I was amused to see the Frequently Asked Questions that Barclaycard have posted on here (next tab, top right). Not often you get a financial institutions FAQs telling you about carbon credits and what not. The point I was interested in was whether dams are OK or not. I like dams – I particularly like the idea of the Severn Barrage – but Barclaycard don’t, which is fair enough, their rationale being that: “building them generally requires flooding of vast areas of land, destroying plant and animal life and uprooting local populations. For this reason, they don’t meet our overall ethical standards.”. It’s quite amusing, though, that the point is illustrated with some windmills, some waves and, erm, a great big shiny dam…

Individuals can do next to nothing significant to affect climate change – this is one of the problems I keep banging my head against. As I’ve said before, the idea that our own little changes are important relies on the infantile notion that everyone else will do the same as us – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

BUT here is one thing we actually can do that isn’t actually pointless and really does make a difference.

Cutting down rainforest accounts for between a sixth and a third of carbon emissions, depending on whose figures you read. Here’s a way to stop it – buy some of it. Not only do you stop it getting chopped down, but the trees that coolearth.org have earmarked for protection are in a big defensive ring, and once the barrier is completed loggers won’t be able to get through it to cut down the rest.

I think this idea is brilliant – and cheap too, starting at £1 a tree. Obviously this depends on it actually being policed properly – if anyone cuts down my tree how will I know and what will I do about it? Coolearth say that through “community rangers and satellite imagery we monitor and protect the rainforest around the clock.” So that’s good.

I think that spending a few quid on this is far, far, far better than spending the equivalent amount on, for example, buying your electricity from ecotricity (flawed) or paying easyjet to offset your flight’s emissions (counterproductive).

We should all do it. Here’s the link.

Good discussion over on Green Thing about this video:

Interesting comments section, split evenly between furious hardliners saying “the video’s good because it’s worse than that in reality” and moderates saying “it’s bad because it’ll turn people off”. Most green arguments come back to that sort of thing in the end.

Overall I’m probably anti – seeing polar bear blood smeared over corners of buildings isn’t going to make any frequent flyers change their habits, it’ll just make them stop watching the video before it gets to its main message.

Went to a good talk in Bristol’s CREATE Centre last week – by a guy called Andy Hamilton who runs a website called Self-Sufficient-ish a kind of light green “how to” guide which he knocked up while he was unemployed one day, and led him onto fame and fortune.

It was quite good. Some good tips on how to make plant pots using old newspaper (he used the Guardian which is probably the most appropriate but one assumes it would work with other papers) and a nice easy recipe for Sloe Gin.

The worst tip by far was his suggestion that you should make your fridge more efficient by filling it with loads of beer, his idea being that the beer acts as a heat sink and somehow makes the fridge colder. This isn’t right at all, if you want your fridge to be more efficient you should put no more stuff in it than you need. Keeping things below room temperature requires energy. The more stuff you keep artificially cool, the more work your fridge will have to do. A more fridge will have less problem with that, but it will still require energy. Duh!

This hilarious article from the excellent Daily Mash is mainly having a swing at Labour’s last Queens Speech this term (and rightly so) . It could, though, apply equally to the ridiculous policy of “legally binding targets” for cutting carbon emissions, which do absolutely nothing.

Who will get sued if those targets aren’t achieved? Certainly not the politicians. We’ll get to 2020 and say “Oh dear, we’ve missed those legally binding targets. Isn’t it weird, that even though they were legally binding, we still managed to break them? Ho hum. What now?”

Politicians like to think that all you have to do to stop something happening is to pass a law against it. Crazy. The article makes the point very well – allowing people to sue a cloud for raining outside its catchment area won’t change anything.

The government’s “legally binding” target of cutting emissions by 80% by 2050 is unachievable, according to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.

Big surprise there. What a cop out that policy is. It’s ridiculously easy to impose a meaningless target like that (and “legally binding” on whom? Who pays if we fail to make it? Not the politicans whose fault it is, that’s for sure). What’s more tricky is to actually bring about the changes necessary to make that happen, and that’s what our leaders have absolutely failed to provide for.

I keep saying this, but the change needs to come centrally, from the politicians – any minor savings some of us make as individuals only scratches the surface. It makes little different to save a bit of electrcity while that electrcity comes from dirty power sources. The politicans have got to sort this one. The problem is that “it doesn’t play well with the voters” and solving it takes longer than a political party’s five year term in office. So instead of forcing through the necessary changes they mess around with imposing meaningless targets while imposing now way of acheiving those targets.

All very dispiriting.

Most of the things on this site involve changing something minor which has a negligible effect on the world because it makes you feel a bit good. But once in a while you have an idea of how something a little bigger could be done and a positive change made. Mine was a plan to save about 5 black binbags full of other little plastic bags (13,500 of them to be precise), and now I find myself waging some sort of crusade at the Council about it. The below email thread (including my increasingly bitchy responses) may amuse you.

(the rest of this post may look long but really it’s just the stupid way it’s laid out)

The following information was submitted by web form:
enquirytype: Comment
previouscontact: No
age: 25to39
disability: No
sexuality: Hetro
ethnicity: whitebritish

Hello. I volnteered to help run the half marathon yesterday. Well done to all involved, it’s quite an achievement. I have a small comment which I really hope could be implemented for next year, and I’d really appreciate being put in touch with the relevant person.

I, together with about 20 others, spent 2 and a half hours unwrapping medals. The amount of packaging on the medals was ridiculous, and together we ended up filling around 20 black bin bags with other little plastic bags – all straight to landfill! Someone who had done the same thing last year said it was worse this year than last.

Apart from the fact that 50 man hours were wasted, there is really no need for each medals to be inside 4 plastic bags. When ordering the medals next year, please could we specify to the Chinese manufacturer (they were made in China) that they should not be packaged in this way? It would save a lot of wasted time and wasted plastic.

Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:09:57 +0100
From: georgette.vanhoof@bristol.gov.uk
To: Moderngreenollie
CC: marion_britton@yahoo.co.uk
Subject: Medals packaging Re: Comment

Hi Ollie

Can I start by thanking you for helping the swim club volunteers give out the medals at the Bristol half marathon this year – I have also copied in Marion Britton who usually co-ordinates the swim club volunteers but was not available on this occasion.

Although I agree there does seem to be an excess of packaging around the medals and I will certainly query this with the supplier – I just wanted to let you know that some of it is essential. Aside from the potential issue of the ribbons becoming entangled with each other if medals weren’t separated by packaging, they are also packed to stop the damage to the soft metal if they rub against each other in transit. I am also assuming that some of the further packaging is to limit movement in transit, discourage theft and enable quick counting of the number supplied.

Many thanks for your comments and if the supplier has any particular points to make I will pass these on to yourself and Marion for future information.

Georgette
Race Director

>> Moderngreenollie 22/09/2009 18:21 >>>

Hi Georgette

Thanks for the email.

Of course you are right that some of the packaging is necessary. But I am sure that not all of it is! For example, you don’t need to put the ribbon AND the medal each in separate bags. One would do for the two together. And that change alone would save 13,500 little plastic bags.

Sorry about the appallingly dreary nature of this email. I know I should have better things to do, but 5 minutes writing this is nothing compared to the 2.5 hours I spent unpacking those bastards.

Ollie

Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:35:17 +0100
From: georgette.vanhoof@bristol.gov.uk
To: Moderngreenollie; marion_britton@yahoo.co.uk
Subject: RE: Medals packaging Re: Comment

Hi Ollie
Still waiting for the supplier to come back to me but I think the medals arrive in bags from China and the ribbons are then added in the UK – hence the 2 bags.
Many thanks
Georgette

From: Moderngreenollie
To: georgette.vanhoof@bristol.gov.uk; marion_britton@yahoo.co.uk
Subject: RE: Medals packaging Re: Comment
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:20:59 +0000

Hi Georgette. Thanks so much for your quick reply. Really sorry to labour the point, but if that is the case, and the medals really do come from China in bags, and then are opened up in the UK, and ribbons are added (Are they really? That seems quite labour intensive!) there’s still no need to put them back inside 2 more bags. One bag would do.

Ollie

From: Moderngreenollie
Subject: RE: Medals packaging Re: Comment
To: georgette.vanhoof@bristol.gov.uk, marion_britton@yahoo.co.uk
Date: Sunday, 8 November, 2009, 13:06

Hi Georgette

I wondered if the supplier had come back to you on the below yet? It does seem to me that it would be a real shame if nothing were done about this in time for next year.

Cheers

Ollie

Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2009 18:42:46 +0000
From: marion_britton@yahoo.co.uk
Subject: RE: Medals packaging Re: Comment
To: Moderngreenollie
CC: georgette.vanhoof@bristol.gov.uk

Hi Ollie

Bristol Central Swimming Club have been issuing the medals for a few years now and are quite happy with the way they are packaged and have no problem with opening them up. I know the packaging seems excessive, but it does prevent the medal ribbons from getting knotted up.

Regards
Marion Britton

From: Moderngreenollie
To: marion_britton@yahoo.co.uk
CC: georgette.vanhoof@bristol.gov.uk
Subject: RE: Medals packaging Re: Comment
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:49:20 +0000

Nice one Marion. It’s bad for the environment, so I don’t think that whether the Swiming Club is happy with that or not really makes much difference.

I quite agree some packaging is necessary to stop the medals getting tangled although you don’t need 2 bags per medal to achieve that. Also, once the medals are unwrapped they actually don’t get very tangled anyway, so is it really such a problem? I know you weren’t there this year Marion but some of your colleagues did mention that it was much worse this year than in previous years.

No doubt this will sound catty, but my experience of this year was that the Swimming Club actually did a relatively small amount of unwrapping, and then mainly did the “fun” bit of handing the medals to competitors, while the other volunteers (who were more numerous anyway) mainly did the boring bit of unwrapping the things. If that’s what usually happens then I’m not surprised the Swimming Club is quite happy with the arrangement, but either way it doesn’t affect the fact that:
a) a large amount of plastic is being wasted totally unnecessarily, and
b) so is the time of a large number of volunteers which could be put to beter use and
c) that could be changed or reduced really quite easily.

This is a small change which would be easy to make so I hope your comment doesn’t put Georgette off making an improvement and saving time and the environment.

Regards

Ollie

This sort of scheme makes me rub my fairtrade-hemp-clad thighs in delight. And I’m not being sarky here – I salivate with delight when I read that we’re considering MASSVE engineering projects like this.

Admittedly, I am very sceptical about wind power. The wind doesn’t always blow, and when it does it blows in the wrong places (you lose a lot of energy transmitting energy from the middle of the north sea to London). And I don’t like the subsidy that this costly unreliable technology requires and gets from the government (read, the taxpayer). £125bn used to be a lot of money once upon a time, but not these days.

But I love the idea of stiumulting our engineering industry,creating jobs, and getting to a position where our energy prices aren’t reliant on the whims of OPEC or on Russian gas prices.

Bet it never gets off the drawing board Ho hum.

This article complains about how we throw away loads of wood every year and it goes to landfill. It made me smile, because it reminded me of Kirk and my scheme to save the planet – bury-a-pencil.com. Pencils are made out of wood (carbon) and graphite (even more carbon). So it would be a good thing if we buried them in the ground to take them out of the carbon cycle. Buryapencil.com was going to be set up to allow people to pay us a pound to buy a pencil from a shop and then bury it for them. I never got round to setting up the paypal link though.

I still think bury-a-pencil is an excellent idea, especially if they are really sharp pencils because then they are easy to bury merely by pushing them into the ground. And the more pencils you bury the more likely it is they will get deep enough to get out of the carbon cycle. Home carbon sequestration – technology of the future. Must set up that website…

Bit of a worthy one, this, but I don’t think you can argue. If there were just one green thing I would change it would be the destruction of the rainforest. Not because I could give two hoots about endangered species and that – but because disafforestation accounts for one third of our carbon emissions.

I urge any readers to sign up to the Prince’s Rainforest Project, who are attempting to “demonstrare enormous public support for action to stop deforestation. The deadline is Monday November 9th.” Sign up, (and sign your mates up) to demonstrate your enormous support here.

It’s shame they’ve got Tracey Emin on board though, who for my money is among the worst people ever. If I had the choice of saving the rainforest and seeing Emin’s life work (together will all record of all her public pronoucements, ever) go up in a thick black smoke, well, I just don’t think I know which I’d go for.