Nice idea, let's see how practical it is

Apparently 40 of the top British companies - including my "favourite" BSkyB - are spearheading a campaign by Blair to cut carbon emissions (see here). Naturally I'm all in favour of this, but I can't help feeling that these businesses need to do more than just cut carbon emissions from their own businesses. For example, knowing how wasteful companies are with their electricity - employees regularly leave their machines on overnight - cutting their electrical consumption isn't that difficult, and obviously makes business sense in the costs they'll save. I shouldn't be too churlish - at least they're making the effort, but taking BSkyB as an example, forcing users' boxes into standby is one thing, getting users to switch them off is quite another. Take the example of our NTL box for example: it consumes 15 watts in use, and 14 watts in standby. The only way to make significant cuts is to switch it off at the wall when you're not using it.

We need to introduce tough new energy saving measures for all these electrical gadgets we buy (as well as encouraging people to buy less of them - after all, it's not as if you're "buying British" is it?), so standby consumes a maximum of 1-2 watts, leaving just the obsessives like myself to keep switching them off at the wall when they're not in use. Having just received our quarterly electricity bill and seeing our "surplus" grow by £40, it's clearly working for yours truly...