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?

A clean slate

I’ve just wiped my iPod (after successfully transferring the tunes off it first, phew) and now I’m back to zero in my Most Played list.

I listened to so much Super Furry Animals about a year ago that nothing could replace them on my personal leader board. Haven’t listened to any SFA for, ooh, two weeks now. I look forward to seeing what I'm going to play to death next!

Current candidates include Ryan Adams, Amy Winehouse and Spoon.

This lunchtime, in between fighting off scraggy dogs for possesion of my dubious "chicken" sandwich and fending off offers from buff young men to lather me in suncream, I had a lovely time sitting in the sunny park enjoying the contrast with angry In Utero in my ears.

Who are you calling primitive?

Yes, I admit it. I'm only writing this post for the gratuitous coelacanth shot below. And the fact I need to write something because its very slow in the world of pharmaceutical news this week and I'm not used to being bored at work.

That aside some really quite interesting new research is out that challenges the notion of evolution as some sort of escalator of superiority.

Coelacanths are thought of as the original "living fossil", since the first living (well only recently dead) example was fished out of the Indian Ocean in East London in 1938. (That's East London, South Africa.) Previously, this group of lobe-finned fishes had only been known from the fossil record.

But new research suggests we shouldn't dismiss coelacanths as being primitive.

For some time now, scientists have hoped that examining the lobed fins of coelacanths and lung fishes would hint at how fishes' fins evolved into the limbs of the first land-dwelling vertebrates.

But now researchers from the University of Chicago say that the fins of living coelacanths are just too specialised, after discovering a new coelacanth fossil.

"Our fossil shows that what we've using to define a primitive state is actually very specialised," says lead author Matt Friedman. "It might give a deceptive view of what evolution was like for these fin skeletons.

"If you're going to figure out how limbs evolved you need to have a good idea about pre-conditions," he adds.

This is where the new fossil has helped. It shows that the ancestral pattern of lobed fins closely resembles the pattern in the fins of primitive living ray-finned fishes.

It challenges the idea of coelacanth as a "living fossil" because the fishes have continued changing since coelacanths were fossilised, by continued evolution or random genetic drift, which surely must have happened in the 4 million years since coelacanths disappeared from the fossil record. Perhaps the lovely term of a lazarus species is more suitable.

It also reinforces the notion that every living thing adapts to its own niche, as Darwin tells us.

So a duck-billed platypus is only inferior to humans in our minds. A duck-billed platypus is perfectly happy is its own niche and has no desire for consciousness or opposable thumbs. (And that's the point, the idea of a platypus being happy or otherwise in this sense is a concept only we can think of.)

The identification of the first coelacanth's is a great tale of scientific discovery (see here) and is re-told in A Fish Caught in Time.