I have been given a WWF smack down by my commenters. Turns out we aren’t greener than Sweden, it’s just that I can’t read diagrams. This is my own fault, and not NatGeo’s silly fault for making dark green bad, and light green good, in defiance of all usual conventions.

This is only supposed to be a light green blog (it says here), is accuracy too much to expect from light green bloggers eh?

My friend Gunther sent me this:

Nice, eh?  A map, and lots of different shades of green (although from what I can make out, the less green you are on the map, the more gren it means you are – nicely done, National Geographic).

It leaves me pretty cold really – I mean, what’s it for?   If anyone can tell me what it’s for it’d be good.   But I think the “take home point” has to be this: HAVE THAT, SWEDEN!  We’re loads greener than you, so shut up.

I hope I don’t get in trouble with Barclaycard for this environmental jingoism.

I don’t think it’s ever inspiring or refreshing when you read about the politics of climate change. Articles like this: China ‘unfairly seen as eco-villain’ are no exception.

Experts like William Bleisch reckon we should go easy on China because its emissions per capita are 25% less than the US – because of course, as everyone knows, that means China’s sea levels will; only go up by 25% as much as Americas.

I’m selectively quoting the guy’s argument, admittedly – but statistics like that just seem so pointless.

The carbon footprint of making a bullet to shoot a vegetable with is greater than the cost of shipping said vegetable round the world. Probably.

Anyone else think the assassin looks like a young less punchable Ed Balls?

Hat tip: Green Thing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickharris/2734202140/

Round here (Clifton, Bristol) we have to recycle food waste, on pain of death (or at least a telling off from the Council). It’s a good thing on balance, although the drawback is that we Bristolians have these foetid Brown Bins which lurk in corners of our kitchen and play host to all range of indeterminate “matter”.   They’re pretty vile.  My solution to this was to get a wormery, and it has worked for a good few months – less smelly, and now I get to have pets.   I think something’s gone wrong recently though.

Last week we had a couple of friends round to dinner and about every 5 minutes a solitary fruit fly would come into our room and have a bit of a wander around while our guests politely tried to ignore it. Of course, They were coming from the wormery. Since then it got worse – really uncivilised.  As a rule of life, no-one’s girlfriend ever enjoys a plague of fruit flies in her house, and mine has been no exception.

I thought about opening the wormery and going nuclear on them with a can of fly spray, but then read that you could just bury the flies alive by putting a load of earth on top (which also has the advantage of not killing the worms, as they are pretty used to that sort of thing).   So that’s what I’ve done, and it seems to have solved the problem for a bit.  Still, the worms are on their final warning now.

“Climate Change” has become such a ubiquitous phrase that its meaning is lost a bit when we use it. We’re talking about the climate actually changing- by a few degrees, by a few feet of sea, by a season being a couple of months out of kilter. That’s a big deal.

I think we need to speak a little more about “Climate Repair”- I’ve not seen this used before, so will claim it as my own until told otherwise…

I came across a Sustrans campaign today that is a step towards climate repair- asking people to swap a day of car travel for something a bit greener- the logic stands that if all car drivers did this for just one day in a week of 5 working days then we would reduce traffic and car pollution by 20% That’s huge!

The campaign is the Sustrans Change Your World campaign and the week when they want us to swap is the 29th June onwards (so it will be warm and dry in theory, nice days to walk in)

I cycle or run to work, so can’t pledge to swap a journey but if I did have to swap a car trip, I think I’d fling myself with a catapult- like in this game set up to promote it:

ViaLittle Green Blog

I discovered these radiator rolls a while ago, but neglected to mention it on this here blog, seeing as I wasn’t writing it back then and everything. I can highly recommend them though.

The idea behind them is that when it’s cold, there’s no point using your heard-earned on heating up your walls. These insulate the wall behind your radiators, and shinily reflect the heat back into the room. They really work – my flat warms up loads more rapdily since I installed them. (It being summer at the moment helps as well, but look, that’s not the point). Pretty easy to install too – my DIY is about as cack-handed as it gets and even I managed it.

Best of all, they’re cheap, so unlike a lot of efficiency devices, you get your money back pretty much straight away – a fiver at B&Q!

…it just gets in the way of awesome engineering projects. I am massively keen on the Severn Barrage. The numbers are awesome. 6% of the WHOLE COUNTRY’S energy in one go. That’s amazing! And all we lose is a big wave (the severn bore) and £15 billion pounds (one tenth of what we spend on the NHS each year).

In April another stupid commission came out against it (the usual motley assortment of Lib Dems and Bill Oddie) saying we shouldn’t have it because it could “do serious damage to the estuary by wiping out around 80% of the inter-tidal habitat.” Various wading birds live there, which seems to be the main sticking point.

So what? How much of the inter-tidal habitat will be serious damaged if sea levels rise by 10m? The weading birds will have to go and wade somewhere else in either scenario, and I’m sure they’ll get used to that. Even if they don’t – big deal. It really frustrates me that people can’t see the bigger picture here – maintenance of the status quo isn’t an option.

Here’s some more jingoism – if Brunel were around today he’d be building massive tidal barrages over the place, and giving twitchers short shrift.

Has anyone read any of James Lovelock’s books?  They scare the hell out of me.  In case you haven’t read them, here’s a summary:

“Climate change already can’t be stopped, it’s too late, and we’re all about to be totally flipped over and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Well that’s all right for HIM – he is OLD so he can afford to beleive in scary things, secure in the knowledge he’ll be dead by the time it happens.  As for me, I really don’t want to believe his chat.  I don’t mean that in a I-deny-global-warming-is-happening sense – it’s just that what he has to say is so bleak.

Listening to him makes me think I ought to be upping-sticks and moving to high ground somewhere remote and temperate.  And if you don’t do that you’ve got to find good reasons to dismiss what he says.   I really can’t be bothered to move to New Zealand – I really like it here.  So I’m left with trying to convince myself he’s either a nutter or just at the worst-case-scenario end of the scale.  Hmm.  Will keep you posted.