I saw an advert today for the BMW Hybrid Car and also have recently seen people driving Teslas on the road - but there are arguments for and against the actual environmental benefits of driving "green" cars. But the environmental benefit of our move last year was that now that we're so much closer - 20km closer - to work, school, shops etc., we do far less driving than we used to, thus we're consuming much less petrol and emitting a lot less carbon. Although when we used to live farther away we always used the one car, but it was frustrating because my wife's working hours are quite different from mine. We use separate cars now, but the combined number of k's driven between both cars is still way less than the amount of k's we used to clock when we car pooled before the move.

Having said that, I heard on the radio today that Sydney is now the 2nd most expensive city for housing in the world after Hong Kong. A lot of people simply cannot afford to live closer to work.