Biofuels: It seemed like a good idea at the time

I’m sad about biofuels. It just sounded like such a great idea didn’t it? We don’t need to dig oil out of the ground, let’s grow it instead! Plants could be a renewable source of energy, hooray! (I also got excited at university about the prospect of freakish plastic-producing GM crops – fields growing yoghurt pot ingredients instead of big horrible polluting factories.)

But the flaws with biofuels are becoming too big to ignore.

Let’s grow fuel instead of food. Oops, now there’s no food. Or not enough to stop spiralling food prices. And the glaring problem that biofuels are a pretty rubbish alternative to oil – considering that producing biofuels is very thirsty in terms of energy, particularly in terms of manufacturing fertilisers and pesticides to keep up crop yields. The rising prices for both food and biofuels are a great incentive for developing countries to cut down more rainforest. Ah, weren’t we trying to stop all that? (Good summary by Jeffrey A McNeely is chief scientist of IUCN, World Conservation Union here.)

It’s just a horrible big circle that brings you back to the problem of our excessive energy use in the first place.

In a brilliant fudge, the UK today said it would slow down introducing biofuels, while still actually introducing them, after a cautious review by renewable energy big-wig Professor Ed Gallagher.

The Global Forest Coalition picked up on Gallagher’s support for second-generation biofuels, which it says will still have an effect on food supplies and encourage deforestation. UK’s Biofuel Watch maintains “agrofuels” are not sustainable.

The biofuels debate just goes to show there aren’t quick-fix solutions to climate change. And that we can’t combat consumerism with green consumerism. Green cars are better than dirty, gas-guzzlers. Even better is living so you don’t have to drive miles to work, to the shops and so on. But now I’m sounding like a terrible hippy.

Greening Sainsbury's

Sainsbury’s "take an old bag shopping" campaign has already been criticised for being sexist and oldist. Now it seems it is just a sop to green sentiment.

Going to the supermarket this evening I noticed I’d been awarded an extra point on Sainsbury’s Nectar loyalty award scheme because I reused a plastic bag. But does Sainsbury’s honestly think this is an incentive?



A quick look at what Nectar points will earn you suggests not. One Nectar point will buy you 1/1400th of Coldplay’s new CD. If you want to save up for two bottles of white wine you would need to reuse a plastic bag every day for 10 years. To earn a Sainsbury’s restaurant voucher, you would have to reuse between 13,000 and 21,000 plastic bags.


Real incentives could play a role in changing behaviour. Fresh & Wild, which was recently bought by Wholefoods, refunds customers 5 pence for every reused bag. Not a fortune, but perhaps enough to make people think twice. Experience in Ireland shows that small fines can also work.

But with it's paltry "benefits" for reusing plastic bags Sainsbury's is hoping it can be seen as promoting green lifestyles without making any real commitment to doing so.

Tropical Disease Warning for a Hotter, Wetter Europe

Think climate change - think extreme weather like floods, droughts and hurricanes. But now Europeans are talking up another threat that could be equally dramatic – the coming of tropical diseases, aided by changing climates and globalization. More.

This came up when I visited the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm. With an LED display showing how close Europe was to potential life-threatening disease outbreaks and a world map on the wall with flags marking current disease hotspots, it was the closest I'll ever come to real-life War Games.

A couple of friends of mine have pointed out that animal diseases are also spreading as the climate changes. Bluetongue used to be found only in the Mediterranean during the summer months, but came to the UK for the first time last year. Bluetongue's an insect-borne viral disease of mainly of sheep and less frequently of cattle. (Thanks Ben and Sam.)

It'll never work, Sean

There was a reggae song on the radio a little while ago: “You're way too beautiful girl, That's why it'll never work,” it starts.

With a couple of splashes of vocoda and a baseline borrowed from Stand by Me, Sean Kingston’s Beautiful Girls sounds quite jolly, until the next line – “You'll have me suicidal, suicidal, When you say it's over.”

Suicidal? Are you sure? Kingston doesn’t sound suicidal, he sounds bored and a bit whiny.

The use of the word suicidal annoys me in so many ways. I hate the casual way he just throws it in, like it’s a choice between that and nipping round the shops for a pint of milk. It’s so bloody unsubtle. If he really were suicidal he wouldn’t be saying so, neither would he be listening to Ben E King. It annoys me that it makes me come over all PC – but I think it really cheapens the word.

It also gets to me because it’s been done so much better – even Celine Dion sounds moving: “I can’t live, if living is without you.”

But for “you’re so wonderful I’d rather die than be on my own” sentiment, the bittersweet Smiths do it best: “If a double-decker bus, crashes into us. To die by your side, well the pleasure, the privilege is mine."

42 days - to my MP

Dear Martin Linton MP,

Today is the day of the crucial vote on extending the limit that terrorist suspects can be held without charge to 42 days.

I am making last-minute appeal to you not to vote with the Government, because I think this move would mark a further deterioration of the civil liberties of everyone in this country.

I fully understand the need to protect the UK from terrorism, but holding people without charge is against their fundamental human rights. If a British citizen was locked up in another country with no charge being made we would expect the UK Government to intervene, and yet this is what the Government is proposing for Britain.

According to Liberty, the UK already has the longest period of pre-charge detention in the western world, and there is no evidence that a further extension will make us any safer.

I would also ask you to bear in mind Liberty’s concern that the Home Secretary will be able extend pre-charge detention in individual cases beyond 28 days without any evidence of a genuine emergency situation; that parliamentary oversight will be weak, as MPs are not allowed to vote when powers are activated; and that judicial oversight will be inadequate as courts will not be able to review the decision to extend pre-charge detention.

I agree with Liberty that an extension of the period that suspects can be held without charge from the current period of 28 days will not necessarily make us safer. Indeed, it risks one section of society – namely the Muslim population who are thought to pose the greatest terrorist threat – feeling unduly victimised.

Furthermore, the Government’s concessions, such as the proposal of compensation for suspects, should not distract from the true intent of the bill. The extension of detention without charge to 42 days is too important for Labour MPs to vote with the Government to state their confidence in the Prime Minister.

Liberty believes there are realistic alternatives to extending pre-charge detention, such as removing the ban on the use of intercept (phone-tap) evidence, allowing post-charge questioning in terror cases and hiring more interpreters to speed up pre-charge questioning and other procedures.

If the police have a good reason to suspect someone of terrorism, let them charge that person. If the police cannot make a good case that someone is a terrorist during a reasonable time limit, then they should let the suspect go. There is no reason why the person cannot be kept under surveillance, but we simply cannot lock people up for long periods of time without saying why.

I sincerely hope you take on board my views as a constituent and that you choose to vote against the extension of pre-charge detention to 42 days.

Yours sincerely,

Ailis Kane

Book recycling

I recently had a great success recycling some of my old books by posting a list of them on Facebook and asking my friends to take their pick.

ReadItSwapIt is a website that helps readers give away books to willing homes and earn a couple of titles for their own collections. Not so great in terms of reducing the number of books on your shelves, but a great way to reduce the consumption of books in general. I’m pleased to be able to post the Facebook rejects on there and hope to pick up a couple of books for my upcoming hols.

Excellent ideas for cycle geeks

What a great idea - a planter you can stick in your front garden and lock your bike to. My front hall is so grubby from bike grime and difficult to negotiate because of the bike. And it combines my two of my favourite things - plants and bikes.

Meanwhile in Stockholm I came across this lovely basket. Annoyingly it's loads more expensive on UK websites than those in the US, don't understand that given that we're closer to Sweden. In the end I decided that my very lovely but functional-looking bike might look a bit silly with this attached. That said, I love useful things that are pretty too.

Also, what about green chain oil? My bone-dry, rusting chain earnt me a telling off from the bike shop last time I took it in, so I have a particular need. According to its inventors it doesn't contain any oil-derived hydrocarbons, but its exact formula is a closely guarded secret...

References to explicit substance use common in popular music

Approximately one-third of popular songs include reference to explicit drug, alcohol or tobacco use, varying widely by musical genre, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. See link.

Not saving the world, saving myself

The problem with the phrase “save the world” is that it highlights the chasm between individual actions and the magnitude of problems facing the country. It’s easier to bury your head in the sand than “save the planet”. It’s easy to consign your empty beer bottle to disappear among the countless tonnes already dumped in landfill and instead of taking it home to recycle. Mentally conjuring up the display of night lights across the country it might seem pointless paying an extra ten pounds on your electricity bill a month for renewable energy. And why shouldn’t you join the thousands of commuting workers in their cars?

The same goes for language like “it’s not easy been green”. It’s all about depriving yourself, going back to rationing, struggle that kind of thing. It just doesn't sound as fun or interesting as a carbon-heavy business-as-usual lifestyle. If envinronmentalists truly want to promote change, rather than isolating themselves in ecofriendly bubbles and bemoaning the selfishness of the vast majority of humanity, they need the language that makes an environmental way of life seem attractive.

For individuals, living ethically may be all about taking personal responsibility. But its difficult to see it working on a larger scale. However, it's very convenient for governments to place the emphasis on personal responsibility, rather than action across society, because it allows them to talk green without having to take any steps towards real change. It allows them to place a premium on domestic recycling, while businesses are free to send masses of material to landfill.

It allows Brown to fiddle around with the idea of banning supermarkets from handing out plastic bags, despite the very small impact this would have on the UK's carbon footprint. (Although it would be a powerful symbolic signal.) The Environment Agency last year asked a panel of experts to give the top 50 things that would make most difference to the environment - not using plastic bags didn't figure at all.

George Marshall of the Climate Outreach Information Network says the contribution of plastic bags to climate change is “vanishingly small”. This puts into perspective VW’s arresting dancing plastic-bags advert which says driving its car could reduce your carbon footprint the equal of recycling 25,000 plastic bags.

Marshall is great on the language of climate change - a powerful psychological deterrent to action: One psychological response to climate change is to find language and images that create distance– to suggest that it will affect someone else in the future. So the talk and images are of ‘climate’ not ‘weather’, polar bears not hedgehogs, African children not our own.

See his take on the phrase Save the Planet here.

Patio heaters no more at B and Q

Hearing that B&Q has pledged to end sales of patio heaters pleases me on two accounts.

Firstly, great news that it will be more difficult for people to buy a product that is so patently wasteful of energy. (Although the problem with this point of view is all about civil liberty, the unattractiveness of banning eco-friendly choices and smug eco-martyrs.)

Secondly, it could discourage my neighbours from their patio heater-fuelled parties of talking loudly in posh voices and playing Red Hot Chilli Peppers till dawn.

Boo to Ken

We need more cycle racks, not more councils impounding our lovely bicycles.

See London clamps down on cyclists - Ken Livingstone has fought for low emissions in the capital, so why are the authorities now targeting bicycles? (Guardian unlimited.)

London: greyness and light

Sometimes I get a bit fed up with the greyness of London, the rude, unfriendly people, the horrible traffic and the rain. (Especially in January.)

But some days it just seems brilliant.

Last night on the bus, London was divided. I couldn’t read my paper because a huge, slumbering guy behind me was blaring out R&B from his jacket pocket. There was nothing to see from the window but the concrete of Stockwell. It was an annoying Sunday night journey, slow and everyone on separate journeys.

Then a group of people on the back of the bus starting singing. It was a beautiful song in an African language. They were forgetting the words, and laughing through it. It was a beautiful lilting melody. The slumbering guy came to and turned off the music from his phone. They sang louder, and we all sat there listening.

Getting off the bus and walking over Waterloo bridge with the wind hitting the side of my face, the lights were lovely. Purples and peaches lit up the National Theatre. Lovely blue blobs adorning the Hungerford bridge. The yellow glow of parliament beyond that on the right, the blinking pyramid of Canary Wharf off in the distance to the left. The view was only marred by the London Eye, which was flashing psychedelically.

Heading towards London Bridge on the South Bank, the trees sparkled blue and white. Rather than being lit from above the benches along there have lighted underskirts. “Like wideboys’ cars,” said Tom. “Or pimp my bench.”

On the shore of the river, by Gabriel’s Wharf, a group of crusties were sitting around a fire on a sofa moulded from the sand. Further on was a sand “angel of the south” surrounded by flickering nightlights in reclaimed plastic bottles.

Along the way we had an impromptu tutorial on playing the berimbau (a musical bow) from a busker with dreads, who made a wonderful cacophony with the pitch-bent twanging of his bow which he accompanied by shaking a rattle and singing.

Coming back the same way we went past the mini beach party again and as Sunday faded towards its end we were in time to see the rising tide crumbling away a huge rounded skull. Thoughts of the impermanence of beauty, the power of nature and the inevitability of time were brought back to reality by a hippy emerging from weeing in the shadows.

Thrill seekers

This week a York academic Professor Trevor Sheldon likened staying in an NHS hospital to bungee jumping, because up to 10% of hospital stays resulted in some kind of mishap.

I wonder if this says more about how safe bungee jumping has become, or perhaps hints at a new thrill seeking pasttime for middle Englanders.

Now there’s no need to try an extreme sport like snowboarding, or throwing yourself out of a plane. Why not get yourself down to your local NHS hospital. Wonder where the MRSA is lurking? So do the staff. Their guess is as good as yours, and if its smeared around your bed waiting to infect your open wound, chances are the cleaners will miss it too.

Trouble with your kidneys? Try having one of them removed. Just hope it’s the right one.

Time to save the world again

The Environment Agency has asked an expert panel to list the top 50 things that will save the planet. I’m pleased to see that quite a few of the top priorities are actions that decision-markers need to take, rather than making us green people feel even more guilty. We need more government action on this! Also see Leo Hickman in the Guardian, who assesses whether they got their priorities right.

The top 20: What the panel prescribes
1 Dramatically improve the energy efficiency of electrical goods
2 Religious leaders to make the environment a priority for their followers
3 Encourage the widespread use of solar power throughout the world
4 Secure a meaningful post-Kyoto treaty on reducing the emissions that contribute to global warming
5 Encourage households to generate much more of their own power
6 Introduce tax incentives to "buy green"
7 Tackle the rapid growth in aviation emissions
8 Wean ourselves off dependency on petroleum
9 Encourage individuals to buy less non-essential "stuff "
10 Dramatically improve public transport
11 Aim for a "zero waste" culture
12 Install "smart energy" meters in all homes
13 Introduce a measure of economic success that includes the environment
14 Fully harness Britain's huge potential for generating renewable energy
15 Seek alternative, less damaging sources for biofuels
16 Bury carbon dioxide from power stations underground
17 Encourage hydrogen fuel cell technology in cars
18 Implement government policies to control global population growth
19 Reach international agreement on preserving rainforests
20 Create better incentives to improve energy efficiency in the home

I’m also getting worried about biofuels. The idea seems so nice. Petrol = bad, so let's turn plants into energy instead. But the benefits of biofuels may have been underestimated, and subsidies to produce biofuels is both creating an excess of bio-ethanol and skewing agriculture away from food production.

"The net greenhouse gas emissions of expensive European rapeseed oil-based diesel are a mere 13 per cent less than those of conventional diesel", says Martin Wolf in a thoughtful piece in the FT. I've also read in the Wall Street Journal that the biofuels gold rush is threatening the last bits of existing prairie-land in the US. Collecting bio-gas from landfills intuitively seems like a better idea, but don't know how this compares.

Chaos fans

Fantastic site by The Institute for Figuring - "an organisation dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts". Including fractal crochet!

Climate change: little things won't make all the difference

Green tips are all well and good, but are they just a salve for our conscience? Can they really make an appreciable impact on climate change?

No, says George Marshall, an environmental campaigner type who is founder of the Oxford-based Climate Outreach & Information Network.

This is a fantastic article of his about how there can’t be any real action against climate change without political change.

So forget about those top ten eco tips you've been following (or Wandworth Council's top 32).

Forget recycling carrier bags: "Their contribution to climate change is vanishingly small. The average Brit consumes 134 plastic bags a year, resulting in just two kilos of the typical 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide he or she will emit in a year. That is one five thousandth of their overall climate impact," says Marshall.

Or turning TVs off standby: "The electricity to keep a television in standby mode for a whole year leads to 25 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide. It’s more than plastic bags, but still very marginal: one fifth of one percent of average emissions."

Or even boiling the correct amount of water in the kettle: "According to the government’s own figures even if you are constantly boiling full kettles this will save all of 100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year, less than one percent of average emissions."

Well, actually don't forget about doing all these things. But don't expect them to save the world.

And be aware that thinking you are eco-good could allow you to turn a blind eye to the much more carbon-heavy lifestyle choices.

But the point really is that the burden of slowing down carbon consumption cannot be carried by individuals alone. It needs collective action. And what is really sinister about the government offering us "eco tips" is that it gives us the idea that they are proactively helping the environment, when they are actually foisting the blame onto us and sweeping things like aviation taxes back under the carpet.

"No major social or economic change has ever arisen from volunteerism and the suggestion that it can is a deliberate strategy to prevent any real challenge to business as usual."

Links:
* Abolish plastic bags - an admirable aim - plastic bags as rubbish are ugly and the production of a new plastic bag for every time we shop is wasteful but the campaigners energy could be better directed elsewhere, says Marshall. Although I have to admit I'm really attracted by plastic bag crochet. Pretty non-plastic bags that encourage you to shop green by giving you a discount in certain shops.

* Marshall has written a book called Carbon Detox. "Don't despair and don't give up," he concludes as he tries to combat "Eco denial".

* Eco blogs

Urban wildlife watching

I went to Clapham Common yesterday and the common-or-garden mallards I saw were outnumbered by: two herons, two cormorants, a solitary moorhen, batches of coots, two Greylag geese, a flock of Canada geese (startling runners by trying to take off in front of them), a jay and a wagtail.

I have re-reminded myself that coots are the ones with a white face and moorhens the ones with red beaks (left). I'm sure I will forget this again instantly.

The angling pond is apparently full of toxic blue-green algae, but it doesn't seem to be doing the birds any bad.

Amy, Amy, Amy

Global warming? David Cameron’s new Conservatives with balls? The deterioration of the social fabric of Britain? No, I’m going to add to the litres of ink already spent over Amy Winehouse.



Firstly, a disclaimer. I think Amy Winehouse is a fantastic musical talent, and if I could listen to Back to Black back to back all day I would.

It’s more-or-less a given that any sensible human being does not want to see someone with so much potential going mad on drugs.

But should we really be so critical of her drug taking when it goes hand in hand with her music? As her friend/producer Mark Ronson was quoted in the press this week: “That's Amy — taking her pain and turmoil and making it into the music we enjoy.”

I can’t stand the Daily Mail-esque moralising over Amy Winehouse. (See this one. Thanks for the marvellous insight that "it would be a tragic waste if her wild lifestyle destroyed a brilliant singing career". Actually I think most right wing commentators would be pleased for another told-you-so lecture on the evils of drugs.)

If her music comes from the same place as her more destructive behaviour then it’s hypocritical to blame her for it.

I think we should leave Amy Winehouse alone, unless we want to produce a million James Blunts. Please no.

We need people to live on the edge and to feel the emotions we are too busy to take notice of. The Amys of this world remind us that there is life outside a cosy suburban workaday existence. But it’s an uncomfortable place that perhaps we don’t want to visit too much. Poor old Amy has to live there all the time.

This article on the Guardian arts blog has come nearest to my thoughts on Amy.

"Every culture needs a totemic figure who is prepared to go into the wilder terrain of subtance usage, a place where the rest of us don't want to or don't need to go. And there is something defiantly totemic about (Amy) Winehouse. The tall figure, the tattoos carved into the arms, the boldly painted face, the huge pile of hair - they all resemble some fabulous totem pole.

"And the great, yodelling, soulful voice brings us news of a place we don't want to go to ourselves."

Crazy Catholic ranting

This is really crazy.

Mozambique's Roman Catholic archbishop has accused European condom manufacturers of deliberately infecting their products with HIV "in order to finish quickly the African people".

Some conspiracy theories are easy enough to dismiss, but the ones about HIV can have a far more deadly effect, says Priya Shetty in her Guardian blog. She points out that some HIV conspiracy theorists are key political figures such as Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, South Africa's health minister.

Proscrastinating

I’m officially “thinking about thinking about” a change of career.

But before I can move onto actually thinking, I have a number of essential tasks I need to get out of the way. Such as:

Defrosting the freezer
Defrosting the fridge
Cleaning the cooker
Cleaning out the grotty trays of bathroom stuff in the bathroom

But damn, I’ve done all of these this weekend. So now I need to move onto the more endless tasks…

Hacking the Triffid-like Wysteria
Putting plants in pots, doing bulbs for spring
Going through ten years worth of photos
Adding all the CDs I own onto iTunes

And if things get really bad:

Putting all my books and CDs into alphabetical order (no I’ll never do that)
Painting – the hallway, the front room, the bedroom, the backroom
Cleaning the carpets, cleaning the rugs
Chucking away old clothes and general rubbish
Finding piles of paper, looking through them, putting them back again
Cutting things out of newspapers, putting them in a new pile, forgetting to read them
Thinking of creative things to do, doing something else
Writing letters to aunties, old friends and school teachers
Baking cookies, making more mess to tidy up later
Treading water
Achieving a Zen-like state through continual housework

I could spend years just writing the list. Who has time to think about the important things in life?