21 December 2006

Swimming

A while since the last update because we've been in Amsterdam, which is sinking. You had better see it while it lasts. It's useful to think of the sea level being a meter or two higher than it is now and thinking about what that would mean for a place ... but then again people are quite resourceful, perhaps they'll figure out ways to hold back the flood.
Today's news comes from China, where green energy sometimes means big deals for wealthy Western bankers.

15 December 2006

Good King Burning Arse

You (and everyone else) missed yesterday's debate about domestic carbon emissions in the Commons. The most interesting tidbit is down near the bottom where Lib Dem MP Martin Horwood mocks a poem that the government has allegedly come up with to demonstrate the effects of climate change on Christmas. Quoting now:

Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen
Sunbathers lay round about
Tanned and crisp and even
Brightly shone the moon that night
With mosquitoes cruel
When a poor man came in sight
Malaria killed his mule

Rubbish poetry or carol or whatever but probably the best thing to come out of the Blair junta in quite some time. Unfortunately a quick search only comes up with this error page and Horwood is vauge about its origins. Any help from DEFRA? Send me a working link if you find it.

13 December 2006

Lil doggies

Much play given to the UN report on livestock and greenhouse gases (btw check out the scot-themed comments. My favourite near-incomprehensible: 'The heidline, for wance, is bang oan! Guff, jist Guff!').
And the NY Times is discovering how business is figuring out how to make money off climate change. I don't want to gloat or anything but this wouldn't be a story in Europe - it's yesterday's news. The homeland has a lot to do to catch up but before you go off America-bashing (or accusing me of doing the same), remember we're all in this together - and we need the US to catch up and quick. Plus the US economy is much more flexible - once peeps get their heads around it, my prediction is that they'll leave Europe in the dust from an effeciency standpoint. And probably make a lot of money besides.
In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert adds a bit of colour to the Supreme Court case mentioned earlier (Massachusettes v. Environmental Protection Agency). I'm becoming a fan of Kolbert; someone can buy me her book for xmas.

When a story is a story, and when it's not a story.

I recently wrote more about the extreme end of the direct action environmental movement in the UK for The First Post. The peg for the story was intially going to be Gordon Brown's decision to increase road taxes for the biggest-polluting vehicles, a development that was widely trailed.
Unfortunately the leaks turned out to be, well, if not wrong, then a little bit, uh, wrong. Pundits deducted that Brown is still testing the limits of political acceptability of green taxes. After all, in 2000, truckers blockaded the roads to protest at rises in fuel duty. Brown gave in on that one and froze it - only to unfreeze it last week. So far, rebellion has not broken out on the streets of London, or anywhere else in the country.

06 December 2006

London's sinking

Here we go ... check out the soundtrack to the era of climate change, playing now in a financial district near, uh, me. Here's a review. And unrelated, though from the same edition of the Independent, questions raised about the Green Belt. At the end it mentions that 'climate change will worsen if the countryside disappears under concrete.' That's a scientific reason against building on the ring of green that surrounds British cities. But here's where artists tend to be out in front of us workaday journalists. The 'idea' of a Green Belt orders urban society in this country to a profound degree. It creates a limit and a boundary to cities. You wouldn't put that in a news article, though, the editor would laugh (with some good reason). Thus: bring on the opera.