Climate
February 8, 2008Visit EfficienCity: a clean, green climate-friendly town
If a picture speaks a thousand words, a multimedia-packed, animation-filled interactive town must speak a million. Which is why on the Greenpeace UK website we've launched EfficienCity (like Sim City, but greener) to explain exactly what decentralised energy is and how it works in practice (which can otherwise be a wordy business).
If you believe our government, you'd think we need nuclear power and coal to stop climate change, but come and pay a visit to EfficienCity, which shows how pioneering, real world communities around the UK are using decentralised energy. As a result, they're enjoying lower greenhouse gas emissions, a more secure energy supply, cheaper electricity and heating bills and a whole new attitude towards energy.
We've been working with the incredible team at Biro Creative to build the town and we're pretty chuffed with the result. It's full of video case studies, animations and slideshows that explain exactly how a genuinely clean and efficient energy system works - from wave and tidal power to micro-hydro and anaerobic digestion.
And, most importantly, UK residents can find out how to make their own town climate friendly.
Anyway, enough of the words - just go and visit EfficienCity to discover a cleaner, greener energy future. Enjoy.
How many retailers does it take to change the light bulb?
Well, all of them, but the Co-op has made a fine start. The supermarket has announced that it’s going to remove all inefficient light bulbs from its shelves within a few months. Gone are the energy-leaching incandescent bulbs and in comes a wider, brighter selection of efficient compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), which use five times less energy and last up to 12 times longer.
If every UK retailer did the same, we’d save over five million tonnes’ worth of carbon emissions – more than the CO2 emissions of the 26 lowest emitting countries combined! That’s on top of saving UK consumers around £1.2 billion in electricity bills per year. Not bad for a little gas filled tube...
The "I Count" in Trafalgar Square, London
© Greenpeace/Dave Walsh
Here in London, we're all recovering from a hectic day at the Count in the Square - 25,000 people packed into London's Trafalgar Square. We were gathered to make a call for action on climate change - everyone from the Women's Institute to the rock band Razorlight. Quite a mixture.
On the bus into central London, I spotted people making their way towards Trafalgar Square. Near Islington, a mother and two daughters boarded, carrying a fantastic handmade placard - on one side was a sad face and the words "do nothing". When they flipped it around, it the other side showed a smiley face, and the words "do something!".
Didcot Power Station: Greenpeace occupation ends!
© Greenpeace/Kate Davison
Twenty-five of our climate campaigners were arrested at 5.30pm, after spending two days occupying Didcot, Britain's dirtiest power station, succesfully cutting Co2 emissions by stopping coal from being fed into the facility. Their point? To show that there's cleaner, more efficient ways of generating energy - like decentralised energy.
Oddly enough, Tony Blair happened to be in the area, and was in a local ITV studio during the Didcot occupation. Greenpeace UK's chief media officer, Ben Stewart - on top of a smoke stack at Didcot Power Station, managed to question Blair on the government's stance on climate change and carbon emissions! And we've got a video of it...
Climate Change: It's not too late, according to the UK government
In a UK review on climate change, British economist and government advisor Sir Nicholas Stern has said that "climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen," but that there "is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally." Which is exactly what we have been saying all along (while getting accused of "climate porn"). The scientific and moral cases for acting against climate change have been known for some time - but ironically, it's taken an economist to spur governments into action. Show me the money...
Read more on the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change »
Greenpeace UK: Climate change: We still have time! »
Help stop climate chaos and get backstage access to Glastonbury for two!
Remember, remember, the 4th of November... Will you be wandering around London on that day? Worried about climate change wreaking catastrophic planetary destruction? Terrified you might not be able to get tickets to the next Glastonbury music festival? Not sure which you should be worrying about more?
Fret no more! We'll get you and a friend backstage at the next Glastonbury for free as our guest bloggers. All you have to do is persuade more people than anybody else* to come to Trafalgar Square on November 4th and stand up against climate chaos.
"PAPT" are in the lead, with 11 team members. Think you can do better? Enter the competition and start inviting your friends. »
EU policy on climate change: I will if you will
It's so easy to shift the blame onto someone else but politicians do it better than most. Witness Margaret Beckett earlier today, speaking to foreign policy experts at the British Embassy in Berlin. Quite rightly, she stressed the dangers of climate change but her role as foreign secretary lead her to framing it as "a serious threat to international security". Which it is, but it's a lot more besides.
All well and good, but what rankles is the bit where she claimed that, as far as the EU is concerned, it's up to Germany to sort it all out. This isn't the result of some diplomatic tit-for-tat stretching back to the Battle of Britain but a forward glance to Germany's presidency of both the EU and G8 next year. "We will support you," she said, but hang on a minute. Wasn't the UK in exactly the same position last year, and wasn't climate change a priority at the Gleneagles summit, hosted by our very own prime minister?
Since then, precious little has altered in either the UK or the EU on the subject of climate change but now our government is out of the firing line, it's easy enough to shift the responsibility elsewhere. Even Beckett's intention to rope aviation into the emissions trading scheme smacks of being too little, too late. "Like putting a sticking plaster on a broken leg," according to one of our climate campaigners, Emily Armitage. But then if we're not to fall into a childish round of 'I will if you will', then someone needs to take the bull by the horns (or the plane by the tail) and do something.
The Red Light District goes green
Our colleagues in the Netherlands who alerted us to the dangers of toxic sex toys are now tackling the Red Light District in Amsterdam, and making energy efficiency sexier than ever. They've replaced the inefficient red light bulbs lighting up six windows in the famous district with energy efficient green light bulbs. The Greenpeace volunteers are also canvassing entrepreneurs in other parts of the neighbourhood asking them to use energy efficient light bulbs.
The guerilla bulb replacement is part of a project called "Heir" (Here in Dutch) to promote the use of 1 million extra energy efficient light bulbs in the Netherlands.
Next stop the Ajax football stadium?!
What's £10 million between friends?
From BBC News earlier today:
A £10m drive to add wind turbines to public sites and to promote renewable energy is being funded by cuts to other green projects, it has been claimed. The Partnership for Renewables scheme will work with private firms to put the turbines on sites such as hospitals. But the Lib Dems and the Energy Saving Trust say money from insulation and double-glazing schemes will pay for it. The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said the sum was never allocated to a specific project.
So despite making the right noises in a bland New Labour kind of way, David Miliband is simply juggling his budgets to make climate change less of a burden to the Treasury.
Are you sitting comfortably?
Climate change is clearly the bandwagon to be on at the moment. The new green-blue Tories (what colour of the political spectrum does that make them - aquamarine?) have muscled their way on board, the media is transmitting the message on all channels, and even celebrities like Thandie Newton are climbing aboard. To my knowledge, we haven't got Jimmy Carr yet but he pops up on everything else so it's only a matter of time. However, one man I perhaps never expected to hear from on the subject was Mr Bagpuss himself, Oliver Postgate.
Scaremongering
The Hadley Centre, part of the Met Office, has just released some research, today, in the Climate Clinic, at the Tory conference. The main headline finding is that drought is set to double this century due to climate change. A spoil-sport serious newspaper would also mention that this figure refers to 'moderate' drought. Moderate drought can still be pretty dangerous if you don't have much in the way of resources to fall back on. Generally the agriculture in a particular area is suited to that area's climate. If you have an agricultural system which requires a lot of rainfall, such as paddy fields, then even a drought which doesn't look like a drought to the average observer could ruin your harvest and lead to a famine.
Dave revisited
So, having lambasted the leader of the opposition for being all talk, perhaps in fairness I should talk a bit more about what he talked about. It's mostly good stuff. Blair may have said that climate change is our biggest threat and challenge, but he clearly hasn't put it at the top of his to-do list (although as Bush seems to have editorial control that's not really surprising). Cameron stands in marked contrast for having given the issue as much time as Tony's apocalyptic pronouncements imply that it deserves, so firstly that should be acknowleged - every time Cameron has spoken about the climate, he was sacrificing the opportunity to talk about law and order or some other issue which might have given him a political benefit. Talk may be cheap, but it isn't free.
Leading the debate
Last night I was privileged to experience the combined force of the two politicians who've done most to get climate change in the UK media, Cameron and Gore. First was An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's block-busting documentary about climate change. If you haven't already seen it then do try to catch it. He refined it over a period of decades, and it's a great primer on climate science and far more entertaining than you'd expect.
Gummer update
BAA spin doctors (seated) look shifty when probed about how more runways mean less aviation emissions
I was so excited by my discovery of environmentally aware conservatism that I may have missed out some of the detail. The bloke from BAA wants inreased capacity (bigger airports) whilst dealing with emissions via efficiency gains and the European Emissions Trading Scheme - ie air travel will continue more or less unchecked, but the aviation industry would have to buy carbon credits from industries which had managed to cut back. I'm not aware of anyone outside the industry who thinks that this might work unassisted - certainly Gummer was quite clear that it wouldn't, and my understanding is that were we to follow this track every scrap of industry or society outside of aviation would have to get down to zero emissions by 2030.
The mouthpiece for big business
That's what Cameron didn't enter politics to become. Allegedly. But as with all questions on the Cameroonian revolution, the real trick is filtering out change of direction from change in presentation. A recently leaked internal email from the Tories expressed concern emanating from the constituency parties concerning Dave's wholesale adoption of 'the Greenpeace agenda'. So I'm here in Bournemouth at the Tory Party conference to try to find out which is further from the truth - mouthpiece for big business, or mouthpiece for Greenpeace?
Flying can seriously damage your health
There's something unhealthy in the air up here in Manchester. As the Labour party conference rumbled on down the road, I sat in a fringe meeting today at the Climate Clinic where the chap from the British Airports Authority allowed the 'sincerity' to drip from his lips like dark honey.
Oh yes, they're concerned, so very concerned by climate change. Cripes, that science, it's so frightening isn't it? But he wants a third runway at Heathrow, and god knows how many more runways across the country, and he wants expansion for a very simple reason - the industry predicts a 300 per cent rise in flights. It wants more planes to fly, which in turn will release more carbon into the atmosphere, which in turn will kill people.
Oh Mandy! You came on a plane...
Greenpeace paging Peter Mandelson... you've gone off message! In your rush to get up to the party conference and shill for the PM, you forgot the party line. Repeat after me, 'New Labour really does care about the environment and is serious about tackling climate change.'
We stuck a snapper outside Manchester airport on Sunday, wondering if we'd catch any of our oh-so-green politicians letting the plane take the strain. When a silver Merc pulled up outside Arrivals and Jeeves stepped out, our guy asked if he was waiting for a big cheese. 'Er, can't say mate.' So who came waltzing out of the terminal?
Oh Mandy, who knew that you flew here from London?
The climate doctor will see you now
With the inevitability of a recurring foot infection, party conference season is upon us once more and despite the tub-thumping, staged-managed entrances and enforced exits (well, maybe not this time round) it can all be quite alarmingly dull. But why the tedium? These are the people who are shaping our lives and the world around us. We should all be getting in there, getting involved and getting excited about the political process once more.
I'd put my money on the inability of politicians, with a few notable exceptions, to talk to us about what actually matters. They seem obsessed with choice and how we all apparently want more of it, but the big things on the agenda like climate change get pushed to the back of the conference centre along with the curling sandwiches and rancid coffee. So in the stale atmosphere of the conference mausoleums it isn't hard to think of the Climate Clinic, an attempt to get serious debate going at the heart of politics, as a breath of fresh air.
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