I couldn’t believe this piece of news when I read it - Global Warming?  Good for us???   There’s me trying to do my bit to save the planet, and then a government department goes and writes a report saying that it’s not all that bad.

Any why?  Because warmer winters are less of a threat to us, ie. less people die.  It even considers that the increases in the summer temperatures (did I miss something last year?) are not so serious because less people suffer from things such as skin cancer than those that suffer in colder winters.

Am I the only person that thinks that this is the wrong way to tackle the problem?  We should be trying to find ways to stop the Global Warming, not trying to find arguments for keeping it.

Yesterday was a real test for the bio-ethanol car - I drove to a meeting in Cologne and back.

This may not sound like anything special, but with Cologne being about 200km away and the car showing 409km remaining on a full tank I was a bit worried as it would be the first time that I had had to fill up anywhere else and, of course, mix the contents of the tank.

In the end though - I didn’t have to. The journey turned out to be about 370km, and even though there was a hold up on the motorway on the way home the on-board computer still calculated that I had enough fuel for 100km when I arrived home.

Of course, this is all down to the lower fuel consumption on the motorway compared to driving around the local towns. The computer worked out that I used 11.6 litres per 100km for the trip - about 2.5 less than normal and hence the extra distance available.

Another interesting fact was that Cologne now has an environmental zone in place - your car needs to display a green “fine particle disc” in order to enter the city. I didn’t see anyone actually check mine, but I did have it on display. More about that another day.

Whilst I may now be filling up with bio-ethanol, I am still interested in the price of normal (95 octane) petrol for my wife’s car. And having just written 3 blog entries about the prices of things going up, I went back through the log book to see if this was true of petrol as well.

We tend to see the price of petrol as something that goes up and down, although more up than down, especially in the summer months.

Actually, it started the year at 1,239EUR/litre and finished off at 1,369EUR/litre - no question about that being a price increase then.

But in-between it reached 1,419EUR/litre (or even more, but we didn’t fill up when it did!) in May, returning to 1,289EUR/litre in August. So even if there was an overall increase, it did go back and forth during the year.

How we long for the Summer of 2003 when we first bought the car, and paid as little as 1,034EUR/litre!