Living without fossil fuel heating.

I submitted last month's post to resilience.org, but they didn't want to publish it. Because I was not fasting for my own enjoyment, in fact, because I was freezing with three sweaters on, because I didn't want to turn on the heating in my office and thus cause climate change while trying to convince others to stop causing climate change, and because my fasting wasn't actually stopping climate change by itself, I stopped. What does mitigate climate change is that my direct carbon emissions are zero. I don't fly, don't drive, and heat my house with wood that I've cut by hand. I do occasionally take the train, and sometimes that train is diesel powered, and very rarely I take the bus or share a car/taxi, but given that I don't get to decide what fuel goes into those trips, I argue that those are part of my embodied carbon emissions. In fact, I wish that train companies would start offering green surcharges that would buy enough Renewable Obligation Certificates to run my train trips on green electricity (would add ~0.008 £/km to the ticket price).
Now OFGEM has decided that they wanted to make it easier to compare utility prices, so they've said every supplier has to have the same pricing policy, with a standing charge that you pay no matter how much or how little electricity or gas you use. Talk about perverse subsidies: if you use less than 900 kWh/y electricity or 2650 kWh/y of gas, you get to pay more. In fact I get to pay twice what I used to pay for my electricity. I thought we had agreed to limit climate change to 2°C by the end of the century, and would therefore expect people who use less than the average to be rewarded. Well, anyway, if you're living a sustainable lifestyle in a deeply unsustainable country, other people's cognitive dissonance is a daily fact of life*. So, although I have heated my house exclusively with wood for the last 4 years, it wasn't until today that I've had my gas supply cut.
It does feel different, even if there's no actual difference. Because I no longer have a backup to my electric shower, I'm thinking whether I should have a different backup installed. I'm thinking in particular of a water jacket around my flue. And/or a solar water heater, although the systems that you can buy off the shelf are so expensive that I'm worried that their embodied energy are going to be higher than what they are ever going to pay back if there's no seasonal heat storage. Anybody know what it takes to store hot water underground in summer for winter use? My searches on the internet haven't turned up anything that sounded feasible on the household level, so if it's possible please let me know.

*Mind you, I'm not saying that I'm less prone to cognitive dissonance than the next person, simply that it's less likely to be biased towards unsustainable actions.

fasting in solidarity with climate change victims, present and future.

summary: Some of the deaths in the Philippines are attributable to climate change, that makes all of us murderers. Rather than send everybody to jail, I propose restorative justice: Contraction and convergence.

On Tuesday I learned that the climate change negotiator for the Philippines, Yeb Sano, was fasting in solidarity with the victims of Typhoon that hit the Philippines and future victims of climate change. I immediately thought I should try and add my voice to his. Since I already have a sustainable ecological footprint (i.e. use less than one 7 billionth part of the resources that nature produces), doing more must take the form of convincing others, therefore, since Tuesday I've been fasting as well.
So, who to convince? Obviously, those who are convinced there is a climate change problem that we're causing but that predominantly others will suffer from, but who are still using more than their fair share of resources, i.e. most of the readers of resilience.org.
I'm not asking you to start fasting as well. I'm asking you not to buy anything unless it's to survive. So, only buy food if it's organic, only buy clothes if you haven't got any without holes in. Pretty much everything else you can do without. I say this from six years of experience. Give the money that you'll have left over to charities.
One of my pet peeves is people who do something for a year, write a book about it, then forget about it. Climate change is going to be with use for at least the next 7 generations. So the changes that you make need to be changes that you keep at. It's fine to experiment, and find that some things don't work for you. But do things with the intention to keep decreasing your footprint until greenhouse concentrations are going down. We're all different, it took me 8 years from the intention to the reality.
I'm talking equity here. We only have the one biosphere, and if you get/take more than your fair share, someone else will have to do without, it doesn't matter whether that someone else is alive now or still to be born, it's the same direct relationship that equates to murder. So no, I'm not trying to convince you how great it will be. There will be compensations, but all in all I think there comes a point where you have to put maximizing your own convenience in the balance against other people's right to life. For some in the Philippines it's already to late, but at least their deaths could be our call to action.