Excellent Huhne plan to phase out petrol

Well done to Chris Huhne for highlighting a sensible plan to phase-out petrol as a fuel by 2040.

I was tempted to call this plan "ambitious" and "radical" but it would be wrong to describe it in either of those ways.

It is simply right and realistic.

"Locally produced champagne" - very restrictive celebration proposed by Guardian

Saturday's Guardian had an excellent pull-out by Mark Lynas: "Eight years and 32 actions to save the planet".

The radical plan culminated in 2015 with the instruction: "We did it! Global emission dip for the first time as countries rush to go low-carbon. Enjoy a glass of locally produced organic champagne."

Unless we all move to Reims, this is a rather restrictive celebatory entreaty.

PS. Noone likes a Smartalec do they? I know. Sorry.

Ken recycles an old idea - but is it Green?

One of the pleasures of going up to London in the 1980s was to see the London unemployment counter which festooned what was County Hall, opposite Parliament. It was a constant sign of reproach by Ken Livingstone's GLC to Maggie Thatcher across the Thames. I suspect she regarded it as a badge of honour.

Well, it seems that old Ken has recycled his old idea. A Greater London Authority press release declares:

The DIY Planet Repairs Campaign kicked off with Kim Wilde starting London’s carbon counter. The counter calculates the amount of carbon pumped out every second of every day in the capital and the Mayor challenged Londoners to take action to reduce their C02 emissions and slow down the ticking carbon clock.

However, Anyone but Ken asks the question: "how much CO2 is being produced to power this counter?".

Norfolk Blogger sets fine motoring example

There appears to have been a rampant discussion of the new cars of Iain Dale and the Norfolk Blogger, without mention of their relative carbon emission levels. A bit of an omission. Here is a comparison:

Norfolk Blogger:
Age 36
New car: Skoda Fabia
Emissions:120 g/km






Iain Dale:
Age 44
New car: Audi A5 Coupe
Emissions:191 g/km


I treated you to the comparative ages because Iain Dale published a posting about the NB's new car under the title: "You know you're middle aged when..."

Some of us would argue that you know you are middle aged when you have to purchase a sort of automotive Viagra.

It is also fascinating that Iain Dale announced the order of his new car, writing: "And before anyone says anything, it is 34 g/km greener than my current car!"

Oh well, that's alright then.

Business opening for Rag and Bone men

The Guardian has recently been having one of its "35mm film cannister" letter writing chains about rag and bone men.

I did a google for "rag and bone man" and it comes up with all sorts of dictionary-type explanations of what they were. It had me thinking that, in fact, there are plenty of rag and bone men still in operation and more large-scale enterprises doing the same job of recycling metal etc. There does seem a big opportunity for someone to call themselves a "Rag and bone man" on the internet and get a whole host of Google traffic.

The Sherlock Award #789: Climate change "not a business priority"

This week's Sherlock award ("No s*** sherlock", that is - I'm sorry I have to be careful - at least two fully frocked Reverends regularly read this blog) goes to this morning's Financial Times:

Climate change is bottom of the priority list for Britain’s largest companies, a survey of business leaders has found – and their biggest shareholders are not much more exercised by the issue, according to a report.

Surprise? Of course not.

Instead they regard climate change effects as slow and cumulative and the issue as outside the remit of typical fund managers who “are not looking at 2012, let alone 2050.” Long term for the investment community was about three years, they said.

Three years? In my experience most business managers think about this quarter's figures, and that's it. Thirteen weeks is 'long term' in most businesses.

The two surveys identified a degree of cynicism about climate change issues among businesses. A third of the senior corporate executives saw policy initiatives as more about managing company reputation than making a difference to global warming.

To be fair, there are many companies who do take climate change seriously and are doing something about it. But the findings of these reports should not surprise anyone. They reinforce what the Liberal Democrats have been saying for decades. The only way you will get real changes in behaviour is through economic measures. Companies will only sit up and take notice of climate change if their bottom line is impacted.

Brazil's Lula is saying what our PM should be saying about Bush

Thank goodness for President Lula of Brazil and his clear rejection of George Bush's proposal of a parallel climate change initiative. While it is a step forward for the USA to be talking about agreeing to carbon reduction targets, Bush's proposals are cynical and oafish. He is obviously trying to head off getting rail-roaded at the G8 conference. To invent a process outside of the UN is just bizarre. Lula makes this clear:

If you have a multilateral forum [the UN] that makes a democratic decision ... then we should work to abide by those rules [rather than] simply to say that I do not agree with Kyoto and that I will develop another institution.

Lula is saying what our Prime Minister (who he, ed?) should be saying but hasn't got the guts to say. Bush's ratings in the USA are among the lowest ever recorded for a President. The man hardly commands respect especially when he comes up with such a ludicrous pronouncement.

Lights out London

One of the oddities of going to the gym is that I get to listen Capital Radio in the middle of Berkshire. I couldn't help noticing - mainly because they mentioned it 1,966 times every ten minutes when I was at the gym - that they are running a "Lights out London" event which will involve getting people to turn off their lights and other non-essential domestic appliances between 9pm and 10pm on June 21st.

Hello? It's still light while I type this - without the light on - and on June 21st it will be even more light at 9pm.

Anyway, full marks to Capital. I do wonder how much energy the event will save (I am told some lights and appliances use more electricity if you turn them off and on again, than if you just leave them on). But it gets people thinking in the right direction.

Questioning recycling

Tim Worstall has a challenge to all advocates of recycling in this morning's Times:

Recycling is based on the near-religious belief that everything has value, everything is worth saving, except your time.

He quotes a study in Seattle which showed a household spending an average of 44 minutes a week to sort rubbish. He then projects this to estimate the cost for the UK:

The Worstall Calculator (envelope, 1, pencil, 1) tells us that our time spent in sorting our rubbish by these new rules has a cost of between £1.7 and £4.5 billion.

The solution being proposed is thus that we should spend more money than the cost of the entire waste disposal process in sorting the rubbish, before we spend still more collecting it, recycling or incinerating it and then tipping the remainder into the same holes in the ground that we’ve always used. The system will cost more in total than the old one in the name of saving money.

There is a legitimate concern about methane emissions from food rotting in landfills. Fortunately, as Elliot Morley (at that time a Defra minister) told the Commons in 2004, this has already been solved: all modern landfills collect this greenhouse gas and use it to create energy.

I can't help thinking that Monsieur Worstall has gone a little OTT here. He doesn't seem to recognise that recycling saves the energy and resources to make new products, that there is a shortage of land for landfill and that 50% of the waste in an average bin could be composted thereby feeding new plant growth.

I am also not entirely sure if the Seattle study gives a fair view of the extra time spent recycling compared to traditional waste disposal. If you are just slinging bits in a few recycling bins that you keep outside your kitchen door, it is not really more time-consuming than putting it in a waste bin and then carrying it to your wheely bin is it?

A far-reaching decision, taken at the eleventh hour - Why?

This seems to be a week for major announcements:

Energy
Planning
HIPs

Is this considered a 'good week to bury bad news' or, at least, major announcements?

It all seems rather strange since Blair will soon be gone. Does Brown want all the clutter out of the way before he starts? Is Blair trying to secure himself a place in history other than as an alleged, potential war criminal?

Blair's message at Prime Minister's Questions today was summarised by the BBC as being, in effect, "not me guv - Blair tells MPs it's now up to someone else to decide things"

In which case, is it really a good thing that this 'headless chicken' government is announcing such a major decision as that on nuclear power? After all, as recently as 2003, the relevant minister told the Commons:

It would have been foolish to announce ... that we would embark on a new generation of nuclear power stations because that would have guaranteed that we would not make the necessary investment and effort in both energy efficiency and in renewables. That is why we are not going to build a new generation of nuclear power stations now.

(Hat-tip John Sauven on Comment is free)

For such a long-term policy area, with consequences for many future generations, is it wise to be making a decision, which reverses the direction of the government announced only four years ago, at the eleventh hour of Blair's premiership? What's to say it won't be reversed by Gordie next year?

Survey on climate change by the University of East Anglia

I have been invading "Norfolk Blogger" country. We enjoyed a day exploring Norwich yesterday. Again, we visited the Forum, which is one of my favourite public spaces in the country.

While in there, we were gently persuaded by students from the University of East Anglia to complete a survey on climate change. It was fascinating. We were given information on polar bears, ice shelves, ocean acidification and the Norfolk Broads. We had to comment on how we felt about each of these "icons".

After reading the bumpf I chose ocean acidification as the item which scares me and motivates me the most. That was interesting in itself, as a picture of sea is not as "sexy" as one of a polar bear or the Broads.

The idea that acidification could mean creatures not forming shells properly is deeply worrying in its implications for the food chain.

Desmond Tutu pricks the conscience

There is a sobering and timely reminder of the impact of climate change on Africa from Desmond Tutu in the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' section today.

Reading this article reminded me to order "How many lightbulbs does it take to change a Christian? - A pocket guide to shrinking your ecological footprint". I'd been meaning to do it for a while.

This booklet is what has been called in the press, "The Ten Green Commandments" from the Church of England.

I and my family have made a lot of progress (eg. lowish emitting cars, light bulbs, holiday to discover the joys of western Scotland by car this year, dutifully using the recycling bins, the missus hangs out clothes to dry, taking showers instead of baths, putting a hippo in the cisterns, using both sides of paper etc etc) but I think this booklet will be helpful in niggling away at our conscience to do more.

The booklet seems to have been written in such a way as to encourage people by praising small successes. For example, it says: "Sign up to stop receiving wasteful junk mail." and "Use the toaster rather than the grill when making toast to conserve energy". Well, we signed up to the Mailing Preference Service, which stops a lot of junk mail, ages ago. And, I can't remember the last time I used the grill to toast bread. So that gives me a warm glow and will encourage me to go further with other things.

The Ten Green Commandments

The Church of England has issued The Ten Green Commandments, which include sharing cars, using energy saving bulbs and taking local holidays. I know they have done this, because I heard it on Radio Two's news. That was during the Alan Titchmarsh programme. (Hello? I can't believe I am listening to Alan Titchmarsh). But can I find the story on the web? I cannot.

Anyway, well done CofE, and I am preparing to have a guilty flurry of activity.

Why do we use so much loo roll?

...Just watching a fascinating programme about W.H.Auden. One of the talking heads said, apropos virtually nothing, that he was made to use just one piece of toilet paper per go, when he was a child.

In fact, I have been meaning to make a similar observation for some time. We used to make do with two pieces of paper (not on a roll in those days - it was in a box). In fact it would have never entered our head to use more. Nowadays I seem to use half a roll. Is it me? Or is it the quality of the paper? The old stuff may have had that annoying shiny surface but at least you knew where you stood with it. You knew you would never put your finger through it - no danger of that.

Sorry if you are eating.

Richard Benyon - Petrolhead?...Shurely shome mishtake?

From the just-published figures, I notice that Newbury MP Richard Benyon is an apparent "petrolhead", spending £2263 on car travel and only £333 on the train, even though he lives just three minutes from Theale station, which is on the mainline to Paddington.

Perhaps he travels in a Toyota Prius like Chris Huhne? If so, I wasn't aware of this. I thought Audis were Mr Benyon's favourite, and I have seen him driving a huge Range Rover. We wait to hear about the emissions level of his current car with bated breath.

Only recently, Richard Benyon was breathlessly heralding Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", so one is anxious to hear the story behind his travel expenses. Perhaps he has recently switched to a more rail-orientated pattern of travel? I am very charitable aren't I?

This apparent mismatch of actions versus words is all the more surprising given this recent Churchillian pronouncement from Mr Benyon:

Climate Change is the defining issue of our age. Previous generations had to deal with the rise of Nazism or communism. This is the issue on which my generation of politicians will be judged. This is our Dunkirk.

Perhaps he is a late convert to this thinking? After all, the newly published figures are for 2005-6.

Carbon off-setting = selling indulgences?

There was a classic letter in the Guardian yesterday:

Has anyone noticed the similarity between carbon offsetting (Report, January 27) and the medieval practice of selling indulgences - where a sinner would "offset" his wickedness with a paid-for prayer at a handy monastery. Perhaps Chaucer's Pardoner - a great sin-offset man if ever there was one - is alive and well and working for Bono?

Paul Dornan, London

Quality.

Is Iain Dale giving ostriches a bad name?

TheBBC reports that:

Global climate change is "very likely" to have a human cause, an influential group of scientists has concluded...The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said temperatures were probably going to increase by 1.8-4C (3.2-7.2F) by the end of the century. It also projected that sea levels were most likely to rise by 28-43cm, and global warming was likely to influence the intensity of tropical storms....

Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said the findings marked a historical landmark in the debate about whether humans were affecting the state of the atmosphere.

"It is an unequivocal series of evidence [showing that] fossil fuel burning and land use change are affecting the climate on our planet."

In a series of reports from the conference in Paris today, BBC reporters have emphasised that this report is extremely thorough and conservative, having been prepared over several years by hundreds of scientists from scores of countries. It has described this report as putting beyond all reasonable doubt the statement that global warming is caused by man's activity.

And yet, over at Iain Dale's Diary, on the same day as this significant report is published, he is carping on about the government sending a copy of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (incidentally a film much loved by Conservative councils, several of whom have organised special showings of it - e.g. at Newbury and Winchester) to all secondary schools.

Iain Dale describes An Inconvenient Truth as a "Propaganda film" and says that the government is seeking to "indoctrinate children" with it.

Fascinating.