Yesterday I watched the Oscar winning film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ documenting Al Gore’s plight to educate the public about the severity of the climate crisis.

So inspired by the film was I, that when I went to bed last night I didn’t just leave the TV on standby … I actually turned it off at the mains! This small step means I have official gloating rights and can look down my nose and tut disapprovingly at the Britons who waste the equivalent of around two power stations’ worth of electricity each year by leaving TV sets and other gadgets on standby.

With my environmental radar now heightened, this afternoon I stumbled across an impressive little PR stunt (although slightly old now) that caught my eye – essentially a black version of Google called Blackle.

But why? I hear you ask!!

Well apparently it takes more energy to power a white screen than a black screen, so … (stay with me here) … some bright spark pointed out that if Google changed its homepage (one of the most used websites in the world) to a black background then it would save the world around 750 MegaWatt hours per year. Not content with the theory, some crazy folk in Australia known as Heap Media went a stage further and created Blackle (bookmark it now).

750 MegaWatt hours per year … that is, I’m reliably told, the equivalent to the energy content of 2.8 million mars bars or the amount of energy needed to boil enough water to make 30,000 cups of tea … well that should keep the EML office going for at least a fortnight.