Inconvenient Truth - Dec 2009
For those who still think the sky is too big for us to impact on our atmosphere: stand on top of the Minster and you can see the white horse at Kilburn on a clear day, 25 miles away. Go vertically above the Minster for
25 miles and 99% of the planet’s atmosphere is beneath you. That’s how thin our atmosphere is.
I don’t expect the MET Office’s decision to release all their data will convince those with their fingers in their ears; it isn’t about the science anymore. The MET office tell us the past decade is the warmest on record. Gardeners know this - they see plants flowering in November. Farmer across the region know this - they manage crops differently now.
The proof that humans do impact on the Earth’s atmosphere is found by studying the impact of Chlorofluorocarbons on atmospheric ozone. By the mid-1970s some nations recognised that CFCs, in fridges and aerosols, were causing ozone depletion in the atmosphere. It took until 1996 to get them banned, because vested interests argued there was no proof humans were responsible for changes in the upper atmosphere. It was a natural process, apparently. Sound familiar?
Since CFCs were phased out, the ozone holes over the poles have slowly stabilised. Scientists expect ozone concentrations to return to pre-1980 levels by around 2060.
What is true for CFCs is also true for CO2. The positive thing is that we have proved to ourselves that not only can we make things worse, we can also make things better.
Funny how some people love scientists while they’re giving us air travel, televisions and proper health care but quickly call them all nuts when they draw our attention to an inconvenient truth.
Tory cat out of bag on on environment - Dec 2009
The cat is slipping out of the bag and David Cameron’s battle with climate change deniers in his party is now in the open. About time too.
I shared a platform with Tory MP Andrew Tyrie and few weeks ago and heard at first hand silly assertions that the poor need fossil fuels. They don’t, they need insulation.
Nigel Lawson, ex-Tory Minister regularly peddles his anti-climate change views on behalf of his consultancy company’s corporate clients who include many of the world’s oil companies. As John Prescott said recently of Lawson consultancy firm it is not so much a think tank and a petrol tank.
The sad thing about these people is that they advance no plans for the future of this nation, only a desire to ensure bankers run everything, oil companes remain top dogs, and the economy stays just the way it is.
I do not doubt David Cameron’s sincerity on environmental issues but it is clear that his own party is only tolerating his view in thehope that he can get them elected. If they are elected, I predict that Cameron will have only months to either assert his authority or be brushed aside by a party that seems completely out of touch with the challenges of the 21st century.
The Tories are unfit to run the country because they fail tounderstand either the scale of the challenge facing us with climate change or the scale of the opportunity to transform our economy and lead the world by responding to climate change in a positive, coherent and strategic fashion.
As for Labour, what can you say about a government that is so committed to urgent action that it says it will introduce smart meters by 2020?
The Lib Dem challenge - Sept 2009
The challenge for the Lib Dems is how to appear the credible alternative to this weary government.
We have had a good year: right on the need to find a new Speaker, right on getting rid of ID cards, right on the need to nationalise the banks, and so on.
The public is rightly cynical about politicians. We have to continue advancing solutions and abandon empty rhetoric. Only politics groupies trust soundbites offering 'real change' instead of 'phony change'. Anyone can list what is wrong with our current state of affairs, people want clearly articulated proposals and solutions.
I am calling on the national party to declare a manifesto commitment to transform the Houses of Parliament into an environmentally sustainable building. Nobody takes lectures on the dangers of smoking from a doctor
with a fag in his mouth. If climate change is a serious enough issue for MPs to tell everyone from businesses to local authorities to individual residents to change their behaviour, then it is serious enough for MPs to put their own house in order.
Let them introduce double glazing, water source heat pumps, insulation, an energy manager,
a carbon reduction programme, etc. The party that leads on this will win the respect and confidence of the electorate. In transforming their building, MPs of all parties would also better understand why we need to overhaul our archaic planning legislation.
No Car Day and parking in York - Sept 2009
Last week York households received printed leaflets advising them that the council was organising a No Car Day on 22nd September, to co-incide with International No Car Day.
From the leaflet, the council appears not to be planning to do anything itself, other than urging residents and businesses to reduce their car use. The initiative is designed to demonstrate the council’s commitment on environmental matters.
This week we hear that in a few week’s time car park prices in the city centre will be dropped. Presumably this initiative is designed is to increase the number of people coming into York to drive and park their cars.
How can two so completely contradictory initiatives be launched by the same council over a two week period? Our local transport plan commits us to reducing car use and investing in public transport, but we prioritise building a roundabout that council officers advise will, at best, do next to nothing. We introduce Yozone cards to reduce bus fares for young people, but young people in rural wards cannot use them because, in negotiating the bus contracts, the council has not required the bus companies to recognise the cards.
There are many ways to help local businesses in the current difficult economic climate besides yoyoing car park prices.Finding a home for the Big Wheel would be a start. Ensuring we don’t lose the ice rink would be another. Negotiating a serious city centre investment plan that includes the council, local businesses, and the regional development agency would be another.
We need and deserve a coherent and properly thought out strategic plan that secures our economic prosperity AND tackles the environmental challenges this city faces.
Our Energy Future - Jun 2009
I am very grateful to Phill Thomas for his kind words regarding my comment column last week on our country's energy future. (Just imagine our eco future, The Press, June 3)
He was wrong, however, to suggest that I did not outline how we would get around the opponents of change. As I set out in my article, both on a national level and at local authority level we need leaders 'with the will and the courage and the vision to grab the future'. With inspirational and dynamic leadership we progress, without it we fail. It really is as simple as that.
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The gulf between green and Brown - Mar 2008
The gulf between Labour’s empty rhetoric on climate change and it's fist-chewingly hopeless record just gets wider and wider.
As Gordon Brown struts another party conference stage boasting his government leads the world on tackling the issue almost all analysts agree is the most serious threat to the planet, here are just four ways in which the nation continues to lag behind almost all the nations of Europe on this issue.
One. Since 1990 the percentage of our nation's energy supplies that come from renewable sources has increased by only one percent. We generate less than half of one percent of the amount of solar power generated in Germany. Only Malta and Luxembourg do less well than the UK and both of those nations would fit comfortably inside Yorkshire.
Two. Far from making any attempt to scale back aviation, the government is set to allow an extra 524 more flights to the US from Heathrow every month.
Three. The government's refusal to ring-fence revenue from the European Emissions Trading System, an agreed EU wide levy to help nations develop clean technologies, means that yet another 'green' tax, estimated to be worth around £1 billion a year, will simply be siphoned into the treasury to spend on whatever Brown likes.
Four. Is there any spectacle more ridiculous than watching Brown wagging his finger at supermarkets and threatening to join the campaign against plastic bags? He is the prime minister for goodness sake. If he had any interest in showing leadership he would pass laws banning plastic bags. Since that is what has already been done in countries all round Europe, it would still fall short of the global leadership Brown flatters himself he is showing, but it would be better than nothing.
A Green Bayley? - Sept 2007
So Hugh Bayley is finally interested in Climate Change? [MP's India Mission]. An election must be round the corner!
In seven years Bayley has spoken on environmental issues in parliament on only three occasions, according to Hansard: once on chewing gum [Jan 2005], once to ask how the government was proposing to cut carbon usage [Dec 2006], and once in a Climate Change & Sustainable Development debate [Dec 2002] where he praised his government's achievement for showing Europe the way on development aid.
We are actually way down the list on the proportion of GDP given to development aid by European nations, behind: Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, France and Spain. But in Bayley's mind we lead Europe, so that's OK.
Similarly, Bayley's view that the UK is leading the way on cutting greenhouse gas emissions is no more than Labour spin. While he and his government compliment themselves on their achievements, the rest of Europe continues to put us to shame on tackling energy reduction. In Italy 30 million electricity customers have smart metering to help them reduce their electricity bills. Swedish homes emit 65% less CO2 than homes in the UK. Germany invests ten times more in solar panels than does the UK.
While Bayley boasts of reduced CO2 emissions, the figures from Defra show that since this government have been in power CO2 emissions have actually risen, which is why he very carefully chooses to compare 1971 with 2004
This government has shown it isn't even capable of putting a tax on plastic bags. Oh and readers will remember the occasional last year when Bayley shamelessly tried to claim that our ecoDepot was all the work of his government. If you want action on the environment there is no point supporting Bayley or Labour.
Change? Not for all the fish in the Sea - Sept 2007
Last year UK fishermen landed 20,000 tonnes of cod. They only land the bigger fish. The smaller ones are tossed back into the sea, dead. 8,000 tonnes of them. To protect the species!
Our madness knows no bounds. I only got as far as an A-level In biology but, as far as I know, dead fish don't breed, or grow. They don't do anything much.
We are in desperate need of politicians with the courage to act. Around the world, one in three species of fish is threatened with extinction, according to the newest figures from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. One in four mammals and one in eight birds are on the endangered list.
I have recently bought cod from a company that has set up the world's first cod farm. So change is possible but, if we are to protect the natural resources of the world, we need governments with the will to act. The solutions are not technical but political.
What's the answer? Ban all fishing in the North Sea for five years and, in the intervening period, employ fishermen to use their specialist knowledge of where fish live and breed to create artificial reefs to encourage stocks to grow. Employ fishermen to save their industry rather than kill it off. Why isn't this happening? Because politicians focus on helping their constituents in the present instead of taking responsibility for the future.
Protecting the UK fish industry for a few years while fish stocks disappear completely is ridiculous. The European Union does its best, organizing meeting between member states, but it is not powerful enough to knock national governments' heads together. And so the decimation of the sea continues. Where are our national politicians brave enough to face up to this?
Storms and Hot Air ahead - March 2007
We've reached a tipping point. Expect raging storms and much hot air.
As the Climate Change debate reaches its zenith, tempers are flaring like sun spots. The government sets vanity targets, so far into the future that they won't be around to see them implemented, before boasting that they now lead the world.
Now a few of those who have led the fight suddenly abandon ship and start to deny Climate Change is happening because, in truth, what they enjoy most is being part of a tiny minority, challenging the status quo.
And then we have programmes like The Great Global Warming Swindle with its bogus graphs and its casual misrepresentations of scientists' work. In one instance the Channel 4 programme showed a graph that came from a magazine over twenty five years old. Martin Durkin, who directed the film, just made up the figures for 1980 to the present day. 'There was a fluff there,' he now admits. Asked to comment on the rest of the graph, he said, 'The original NASA data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find.'
So he just made it up. Expect more of this. As someone who has worked on dozens of television documentaries, I have seen this many times before. The director who tinted the moon purple and presented it to the tv audience as Pluto because he couldn't find archive footage of Pluto and 'no one knows what Pluto looks like anyway'. The animation where the earth went round the sun the wrong way 'because it looks better that way.'
Fortunately, there are many others of us getting on with advancing practical measures to help us tackle Climate Change, like getting the ecoDepot built and transforming planning guidance for the city.
Steady as she goes.
Helping hedgehogs - Feb 2007
For those of you who have spotted hedgehogs tottering about when they should be hibernating, here are a few tips on what to do during the cold snap.
There isn't enough food available in the wild for hedgehogs at this time of year so putting a little dog food or cat food will help. Keep an eye on what is eating the food if you don't want to attract opportunist rats. If there is no shelter about, a box for the hedgehogs to rest in or hibernate is also a good idea.
While a few contrarians continue to pretend nothing is happening to our climate most of us will have begun to notice tale-tale signs. Outside my kids' primary school daisies and dandelions have been flowering throughout January.
There is much that we can all do to reduce our CO2 emissions and, yes, what we do does matter. All over Europe animals that should be hibernating are confused by changing weather patterns. It is right that we should be keeping an eye out for creatures suffering in the cold is something we should thinking about. Wild birds too will suddenly be short of food and grateful for any food we put out.
The Drax protest - Sept 2006
It is a shame that in your coverage of the Drax protest yesterday the Press failed to make any mention of what the protest is about. While it is regretable that considerable sums of money have to be spent policing protests, it is also regretable, to put it mildly, that the issue of 20.8 million tonnes of CO2 being emited every year from Drax seems to merit no mention whatsoever in your paper.
In Scandanavia a plant like the Drax power station would be providing district heating for thousands of homes instead of simply pumping heat into the atmosphere via those massive cooling towers that dominate the site. In this country we have a Labour government that is good at commissioning reports and reviews but desperately short on action. I understand that only 25% of the energy in every tonne of coal burnt at power stations like Drax ever reaches any consumer, the rest is lost through the inefficiences of the power stations or in the national grid of pylons that straddle our landscape.
With energy bills rising over 20% a year for many consumers, it is clear to most of the public that serious action is needed to dramatically improve energy efficiency: in the home; in the work place; and, importantly, at the power stations. The cloud machines, or cooling towers, that have dominated the landscape south of York since I was a child, and the National Grid itself are not the only way of generating energy. The public at large are right to expect the government to make real progress on this and not simply lecture us on switching our TVs off at night.
Published and promoted by Christian Vassie, 10 Blake Court, Wheldrake, York YO19 6BT
