Once again, it's that time of year, when most of us are too busy running around seeing friends and family, finishing our Christmas shopping and cooking huge amounts of food to worry much about our ecological footprints. Christmas seems to be the one annual occasion that sorts the eco bunnies from the eco butterflies. Those who are slightly scarily obsessed with being as green as humanly possible fret over whether buying a real tree or a fake one is kinder to the environment, buy all their friends and family gifts from Oxfam and will scour their nearest high street relentlessly in search of recycled wrapping paper and Christmas cards. But is all this effort really necessary?Any intelligent individual with a modicum of interest in popular culture is well aware that Santa started out life wearing green, until he got hijacked by the big bad Coca Cola Ltd, whose seasonal adverts many people now use as a measure as to whether Christmas has arrived or not. But just because Santa is no longer green, does that mean that Christmas isn't either?
The tradition of putting up a Christmas tree was apparently a tradition the entire world inherited from Germany (how silly must Hitler have felt? a tree can conquer the world; he couldn't) and in recent years Christmas trees have become a bit of a festive controversy. It was thought that buying a fake plastic tree and re-using it year after year until it resembles a toilet brush was kinder to the environment than buying a real tree every year because it meant that fewer trees had to die. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Trees Are Good, and the death of trees Is Not Good. Therefore, you would think that most eco-types would agree that fake trees are the way to go. However, since everybody became unhealthily obsessed with the contents of their recycling bin, several people have questioned whether fake plastic trees which probably aren't recyclable and will take hundreds of years to degrade in a landfill site are really better for the environment than real trees, which are, after all, typically grown especially for the purpose of being bedecked with baubles and tinsel.
One ingenious guy, the aptly named Martin Cake, a.k.a. the Christmas Tree Man, has come up with the idea of renting out living Christmas trees. Customers choose their tree, and the Christmas Tree Man will deliver it in its own pot, with a bag of feed to keep it going through the festive season. After Christmas, the Christmas Tree Man will collect said tree and re-plant it in the ground. If all is well and good, and said tree can put up with the stress of being moved indoors from outdoors and back again, not to mention the trauma of being uprooted and then re-planted a few weeks later, then said tree will go on to spread festive cheer in living rooms up and down the country for years to come. The Christmas Tree Man also donates to the Dorset Wildlife Trust and Help for Heroes. Eco-friendly and charitable... is it just possible that a solution to the great Christmas Tree Controversy has been found?
Another annual agony for enviro-bodies is what to do about wrapping paper and Christmas cards. Thankfully these days it isn't hard to find charity Christmas cards and wrapping paper that at least carries the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) logo, which usually ensures that what you are buying is the product of a responsibly managed forest. However this doesn't alleviate the fact that often there's a heck of a lot of used cards and wrap left lying about the house after Christmas. The most sensible thing to do is obviously to put it all in the recycling box, sans sellotape. However if you're anything like me, and actually like Christmas cards, you'll probably have a build-up of old cards lurking in the back of some cupboard. I don't know why, but I just can't bring myself to throw Christmas cards away; last count, I had 4 shoeboxfulls sitting gathering dust in the back of my cupboard. I figure they'll decompose eventually, or get eaten by spiders, so I don't have to throw them away...insert slightly more imaginative uses for old cards here...
The thing about Christmas is that everybody has their own traditions, their own way of celebrating, and probably their own way of helping out the environment. Or not. Whatever you're up to, have a very merry Christmas, and a green and happy new year.
xx
Thursday, 24 December 2009
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Political Hot Air, part 2
Us British are a funny old bunch of people. To us, things like queuing, having half-hour long conversations about the weather and all rituals surrounding the art of making a cup of tea are part of the fabric of everyday normal life. To the rest of the world they are, at best, eccentricities, and at worst, something a lot ruder. A certain European friend of mine sometimes refers to Britain as “the Island”, and although she means this in the literal geographic sense, it strikes me that this description works on many, many more levels.
In 2008, as part of the Climate Change Act, our honourable government announced that it intended to cut the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80% below 1990 levels. Most of the rest of the world is planning on maybe perhaps cutting their emissions by 50% by 2050 if everyone firstly agrees to do so and secondly if everyone actually looks like they might make a respectable attempt at doing so. In this context, the UK’s policy on climate change looks a tad over-ambitious, if not slightly schoolmarmish (you get the impression that the need to “take the lead on climate change”, i.e. boss the rest of the world around, was discussed at great length when the Climate Change Act was first thought up). Anyway, we’ve somehow managed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 21% below 1990 levels, so we’re on the right path. In The UK Low Carbon Transition plan, those ambitious fellows at the Department for Energy and Climate Change aim to have 40% of our electricity coming from “low carbon sources” by 2020. However, heed the wording of this because they plan to get only 30% of this 40% from renewable energy sources. There are plans afoot to install carbon-capture technology at coal-fired power stations, but there are also plans afoot to build new nuclear power stations.
Nuclear power is like marmite; you either love it or you hate it. It has to be said that in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, it is one of the cleanest, most economical ways of producing lots of electricity. The trouble is that, as a society, we have started to regard readily available electricity as a right, not a privilege. I am the last person on earth who would want to be thrown back into the dark ages (she says, whilst using her laptop to update her internet blog, sitting next to an electric lamp with a cup of tea made using an electric kettle). There are a lot of very negative aspects to nuclear power, such as toxic nuclear waste that hangs around for centuries, the possibility of leaks and accidents, not to mention what would happen if nuclear material fell into the wrong hands. Just this week, a scientist working at the Cern laboratory in Switzerland, which also houses the Large Hadron Collider (of Angels and Demons fame), was arrested for having links to al-Qaeda. But we can’t turn the clock back 500 years and start using fat lamps and wood fires again just to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, it seems logical that, for the time being at least, nuclear power may be one of the only ways we can quickly and drastically cut our greenhouse gas emissions whilst keeping the technological revolution going full steam ahead. The technology behind renewable energy needs much more development before it can be regarded as a practical alternative to anything which generates a large amount of toxic substance, be it greenhouse gas emissions or rocks that could give your unborn child nine fingers instead of ten. Currently, your average wind turbine can power about five houses (unless you’re the leader of the Conservative party, in which case it can power one house, one party manifesto and several right wing-ish newspapers for an infinite amount of time, it seems). But, here in windy, rainy Britain we are sitting on a veritable green goldmine of renewable energy sources, if only we had a way to tap them effectively. The development of renewable energy technology has the potential to create jobs in the short term, create UK investment and income in the long term and could potentially mean that one day we can proudly decommission our last toxic nuclear assets and run entirely off renewable energy. Nuclear energy may be the short-term answer, but renewable energy is still the long-term solution.
However, all this um-ing and ah-ing over where our future electricity will come from might well be in vain, because the government seems to be suffering from an extreme case of Iwanttohavemycakeandeatitisis. In other words, they seem convinced that we can have prosperity, rocketing growth and low carbon emissions. In particular, I’m thinking about the government’s policy on aviation. In 2003’s The Future of Air Transport, the Department for Transport infamously earmarked London Heathrow and London Stansted airports for expansion. Ever since, it seems they have been hell-bent on insisting that the Aviation industry must continue to grow. Predictions for London Stansted alone estimate that 68 million passengers will pass through its check-in desks every year by 2030 if BAA have their wicked way and build a second runway on prime Grade 2 arable farmland. Here’s the problem: Aeroplanes run on aviation gas, which is a fossil fuel. More growth in the aviation industry = more aeroplanes in the sky. More aeroplanes in the sky = more filthy greenhouse gases being guffed into the atmosphere by said aeroplanes. Not to mention the fact that scientists are still frowning and scratching their heads over the actual effect of emitting greenhouse gases at high atmospheric altitudes. As recently as September, the Climate Change Committee, who are the government’s climate advisors, warned that if aviation is to be allowed to grow at its forecast rate, the rest of the UK economy will have to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2050 instead of 80%. A 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050? Now you’re talking silly numbers.
Being an island has its advantages. We’re hard to invade; we, erm, have a historic navy, lots of weird fish dishes like jellied eels, and you’re never a million miles away from the coast, and the chance of a fun cheesy day out at a bucket-and-spade seaside town like Southend. But the effect of taking a lead, or, as others might see it, going it alone on such a crucial global issue such as Climate change might not be as positive as we hope. We might, maybe, succeed in our ambitious plans; we might, maybe, inspire other countries to take the initiative to cut their own greenhouse gas emissions by a similar amount. Or our government could simply end up looking like they’ve collectively got their heads in the clouds at the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December. Stay tuned.
xx
p.s. Sorry, this one's far too long
p.p.s. In other news, Cadbury's Dairy Milk has gone fairtrade, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
In 2008, as part of the Climate Change Act, our honourable government announced that it intended to cut the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80% below 1990 levels. Most of the rest of the world is planning on maybe perhaps cutting their emissions by 50% by 2050 if everyone firstly agrees to do so and secondly if everyone actually looks like they might make a respectable attempt at doing so. In this context, the UK’s policy on climate change looks a tad over-ambitious, if not slightly schoolmarmish (you get the impression that the need to “take the lead on climate change”, i.e. boss the rest of the world around, was discussed at great length when the Climate Change Act was first thought up). Anyway, we’ve somehow managed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 21% below 1990 levels, so we’re on the right path. In The UK Low Carbon Transition plan, those ambitious fellows at the Department for Energy and Climate Change aim to have 40% of our electricity coming from “low carbon sources” by 2020. However, heed the wording of this because they plan to get only 30% of this 40% from renewable energy sources. There are plans afoot to install carbon-capture technology at coal-fired power stations, but there are also plans afoot to build new nuclear power stations.
Nuclear power is like marmite; you either love it or you hate it. It has to be said that in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, it is one of the cleanest, most economical ways of producing lots of electricity. The trouble is that, as a society, we have started to regard readily available electricity as a right, not a privilege. I am the last person on earth who would want to be thrown back into the dark ages (she says, whilst using her laptop to update her internet blog, sitting next to an electric lamp with a cup of tea made using an electric kettle). There are a lot of very negative aspects to nuclear power, such as toxic nuclear waste that hangs around for centuries, the possibility of leaks and accidents, not to mention what would happen if nuclear material fell into the wrong hands. Just this week, a scientist working at the Cern laboratory in Switzerland, which also houses the Large Hadron Collider (of Angels and Demons fame), was arrested for having links to al-Qaeda. But we can’t turn the clock back 500 years and start using fat lamps and wood fires again just to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, it seems logical that, for the time being at least, nuclear power may be one of the only ways we can quickly and drastically cut our greenhouse gas emissions whilst keeping the technological revolution going full steam ahead. The technology behind renewable energy needs much more development before it can be regarded as a practical alternative to anything which generates a large amount of toxic substance, be it greenhouse gas emissions or rocks that could give your unborn child nine fingers instead of ten. Currently, your average wind turbine can power about five houses (unless you’re the leader of the Conservative party, in which case it can power one house, one party manifesto and several right wing-ish newspapers for an infinite amount of time, it seems). But, here in windy, rainy Britain we are sitting on a veritable green goldmine of renewable energy sources, if only we had a way to tap them effectively. The development of renewable energy technology has the potential to create jobs in the short term, create UK investment and income in the long term and could potentially mean that one day we can proudly decommission our last toxic nuclear assets and run entirely off renewable energy. Nuclear energy may be the short-term answer, but renewable energy is still the long-term solution.
However, all this um-ing and ah-ing over where our future electricity will come from might well be in vain, because the government seems to be suffering from an extreme case of Iwanttohavemycakeandeatitisis. In other words, they seem convinced that we can have prosperity, rocketing growth and low carbon emissions. In particular, I’m thinking about the government’s policy on aviation. In 2003’s The Future of Air Transport, the Department for Transport infamously earmarked London Heathrow and London Stansted airports for expansion. Ever since, it seems they have been hell-bent on insisting that the Aviation industry must continue to grow. Predictions for London Stansted alone estimate that 68 million passengers will pass through its check-in desks every year by 2030 if BAA have their wicked way and build a second runway on prime Grade 2 arable farmland. Here’s the problem: Aeroplanes run on aviation gas, which is a fossil fuel. More growth in the aviation industry = more aeroplanes in the sky. More aeroplanes in the sky = more filthy greenhouse gases being guffed into the atmosphere by said aeroplanes. Not to mention the fact that scientists are still frowning and scratching their heads over the actual effect of emitting greenhouse gases at high atmospheric altitudes. As recently as September, the Climate Change Committee, who are the government’s climate advisors, warned that if aviation is to be allowed to grow at its forecast rate, the rest of the UK economy will have to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2050 instead of 80%. A 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050? Now you’re talking silly numbers.
Being an island has its advantages. We’re hard to invade; we, erm, have a historic navy, lots of weird fish dishes like jellied eels, and you’re never a million miles away from the coast, and the chance of a fun cheesy day out at a bucket-and-spade seaside town like Southend. But the effect of taking a lead, or, as others might see it, going it alone on such a crucial global issue such as Climate change might not be as positive as we hope. We might, maybe, succeed in our ambitious plans; we might, maybe, inspire other countries to take the initiative to cut their own greenhouse gas emissions by a similar amount. Or our government could simply end up looking like they’ve collectively got their heads in the clouds at the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December. Stay tuned.
xx
p.s. Sorry, this one's far too long
p.p.s. In other news, Cadbury's Dairy Milk has gone fairtrade, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
Monday, 5 October 2009
Political Hot Air, part 1
I once heard that politicians get into politics to help themselves, not other people. Whilst on the face of it this seems odd, as politics is all about people, if you think about this for maybe 30 seconds it pretty much explains everything politicians say or do (ahem, moat maintenance). This also explains the saga that is climate change policy, which has been running for the last twenty years or so.
This is a tale of a big country (the US), a big problem (the amount of c.r.a.p. said country was/is belching into the atmosphere), and big greedy business (I’m feeling mean so I’ll pick on ExxonMobil, or as we know them in the UK, Esso). In 1992, at a big piss-up in Rio (sorry, I mean Summit) (told you I was feeling mean), various individuals with some semblance of authority in the countries they respectively represented agreed that Something Needed To Be Done About Climate Change. This was over a decade after the original scientific evidence, which first suggested climate change was occurring, was published. Needless to say, in between glasses of taxpayer-funded wine, the politicians at Rio realised that they needed to look like they were doing something about this phenomenon that the scientific community was increasingly getting its knickers in a twist over. After Rio, everyone went home and apparently it was one heck of a party over there because they all forgot about that thing they agreed to do for the next 5 years. In 1997, however, the hangover finally wore off and most of the known world agreed to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which committed its signatories to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.
Then, in 2001, lead by the idiot king of piss-ups, Bush, the US decided to withdraw its support of the Kyoto Protocol. They were rapidly followed in 2002 by Australia. At the time, the US was one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and the Australian Prime Minister John Howard rightly said he wasn’t going to bother with greenhouse gases unless the US, and developing countries such as India and China, started bothering with them too, as there was no point. One obvious problem here is that rich countries, which (should) have sound infrastructure, lots of research and development, access to new technology and pots and pots of money, are the original cause of climate change. It was our industrial revolutions, and our addiction to all things hydrocarbon since then, that has resulted in such a large amount of choking gas floating about above our heads. Should the wealthy west turn around to the rest of the world, which we have mostly pillaged and colonised and messed up anyway, and deny them the chance to build their economies and make money in the same way that we made ours by asking them to cut back on their emissions to the same extent that we would cut back ours?
One company that grows fatter by the day living off the west’s oil addiction is ExxonMobil, or Esso. Fair enough, there are a lot of oil companies who make a mint out of this habit of ours, but Esso is a particularly fiendish culprit as they are, to put it politely, a bunch of climate change-denying greedy ignorant eejit scumbags. Here’s an interesting fact for you: ExxonMobil donated the tidy sum of $1,086,080 to the Republican party at the start of Dubya’s first election campaign. Here’s another interesting fact: up until recently, ExxonMobil dismissed the science behind climate change as a load of hot air (it would seem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report has now persuaded them otherwise). It is well known that ExxonMobil actively lobbied Bush to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol as soon as he was elected president. Just think what little men in white lab coats could have achieved in if ExxonMobil had spent half as much time, energy and money funding research into renewable energy sources and energy efficiency as they did denying that climate change existed.
The problem with global warming is that it is global. Up until recently, every miserable little country on earth has carried on as if it were an island; as if what went on at home didn’t have the slightest effect on the world outside. That is not to say that some, such as our own very very very eager Mr Ed Miliband, are not trying to boss around both folk residing in our green and pleasant land and folk living in....other places when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of Political Hot Air....
xx
This is a tale of a big country (the US), a big problem (the amount of c.r.a.p. said country was/is belching into the atmosphere), and big greedy business (I’m feeling mean so I’ll pick on ExxonMobil, or as we know them in the UK, Esso). In 1992, at a big piss-up in Rio (sorry, I mean Summit) (told you I was feeling mean), various individuals with some semblance of authority in the countries they respectively represented agreed that Something Needed To Be Done About Climate Change. This was over a decade after the original scientific evidence, which first suggested climate change was occurring, was published. Needless to say, in between glasses of taxpayer-funded wine, the politicians at Rio realised that they needed to look like they were doing something about this phenomenon that the scientific community was increasingly getting its knickers in a twist over. After Rio, everyone went home and apparently it was one heck of a party over there because they all forgot about that thing they agreed to do for the next 5 years. In 1997, however, the hangover finally wore off and most of the known world agreed to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which committed its signatories to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.
Then, in 2001, lead by the idiot king of piss-ups, Bush, the US decided to withdraw its support of the Kyoto Protocol. They were rapidly followed in 2002 by Australia. At the time, the US was one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and the Australian Prime Minister John Howard rightly said he wasn’t going to bother with greenhouse gases unless the US, and developing countries such as India and China, started bothering with them too, as there was no point. One obvious problem here is that rich countries, which (should) have sound infrastructure, lots of research and development, access to new technology and pots and pots of money, are the original cause of climate change. It was our industrial revolutions, and our addiction to all things hydrocarbon since then, that has resulted in such a large amount of choking gas floating about above our heads. Should the wealthy west turn around to the rest of the world, which we have mostly pillaged and colonised and messed up anyway, and deny them the chance to build their economies and make money in the same way that we made ours by asking them to cut back on their emissions to the same extent that we would cut back ours?
One company that grows fatter by the day living off the west’s oil addiction is ExxonMobil, or Esso. Fair enough, there are a lot of oil companies who make a mint out of this habit of ours, but Esso is a particularly fiendish culprit as they are, to put it politely, a bunch of climate change-denying greedy ignorant eejit scumbags. Here’s an interesting fact for you: ExxonMobil donated the tidy sum of $1,086,080 to the Republican party at the start of Dubya’s first election campaign. Here’s another interesting fact: up until recently, ExxonMobil dismissed the science behind climate change as a load of hot air (it would seem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report has now persuaded them otherwise). It is well known that ExxonMobil actively lobbied Bush to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol as soon as he was elected president. Just think what little men in white lab coats could have achieved in if ExxonMobil had spent half as much time, energy and money funding research into renewable energy sources and energy efficiency as they did denying that climate change existed.
The problem with global warming is that it is global. Up until recently, every miserable little country on earth has carried on as if it were an island; as if what went on at home didn’t have the slightest effect on the world outside. That is not to say that some, such as our own very very very eager Mr Ed Miliband, are not trying to boss around both folk residing in our green and pleasant land and folk living in....other places when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of Political Hot Air....
xx
Sunday, 27 September 2009
All you ever wanted to know about inflatable chimney pillows, and other useless eco-gadgets
So as I've mentioned before, there seems to exist this peculiar idea that we can avert an environmental crisis by changing our shopping habits instead of cutting back on the sprees'. Now I'm as guilty as the next person of maybe spending a bit too much money on a Saturday afternoon in the town. Shopping. Is. Fun. And, to some extent, changing what you buy and where you buy it from does help, as I already mentioned in my post about buying fair trade and organic produce.
However, things can get taken to extremes. Websites such as www.ethicalsuperstore.com , whilst being invaluable to me for supplying the only fair-trade Earl Grey tea in existence (as far as I'm aware), also seem to make quite a healthy buck peddling some of the most dubious-sounding Eco-gadgets I've ever heard of. Take, for instance, the inflatable chimney pillow. It pretty much is what the name suggests it is. It's basically a giant bath pillow that you blow up and stick up the chimney to "allow ventilation, but stop unwanted draughts, debris, and noise entering your home." Don't worry though, if you accidentally forget about it and light a fire underneath it, it should "shrivel and deflate". Good stuff. But, wait a minute. I don't claim to have any knowledge whatsoever of the structure of your average chimney, but a vague memory of the fireplace in my grandparent's house tells me that usually, most chimneys have a sort of metal flap that closes over the fireplace to stop things like "unwanted draughts, debris and noise". Wikipedia has confirmed this suspicion of mine, and informed me that this metal flap is in fact called a damper. So, the magical wonderful inflatable chimney pillow is designed to do a job that you average conforms-to-industry-safety-standards fireplace does already? I smell a pointless product....
Another useless investment you might wish to make if you've a spare £229 knocking about is the "Multi Tech Intelli Pro Air Purifier". This contraption will "destroy air pollutants and bacteria" for you in your home. Presumably this gadget is aimed at those world-weary souls who, after years and years fighting the good fight trying to save the world by buying fair trade everything, have realised that the whole planet's still going to go to hell in a hand basket, but would rather not go themselves just yet. So, whilst still happy to consume away the planet, they remove one effect of their habits, air pollution, from their immediate vicinity and their loved ones, the rest of the planet can merrily choke on the fumes produced by their greedy shopping habits. Isn't it nice to know people haven't lost hope (or their hunger for More Stuff).
Shopping may be fun, but don't let Eco-friendly labels cloud your judgement into thinking that shopping is the answer to the world's problems.
xx
However, things can get taken to extremes. Websites such as www.ethicalsuperstore.com , whilst being invaluable to me for supplying the only fair-trade Earl Grey tea in existence (as far as I'm aware), also seem to make quite a healthy buck peddling some of the most dubious-sounding Eco-gadgets I've ever heard of. Take, for instance, the inflatable chimney pillow. It pretty much is what the name suggests it is. It's basically a giant bath pillow that you blow up and stick up the chimney to "allow ventilation, but stop unwanted draughts, debris, and noise entering your home." Don't worry though, if you accidentally forget about it and light a fire underneath it, it should "shrivel and deflate". Good stuff. But, wait a minute. I don't claim to have any knowledge whatsoever of the structure of your average chimney, but a vague memory of the fireplace in my grandparent's house tells me that usually, most chimneys have a sort of metal flap that closes over the fireplace to stop things like "unwanted draughts, debris and noise". Wikipedia has confirmed this suspicion of mine, and informed me that this metal flap is in fact called a damper. So, the magical wonderful inflatable chimney pillow is designed to do a job that you average conforms-to-industry-safety-standards fireplace does already? I smell a pointless product....
Another useless investment you might wish to make if you've a spare £229 knocking about is the "Multi Tech Intelli Pro Air Purifier". This contraption will "destroy air pollutants and bacteria" for you in your home. Presumably this gadget is aimed at those world-weary souls who, after years and years fighting the good fight trying to save the world by buying fair trade everything, have realised that the whole planet's still going to go to hell in a hand basket, but would rather not go themselves just yet. So, whilst still happy to consume away the planet, they remove one effect of their habits, air pollution, from their immediate vicinity and their loved ones, the rest of the planet can merrily choke on the fumes produced by their greedy shopping habits. Isn't it nice to know people haven't lost hope (or their hunger for More Stuff).
Shopping may be fun, but don't let Eco-friendly labels cloud your judgement into thinking that shopping is the answer to the world's problems.
xx
Monday, 21 September 2009
Some good news for the Arctic...?
Believe it or not, it's September already. Tree leaves are turning brownishreddishyellowish gold; blackberries are appearing on bramble hedgerows and in fridges/lunchboxes up and down the country; and yes, no matter how much you hate it and how completely unnecessary it seems, the first of the Christmas adverts will appear on TV, probably around teatime on ITV.
Something else that happens at around this time of year, one which tends not to grab our attention in the same way that that overplayed Slade Christmas song might, is that Arctic ice stops retreating and starts replenishing itself. (er, what? I hear you mumble...). It goes something like this. The Arctic pole consists entirely of ice. Every summer, that ice melts, or retreats, due to the (comparatively) warmer weather. Every winter, this ice replenishes itself. This thawing-and-freezing pattern is completely natural in itself as different seasons bring different temperatures, even to the Arctic, etc etc.
What is not natural is the extent to which Arctic ice has been melting in the last few years. Boffins in white lab coats (not me, honest) have been measuring Arctic ice since forever, (well, 1950 or something), including its extent in the middle of each annual summer and its extent in the middle of each annual winter. So, when these boffins say that in recent years, the extent (the amount of ocean the ice covers) of Arctic sea ice in the middle of summer has decreased, there's a pretty sure chance they're right. However, this year, according to the boffins from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, the ice in the Arctic didn't melt as much over the summer of 2009 as it had done in the previous two years. According to a BBC news article, this is due to two reasons: firstly, temperatures have been cooler this year, and secondly, it's been windier, meaning a lot of ice got blown about over a larger area than normal.
Aha, I hear you say. So the Arctic didn't melt as much this year because temperatures have been cooler? What happened to this so-called global warming thing that everyone's got their knickers in a twist over? Well, on the surface it does seem a bit confusing. Two things to bear in mind are that, firstly, 2007 and 2008 were reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally bad years for Arctic ice melting, so it wouldn't take much for things to get better, and secondly that even though the ice didn't melt as much this year, at its minimum the ice covered 24% less ocean than the 1979-2000 average. So, things aren't as bad, but they're still bad. What will be interesting to see is how much the ice melts next year. This will show us whether or not this year was a fluke cold year and the ice-melting trend is still rapidly downward, or whether in fact things aren't getting as bad as quickly as 2007 and 2008 suggested and Arctic ice is not melting as fast as first thought.
But it's still melting.
xx
Something else that happens at around this time of year, one which tends not to grab our attention in the same way that that overplayed Slade Christmas song might, is that Arctic ice stops retreating and starts replenishing itself. (er, what? I hear you mumble...). It goes something like this. The Arctic pole consists entirely of ice. Every summer, that ice melts, or retreats, due to the (comparatively) warmer weather. Every winter, this ice replenishes itself. This thawing-and-freezing pattern is completely natural in itself as different seasons bring different temperatures, even to the Arctic, etc etc.
What is not natural is the extent to which Arctic ice has been melting in the last few years. Boffins in white lab coats (not me, honest) have been measuring Arctic ice since forever, (well, 1950 or something), including its extent in the middle of each annual summer and its extent in the middle of each annual winter. So, when these boffins say that in recent years, the extent (the amount of ocean the ice covers) of Arctic sea ice in the middle of summer has decreased, there's a pretty sure chance they're right. However, this year, according to the boffins from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, the ice in the Arctic didn't melt as much over the summer of 2009 as it had done in the previous two years. According to a BBC news article, this is due to two reasons: firstly, temperatures have been cooler this year, and secondly, it's been windier, meaning a lot of ice got blown about over a larger area than normal.
Aha, I hear you say. So the Arctic didn't melt as much this year because temperatures have been cooler? What happened to this so-called global warming thing that everyone's got their knickers in a twist over? Well, on the surface it does seem a bit confusing. Two things to bear in mind are that, firstly, 2007 and 2008 were reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally bad years for Arctic ice melting, so it wouldn't take much for things to get better, and secondly that even though the ice didn't melt as much this year, at its minimum the ice covered 24% less ocean than the 1979-2000 average. So, things aren't as bad, but they're still bad. What will be interesting to see is how much the ice melts next year. This will show us whether or not this year was a fluke cold year and the ice-melting trend is still rapidly downward, or whether in fact things aren't getting as bad as quickly as 2007 and 2008 suggested and Arctic ice is not melting as fast as first thought.
But it's still melting.
xx
Sunday, 13 September 2009
A quick guide to rainforest alliance fair-trade certified organically grown this-product-was-not-tested-on-animals domestic bleach
As can be proven by the response of pretty much every government the world over to the economic crisis and impending recession, the best solution your average free-market economy can come up with when faced with a problem is to throw money at it and hope it goes away. Similarly, when we as a society were first alerted to the fact that our consumption habits may well be not only wrecking the environment but making poor people in poor countries poorer, our best solution was not to buy less stuff but to make the stuff we bought eco-friendly, people-friendly and planet-friendly. What do you know, apparently you can shop your way out of a crisis.
However, I don’t know if you noticed on your last trip to Tesco, but things have got slightly out of hand. Firstly, you’ve got your organic stuff. I reckon you can probably now find an “organic” version of almost everything Tesco sells, maybe with the exception of their electronics department and shoe polish. I use the term in inverted commas because not everything that says it is organic on the label is actually certified as organic by the UK Soil Association, who are the bunch of anoraks who sit around in fields with clipboards and thermos flasks and regulate the organicness of the fertiliser the farmer uses etc. etc. etc., so watch out. Then, you’ve got your Fair-trade-labelled stuff. This is actually the one label that you can trust fairly well; products bearing it, usually tea, coffee, bananas, sugar or chocolate amongst other things, will have been produced under reasonably humane, eco-friendly conditions, since to gain fair-trade certification, farmers, or farmer’s co-operatives, have to abide by pretty strict rules when it comes to things like health and safety and the right to a decent wage for workers, sharing out the profits in co-operatives and small producer’s organisations, and respect for the environment. Then, as anyone who was around in the 90’s when there was so much fuss about animal welfare will well know, you can usually get your hands on free-range eggs and free-range chicken, or, if budget is a major issue, chicken, eggs and (so I’m told) other meat products that bear the “Freedom Food” label, meaning the conditions in which said product was produced are monitored by the RSPCA. Presumably this means minimal chance of your dinner having lived for only a month, fed growth hormones, never seen the light of day or having spent most of its life treading all over the remains of the chicken with whom it used to share a tiny cage.
You can see where I’m going with this – we’ve already got four labels for four different ways in which food is produced. But hold onto your hats – a mysterious brand is invading a coffee shelf near you. This brand is known as the Rainforest Alliance – it’s the one that those purveyors of dubious coffee-flavoured water, sorry, I mean Starbucks, were championing for so long. A quick Google later and I am enlightened that the Rainforest Alliance “works to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practises, business practises and consumer behaviour”. That’s nice and fluffy. But isn’t that pretty much what the Fair-trade Labelling Organisation do? Another few labels I’ve come across on my weekly shop are FSC, who make sure that the forest your bog roll comes from is sustainably managed, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a label to do with sustainably-caught/farmed fish and I’m not even going to get started on all the different eco-friendly labels that are popping up all over packets of Persil laundry tablets and bottles of washing up liquid.
My point is if anyone did ever want to shop a bit greener, they risk utter bewilderment and confusion when confronted with this minefield of eye-catching labels and slogans. I can only just about get my own head around it all and I’ve been trying to buy green for the best part of four years now. But what is worse, in my opinion, is that, even though there’s a plague of green labels out there, the non-green alternative still exists. People will still happily buy Nescafe’s cheapest, nastiest granules, often because it’s cheaper, sometimes because it’s their only option and sometimes because they really don’t understand where their coffee has come from.
In the case of coffee in particular, people who buy the cheap stuff over here are rarely aware that the farmer over there who grew their coffee for them probably works an obscene amount of hours per day, probably can’t afford to send his kids to school, will probably get injured by the age of 40 in a work-related accident and will probably die not long after as a result of the grinding poverty he is forced to live in, all because we would rather spend the 50p we saved in not buying fair-trade coffee on a packet of biscuits instead. This is not me being melodramatic and having a rant. If you do a bit of digging, it becomes clear how wildly the price of coffee in international markets has fluctuated since the start of the century, and if you do even more digging you realise that this is in part due to the big coffee companies such as Nestle effectively controlling the price of the coffee it buys to turn into those appetising looking jars of gravelly brown dust. If you really want to know more about the highway robbery that is the coffee-producing trade, Google the film “Black Gold”.
So no, sorry, the “someone else will just buy it instead” excuse won’t wash here. I know it’s bloody confusing and costs a bit more, but if everyone who said this actually stopped whining and bought greener products, we would all be able to sleep a bit better at night knowing that our breakfast won’t be impoverishing the third world, won’t be damaging the environment as much as it might have and that our eggs and bacon came from happy hens and happy pigs, and that we all stand a better chance of living happily ever after. The end.
xx
However, I don’t know if you noticed on your last trip to Tesco, but things have got slightly out of hand. Firstly, you’ve got your organic stuff. I reckon you can probably now find an “organic” version of almost everything Tesco sells, maybe with the exception of their electronics department and shoe polish. I use the term in inverted commas because not everything that says it is organic on the label is actually certified as organic by the UK Soil Association, who are the bunch of anoraks who sit around in fields with clipboards and thermos flasks and regulate the organicness of the fertiliser the farmer uses etc. etc. etc., so watch out. Then, you’ve got your Fair-trade-labelled stuff. This is actually the one label that you can trust fairly well; products bearing it, usually tea, coffee, bananas, sugar or chocolate amongst other things, will have been produced under reasonably humane, eco-friendly conditions, since to gain fair-trade certification, farmers, or farmer’s co-operatives, have to abide by pretty strict rules when it comes to things like health and safety and the right to a decent wage for workers, sharing out the profits in co-operatives and small producer’s organisations, and respect for the environment. Then, as anyone who was around in the 90’s when there was so much fuss about animal welfare will well know, you can usually get your hands on free-range eggs and free-range chicken, or, if budget is a major issue, chicken, eggs and (so I’m told) other meat products that bear the “Freedom Food” label, meaning the conditions in which said product was produced are monitored by the RSPCA. Presumably this means minimal chance of your dinner having lived for only a month, fed growth hormones, never seen the light of day or having spent most of its life treading all over the remains of the chicken with whom it used to share a tiny cage.
You can see where I’m going with this – we’ve already got four labels for four different ways in which food is produced. But hold onto your hats – a mysterious brand is invading a coffee shelf near you. This brand is known as the Rainforest Alliance – it’s the one that those purveyors of dubious coffee-flavoured water, sorry, I mean Starbucks, were championing for so long. A quick Google later and I am enlightened that the Rainforest Alliance “works to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practises, business practises and consumer behaviour”. That’s nice and fluffy. But isn’t that pretty much what the Fair-trade Labelling Organisation do? Another few labels I’ve come across on my weekly shop are FSC, who make sure that the forest your bog roll comes from is sustainably managed, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a label to do with sustainably-caught/farmed fish and I’m not even going to get started on all the different eco-friendly labels that are popping up all over packets of Persil laundry tablets and bottles of washing up liquid.
My point is if anyone did ever want to shop a bit greener, they risk utter bewilderment and confusion when confronted with this minefield of eye-catching labels and slogans. I can only just about get my own head around it all and I’ve been trying to buy green for the best part of four years now. But what is worse, in my opinion, is that, even though there’s a plague of green labels out there, the non-green alternative still exists. People will still happily buy Nescafe’s cheapest, nastiest granules, often because it’s cheaper, sometimes because it’s their only option and sometimes because they really don’t understand where their coffee has come from.
In the case of coffee in particular, people who buy the cheap stuff over here are rarely aware that the farmer over there who grew their coffee for them probably works an obscene amount of hours per day, probably can’t afford to send his kids to school, will probably get injured by the age of 40 in a work-related accident and will probably die not long after as a result of the grinding poverty he is forced to live in, all because we would rather spend the 50p we saved in not buying fair-trade coffee on a packet of biscuits instead. This is not me being melodramatic and having a rant. If you do a bit of digging, it becomes clear how wildly the price of coffee in international markets has fluctuated since the start of the century, and if you do even more digging you realise that this is in part due to the big coffee companies such as Nestle effectively controlling the price of the coffee it buys to turn into those appetising looking jars of gravelly brown dust. If you really want to know more about the highway robbery that is the coffee-producing trade, Google the film “Black Gold”.
So no, sorry, the “someone else will just buy it instead” excuse won’t wash here. I know it’s bloody confusing and costs a bit more, but if everyone who said this actually stopped whining and bought greener products, we would all be able to sleep a bit better at night knowing that our breakfast won’t be impoverishing the third world, won’t be damaging the environment as much as it might have and that our eggs and bacon came from happy hens and happy pigs, and that we all stand a better chance of living happily ever after. The end.
xx
Sunday, 26 July 2009
So I wonder if I can recycle clingfilm....?
One controversial subject we've all had to deal with in recent years is recycling. Obviously, the more you recycle, the less waste there is choking up your local landfill site, so all the better for the environment. All was well back in the good old days where you took your cans, bottles and newspapers down to the local bottle bank on a Sunday afternoon. People who wanted to recycle could recycle; they knew what they could recycle and they knew that if they didn't recycle they weren't going to get their bins attacked with bright yellow warning stickers by an over-zealous local council employee.
Nowadays, things are quite a bit more complicated. It seems as if most local authorities, in the UK, at least, are having a keeping-up-with-the-Jones' style competition to see which of them can get their constituents to recycle the most waste in the shortest amount of time. This is all very well, but it seems to have lead to what must be the most over-complicated recycling system in the entire western hemisphere. For example, at my parent's house in Essex, they are blessed with three huge wheelie bins, one green, one brown and one black. The brown bin is for kitchen waste, i.e. potato peelings, manky leftovers, things that have been trying to create an ecosystem at the back of the fridge and have been evicted. The green bin is for recyclables. The local council helpfully distributed a list of things which can and can't be recycled when the bins were first introduced, and since then it hasn't changed much as the list of things which could be recycled was already fairly extensive. All other waste, i.e. that which isn't harbouring anthrax spores or can't be turned into a Bag For Life, goes in the black bin. The one glaring fault of this system is that, for some unknown reason, glass can't be recycled. So, the institution of the Sunday afternoon bottle bank trip is safe, for now.
Where I live, the system is completely different. We have a brown bin, a black bin and a blue box (yes, a box.). The brown bin is for cardboard and garden waste only. The council says that this is because the contents of this bin are composted (I'm sorry, but can't kitchen waste be composted too?). The black bin is for "household waste", in other words, stuff that isn't cardboard or garden waste and can't be put into the blue box. The blue box is for recycling.
I have issues with this blue box. First off, it's a box. It might be emptied weekly, but, in our flat at least, it still ends up overflowing. Secondly, the list of items that can be placed in it is a constantly changing magical mystery that the council only occasionally deigns to inform us of. If you were to present me with a milk bottle made from a slightly obscure type of plastic right now, I wouldn't know which bin to put it in. When the blue box first arrived on our doorstep, we were presented with a list of things which could be put in it. I was even slightly annoyed at this, because to be honest the list was fairly basic, limited to items such as newspapers, magazines, coke bottles, glass bottles, etc. Next to this was a list of things we would be able to recycle at some point in the future, e.g. "Coming soon to most areas! Recycle empty milk and juice cartons from August onwards!". Why only most areas? And rumour has it that there are 31 whole days in August, so any chance of narrowing that down slightly? And aren't milk and juice cartons made of cardboard anyway, so why can't we just put them in the brown bin?! Anyway, you get my point. Present me with a scrunched ball of used clingfilm at my parent's house, and I can tell you right now that it belongs in the black bin. Present me with such an obscure item of rubbish here, and I'll tell you it's probably best to phone the council and ask.
Recently, the council managed to annoy me even more by dropping a letter through our door informing us that they were going to start charging fines for offences such as having a black bin which is too full for the lid to close properly, the assumption being, of course, that said person who is committing such an offence is not recycling enough of their waste (because it couldn't possibly be that a family of five produces more unrecyclable waste than an elderly couple). However, if you have a contentedly filled, fully closed black bin and an overflowing blue box, like we do most weeks, the bin men have been told to ignore any extra bits of recycling which might appear next to a blue box, and, in fact, this is another practise which could incur the council's wrath in the form of a fine. So what's the solution? It seems to me that the council are implying we dispose of our annoying extra rubbish through fly-tipping. Either that, or put it in the shed, wait for the rats to invade and then give the council's pest control men something to do.
The point of this acidic rant is that two different areas of the country have two completely different systems for getting rid of rubbish. It's pretty clear which one is the most efficient; but shouldn't such systems be uniformly the same across the country? This would put an end to the eternal confusion of most of the populace when it comes to being green about your bin. Or maybe that's just too easy.
xx
Nowadays, things are quite a bit more complicated. It seems as if most local authorities, in the UK, at least, are having a keeping-up-with-the-Jones' style competition to see which of them can get their constituents to recycle the most waste in the shortest amount of time. This is all very well, but it seems to have lead to what must be the most over-complicated recycling system in the entire western hemisphere. For example, at my parent's house in Essex, they are blessed with three huge wheelie bins, one green, one brown and one black. The brown bin is for kitchen waste, i.e. potato peelings, manky leftovers, things that have been trying to create an ecosystem at the back of the fridge and have been evicted. The green bin is for recyclables. The local council helpfully distributed a list of things which can and can't be recycled when the bins were first introduced, and since then it hasn't changed much as the list of things which could be recycled was already fairly extensive. All other waste, i.e. that which isn't harbouring anthrax spores or can't be turned into a Bag For Life, goes in the black bin. The one glaring fault of this system is that, for some unknown reason, glass can't be recycled. So, the institution of the Sunday afternoon bottle bank trip is safe, for now.
Where I live, the system is completely different. We have a brown bin, a black bin and a blue box (yes, a box.). The brown bin is for cardboard and garden waste only. The council says that this is because the contents of this bin are composted (I'm sorry, but can't kitchen waste be composted too?). The black bin is for "household waste", in other words, stuff that isn't cardboard or garden waste and can't be put into the blue box. The blue box is for recycling.
I have issues with this blue box. First off, it's a box. It might be emptied weekly, but, in our flat at least, it still ends up overflowing. Secondly, the list of items that can be placed in it is a constantly changing magical mystery that the council only occasionally deigns to inform us of. If you were to present me with a milk bottle made from a slightly obscure type of plastic right now, I wouldn't know which bin to put it in. When the blue box first arrived on our doorstep, we were presented with a list of things which could be put in it. I was even slightly annoyed at this, because to be honest the list was fairly basic, limited to items such as newspapers, magazines, coke bottles, glass bottles, etc. Next to this was a list of things we would be able to recycle at some point in the future, e.g. "Coming soon to most areas! Recycle empty milk and juice cartons from August onwards!". Why only most areas? And rumour has it that there are 31 whole days in August, so any chance of narrowing that down slightly? And aren't milk and juice cartons made of cardboard anyway, so why can't we just put them in the brown bin?! Anyway, you get my point. Present me with a scrunched ball of used clingfilm at my parent's house, and I can tell you right now that it belongs in the black bin. Present me with such an obscure item of rubbish here, and I'll tell you it's probably best to phone the council and ask.
Recently, the council managed to annoy me even more by dropping a letter through our door informing us that they were going to start charging fines for offences such as having a black bin which is too full for the lid to close properly, the assumption being, of course, that said person who is committing such an offence is not recycling enough of their waste (because it couldn't possibly be that a family of five produces more unrecyclable waste than an elderly couple). However, if you have a contentedly filled, fully closed black bin and an overflowing blue box, like we do most weeks, the bin men have been told to ignore any extra bits of recycling which might appear next to a blue box, and, in fact, this is another practise which could incur the council's wrath in the form of a fine. So what's the solution? It seems to me that the council are implying we dispose of our annoying extra rubbish through fly-tipping. Either that, or put it in the shed, wait for the rats to invade and then give the council's pest control men something to do.
The point of this acidic rant is that two different areas of the country have two completely different systems for getting rid of rubbish. It's pretty clear which one is the most efficient; but shouldn't such systems be uniformly the same across the country? This would put an end to the eternal confusion of most of the populace when it comes to being green about your bin. Or maybe that's just too easy.
xx
Sunday, 19 July 2009
Noise? Trees??....huh??!
If this is what you're thinking right now, read on for an explanation.
So there I was sitting on a train the other day thinking how no-one told me before I decided to "go green" (i.e. do my bit to save the world from burning to a crisp via global warming etc.,) that this business of going green really isn't very easy at all. For example, the particular train I was on was running half an hour late. Not such a big deal? Well, in actual fact, that meant that I was going to miss a connection, which meant I'd have to sit around at Peterborough train station for forty minutes waiting for the next connecting train, which meant that my journey would end up being one hour and ten minutes longer than it should have been. Again, not that much of a big deal, you might think? Trust me, it's a pretty big deal when your journey is supposed to be eight hours long in the first place.
Now I'm a frequent commuter between Scotlandshire and Englandshire and I have to say unfortunately this wasn't the first time my journey had been thus disrupted. Time and again people have said to me, when I'm having a moan about the abysmality that is the East Coast train service, "Why don't you just fly?". The answer, plain and simple, is that getting on a plane to travel a relatively short distance, such as from regional capital to regional capital, is horrendously bad for the environment. I can't remember the precise technicalities, but I think that for a journey of this distance, a train emits around a third of the total carbon dioxide emissions that your average Mr Ryanair tin can (sorry, "aeroplane") would. This is why I will continue to endure savage delays and disrupted schedules on a near antique railway line, instead of getting on a plane and supersizing my carbon footprint. I wish, however, that before I got all environmentally concerned, someone had told me what a pain in the ass being green is.
So, to the title of this blog (sorry, I did promise an explanation, didn't I?). A lot of people might be familiar with the old riddle, "If a tree falls down in a forest, but no-one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?". The answer of most rational, scientifically-minded folk is yes, of course it makes a noise, because of sound waves travelling through the air and all that. A lot of climate change deniers, or even those who aren't so sure, when questioned why they think global warming isn't happening tend to come out with "Well, they say global warming's happening, but I don't notice the temperature going up" or, on a rainy summer's day, "So much for global warming, eh?". To these people, I ask a simple question. Just because you don't notice something happening, does it mean it isn't happening at all?
xx
So there I was sitting on a train the other day thinking how no-one told me before I decided to "go green" (i.e. do my bit to save the world from burning to a crisp via global warming etc.,) that this business of going green really isn't very easy at all. For example, the particular train I was on was running half an hour late. Not such a big deal? Well, in actual fact, that meant that I was going to miss a connection, which meant I'd have to sit around at Peterborough train station for forty minutes waiting for the next connecting train, which meant that my journey would end up being one hour and ten minutes longer than it should have been. Again, not that much of a big deal, you might think? Trust me, it's a pretty big deal when your journey is supposed to be eight hours long in the first place.
Now I'm a frequent commuter between Scotlandshire and Englandshire and I have to say unfortunately this wasn't the first time my journey had been thus disrupted. Time and again people have said to me, when I'm having a moan about the abysmality that is the East Coast train service, "Why don't you just fly?". The answer, plain and simple, is that getting on a plane to travel a relatively short distance, such as from regional capital to regional capital, is horrendously bad for the environment. I can't remember the precise technicalities, but I think that for a journey of this distance, a train emits around a third of the total carbon dioxide emissions that your average Mr Ryanair tin can (sorry, "aeroplane") would. This is why I will continue to endure savage delays and disrupted schedules on a near antique railway line, instead of getting on a plane and supersizing my carbon footprint. I wish, however, that before I got all environmentally concerned, someone had told me what a pain in the ass being green is.
So, to the title of this blog (sorry, I did promise an explanation, didn't I?). A lot of people might be familiar with the old riddle, "If a tree falls down in a forest, but no-one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?". The answer of most rational, scientifically-minded folk is yes, of course it makes a noise, because of sound waves travelling through the air and all that. A lot of climate change deniers, or even those who aren't so sure, when questioned why they think global warming isn't happening tend to come out with "Well, they say global warming's happening, but I don't notice the temperature going up" or, on a rainy summer's day, "So much for global warming, eh?". To these people, I ask a simple question. Just because you don't notice something happening, does it mean it isn't happening at all?
xx
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