Eco-Living

TED Talk: Nic Marks on Happy Planet Index

2010-09-02T14:24:00.003+01:00

I've been very neglectful of this blog of late - I've found it increasing difficult to juggle my various commitments and still have a bit of me time. I had considered closing the blog down, but I think I'll just post once in a blue moon instead - there's some good stuff in here if you work back through the archive.

Anyway, if you haven't seen this TED talk by Nic Marks of the New Economics Foundation - interesting stuff.

James Lovelock profile BBC4

2010-04-15T10:32:00.003+01:00

If you didn't see the James Lovelock profile on BBC4 last night then I really recommend it (click here to see it on iPlayer - I don't think it's available outside the UK).

The man is a true genius - without his detection device, we would never have seen the issue of persistent pesticides or traced CFCs as the cause of the hole in the ozone layer. The realisation that life on Mars would change the planet's atmosphere, so you didn't actually have to go there to catch something living to prove/disprove its existence, led to his Gaia theory - probably the most misunderstood scientific theory in history as most conflate it with the tree-huggers who, erm, embraced it. Gaia was held up in this programme as being as important as the theory of evolution. Virtually all this work was done outside the mainstream academic system - a true maverick genius.

The real star was the 90 year old Lovelock himself who told his story with good humour. As another contributor put it, "Jim thinks outside the box so easily, because he doesn't see the box." Brilliant stuff all round.

Btw you can see my profile of Lovelock on Green Gurus here.

A little birdhouse in my soul...

2010-04-05T14:09:00.004+01:00

Normally I have a big project over the Easter weekend, but this year with a baby and an election, I have only really managed to repair and reposition our birdbox which had been battered by the weather (or a trespassing tree climber). I've never been that sure how much birdboxes help given the number of perfectly decent trees around, but we'll see if anyone takes up the offer.

I was devastated to hear that long tailed tits had a hard winter and their numbers are down - they're my all-time favourite bird and bring joy to my heart with their cheeky antics. So I was delighted when four flitted through the garden on Saturday. I like to think that our feeders gave them the edge over the crushing winter we had this year*.

So apart from that, I've redosed our lawn with organic food, but I haven't managed to get a full crop of compost for mulching having emptied all the heaps/containers last year. I may turn the "hedge heap" but I'm not expecting much quality compost there.

*btw not only was Jan the warmest globally on the satellite record, but Feb was second warmest on record. We just got someone else's weather.

We've been recognised!

2010-03-31T09:44:00.002+01:00

You post almost nothing for a couple of months and what happens? Someone goes and lists this blog as one of the top 50 sites to help you live a green life. Of course I'm pleased (read: over the moon), but I'm going to have to get back into the groove or people clicking through will be disappointed...

Sometimes I feel like such a dad...

2010-03-22T10:26:00.001Z

... I seem to spend my whole life walking around switching lights off and grumbling!

Politics and blogging

2010-02-23T06:18:00.003Z

Dear readers,

Posts to Eco-living are going to become a little erratic over coming months as I'm standing for the Liberal Democrats in the UK's general election which is likely to be on May 6. If you want to follow my progress on that, I've just set up a Facebook campaign page which you are welcome to peruse or join as you see fit.

Obviously the environmental agenda is going to be at the top of my list.

All the best,

Gareth

Dr Seuss' Copenhagen

2010-02-14T16:09:00.001Z

Snow or no snow...

2010-02-12T19:16:00.004Z

With every smart-alec comic and commentator making play that much of the UK and US eastern seaboard have been covered in snow since Copenhagen, there's a bit of a panic on in Vancouver before the Winter Olympics - you guessed it - no snow. Any jokes about that? Mention on the front page of the Express? Not even a little one? No?

I want to make all these characters write out 1000 times "I must not confuse weather with climate". That'd learn 'em.

UPDATE: Satellite readings show that last month was the warmest January on record (ie since records began in 1979).

Tiny CFLs

2010-02-02T08:54:00.003Z

Compact fluorescent tubes are getting so, er, compact these days that we are finding it possible to replace the last few incandescents in the house, including these tiny ones in our cooker hood. Smart!

Permaculture-ish Experiment

2010-01-26T20:52:00.005Z

Snow's gone, so I've finally got around to giving the allotment a bit of the permaculture/no dig treatment. The idea is to try to maximise natural processes and minimise the effort that goes in. A big part of this is not walking on the soil which compacts it and ruins its structure, so I dug a couple of paths to keep feet off the beds. Then I spread compost over the bed to add organic material which the worms should process down into the soil. The last thing I did was to spread some horticultural fabric on the soil to keep weeds down. I'm going to plant through the fabric on at least one of the beds.

Here's before:

And after:

I'm not 100% sure about this approach, I have to admit - at the minute it looks very artificial and not very wildlife friendly. And I may have dug the paths a bit deep, so they may need flags or gravel in case they get muddy. We shall see...

So what about the Himalayan glaciers?

2010-01-20T15:10:00.002Z

You've probably seen in the press that an error has been found buried in an IPCC text. It said the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 and it turns out that the statement has no scientific backing. The denial industry has gone into paroxysms of rage/joy, but the claim wasn't even featured in the document summary. The fact is that no-one knows for sure what is the state of these glaciers because they simply haven't been studied enough despite the fact that 2bn people rely on them for drinking water. Have a look at this short video and you'll see that we'd need to take a closer look because the limited information we have doesn't look good.

Yikes!

2010-01-14T08:53:00.003Z

Have you seen the Yike Bike? - looks like a fantastic piece of engineering if you watch how it folds at the end of the ad. Until now, many of these kinds of vehicles (Segways etc) have been illegal on UK roads, but the Department for Transport is now consulting on their road use. About time, too - this sort of antiquated legislation is holding back the innovation we need to make eco-living practical, funky and fun.

A clear route from farm to fork...

2010-01-09T17:26:00.003Z

Yesterday I had a lovely, warming lunch in Blackfriars cafe in Newcastle. Even better were the placemats which showed you where they get all their produce from in the region. Nice one.

Don't forget the birds...

2010-01-07T11:57:00.003Z

If you're in this strange snow-bound world that we call the UK, don't forget our little feathered friends. Fresh water, fatty foods, seeds etc etc will all help them through. Don't bother with bread and you're better losing the plastic nets that peanuts and fatballs come in - they can damage birds' feet.

The snow seems to have brought a few new visitors to our garden. We had a woodpecker at the nuts yesterday and as I type there are three redwings up in a tree, eating snow. I've never seen either in the garden in the ten years we've lived here.

One thing I have noticed about the snow is a resurgence in walking. People are wrapping up and trudging their way around the city - maybe the habits will stick for a while.

Oh for a 4X4!

2010-01-03T20:07:00.004Z

Happy New Year Everyone! Hope you all had a fantastic break.

Mine was great, but fell down on the green front. Santa went a bit overboard for the older boy. And me. Less so for the old girl - my tightness saves on a lot of resources. Actually she got a merino wool walking top - very sustainable indeed.

Foodwise, we couldn't get our usual organic turkey and the free range we did get came in at a whopping 2kg more than we expected, so the meat once a day pledge went out the window in favour of not wasting something that died for us.

Then there was our New Year break, in Belford, Northumberland. Our house was lovely, but solid stone walls and poor insulation (our roof snow went first everyday), and some idiot left a window open while the it was empty for 5 days in sub-zero temperatures... it took about 24hours of full on heating to get the place to a temperature which meant we could change the little one without putting the prospect of grandkids at serious risk.

It snowed and it snowed and it snowed. In the old, sprogless days, this would have been a great opportunity for tramps across the snowy landscapes, but with little ones it usually meant hours of Thomas the Tank Engine. It also meant we had to dig the car out and skite across ice to the A1 to get home. For only the second time in my life, I wished I had a 4X4 - the local farmers were having no problems. Still, we ate well, the NY fireworks were just outside our window, I got to catch up on some reading and the scenery was fantastic.

By the way, lots of people will be thinking, how come all this snow with global warming? North-easterly winds is the answer - we're just getting someone else's weather for a while. Siberia's to be precise.

It is holding up the start of my permaculture experiment - part of my 10:10 commitment - the agricultural mulch rolls have been bought, but the spade is staying put for the time being.

I hope 2010 brings you harmony, health and happiness!

Have a very Merry and Green Christmas!

2009-12-24T19:04:00.002Z

And all the best for the New Year.

Don't forget that, if you're struggling to make a New Year's resolution, making a 10:10 commitment would be a good place to start.

Take care - there will be plenty more in 2010,

Gareth

Monbiot vs Plimer

2009-12-17T14:49:00.003Z

I know I've been a bit obsessed about the denial movement of late, but you really must watch George Monbiot take apart the darling of the denial circuit, Ian Plimer, and his dodgy science. Enjoy!

http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/12/15/2772906.htm

The Age of Stupid

2009-12-15T05:39:00.004Z

I finally watched Franny Armstrong's Age of Stupid last night on BBC4. The film is effectively a series of modern day mini-documentaries of people with different attitudes to climate change around the world, but framed as archive pieces being assembled by Pete Postelthwaite in an armoured repository in post-apocalyptic 2055. There are also some animated sequences, but these were undoubted the weakest part of the film as they tended to slip into a standard activist polemic-by-numbers, whereas the real life elements really got across the complexities, self delusions and frustrations in the response to climate change.

There was the small scale wind farm developer, losing a planning application in the face of NIMBYs. The head NIMBY, a middle aged woman who had apparently managed to stop a farm "on her Scottish estate" said to the camera "of course I'm worried about climate change, of course we must expand renewable energy", leaving the "but not in my back yard" unspoken.

There was the Indian entrepreneur who was on a mission to bring air travel to the poor through a low cost airline, the Iraqi kids scratching a living in Jordan whose father had been killed by the Americans, the American who saved hundreds in the aftermath of Katrina but who used to work in the oil industry, the elderly French alpine guide who was campaigning against a second Mont Blanc tunnel.

But the story that really struck home for me was the Nigerian woman trying to get into medical school while living in the shadow of a Shell Oil refinery. A standard line from the sceptic/denial camp is that acting to stop climate change will divert funds away from poverty reduction and lock the poor into a doom loop. What utter nonsense. Shell flares enough gas in Nigeria to be equivalent to about 10% of the UK's carbon emissions. They could sell it cheaply to Nigerians for cooking, vehicles etc, but no they just burn it off. Nigeria, with all its natural wealth, is stuck in a rut of corruption, poverty and pollution. So the $6m question is, what has the high carbon economy ever done for the poor?

As I said before, the animations didn't add much and the Postlethwaite bits could be a bit mawkish, but the heart of this film is a powerful story of how we can be so stupid - and I use that word in as nice a way as I can as few people featured were being particularly greedy. It is both a warning and an insight into the trajectory we are locked into by the dint of what is between our ears.

You can't kill a zombie

2009-12-13T20:03:00.003Z

Ben Goldacre writes the regular Bad Science column in the Guardian. Normally he sticks to medical issues, particularly the MMR scare, but he turned his scathing eye to climate change denial this week and gave us a new phrase - "zombie arguments". These are the arguments that keep coming back no matter how many times you blow it to smithereens - global cooling in the 70s, mediaeval warm period, no warming since 1998 and all the usual suspects. You can try using the well rehearsed responses listed at Grist, New Scientist or try the heavy artillery of scientific argument at Real Climate, but you won't kill zombies with mere facts - they keep coming back.

BTW, I had lunch on Saturday with a leading climatologist. He's very relieved that none of his e-mails to Phil Jones at CRU have been through the denialists' distortion mill and says that Phil Jones is a true gent and completely above reproach. The New Scientist debunking of the e-mail allegations is worth a read - there really is nothing in it.

Cooking up a storm...

2009-12-08T20:47:00.002Z

A strange cooking urge comes over me when I have a young baby in the house. I don't know whether it is some kind of hunter-gatherer-protect-the-young-instinct, or just the fact when I cook, I want to cook, not just heat stuff up. It's a paradoxical thing - I'm meant to have no time at all (baby, toddler, 1.6 jobs), but I'm spending about an hour almost every evening cooking (one evening a week is usually a junk food binge). Sometimes, like tonight, it gets me in trouble if people are hungry...

So what's this got to do with sustainability? Food makes up a huge chunk of our carbon footprint - and then you add in all the other environmental issues - nitrogen run-off into rivers and lakes, pesticide use, land use, biodiversity loss, soil erosion.

If you cook from fresh, you can choose where each ingredient comes from and, to an extent, how it was produced - I try to get as much as possible from our allotment (not a lot!) and from Northumberland and rural Durham - our city's agricultural hinterland - and organic where possible. You can also avoid all the gunk that processed foods use to bulk out food and try to make it moreish. There's more I'd like to do - get more from the allotment and do a bit more foraging - although my attempt at using dandelion leaves instead of rocket this summer didn't quite work out. I must dig out my copy of food for free.

We can go a little deeper as well. Like many people I believe we need to reconnect to the natural systems we rely on - and our food choice is probably the closest conscious interaction we have with that world. So cooking properly with good ingredients is my little way of connecting, living life properly and giving two fingers to the myth that we're all too busy.

20% off The Three Secrets of Green Business...

2009-12-04T11:44:00.001Z

OT: My first book, The Three Secrets of Green Business will be published by Earthscan later this month. For more details see here.

I'm very excited and it is Christmas, so I'm offering a 20% discount and some free goodies to subscribers to my monthly bulletin, The Low Carbon Agenda - you've got until 15th December to sign up as the offer will go out on the 16th.

When Physics & Politics Collide

2009-12-03T15:39:00.000Z

If he wins the next UK General Election, Conservative leader David Cameron is going to have a problem. His first act to decontaminate the Tory brand was to fly to a melting glacier and hug a husky. Vote blue, go green was the slogan. But a recent survey found that the top ten Tory or Tory-leaning bloggers are all proudly in the climate change denial camp. If Dave is going to match his talk with action if and when he wins, will he be able to bring his party with him?

Going further to the right, the small party UKIP are renowned deniers and at the extreme end of the scale, the racist BNP are also deniers. In the US and Australia the situation is similar - as you move from centre to the right, climate change denial goes from rare to the gospel. And what do these people tell you? That climate change is a socialist hoax to enslave the individual in a communist new world order. Those of us who "spread alarm" about climate change are 'watermelons' - green on the outside and red in the middle. This is clearly preposterous - are (almost) all the climatologists and world leaders involved in some humungous socialist conspiracy? In any case communism has been just as polluting as capitalism.

Going leftwards, there is a tendency for Marxists to deny - the Great Global Warming Scandal declared that Margaret Thatcher had created the whole thing to smash the mining unions (crikey...). But you have to go much further from the centre before you hit such crazy conspiracy theories.

I find all of this bizarre. Climate change is about physics, not politics. You have to look at the evidence and decide whether or not you accept it. Your political orientation shouldn't come into it. Politics is about people, not physics.

So why does it happen? Previous environmental crises have been regional in source or impact - acid rain from the UK would damage European forests - or involved certain chemicals (eg DDT, CFCs) which could easily be substituted or phased out. What climate change does for the first time is fundamentally challenge the status quo. Our economy is built on cheap fossil energy and that is rebounding on us in a big way. The solutions are political and difficult and will be very hard for a free marketeer with their abundance mentality to accept.

It is much easier to deny the science than accept the reality. But in my book the laws of physics will always defeat political argument every time.

Lord Lawson "fiddles climate data"

2009-12-02T15:12:00.003Z

Nigel Lawson is another non-climatologist who believes he is qualified to review the evidence on climate change. He has recently been in the press harrumphing over the CRU e-mail hack revelations.

Shame he has been found out fiddling the 21st century climate data on the logo of his new objective climate change think tank to show a cooling trend.

This is the latest in a long line of faked data from the sceptic/denier camp - eg Pat Michaels misrepresenting James Hansen's predictions to Congress and Christopher Monckton's fictional IPCC prediction. [update - we should add Booker, Plimmer, and Durkin to this list]

Should we have an independent review? Or just laugh?

Birdlife: my favs

2009-12-01T15:22:00.004Z

The last couple of years we've been getting a small flock of long tailed tits (above) in the garden. I love them - they're cute, cheeky and agile and they look like they've got a real gang-of-mates thing going on. But this year they've been usurped in my affections by a pair of nuthatches (below). They're cute too, with added colour and their habit of running straight down tree trunks towards the feeders is just delightful.

The Observer ran an article a couple of weeks ago about the growing popularity of birdwatching. I'm not surprised - watching the activity around the feeders is a lovely, innocent pleasure that makes my heart sing. A reminder that eco-living can be local as well as global.

Images are from Wikipedia and used under Creative Commons licence.

Monckton/Gore Rap It Out

2009-11-27T07:00:00.002Z

Climatologists are human shock!

2009-11-26T12:20:00.003Z

You've probably heard the furore over the leaked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. If you are a climate denier/sceptic then this is the proof you've been waiting for that the whole thing is a socialist scam to enslave the world. Even George Monbiot says that heads should roll. Rejoice!

Except...

When you look at it, it's all a big fuss over nothing. Let's look at the "smoking guns":

1. One researcher says he's used a "trick" to deal with the "decline". This has already been misinterpreted by The Telegraph that the "decline" refers to recent years' temperature data when it doesn't. It refers to a way round a problem marrying historic tree ring data and actual temperature data. The whole "trick" was so devious the researcher published what he did and how he did it at the time in the prestigious scientific journal Nature and it was accepted as scientifically sound by their (very strict) peer review panel.

2. The censorship of research. This refers to the controversy in 2004 over the editorial policy in the journal Climate Research and again the row was very public at the time. Several editors resigned in protest at the acceptance of a number of (sceptical) papers which they felt did not meet proper academic standards. Academic politics can get quite bitter.

3. Freedom of Information requests. Again this has all been in the open, although I believe that in general data should be shared, even with people who will misinterpret it, deliberately or otherwise.

4. One researcher is frustrated he can't explain why 2008 was relatively cool. If you've worked in academic circles, there are always problems like this to solve.

What else do the e-mails tell us? That climatologists can be truculent, defensive and sometimes rude about others in private. Well, just like the rest of us then...

The whole fuss has got the denial brigade back in the media just before Copenhagen. You'd think someone had planned the whole thing.

Also, Nigel Lawson has launched a new "cross-party policy forum" on global warming which is going to carry out an objective review of the evidence. Except the board of trustees and scientific advisors are packed with the usual suspects from the denial circuit (Lindzen, Stott, Plimer - the best that money can buy). The banner of the website shows temperature data from 2001-08, nailing their colours firmly to the mast. Looks like the Heartland Institute on Thames, then.

Ho hum.

Coming clean: my 10:10 commitment

2009-11-24T20:19:00.001Z

I've been mulling for a while on what to do for my 10:10 commitment. According to the Carbon Detox method of counting, my carbon footprint is about 18% below average*, so I've done the quick wins and much of the more difficult stuff.

So, I've decided to:

1. Cut my meat intake to a maximum of once per day when I've got a choice.

2. Make a much bigger effort on the allotment this year so I'm both producing more food and providing a carbon sink in the soil by using permaculture and no-dig methods to build up humus (more on this as I get stuck in).

3. Putting another 4 inches of sheep's wool insulation in the loft and growing some climbers up the north wall of our house - the latter will provide insulation and a habitat for wee beasties.

* Actually, the method would now give me an even lower footprint since Jimmy was born as things like heating and car use would get shared between four rather than three, but that seems a bit of a cheat!

FoE Climate Change viral

2009-11-23T14:33:00.001Z

Book Review: The Transition Handbook, Rob Hopkins

2009-11-21T20:17:00.000Z

Rob Hopkins founded the Transition Movement whose aim is to build resilience to the twin threats of peak oil and climate change in communities through a return to localisation of services. The model has been applied most prominently in Kinsale in Ireland, Totnes in Devon and Lewes in Sussex and is now springing up all over the UK and indeed the world. This book is essentially both a manifesto for the concept and a 'how to guide' for its implementation.

He starts by making a persuasive argument that peak oil and climate change cannot be addressed in isolation - otherwise a solution to one could worsen the other. The second section of the book is about presenting a positive vision of a resilient future and the third is on how to get there. Hopkins' background is in permaculture and it is no surprise that many of the examples in the book are of the local food, 'rustic' skills and vernacular building. The transition movement has also experimented with using local currencies to strengthen local economies.

The first thing to say is that, as a book, The Transition Handbook is superb. Hopkins practises everything he preaches - a positive vision and a no blame culture - and his prose is clear, personal and anecdotal without ever being cheesy. The participation techniques he outlines are clear and effective - I pinched one (storytelling the positive vision) for a corporate workshop I was running last month and it worked a treat. The only things I felt were a bit underdeveloped were some more examples outside permaculture and local currencies - for example, I'm sure the Transition Movement could help persuade people to walk and cycle rather than driving, or roll out an extra layer of insulation in their loft. While teaching self-build skills is admirable, it will have little effect on carbon emissions in the short-medium term where action is required. This is a minor niggle - as I said the book is superb and I will be using it and its engagement and practical techniques more and more as time goes on.

On the Transition Movement itself, the argument for moving in this direction is compelling. The big challenge is whether they can extend their appeal beyond the people (including me!) who naturally flock to this kind of thing. It is no surprise that the Transition concept started in the UK in Totnes and Lewes - places with a long history of alternative living and thinking. Transition Brixton will be a key test of whether the man in the Pringle sweater, the woman in the M&S dress and the teenagers in the Kappa tracksuit will join the people in 'ethnic trousers' who have flocked to the movement. Again this is no criticism of the Transition Movement itself, more a reflection on the challenges ahead.

Can we flunk it? Yes we can!

2009-11-15T20:33:00.005Z

No, not Obama this time, but Bob the Builder. I took my 2.75 yr old to the live show in Newcastle on Saturday (not my idea, honest, no really). The show was pretty well put on (although the young Muck fans behind me were to be disappointed), but it featured such a heavy-handed green theme it made me cringe. Bob and his team were set the task of building an eco-centre, featuring wind turbines, recycling facilities and the slogan "it's only rubbish if you can't recycle it!" repeated ad-nauseum. Pity they couldn't have provided any recycling bins in the auditorium - and don't get me started on the decidedly unrecyclable tat they were selling in bucket loads to the pre-schoolers as merchandise. Just a little more thought would have made it appear a lot less cynical. The Millennium Dome got slaughtered for this kind of not practising what they preach gaffe, you'd think people would learn...

Today (Sunday) we went for a greener trip - the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust at Washington. Unfortunately we got off to a bad start getting lost due to a road closure and some terrible signposting and, with the moans of hungry people in the car ringing in my ears, we ended up pulling into a garden centre with a coffee shop. We opened the door to my personal room 101 - a seemingly infinite array of gaudy Christmas tat extending as far as the eye could see, with Do They Know It's Christmas blaring over the top - Nooooooooooooooooaaaaaah!!!! Make it stooooop!

Anyway we got to the WWT with time to go around the inner walk - little Jimmy getting breast fed as we went (it really is a very mild autumn, denialists, isn't it?). Great place with loads of interesting birds and hides and some good interpretation panels (I'm a sucker for a good fact). Best one this time - 40% of all species which live on dead wood are under threat of extinction. This made me a bit smug as all the round wood that we can't burn at home I lay between the base of one of our hedges and an old stone retaining wall as a wilderness pile. I originally thought of this to provide somewhere for beasties to hibernate, but I didn't realise I was providing a habitat too. A great day out - despite Harry falling out with a goose - and a lot cheaper than BtB - we will definitely be back for a full day visit.

Turning over a new leaf...

2009-11-11T13:30:00.005Z

My New Year's Resolution every year is exactly the same - to live life properly. This gives me a kick up the backside every January to stop cutting corners and take the time and effort on every task. That's very fulfilling in itself - I don't buy into this "modern life is so hectic" nonsense in the meeja. If you want the time to do something then you will find the time.

So, a bit early this year, I've decided to do my composting properly. Normally I just chuck leaves into the general compost heap, but this year they're going into a dumpy bag of their own to make leaf mould. Most of the work in a compost heap is done by bacteria who need heat and oxygen through turning. Tree leaves however are broken down by fungi who work in a cooler environment and don't like being disturbed. I'm paraphrasing Carol Klein here, but, unlike her, I'm leaving some leaves to decompose in situ which should improve the ecological value of the garden by encouraging microfauna.

On my main food composter, I'm not only adding shredded brown envelopes this year, but I'm using a small pitchfork (which was in the house when we moved in) to mix the material as I go along. Already the composting is happening faster and better. I've also just insulated the worm bin to help them through the frosts.

All this compost will be used to top-dress the flower beds next year. We did this earlier this year and we've had the best display that we've had in the nine and a half years we've lived here.

Blind faith or sound science?

2009-11-09T06:01:00.004Z

The case of Tim Nicholson, who successfully sued his employer Grainger plc for unfair dismissal on the grounds that he believed too deeply in environmentalism akin to a religious belief, has generated more in column inches than it arguably deserves. But, never one to eschew a bandwagon, here's my take on faith vs science on climate change.

To start with, most if not all of the commentary is oversimplistic in order to make a good headline. To get a sensible understanding of this situation, we've got to split the 'green position' into three.

First of all, take the science of, say, climate change. I once heard a Met Office climatologist tell an audience "I often get asked at parties whether I believe in climate change. I respond that you might as well ask me whether I believe in mountains. It [climate change] is simply a physical fact." Estimating the likely impacts of man-made climate change is where the real scientific debate takes place and that is a matter of observation, modelling, debate, peer-review and all the other objective processes of scientific endeavour. Faith does not, and should not, get a look in.

Secondly, there is the deeper value-driven belief system when it comes to the environment. Everyone (OK, almost everyone) is an environmentalist. Who isn't amazed by the splendours of nature - the Grand Canyon, wildebeest migrating across the Serengeti or an eagle in flight? This taps into a deeper part of our soul - our attachment to our natural habitat. This is subjective and will manifest itself in different ways for different people. This is the closest environmentalism comes to faith.

Thirdly, there is political outlook. There is no doubt that the physical phenomenon of climate change is convenient for those with an anti-capitalist, anarchist mindset - just look at any major protest. Despite claims to the contrary, you rarely see many men in Pringle sweaters or women with blue rinses at a Climate Camp. That's not to knock those protesters, but they would have to admit themselves they tend to come from a particular mindset. People's politics change, so this can't be faith either.

Many of the commentators on the Nicholson case, deliberately or otherwise, have mixed up these issues. We get told that if we don't get in step with "the climate change orthodoxy" we get howled down (who by? go to any online debate on climate change and see who is doing the howling). Let's get it straight. Man-made climate change is a scientific fact. The enthusiasm or tone of argument of those who promote action on climate change does not undermine that fact or make it an article of faith.

I would like now to throw the "faith" issue back at the climate change denial brigade. I went to a very academic and quite religious school in Northern Ireland. On the subject of evolution we got a very schizophrenic education. We'd go to Biology and get the science in an objective and rigourous manner, then to Religious Education, where a man in a dog collar would try and disprove that science using what I now recognise as some very dodgy scientific arguments and some stuff he simply made up. Reading the ramblings of a climate change denier like Christopher Booker of the Telegraph (who also happens to be a creationist) reminds me of my old RE teacher. They start with an assumption they are right (faith), ignore the core evidence (blind faith) and pick out (or make up) a few 'facts' which they say bring down more than a century of climate science (self delusion). Straw men are set up to be knocked down, experts are derided and laymen are quoted as soothsayers. Despite this, they get the book deals and the newspaper columns - just like many other huxtsers in other lines of human endeavour.

So, whether greens are coming from a scientific or a political angle, it cannot be argued that climate change is "eco-fundamentalism". The only fundamentalism in the green debate is from the denial brigade. Fact.

Mr James William Kane...

2009-11-01T20:30:00.003Z

...aka Jimmy was born on Thursday at 8:30pm weighing in at 8lb 10oz. He's great, his Mum's recovering well and his brother keeps wanting to buy him presents, so I'm a very lucky man.

So posts here will continue to be a bit erratic for a bit. But eco-living wise, we're mega-recycling stuff from boy#1 most of which has been used by another kid or kids in the meantime. He has inherited his big bro's reusable nappies although we are using some disposables overnight as they do let the lil'un sleep better.

Superfreak! Superfreak!

2009-10-23T10:38:00.003+01:00

The chapters of new book Superfreakonomics on climate change (saying we should simply blow aerosols in the atmosphere rather than try to cut carbon) has caused a swift backlash from climatologists - check out this and this.

One thing that bugs me about "the climate change debate" is that everyone thinks they know better than the experts - I don't go to the dentist if I need brain surgery...

Should greens buy eco-homes?

2009-10-22T06:19:00.000+01:00

From an ecological point of view my house is rubbish. It was built 110 years ago when the ventilation to prevent rot was seen as more important than energy efficiency, it has solid brick walls, it is the northern one of a pair of semis and it is down in a dip where the sun seldom strikes when we need it in the depth of winter. We have done what we can to improve it from a carbon point of view - blocking holes in the wall, replacing single with triple glazing, doubling the attic insulation and adding some to smaller roof cavities, upgrading the boiler and putting in a solar hot water system, but I doubt the house has a better carbon footprint than a well made modern house. I have a dream of building my own zero carbon home, but the question remains, why don't I move into a well built modern home? My personal carbon footprint would be instantly cut.

The simple answer is location, location, location. I live within walking/cycling distance of the city centre in a wooded river valley where I can hear the owls cry in the night. You can't beat that on many levels.

But, more importantly, would a non-green have lavished the eco-love (and money!) on this house that it needed? Probably not, and while I was tucked up in a modern house feeling smug, someone would be sitting in this one, complaining about the fuel bill, while the inefficient boiler pumped out the carbon.

So, with a huge number of poorly performing houses out there, there is a strong argument that greens should buy houses with a huge carbon footprint and do their best to cut that footprint as much as possible, going above and beyond what a home owner would normally do. Then Joe and/or Jo Public can buy a modern house and have a lower carbon footprint by default. Everyone's a winner!

Bunny boilers...

2009-10-19T06:11:00.001+01:00

... the Swedes have come up with a solution to having too many rabbits and not enough renewable energy... those with a delicate disposition may want to skip this one!

Like father, like son...

2009-10-15T07:00:00.000+01:00

Chop chop!

2009-10-12T13:16:00.005+01:00

My arms are aching today from chopping the four large logs I've had in the back yard for about three years - they were 'rescued' from some local tree surgery. Well, I got a neighbour with a chainsaw to cut them, then I split them in four with a large axe, so they're not quite a carbon neutral fuel. If they were recently felled green wood I would leave them for a year to 'season', but these seemed to have dried out well during their wait, so I'll try them out in the new year. I should have enough wood from previous years to last until then - we only use our wood burner on really cold nights.

Also yesterday I did the final hedge trim of the year which filled up much of the compost heap. The problem now will be getting enough high nitrogen material to help the woody stems to rot - not much grass from now on in, so it will mainly be the odd widdle... I made sure that I left some parts of the hedge rough and left some leaves for the micro-fauna.

I also fixed my wormery whose tap I had managed to knock off some time ago - so little or no liquid worm food this year, although we'll still get the lovely wormcast to top dress the flower beds in the winter. Once I've made sure they've got enough food for the winter, I'll bubble wrap the container to keep the frost off.

Just another Sunday in the life of an eco-liver (or lifer!)... by the way, is it just me or are the leaves staying on the trees much longer this year?

Sticky

2009-10-06T19:00:00.003+01:00

I'm on a train back up to Newcastle after a couple of day's work in London. Hardly slept last night as it was so sticky.

Sticky? In October?

I was sleeping under a single sheet with the window open. And yes, the heating was off.

Funny how a bit of snow back in February brought the denial brigade out to play. What do they say now?

(actually neither event proves anything - could just be freak weather - you have to look at the trends, but still...)

Blooming obvious

2009-10-06T06:46:00.002+01:00

A little obsession of mine this year has been keeping colour in the garden all year round to support a healthy insect population and, in turn, birds too. The easy way to do this is any time the garden is looking a little green, go to the garden centre. They tend to sell whatever's in bloom at the time as it looks nice and you tend to buy it. Obvious, isn't it, but it took me long enough to work out!

Franny Armstrong on 10:10

2009-10-02T07:24:00.002+01:00

Personal journeys

2009-10-01T06:55:00.003+01:00

I was running a sustainability workshop for the executive board of a major client yesterday. Despite there only being 7 (sometimes 8) people in the room, the reactions were honest and varied. Initially one attendee said "this is nothing to do with me" and another "we're all going to hell on a handcart and there's nothing we can do about it" - the two extremes of denial. By the end of the session, both these people (and their colleagues) were fired up to act, but there wasn't a neat progression - the buy-in ebbed and flowed like waves on a rising tide. While one person made a step forward, another would be retracting slightly, but overall the motion was in the right direction.

It struck me on the train on the way home that we're all on a personal journey when it comes to sustainability, climate change and all the rest. There is a tendency for those who 'get it' to berate those who don't. This will achieve nothing, or worse, push people into a more defensive position. We need to help people find the way forward, make them feel comfortable with what they are doing and confident to make the next steps.

So as well as working on our own footprint, it is essential to bring someone with us.

How to meet your 10:10 commitment

2009-09-23T14:00:00.006+01:00

If you've signed up to 10:10, here's some guidance on how significant different actions are to the average UK citizen's carbon footprint. Just pick the right combination to add up to 10%.

Action % cut
Install whole-house biomass heating 21.7
Cut out a long haul flight (eg to the US) 13.0*
Insulate the loft from 150mm to 300mm 13.0
Switch to green electricity 13.0
Insulate your cavity walls 8.7
Install wood burner in one room 8.7
Install solar photovoltaic 8.7
Go veggie 8.7
Eat organic almost always 8.7
Upgrade to a condensing boiler 6.6
Upgrade heating controls 6.5
Upgrade to a Prius or similar car 5.7
Install solar hot water 4.3
Install thermostatic radiator valves 4.3
Turn down thermostats and tweak radiators 4.3
Car share for commuting every day 4.3
Cut out a short haul flight 4.3
Cut mileage by 1000m pa 2.9
Change all lightbulbs to CFLs 2.9
Upgrade to an A rated freezer 2.0
Work from home or cycle to work 1 day pw 1.7
Compost all green/food waste 1.7
Switch off appliances properly (ie no standby) 1.6
Upgrade to an A rated dishwasher 1.4
Insulate hot water tank 1.0
Upgrade to an A rated fridge 0.9
Draughtproofing 0.9
Seal gaps on skirting boards 0.9
Put foil behind radiators 0.9
Upgrade to an A rated washing machine 0.5
Lag hot water pipes 0.4
Defrost freezer and dust coils 0.2

The numbers have been extracted and extrapolated from Carbon Detox and How To Live A Low Carbon Life (see right hand side). The assumptions behind them are necessarily crude to keep this table simple.

* The average person doesn't take a long haul flight every year so I've had to scale this down to account for the fact that if you do, your carbon footprint is way above average.

Seen Any Brown Astroturf?

2009-09-21T11:56:00.008+01:00

Astroturfing is the cynical creation of artificial grassroots movements to achieve political and/or corporate aims. It is a bigger phenomenon in the US than the UK, but I'm sure we still get plenty of climate change denial astroturfing under the radar.

Take George Monbiot's blog in the Guardian. He goes out of his way to provoke the denialosphere and every online post immediately fills up with denial comments. The commenters obviously aren't your average everyday Grauniad readers and you see that many of them are spotting right-wing dweebs just waiting for Monbiot to makes his move before they shout 'Aha!' and start typing furiously. But spotted in amongst these are a strange brand of faux-naive comments like "I came at this with an open mind, but when I looked at the science I couldn't believe how skronky it was."

Let's be clear - almost no-one who looks at the science with an open mind finds fault with it - because most of it is fact and the rest reasonable interpretation of the evidence collected and analysed and checked over many decades by thousands of people. So what made this anonymous poster think he could see gaps where the great minds of science can't? That word 'skronky' looks like a US spinmeister's creation to me and is at odds with the personal authority he claims.

It appears that the same old tactic of 'don't debate the substance, just spread uncertainty' is alive and well. This was the tactic used by the GW Bush administration and the Global Climate Coalition for many years to avoid the brutal facts their scientific advisors were telling them. Beware of astroturf...

The last wilderness

2009-09-18T09:20:00.000+01:00

(originally posted on the Terra Infirma Blog)

On Tuesday night I was invited to a fundraiser to send a young man, Joe Spedding, on an expedition to the Antarctic as part of the 2041 campaign to maintain the continent as the Earth's only untouched wilderness and draw attention to climate change. 2041 is the year when the international agreement to preserve the Antarctic is up for renewal.

The talk was by Robert Swan, the founder of 2041 and the first man to walk to both poles. The tales of derring do, determination and hardship were at times overwhelming, and Swan got rather brutal first hand experience of two global environmental issues. On his South Pole trek in 84/85, the walkers' faces blistered and peeled far more than had been expected. It was only while they were there that the hole in the ozone layer was discovered. On the walk to the North Pole five years later, they found sea where they expected ice - evidence of climate change - which as a scientific phenomena was only just emerging at that time from academic studies into the public arena. Amongst his myriad other claims to fame, Swan now owns the only private building on Antarctica - an educational building powered entirely by renewables. His life is now dedicated to the global environment.

Joe Spedding saw Swan talk about these experiences when he (Joe!) was just 11 years old. 11 years later and he is fulfilling his dream to travel to Antarctica - the aim of the trip is to train him and others as environmental ambassadors and leaders. As one of my formative environmental experiences was an expedition to the Ecuadorian rainforest in 1993, I'm a sucker for this sort of thing and was happy to make a contribution. Pity I can't go too!

Hell-in-a-handcart Headline of the year...

2009-09-16T18:25:00.001+01:00

...must go to the Daily Mail who, in response to some perceived threat of enforced food recycling, thundered:

"A SLOP BUCKET FOR EVERY HOME"

Blimey, O'Reilly, do they never tire of being indignant?

Harvest...

2009-09-14T08:42:00.005+01:00

It's that time of year to collect and eat the allotment bounty. Problems include:

1. Some things are too big and heavy for some of our workers (see above).

2. What do you do with all this food arriving at once?

Well 1. will sort itself out in time and 2. - well it's the chutney season (below). Plums, tomatoes, onions and apples from the allotment, plus some vinegar, sugar and sultanas from the shop*. Shame is you have to leave it for 3 months before trying... The marrow has gone into a lovely marrow, pea and mint soup.

* I should be honest here! Some of the onions and tomatoes were shop bought - the former to get the quantities right, the latter because the home grown toms were too tasty to put into the chutney so we swapped them.

OK, now what?

2009-09-11T14:44:00.001+01:00

So I've signed up to 10:10. How am I going to cut my carbon footprint by 10%?

Low hanging fruit? I work from home, drive infrequently, cycle, walk and take the train all over, I've insulated the loft, put in triple glazing, installed a solar panel and a wood burning stove, mainly buy second hand books, I switch things off, I'm on a green electricity tariff, I don't window shop, I try to buy local and organic, I recycle as much as I can and compost what I can, I wear my clothes until they wear out, I holiday in the UK and take at most one short flight to N. Ireland every year. So, what am I going to do?

Well first off, I'm going to finish measuring my carbon footprint using the Carbon Detox method - a project abandoned three quarters of the way through. At that point my calculated footprint was 18% lower than the UK average and I was assuming my general shopping was average, which it isn't, so I need to some more research and analysis.

But I guess the only chance I have of making a real difference will be food. More veggie, less meat and dairy (the latter being a tip I hadn't thought of before reading the 10:10 website). More food coming from the allotment, which means I have to do some planting as well as my usual role of occasional maintenance, watering and harvesting.

What are you going to do?

Beard stroking and tree hugging...

2009-09-08T14:17:00.003+01:00

I've just finished my profile of deep ecologist Arne Naess for Green Gurus. What struck me about his philosophy (when I wasn't trying to remember what 'deontology' meant) was the idea that not only are we a part of nature (which many people forget), but that nature is a part of us.

Naess spent a huge amount of his time in a mountain hut, contemplating nature, seeking spiritual enlightenment. This kind of behaviour is normally dismissed as beardy-weirdy tree-hugging, but who hasn't felt spiritually uplifted by an amazing landscape or an astonishing animal? I have felt giddy with excitement at the lip of the Grand Canyon, a whale breaching from the sea in South Africa and even a golden pheasant puffing up its ruff in a mating display in our local pet zoo. Millions tune in to nature programmes on TV (tonight's BBC programme about the undiscovered species in a Papua New Guinea volcanic crater looks like a cracker). So why are we so suspicious of those who immerse themselves in nature?

We spend over 80% of our time inside - some of it watching TV programmes about the outside. As a homeworker, I'm particularly vulnerable to not going out as many days I just don't have to go anywhere. So this summer I decided to get out more. Not having a mountain hut in a Norwegian massif to hand, I make do with my garden. If it ain't raining I try to get out - coffee breaks, mealtimes, anytime I can. Blocking out the traffic, people walking down the street and the sounds of work from the allotments, I watch the birds eating at the feeders, the bees on the sedum and the shapes of the trees billowing in the wind.

And guess what? It does makes me feel happy. Of course, it might just be the vitamin D, but I don't care!

A good day to sign up to 10:10

2009-09-02T11:46:00.004+01:00

I've just had the big carbon weekend of my year flying over to Belfast to see my parents. Strangely the small turboprop we flew on had one of those EU Energy Labels which have transformed the white goods market and are now seen in the foyers of public buildings. I couldn't believe that it was an 'A' - the whole point of such labels is to transform the market, so achieving an 'A' should be really difficult. If you give existing craft an 'A' then it suggests that this is the best you will ever get and leave no room for technological improvement. Pah!

Anyway, I'm going to sign up for the 10:10 campaign today - the idea is to make a 10% cut in UK carbon emissions by 2010 - ie in the next year. This is a great an idea - an infinitely stronger and immediate call to arms than all those 2020 or 2050 targets which are so wonderfully distant. You can get a 10:10 tag made out of a scrapped airliner to show your commitment. Check it out, then go through the back posts on this blog to give you some extra ideas.

The apples of my eye...

2009-08-23T08:05:00.003+01:00

Went down to the allotment yesterday for the first time since our holiday and was astonished by the crop of apples from our tree. Actually the tree looked ill-prepared for it too as a major branch had split under the weight. So I picked a month's supply (at least!) for us and left the rest on, but a lot of people are going to get a bag of apples as a pressie in the next few weeks. This is both a nice thing and a pain about growing your own - you get too much of one food in a short period of time. Pain as it makes playing at being Tom & Barbara Goode impossible, but nice as you get to share. Got some onions and tomatoes in more sensible quantities and I'm still plucking the odd strawberry off some plants in the garden too.

As I mentioned earlier in the year, I'm trying my best to keep some blooms all year around. In the garden it's all gone a bit green, but our huge buddleia and a couple of other stalwarts are keeping the insects happy, and the sedums (seda?) are on their way. In the allotment we have some beautiful Dahlias which were crawling in bees yesterday, the sunflowers are about to open, but despite its beautiful white trumpets, the bindweed is mercilessly ripped out.

Speaking of insects, I got nature's full spectrum of beauty and the beast when I went for a run on Wednesday. A raptor of some sort took off up through the trees at my approach, a kingfisher flitted along the river and a wasp went out of its way to sting me on the elbow, all within 2 minutes. They seem to be going for me this week, don't know why...

Puzzle answer

2009-08-18T17:06:00.003+01:00

The answer to my puzzle is that the UK is the biggest cumulative emitter of carbon dioxide per capita as shown in this graph presented by Prof James Hansen when he testified on behalf of the Kingsnorth demonstrators.

Back home again...

2009-08-16T19:39:00.003+01:00

Got back yesterday from a wonderful, relaxing and rather sunny fortnight in the Yorkshire Dales. Our rather spacious 'cottage' was in Askrigg in Wensleydale where All Creatures Great & Small was filmed. While tourism is obviously a big part of the economy, there isn't the cramped, rushed feel you get in, say, parts of the Lake District. We were able to get a lot of local produce: our beer, bread, milk and, of course, cheese was all produced in the village itself or very near by. We spent the time walking, cycling, reading and doing the odd tourist cliché like the bizarre but brilliant Forbidden Corner. Didn't watch any TV for a fortnight.

It's a beautiful part of the world, although the dramatic limestone landscape has been exposed by man - for centuries Wensleydale was a hunting forest. It is notable that the next village to us, Bainbridge, became a centre for forestors. Obviously their job was not to maintain the forest but to clear it for livestock - the stands of trees left over were few and far between. Parts of Swaledale between Reeth and Richmond gave a glimpse of the natural post-ice age environment.

I've really enjoyed holidaying in the UK for the last few years. OK, you take your chances with the weather, but some of my trips have been much more memorable than many trips abroad. This was no faddish 'staycation' - surely the most annoying neologism of the century - but part of a deliberate effort to make up for all the long distance flying I did in my twenties and early thirties. It helps that I get bored very quickly sitting on a beach all day!

Trick question

2009-08-03T09:24:00.000+01:00

I'm off on holiday for a couple of weeks (in Yorkshire - no flying etc), so I thought I'd leave you with a puzzler.

Q. Which country is the biggest contributor to climate change?

A. The UK.

Do you know why? Post your explanations in the comments.

Gee whiz, that's neat!

2009-07-30T19:56:00.003+01:00

Saw this cute little G-Wiz parked up in London today, thoughtfully leaving space for another in the same standard parking bay. Like all electric cars they're exempt from parking charges, but if they weren't surely they'd only have to pay half?

Are you a campaigner? Do you know one?

2009-07-28T08:40:00.003+01:00

The competition for this year's Green Awards has opened - individuals and not for profit groups with less than 4 employees can apply - deadline is 18 Sept. More details here.

One flu over the piggy's sty...

2009-07-23T11:22:00.003+01:00

I had a quick panic on Monday when I started snivelling and coughing - I've got a toddler and a pregnant woman in the house and didn't want to kill either. I'm always surprised at how irrational I can get when something affects me - and at how hard it is to find a thermometer when you really need one. And like the 'cocktail effect' you get with certain combinations of pesticides, the more frustrated I got with the errant device, the more convinced I was that something really bad was going to happen.

But anyway, I found the bloody thing and I now know I've got a bad head cold rather than a mild flu with a scary name. Calm.

Two thoughts are uppermost in my mind:

1. How dare the press accuse the medical establishment of not handling the panic well when it is the press creating the panic. As we speak the Guardian website is both predicting it will peak in the next couple of weeks and cause bedlam in Fresher's week. OK, the official advice for pregnant women is crap too - plan your pregnancy carefully, but don't put off conception. What?

2. Ever since the flu took off (pun not intended) in this country, we've stopped discussing why it came about in the first place - bad animal husbandry on a grand scale in third world countries to meet the demand for dirt cheap food in the first world. Prevention better than a cure and all that? Factory farming is messing with nature and when you mess with nature...

Friday fun

2009-07-17T11:16:00.004+01:00

Book Review: Do Humans Dream of Electric Cars?

2009-07-16T13:35:00.003+01:00

This booklet, full title "Do Humans Dream of Electric Cars?: Your Journey to Sustainable Travel" has been published by Sustrans - the UK's leading sustainable transport charity who are most famous for the National Cycle Network which criss-crosses the country. I should confess now that I'm a member of Sustrans and was until recently a Volunteer Ranger for a couple of miles of that network.

The booklet is laid out in what I call a Purple Ronnie style - informal cartoons, handwritten comments and a deliberate mish-mash of text fonts. I'm not a big fan of this sort of thing personally, but on a climate change communication programme I worked on, it came out as the favoured style with the general public, so what do I know?!

The whole book is obviously designed to be accessible, lightweight, thought provoking - something to dip into in the dentist's waiting room - and it works. There are no real surprises in terms of content - walking, cycling, lift sharing, public transport, car clubs - but the polemic against offsetting seemed slightly out of place (I think a charity should be more even handed). While the booklet does encourage the reader to campaign for low-transport planning like local shops and services, I saw nothing about more distributed work practices. Working from home will not only cut commuting, but support those local services - the evaporation of local shops has as much to do with consumer preference as it does your local planning department.

So, in summary, fresh and light, something to stimulate the uninitiated rather than inform the hardened eco-liver.

What's the most ecologically daft thing you have ever done?

2009-07-13T09:54:00.003+01:00

On our last night in Bruges, I found myself using a hair dryer to dry a teddy. 1.2 kW of energy pointed at a toy. Probably the nadir of my attempts at eco-living.

My excuse is: we had 10 hours of travelling with small child the next day and he decided to chuck teddy in the bath. The thought of risking a sleepness night for all of us if teddy wasn't safely in bed with the boy was too terrifying to contemplate. Didn't stop me feeling pretty stupid all said and done.

So what have you done recently that's made you stop and think "What the hell am I doing?".

Bruges/Brugge/Whatever

2009-07-07T10:19:00.005+01:00

I've just got back from Bruges/Brugge/whatever in Belgium, and it was fabulous - sun, canals, quaint buildings, beer, chocolate - what more do you need?

Anyway from a green point of view, the amazing thing was the sheer nmber of solar PV installations. I took quite a few train trips as I had a number of work appointments and it was rare to see a village or a suburb without at least one house with panels. The photo is a bit rubbish as it was taken from a moving train with a camera phone. I saw dozens of these in each one hour trip. As a comparison I saw a miserly two solar hot water systems on the trip back from London to Newcastle. They have a feed in tariff, we don't. Go figure.

As with most Northern European cities the cycling facilities brilliant despite the limitations of the medieval streets.

One way for cars, two way for cycles and scooters.

Cycle paths on narrow streets - we saw really young kids using these.

The mother of all cycle parks, Bruges station.

As a keen cyclist, I was very jealous!

New! Green Gurus blog

2009-06-30T07:40:00.001+01:00

I've started a new blog called Green Gurus (www.greengurus.com).

As the name suggests, it will consider the contribution made to the environmental/sustainability cause by some of the leading thinkers in the field. It will be infrequently updated as these posts require quite a bit of research. I would really appreciate feedback in the comments - feel free to disagree!

The first two entries are for James Lovelock of Gaia fame and William McDonough and Michael Braungart who developed the Cradle to Cradle concept.

Natural History Museum

2009-06-28T19:20:00.003+01:00

I'm in London en route to a business trip/holiday in Bruges - travelling by Eurostar through the Tunnel which is exciting my 2 and a bit year old son as he's read about it in an edition of "The Little Red Train". Anyway today we took him to the Natural History Museum to see the dinosaurs and Daddy got 15 minutes in the "our environment today and tomorrow" exhibit.

I was quite disappointed in the cautious, almost apologetic tone of the displays. They had the usual stuff about "where does a trainer come from" and a very small exhibit on renewables, but nothing on the grand scale of the "history of the earth" stuff upstairs - nothing to really make you stop and think. In an era where the scientific consensus on climate change must be stronger than many 'accepted' scientific fields - Darwin's brooding presence may overlook the main hall, but there are plenty out there who can't and won't accept the theory of evolution - can they not be bolder? Or was it the fact the exhibit was sponsored by a major mining company?

Frustratingly the only bit that held my attention was a touch screen explanation of the General Circulation Models used by the IPCC to model the world's climate and the bloody thing wouldn't respond to my repeated jabbing. Oh well.

The fact that did make me stop and think was in a completely different section - the creepy crawlies. Did you know that a field of cows produces hundreds of tonnes of dung every year? And that dung beetles and other tiny workers recycle the whole lot? If they can do this in this small area, why can't we?!

A Time Comes

2009-06-24T15:13:00.001+01:00

If you haven't seen Nick Broomfield's documentary about the "Kingsnorth Six" - it's worth a look.

The six Greenpeace activists were acquitted of criminal damage for invading Kingsnorth coal fired power station. The court accepted their argument that they had a lawful excuse - by trying to stop climate change. James Hansen of Nasa, one of the world's leading climate scientists, testified on their behalf.

Whether or not you agree with this kind of activism, this case has undoubtedly contributed to the Govt's tightening of the conditions on the next generation of power stations. The court ruling also creates a massive future risk for the fossil-energy industry.

Very interesting stuff - but I could do without the cheesy music!

The new Prius...

2009-06-22T13:37:00.003+01:00

The new version of Toyota's flagship Prius has gone on sale - 89gCO2/km, 67mpg, optional solar panels to drive fans to keep the car cool when parked on a warm day etc, etc.

It's noticeable that Toyota (flagship = Prius) overtook GM (flagship = Hummer) as the world's biggest seller of cars in 2008 and the latter is currently filing for bankrupcy. Tell them that 'green' is irrelevant in a recession...

Bitten by the allotment bug

2009-06-15T10:31:00.005+01:00

Two Saturday afternoons in a row on the allotment and I'm addicted. Our allotment was always my partner's territory and I've resisted taking on another commitment apart from the the odd bit of humping and dumping of manure or whatever. But she's pregnant, so I was talked into doing some digging and I've had a Damascene conversion.

As well as the low carbon/impact fruit and veg we get from our plot, there are many other benefits:

1. Exercise in the fresh air

2. Peace to listen to some sport on the radio

3. Birds, bees & butterflies

Let's see how long it lasts!

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone...

2009-06-11T07:40:00.002+01:00

I'm in central(-ish) London for a couple of days in the midst of a Tube strike. Chaos - gridlock, buses packed and going slower than pedestrians, taxis all full and stuck in the traffic too, people jumping reds way after they've changed. Horrible.

It just goes to show how much we depend on public transport...

I'm steeling myself for another day of it.

Neologism of the year: Peak Fish

2009-06-08T10:11:00.003+01:00

We've had peak oil, peak uranium, but it appears we passed 'Peak Fish' back in 1988 and the situation is serious. There's lots of fuss in the media just at the minute about declining fish stocks and its a reminder that, while climate change remains the biggest threat, there are other very serious issues out there too that we can't ignore.

80% of fish stocks are fully or overexploited - yes, that is eight zero per cent - we're in very real risk of emptying the oceans.

So what's the advice for eco-livers? Well "Fish Online" has some very useful lists of "Fish to Eat" and "Fish to Avoid". If you have to make a buying decision without access to these, look for the Marine Stewardship Council tick or buy farmed fish (which have their own eco-problems, but at least they won't run out).

Of course that'll only make a tiny difference while the rest of the world eats unsustainable fish - why not write to your MP or MEP and ask them to do something about it?

Electric spin...

2009-05-29T07:00:00.002+01:00

Had a ride in this sharp little mover this week - the Mitsubishi i MiEV - the first plug-in electric vehicle to hit the shores of the UK. Lots of fun, quick acceleration, sharp braking (which helps charge the battery), almost silent too. And according to makers, it only results in 30% of the carbon emissions of its conventional equivalent. Range is about 100miles.

Very nice, but the range is a little for tight me as it stands as I do little city driving - a 150 mile range would give me much more confidence that I could get where I'm going and back again on a single trip.

NO! NO! NO!

2009-05-27T09:28:00.005+01:00

BBC Radio 4 yesterday had some reporter doing his outside broadcast from a truck fest to jazz up a story that truckers are the people being hardest hit by the recession. He said "There's so much fuel burning here I can feel holes opening in the ozone layer above us!"

NO! STUPID BOY! GO AND STAND IN THE CORNER!

You would have thought that most journos would have sorted out the difference between climate change and ozone depletion by now, but apparently not. Barbara Ellen made a similar blunder in the Observer a couple of weeks ago.

Hint for meeja types: if you don't know what you're talking about, either find out, or, alternatively, SHUT IT!

Harrumph...

Flowers all year around!

2009-05-26T20:47:00.003+01:00

Just watching the brilliant Springwatch on the Beeb. Chris Packham (a worthy successor to Bill Oddy) is explaining that to support birdlife at this time of year (nesting), you need plenty of nectar to attract insects - the young birds need the protein to survive.

BTW - leaving some scruffy corners in your garden will help too.

Book Review: Carbon Detox by George Marshall

2009-05-19T08:46:00.004+01:00

I was going to write a book on eco-living because most of them are so goddamn awful they make me want to scream. Well, that idea has now been dropped after reading George Marshall's Carbon Detox because it does everything I wanted to do and a whole lot more...

In extremely short, witty chapters, Marshall demolishes the standard message on climate change - "we're all doomed unless you switch off your 'phone charger and reuse your plastic bags" - showing just how preposterous this is. Big problems require big solutions and we should see that as exciting, fun and ultimately fulfilling.

The first few parts of the book take you on an elegant skip through the science and, importantly, the psychology, of climate change and its solutions. Marshall's skill as a communicator is extraordinary - he gets all the important points across with a light touch. The psychology part is particularly welcome - urging us to confront our internal deniers and make action work for us.

The practical part of the book is a simple carbon calculator and a serious of chapters on how to "drop a tonne" in different elements of your own lifestyle. He nails the issues that most commentators get wrong, eg the more you spend, the bigger your impact, and makes suggestions counter to the tree-hugger ideal: spend your money on employing people to improve your life, an expensive suit is more eco-friendly than a cheap suit and there's nothing wrong with the occasional carbon splurge if you've tackled the big habitual impacts. As he keeps repeating, "the only thing that matters is the carbon bottom line."

The final section is for those who want to "thrive" in this arena - make a career out of being low carbon and he uses a number of case studies.

There are a couple of points I would debate (eg he rates green electricity tariffs as zero carbon) and there are a number of typos, but I have no major criticisms. It should also be noted that, while this book is aimed at the individual, his approach to 'messaging' ("not another bloody polar bear") and engagement will be of great interest to professionals and activists who are spreading the word through public/staff awareness.

Verdict: Buy it, read it, read it again, buy it for your friends.

Monbiot takes a leaf out of Booker's Book

2009-05-18T15:10:00.003+01:00

Deniers aren't the only ones to drop the odd clanger - George Monbiot raced to disprove a Christopher Booker factoid and in his haste picked the wrong figure - oops!

There is neat symmetry with Booker's own boob a couple of weeks ago.

Now can both of you please check your facts?

Throw another planet on the barbie...

2009-05-11T20:38:00.004+01:00

The sun is shining, the weather is sweet and like many people we've been having a few barbecues. These can be a eco-minefield - some charcoal can be from the clearance of endangered mangrove swamps, 'briquettes' and lighters are oil based etc, etc.

The greenest charcoal we have found is Great North Charcoal which is locally produced from sustainably coppiced woodland. But if you don't have a resource like this on your doorstep, some bigger brands are FSC accredited (eg "Big K") so shouldn't be too damaging.

Another little eco-trick (see above) is to use strips of waste tetra-paks (recycling facilities for these are rare) as fire lighters - you can't use the foil backed cartons and make sure you don't use the plastic spout or it could get nasty!

According to this study, charcoal has a carbon footprint than LPG. I don't understand this as charcoal is a biomass fuel so if it is harvested sustainably (as above), it should be almost carbon neutral. I assume the study used the fact that most charcoal is imported.

50 cars = 1 bus

2009-05-05T19:59:00.004+01:00

From the creative review blog.

Booker backs down

2009-05-05T16:55:00.003+01:00

This week's column by our favourite man-paid-to-be-wrong-about-pretty-much-anything, Christoper Booker, is somewhat more 'umble than last week's husbristic sneer-a-thon.

Greenhouse gases raise temperatures online
I am sorry to have misread some of Lord Stern’s figures on CO2, says Christopher Booker, but I'm still concerned that our Government’s leading adviser on climate change has such a wildly optimistic view of the supposed benefits of wind power.

The greener, greener grass...

2009-05-03T07:00:00.001+01:00

Lawns are great for allowing water to soak away (important given potential flooding of rivers in a warmer climate), but traditional lawn maintenance can be quite resource intensive in terms of energy for mowing, water and fertiliser. For the first, we've got a push mower and the second hasn't been a problem yet - that wet August last year watered it in without intervention from us and the garden is reasonably shaded.

For the last one we got some organic lawn food (see above). This is not one for the veggies - it seems to mainly consist of by-products from the meat industry (blood, hoof and feathers) and it does have a faint whiff the day you put it down. But a week later and the grass really is looking thicker and greener. Nice one.

Pigs, Productivity & Pitchforks

2009-05-01T06:21:00.007+01:00

One of the godfathers of the permaculture/organic farming movement, Masanobu Fukuoka, once said:

"If we throw mother nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork."

We've had the first confirmed case of swine flu in our town, Newcastle upon Tyne, someone who'd recently visited Mexico. She's OK and so are his flatmates, and the infection numbers in Mexico are stabilising, but with a pregnant woman and a toddler in the house, it is hard not to worry a little bit.

And why has it happened? We create an industrial style of agriculture where disease flourishes without intervention, then export it to poor countries where costs are low and standards are lower (the two obviously relate) and on top of that we misuse antibiotics to promote growth further. And what happens?

It's another case of where our "success" in raising our standard of living in the West is coming back to bite us (cf climate change, AIDS, drought). Commentators in the press may sneer at the organic movement and say "it's OK for those who can afford it", but the question is, can we afford not to do it?

And, of course, once again, it is the poorest who have been hit hardest.

Booker hoist by his own petard

2009-04-29T09:15:00.007+01:00

The Telegraph's pet rabid climate change denier Christopher Booker has dropped a big one. He produced a column about Lord Stern entitled:

Lord Stern, 'Scaremonger in chief', exposed by simple blunders
How come "the world's leading expert on climate change" doesn't even know how much carbon dioxide there currently is in the air, wonders Christopher Booker.

But, later had to admit it was him who was blundering in the comments:

I must apologise for the confusion over CO2 which has been picked up by several irate commenters below. I was relying on an article in last Tusday's Daily Telegraph which quoted Lord Stern as saying that 'carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are already at 430 parts per million'. Having now checked with Lord Stern's book, I see that he was indeed referring to 'CO2 equivalent'. not CO2 (citing a source dated 2005). I am sorry about this misunderstanding (the moral of which is perhaps that one shouldn't necessarily believe anything one reads in a newspaper!) I would also point out, however, that my column above does make quite a number of other points about Lord Stern, and perhaps his defenders should now turn to answering these instead.

I have a number of words for Mr Booker, none of which I can type here. But I'm really annoyed that the Telegraph hasn't pulled the column, or even put a correction in the text. I've e-mailled them and suggest you do the same.

+++ Update 30/4/09 +++

A victory of sorts - the column now reads...

Error 404
Sorry, the page you have requested is not available
Please try again later

Can't find any apology yet, though...

Oops, I've done it again...

2009-04-26T06:31:00.004+01:00

I'm delighted to announce that my second child is expected on 1 November!

And that's the last one if I've got anything to say about it. I was recently asked in an interview whether having more than two children was "irresponsible". My answer was:

It is a basic human right to have as many or as few children as you want. On the other hand the world will not be able to support 9bn people at the current rates of Western resource consumption, so Governments should be working to educate people to allow them to make better informed choices.

But, in practice I'm stopping at two...

It's Earth Day, by the way...

2009-04-22T07:02:00.003+01:00

...details here, although our city tends to do more for World Environment Day on 5 June. Both have a long history back to the seventies - which to choose?

Headline of the week (or year)...

2009-04-21T06:52:00.001+01:00

Fatties Cause Global Warming in the Sun.

Compost frenzy part 2

2009-04-19T20:45:00.004+01:00

So as I mentioned in part 1, my big compost heap wasn't producing the goods. Too much privet hedge, not enough anything else, was leading to a big dry pile of privet with a trickle of really poor dried out compost from the leaves. So, I shovelled all that out, smashed up the old compost bay (which was disintegrating) and built a new robust double one out of five pallets from my dry stone wall materials, plus some wood left over from our decking. Ta daa...

The two bays mean I can fill one, tip it into the second to turn it, then fill the second. This gives better mixing, oxygenation and it is easier to tell the newer compost from the old stuff.

In the medium/long term I'm not worried about the privet imbalance as, with a lawn, I'm going to have a good source of high-nitrogen garden waste to balance out the high-carbon hedge clippings. Getting that C:N balance right is, along with moisture and oxygen, the key to composting. But in the short term, to get the old privet to rot, I mixed the privet with immature compost from my food waste bin (which you can just see to the left) plus some other soil and green waste I had lying around. If nothing else, this will retain moisture in the heap and allow the woody stems to rot. I'm still not expecting fantastic compost, but this approach has worked before.

We shall see...

How green are electric cars?

2009-04-16T08:49:00.003+01:00

There's a huge amount of fuss in the press about a revolution in electric vehicles driven by the government. The 'greenness' of an electric car depends on where the electricity comes from - don't buy the 0gC02/km figures that are bandied about - that is patent nonsense. It is quite difficult to get precise data, but here's a rule of thumb from www.whatgreencar.com:

Battery-electric cars using renewable energy provide the largest reduction in GHGs of almost 100%.
If 'standard-mix' electricity is used, battery electrics reduce greenhouse gases by around 40%.
Commercially produced pure bioethanol and biodiesel also provide significant reductions in greenhouse gases in the range 35%-90%, the reduction depending on feedstock crop used.
Due to their high fuel-efficiency, most petrol hybrids offer a reduction in greenhouse gases of around 25%.
Bi-fuel LPG and natural gas cars also produce modest reductions of around 15% due to better combustion and to their lower carbon content.

Tesla - the makers of the £90k electric sports car go further and say their car does 46gCO2/km, compared to an European average of 158gCO2/km, but that figure assumes the electricity comes from a brand new gas fired power station.

So electric is good, but not quite as good as some may claim!

Allotment Interlude

2009-04-15T07:14:00.000+01:00

In between the Easter weekend's epic compost odyssey (more soon, not quite finished yet) and drinking beer in a deckchair (one of two found in a skip), I was summoned to 'our' allotment to do some digging and plant some potatoes.

Allotments are great - most of the materials used are reclaimed (our greenhouse is made from old window frames and pallets), the lack of fossil energy on site means everything is muscle powered and all the water is collected from the rain. And, of course, with food being one of the biggest parts of our ecological/carbon footprints, this is one way to make a real difference.

And it's not just me who thinks so - according to the Guardian, there's a 100,000 strong waiting list, um, waiting for one of the 300,000 plots to become available. This is keeping us on our toes - we've been given a quiet word once or twice over the last couple of years about keeping on top of it. This is partly due to our laissez faire approach to tidiness (we like to think of it as "wildlife-friendliness") and, anyway, our fruit trees and bushes will produce food every year with very little intervention. I've got a big book on no-dig gardening to read to see if we can turn this into a win-win. We've also enlisted some help, but this is frowned upon in case it turns into a surreptitious way of passing the plot on to a mate bypassing the waiting list.

We'll just have to keep those spades and forks working!

Compost frenzy part 1

2009-04-13T14:05:00.004+01:00

Easter weekend is the biggest gardening/DIY weekend of the year and I decided to spend it this year sorting out my composting arrangements.

First I had to empty the various containers - worm bin, food waste bin and garden waste bay. Chucking food scraps, envelopes and cardboard into heaps and bins and waiting for nature to do its thing is the easy bit - it is back breaking work shovelling the resulting compost out, sieving it to take out bits of plastic, and then carting it to where you need it.

You can buy sieves for compost but, before I found my proper one, I found that an old wire shopping basket does the trick nicely. This is my food waste compost - the worm bin produces much darker, richer compost (and liquid plant food), but it works on much smaller volumes. My garden waste compost was, frankly, rubbish - too much privet, not enough moisture - more on that in part 2.

I used the compost as a mulch on our front flower bed. It sets off the plants a treat and will also release nutrients into the soil, suppress weeds and retain moisture. Some say it also protects against disease.

More on the new arrangements in Part 2...

Green Brolly from M&S

2009-04-07T09:10:00.007+01:00

My brolly got mangled in the wind recently, so I popped into Marks & Spencer for a replacement. I was delighted to find I could get one made out of recycled yarn. It didn't cost any more than the others, in fact less than some equivalents, so it begs the obvious question - why aren't they all made of recycled material?

Earth Hour 2009 - Official Worldwide Roll Out

2009-04-03T11:24:00.001+01:00

Just in case you missed just how global and high profile last Saturday's Earth Hour Switch off was...

Green April Fools

2009-04-01T10:36:00.002+01:00

I've only spotted one, the Guardian's story that the EU will ban the amber from traffic lights next year to save energy. Classy spoof of a Daily Mail reader's nightmare.

Spotted any others?

Springtime in North Yorkshire

2009-03-31T10:20:00.005+01:00

Every year I say the same old thing - leaves, buds, flowers, lengthening evenings, heating off, solar panel kicking into life... well it's true, I love springtime, the renewal, the light, the life.

Well this year I got whisked away by train to the North York Moors to stay in a converted barn on Red House Farm in Glaisdale to celebrate my birthday. Glaisdale is on the wonderful Esk Valley Line, a railway so beautiful and meandering it is a surprise it survived Dr Beeching's axe back in the 60s. On trips like this, the journey to and from the destination is part of the holiday itself.

From an eco-living point of view, the trip scored highly - public transport only, spending money in the local community (all our food was bought in the village shop and the brilliant butcher's), eggs from the farm, walking on the moors, wood fired heating, local organic ale in the pub... absolutely brilliant in every way.

John Lewis' Green Windows

2009-03-26T21:20:00.002Z

People keep asking "Will the environment suffer in the recession?" John Lewis obviously don't think so.

I understand the ice cores! Victory is mine!

2009-03-18T14:06:00.004Z

I appear to have won my mini-war with some denier acquaintances by outflanking them on the battle of the ice cores.

The denier argument goes like this:

"The ice cores show that past temperature rises happened before carbon dioxide concentrations rose, therefore temperature drives carbon and not the other way round, hence man made carbon emissions will not cause temperature rises."

The statement is true, the conclusion is 180° out.

The ice cores show the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide under natural warming (there were no power stations or SUVs). So something other than carbon pushed up temperature (slowly), leading eventually to the slow release of carbon dioxide and methane (eg from melting permafrost and other climatic changes). This carbon will have then contributed in turn to that warming which lasted for 5000 years before starting to cool again. So we would expect to see what we see in the ice-cores.

The current situation is quite different. Carbon dioxide is rising faster and further than in the ice cores due to man's activity. Temperature rises are lagging behind the carbon rises. Using the deniers' own logic, this lag proves that man-made carbon emissions are driving current temperature rises.

QED.

BTW: the full explanation can be seen on the excellent realclimate.org.

Know your sceptics from your deniers...

2009-03-16T09:49:00.007Z

I keep getting asked to respond to the arguments put forward by climate change sceptics and deniers, which is difficult as I'm not a climatologist and the science is very complex once you get past the simple facts of:

1. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the environment (or we wouldn't be here);
2. Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the environment will trap more heat;
3. Greenhouse gas concentrations are much higher now that they were in pre-industrial times due to fossil fuels;
4. Therefore you would expect temperatures to rise since the industrial revolution and they appear to have done so.

But the climate is a complex 4 dimensional beastie with natural cycles and a complex set of positive and negative feed back loops, so it is impossible to make an easy correlation between gas concentration and, say, average temperature. It is in this grey area that the sceptics and deniers thrive.

So let's have a look at the difference between a sceptic and a denier:

Sceptic: someone who doesn't believe manmade climate change is a dominant force having analysed the data with an open mind. Note that high profile sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg and Nigel Lawson accept the basic principle (they'd be daft not to) but think the IPCC is overstating the impacts by a long way. That's all part of the debate.

Denier: someone to whom the whole idea is anathema, whatever the evidence, for one or more of the following reasons:

1. They see it as a left wing plot to smother the economy and raise taxes (Melanie Phillips, Vaclav Klaus)
2. They are natural contrarians who always swim against what they see as comfortable orthodoxy (Christopher Booker, David Bellamy)
3. They make a living out of it (Fred Singer, the hosts of that anti-climate change conference last week who were funded by Exxon-Mobil until 2006)

Deniers hate being called deniers - they say they are sceptics, but nobody would ever admit to being 'in denial'!

There is a very interesting correlation between deniers on climate change and, say, people who 'disbelieve' the health effects of passive smoking. Fred Singer has been funded to 'disprove' both in his time, the Heartland Institute holds events on both, and Christopher Booker has railed against passive smoking, the link between vCJD and BSE, and indeed the theory of evolution (he's a historian by the way).

I've taken apart Christopher Booker before, but the latest person's arguments to be thrown in front of me were from Prof Bob Carter. Prof Carter is a scientist working in a related discipline with a raft of peer-reviewed papers and academic awards to his name. He has been popping up in the media and in person around the world 'debunking' the idea of manmade climate change and attacking carbon taxes for at least six years. Just one problem. He won't submit his anti-climate change arguments to a peer-reviewed academic journal. Why not? He told the Sydney Herald "the role of peer review in scientific literature was overstressed."

Now that is rubbish and he knows it. Peer review is the basic quality control system in science. All the IPCC analysis Carter derides as "lacking scientific rigour" is peer reviewed. Otherwise anyone could throw up any old nonsense and say it was a fact...

The scientific community has challenged Carter to "put up or shut up", but he refuses to face up to the challenge. It is also worth noting that he is on the board of an organisation funded by the energy industry, but again the Prof says "whether or not a scientist had been funded by the fossil fuel industry was irrelevant to the validity of research".

I came to this thinking Carter was a sceptic, but now I think he's a denier. And there's an easy way for him to disprove that assertion - peer review.

No hair shirt required

2009-03-12T13:54:00.003Z

Today I went to an early morning climate change event at a hotel about 2 miles from home. The event was about the carbon emissions in the North East of England and what could be done to tackle them. One of the speakers, who I've known for a couple of years, made a quip about me arriving by bike.

I cornered him later to point out (in a friendly way) that I didn't wake up this morning and say "Brilliant, I can save a few grammes of carbon by cycling!". Instead I looked out the window and thought "Brilliant, the sun is shining, I can have a lovely cycle up the river valley, listen to the morning birdsong, and get some light exercise while I'm at it!".

It was indeed lovely. When I emerged from the valley I spotted one of the other delegates bouncing over speed humps in his car, looking stressed. Who was wearing the hair shirt?

What if the lights go out?

2009-03-10T11:43:00.003Z

I was just stepping into the shower this morning when the water went cold. The lights had gone off too. I dried off the cold splash of water that had hit me before I could jump out and went and checked the fuse box. Everything was OK there, so we had a power cut.

I got dressed and went up to the newsagents - he was using two battery powered camping lights and a calculator to run the shop, and was worried about his perishable foodstuffs. The pedestrian crossing was out of order too. A symphony of burglar alarms rang out across the neighbourhood.

When I got back we lit the stove with a match to boil the kettle and had cereal rather than toast. My partner and I fought a battle over who was blocking whose light from the window in order to read the paper. It was eerily quiet with no fish tank pump or fridge humming in the background.

After breakfast I found I had about an hour of battery left on my laptop, but no broadband, so I checked my e-mail on my mobile phone. My work choice boiled down to what didn't require much access to the net as the clock was ticking on my battery reserves on both.

Ninety minutes after the cut started it ended, then we had half an hour of power followed by a further ten minute cut. Since then it has been fine and I'm still sighing big sighs of relief.

Now hundreds of millions of people across the world have no access to electricity at all, and many more suffer regular power cuts. 90 minutes without power is nothing on the grand scale of things, but everything changed or came to a halt while it lasted. Our luxuries, basic needs (food, warmth), communication systems, security systems and traffic control systems have all become incredibly dependent on a stable supply of electricity.

So what happens if the lights do go out? Will we descend into Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic anarchy or rebuild small self-sufficient communities and live in eco-harmony singing around the campfire? And do we want to go there?

Lord Mandelson Goes Green...

2009-03-06T09:19:00.001Z

...not the way he expected...

Musings on the "Environmental Debate"

2009-02-26T16:21:00.010Z

There's so much utter rubbish talked about in relation to "the environment" it makes me want to scream. Why when there is almost total unanimity in the scientific community about, say, climate change, is there a debate going on at all?

1. The environmental debate impacts on wider political agendas

Man is inquisitive. For centuries we have striven to discover new lands, new inventions and new ways of doing things. We are also instinctively greedy having necessarily evolved through a couple of million years an urge to acquire resources when they're available in case there's a famine around the corner. The idea of environmental limits is anathema to that enterprising spirit, aspiration and natural greed.

Many of the shriller climate sceptics appear to be driven by the idea that climate change has been invented by left-leaning Governments in order to limit enterprise and raise taxes. Of course for that to be the case the scientific consensus must also be constructed by Governments who (apparently) only fund research programmes which support the notion of climate change - overlooking the fact that political opinion has lagged behind scientific opinion for years and years. Or maybe both have conspired together...

On the other side of the debate there are the deep greens and their political allies in the anti-capitalist movement, not only get the idea of environmental limits, but embrace them as it fits with their wider value system. While I'm all for people pointing out what is wrong with the modern capitalist system (and it's doing a fine job of flagging that up for itself just at the minute), many commentators fall into the trap of being against everything. They will deride technological or economic efforts to cut carbon emissions as greenwash or an outright con and undermine some of the most promising 'quick wins' as ineffective. This creates paralysis in the debate - should we be recycling if even (some) greens deride it as ineffective? The hair shirt approach also tends to switch off the majority of people in the country - the very people we have to reach to move the agenda forwards.

2. Global environmental issues are very, very complicated

If someone dumps oil in a village pond and the fish die, we can all understand that. If sulphur dioxide from a power station in the UK converts to acid rain over the North Sea and kills trees in Norway, most people can get their head around that. But to start to get your head around the mechanics of, say, climate change - extra carbon dioxide traps more heat from the sun (but only what has been absorbed and re-emitted by the earth), but some carbon dioxide is absorbed by carbon sinks and some is emitted due the rising heat, and how the heat affects a whole series of weather systems, climatic patterns, ice sheets and sea levels - well that's really, really complicated. And then there's the complex patterns of production, consumption and related economics that lead to those carbon emissions... There is no simple connection between cause and effect.

This throws up three problems:

a. The man in the street can't easily get his head around it. In fact no-one can get their head around all of it - I've been interested for 2 decades and a professional for 11 years - I learn something new every day, but if somebody, say, challenges me on the Vostok ice core samples, I'm stuck (I do solutions, not analysis of the problem).

b. It is very hard to make judgement calls - Should waste be recycled or incinerated? How much is a Siberian tiger worth in kg carbon dioxide (ie if you had to choose)? Does tree planting offset carbon emissions? These sorts of questions are almost impossible to answer from a purely objective point of view.

c. It is very easy for anyone with a particular agenda to cherry pick a couple of facts and present a superficially straightforward conclusion that suits that agenda.

3. The modern press answers to no-one

"Recycling is a waste of time!", "Organic food exposed!", "Eco-friendly lightbulbs give you cancer!". A significant chunk of the press loves nothing more than to rubbish the 'current big thing', or, in the case of the Daily Mail, to persuade its readers that the country is going to hell on a handcart (pushed along by sundry foreigners).

Journalists rarely have to answer for misleading, incorrect or frankly fictional statements. The prime scourge of the climate change lobby, as he would see it, is Christopher Booker in the Telegraph. I went through one of his columns with my father who had read it and thought it had some merit. Booker based his attack on the International Panel on Climate Change's conclusions on two blogs. We looked them up. The first, written by two scientists, criticised how the IPCC handled some data but stated clearly that this did not prove that climate change was not man made (Booker omitted to mention that statement). The second was written by an ex-TV weatherman with no apparent qualifications in meteorology or climatology. So Booker dismisses the views of 97.4% of published qualified climatologists in favour of the musings of a TV presenter. The TV guy might be right, of course, but it's more than a bit unlikely. This 'analysis' would not pass muster as an undergraduate dissertation, but is printed in the best selling serious newspaper in the UK.

And everyone feels qualified to comment, no matter how toe-curling the results. I love Simon Hoggart's satirical take on politics in the Guardian but why he feels he can and has to repeatedly make naive comments on global carbon emissions and windpower in his Saturday columns is beyond me.

And people believe what they read. And it comes out in statements like "They're saying now..."

So...

We have people who have an axe to grind (point 1), an opportunity to make it sound convincing (point 2), and a huge audience (point 3). Hence we appear to have a debate when there isn't one.

Guilt trip TV...

2009-02-24T09:47:00.006Z

Mea culpa. On Friday I bought a new TV. A 32" flatscreen telly to replace our 25 year old set that had gone on the blink and was too small to watch modern programmes without pressing your eyeballs to the screen. 32" looked modest in the shop and with a toddler in the house we don't get to the cinema much and watch a lot of movies on demand, but since we've got it home it's given me a massive guilt trip, dominating a corner of the room - a big, black, earth-crushing monolith of consumerism...

Except it's not really.

Its power consumption is 100W - a traditional light bulb's worth. OK that's almost twice its teeny predecessor, but it also includes a digital receiver which we'll need in a couple of years when analogue signals are switched off - that cuts out using 38W of digibox and unlike the latter it has an easily accessible off switch, avoiding even shortish stints on standby. And we don't leave the TV on in our house unless we are actively watching it (hint: check the TV schedule first before switching the thing on). So the difference between this and our old set up quickly disappears if we redouble our efforts to switch off unnecessary lights through the winter.

I'm not trying to paint this as a green move - it is a carbon sin, but on the grand scale of things it's a teeny-weeny one. Yes, we could have stuck with our tiny old flickering picture, we could have bought a smaller set, we could have tried to go without (tried that, OK for a while, but wait until you're ill and/or shattered and just want to veg out), but we decided differently.

So, why do I still feel so damn guilty? Where do we draw the line in luxuries? Deep green living in a teepee, or light green life-as-usual with a green electricity tariff and ecover at the sink? It's the space in between that's much more difficult, if you, like me, want to benefit from the joys of modern life but want to make a difference to the planet. I've insulated the loft, replaced the windows, walk and cycle for most trips, work from home, eat local and organic food, use manure on the allotment, feed the birds, work to cut emissions from 100s of clients, avoid foreign holidays - can I not have the TV? And the DAB radio? And...

The guilt trip continues...

Hand me downs...

2009-02-17T15:04:00.003Z

Any parent will tell you that children grow up very quickly and are hard to keep in clothes.

Very little of what our boy Harry wears is brand new, most of it has been handed down from two sets of neighbours with older kids (and better fashion sense) than us. It's funny when we meet in the park and they recognise everything he's wearing. When Harry grows out of it, it gets handed down to a friend's younger kid and some of that clobber has come back again to be passed on to a little'un who arrived just three weeks ago - that's four owners at least.

Nobody sees this as unusual, or particularly green, just good common sense. Who says we are addicted to buying new stuff and throwing it away when it's not wanted?

Earth Hour switch off 8:30pm 28 March 2009

2009-02-13T12:13:00.003Z

Switch off your lights for an hour and make a statement on climate change...