while you were yapping i was digging, page-19

brian, my approaches to these matters are not neccessarily a conscious effort but largely come by default due to living in a rural area, but that in itself was a conscious choice.

Urban living is a high input lifestyle. Rural farming can be high input but it can also be low input if the lower output is acceptable to you. Lower input reduces the risk and is more sustainable with a greater margin to ride out the normal, but somtimes unexpected variations in the markets and the weather.
Everyone in a similar situation to myself will have a lower carbon footprint than the average urban dweller. This comes about by the extremely low tech approach of simply not doing anything that is unneccessary or done only for convenience or causes waste. On the other hand most urban dwellers are such because of the convenience of the lifestyle offerred.

Hand in hand with convenience is a large carbon footprint, and as we can see, many people rather than give up the conveniences, try to offset them by employing high tech means that understandably initially increases their carbon footprint which may take decades before it returns to the point of being carbon neutral, let alone carbon positive. But what is likely is that even before that nuetral point has been reached, the "old" technology will be scrapped and replaced with a new high tech more energy efficient device, and so the cycle starts again.
Much better to go low tech, the savings are immediate, not some indeterminate point in the future. The only drawback is that when some ignoramous asks you what you are doing to save the planet, because it is all about what is not being done, the fact that they had to ask means that they simply cannot grasp such a concept.
For them running faster on the treadmill is better because everybody can see just how much effort is being put in and so applaud their efforts.