Winter has well and truly arrived. The cold weather is a shock to the system, especially when I head out the door at 4am.

Utility bills can really blow out in winter when heaters are on, showers are hotter and longer, and lights are used to brighten up dark mornings and afternoons. Here’s how you can save money and the environment this season.

Use an efficient heater

The most economical way to heat your home is natural gas. Gas heaters can be expensive to buy, but are cheaper to run and produce less greenhouse gas emissions than electric heathers. They’re great for heating big living areas. When buying a gas heater look at the energy star rating, the more efficient the better.

Portable electric heaters like bar radiators and fan heaters are cheap to buy but costly to run, so only use them to warm small rooms for short periods. If you have central heating make sure you can select which rooms to heat, so you don’t waste energy heating the entire house.

In the movies when we see a President’s oval office address, it’s usually because of alien invasion or a doomsday tsunami.

Well yesterday President Obama addressed the world to talk about the BP oil leak, a bit less dramatic but after 57 days it’s about bloody time. He talked of what a disaster it is and what is getting done. He talked about Nobel prize-winning engineers and disaster specialists who are on the job to fix the leak and clean up the mess. He met with BP execs for the first time to discuss the issues. And BP has now pledged $23 Billion to the clean-up and compensation effort. One hell of a sum for anyone not in the oil business.

BP’s share price has halved since the oil spill but the company has deep pockets. It pays out $US10 billion in dividends a year which it has now suspended.

The criticism of the company has quite rightly been all very stern and reprimanding and optimistic, but you probably have a million questions. Like how did this happen in the first place? What is BP doing? Why has it taken so long to get their act together?

Luckily there’s a twitter account with all the answers. It’s called BPGlobalPR , and while it’s not exactly a legitimate BP representative, it’s doing a lot more than the real BP PR team. It is certainly black humour.

Tweets like;

The ocean looks just a bit slimmer today. Dressing it in black really did the trick! #bpcares

Have you got a great joke?

Post in the comments and I'll choose the best for the Sunrise 'Joke of the day' on Friday.

When it comes to tax time, it's increasingly hard to hide particularly when the Tax Office has arguably the most powerful computer system in the country at its disposal.

For Tax cheats, the objective has always been to try and hide sources of income. But harnessing that computer power means the Tax Office is now focussing on uncovering consumption in its battle against the cash economy.

Despite the introduction of the GST, the extent of the cash economy is still mind boggling and a source of frustration for those of us on traditional salary packages paying our proper amount of tax.

The Tax Office now matches consumption data (instead of just income) against tax returns of individuals. For example they look at people who have bought things like boats, racehorses, antiques and luxury cars.

They then check the tax returns of those people to see if they can “really” afford those items. As you can imagine it turns up some amazing results.

Would you believe, a couple of years ago, they found a quarter of all boat owners had outstanding tax returns.