Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Carbon footprint?

The Office of Public Works has come up with a plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in 250 or so of their buildings by 15% over the next two years. A laudable objective, but consider this:

Much of the CO2 build up in government offices is due to hot air.

I propose a series of initiatives to reduce this pollutant from our workplace.

  1. Reduce the number of meetings held annually.
  2. Give managers a certain quota of words to use per day; eg they should not speak more than 20,000 words. This will force them to be more concise in their delivery and will reduce waffling and the resultant confusion among their staff. A good start to this would be banning “management-speak” clichés immediately.

If this should fail, which it might, as change is almost always poorly managed in the civil service, I propose the alternative strategy:

  • Use the CO2 as a renewable source of energy to power office equipment such as computers, fans and photocopiers. This could be adopted on a localised basis by attaching small portable wind turbines to each HEO to convert the hot air produced by said managers into electric current.

Also what about methane? CH4 is a far more deadly gas than CO2 don’t you think? It being highly flammable and all?

If the methane gases produced on a daily basis by civil servants in the office toilets were to be diverted to an external storage tank, this would heat the building in an eco-friendly and sustainable way. Also people using the toilets after the CH4 has been released would no longer have to suffer the appalling stink. Flame throwers using methane as fuel could also be given to each EO as a motivational tool.

Finally, when considering noxious gases, let me remind readers that the abbreviation for clerical officer is the same as the chemical symbol for a molecule of carbon monoxide. And yes, both can provoke thoughts of asphyxiation.

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