Switch off, not over

At the Do Lectures in 2009, Geoff McFetridge's 'Big Do' was "throw away your television". IMHO, living without a TV is one of the best decisions about day to day living that anyone can make - if you're up on your subject, nothing on TV will be news - in fact far from it - the gap between an event and 'news' is often, in my experience best judged in years rather than weeks, days or minutes.

Seth Godin's blog today was on the same topic:

But it's better than TV

At the local health food store lunch buffet, they offer stir fried tempeh.

I never get it. Not because I don’t like it, but because there are always so many other things on the buffet that I prefer.

That's why I don't watch TV. At all. There are so many other things I'd rather do in that moment.

Broadcast TV was a great choice when a> there weren't a lot of other options and b> when everyone else was watching the same thing, so you needed to see it to be educated.

Now, though, you could:

• Run a little store on eBay
• Write a daily blog
• Write a novel
• Start an online community about your favorite passion
• Go to meetups in your town
• Volunteer to tutor a kid, in person or online
• Learn a new language, verbal or programming
• Write hand written thank you notes each evening to people who helped you out or did a good job
• Produce small films and publish them online
• Listen to the one thousand most important operas
• Read a book or two every evening
• Play a game a Scrabble with your family

None of them are perfect. Each of them are better than TV.

We still have choice

With the COP15 Copenhagen climate talks starting in a few days, there may not yet be much of a feeling of optimism in the crisp autumn air, and there is widespread recognition that the liklihood of a binding, realistic and strong set of emissions targets is small. We do however, have many choices still in front of us.

• Regardless of the COP15 outputs, we'd still be smart, at some stage soon, to make some choices about:
• When to start creating a robust plan for food resilience
• When to implement planning restrictions on low level coastal land
• When to integrate potential responses to peak oil and energy security into our strategies.

George Monbiot put it neatly in the Guardian the other day:

In its new World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency (IEA) maintains that, to meet new demand and replace old equipment and exhausted reserves, the world will have to invest $25.6tn in energy supply infrastructure between now and 2030. The industrialised nations would also need to pay a fortune to the Opec countries to maintain their oil and gas supplies: the IEA predicts that the oil producers' income will rise fivefold in this period, to $30tn. These costs will be much higher if oil supplies peak.If moving to a low-carbon economy looks implausible, so does maintaining the high-carbon economy. Whichever route is taken, staggering amounts of money need to be spent. As resources become harder to extract and concentrated in fewer countries, it shouldn't be too difficult to persuade world leaders that the money might as well be spent on exploiting ambient energy, which will neither run out nor allow us to be held to ransom.