A price comparison website has urged consumers to switch to fixed fuel tariffs after warnings came of another round of price rises; however installing HeatingSave is a wiser move to save money.

Britain is not on course to meet its climate change targets for reducing carbon emissions, the Government was warned by the independent Committee on Climate Change. The Government needs to reduce carbon dioxide by 34 per cent (on 1990 levels) by 2020. However in its second progress report to Parliament, the committee said the sharp fall in UK greenhouse gas emissions of 8.6 per cent last year is almost entirely due to the recession, and that the proportion of the drop due to actual climate policies is but “a fraction” of the total.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says climate effects are already being felt in the UK in the form of higher temperatures and changing seasons. This is the first time the CCC has looked into how homes, businesses and authorities should be changing in order to deal with climate impacts. Previously it has concerned itself with matters like the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and energy supply.

The solar industry is disputing claims on the comparative cost of solar and nuclear power. A report from the recent parliamentary Climate Change Committee backed new nuclear as the cheapest option for the green power the UK needs to hit its carbon-reduction targets. Solar firms disagree, claiming that solar costs should be compared with retail prices, due to the scale of the technology. The industry has taken its fight over plans to slash the feed-in tariff (FiT) scheme to the House of Lords.