Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth

Friends of the Earth 2011 AGM - Review of the Year

2011-12-13T21:58:00.001Z

This isn't really us. We wouldn't have fitted into The Fleece, Bondgate Without if it was. But we do this thing each year of giving thanks to all the people who helped Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth spread the love. It's also really good for getting a few more vists to the blog. So if you've coming looking for Philip Angier or George Ellames, I'm afraid they aren't here. But you can find out about the nice things they did.

Community orchard
After years of to-ing and fro-ing and back again, we finally agreed a lease with Northumberland County Council for the patch of land between Glovers Green, Arkle Court, Fairfields and Coopers Close. Completing the 99-year lease in February, and holding a public meeting in early March, we planted in mid-March. Several of the trees were in intensive care through April as we got hit by drought, but most have made it through. We also held two more events - a tidying up session in July and apple day in October.

Thanks to the community orchard committee: Rachael Roberts, Paul Mills, Richard Starks, Sue Patience and Vickie Fyffe. Thanks to Ian Selby at Northumberland County Council, and to Anna Corbett and Pete Edge for all their tree-planting advice. Special thank you to the Swiss Family Swinbank: Martin, Karen, Jessica and Robert and vast numbers of assorted girl guides under Karen and Madeleine's supervision, as well as Madeleine's dog-poo spotting expertise. Thanks also to everyone who joined the community orchard, especially David and Moira Archer, Gail Dundas and Dawn Claxton who fed us, provided tea and water and let us use their toilets. Thanks to everyone else who planted: Peter Edge, Ruth Sanderson, Mick Townsend plus gals Lucy and Charlotte, Imogen and Dr Clare Mills, Angus Robson, Chris Waterston, Mark Hobrough, Jean Lovie, Rosalee Cook-Jury, Jessica's friend Amy and everyone I've forgotten. And only 1 injury on the initial planting and that was our health and safety rep, Uncle Paul.

Thanks also to Vickie and Mick for providing refreshments at event, and Bill for his incredible beer which brought the community around. Ongoing thanks to David Archer for constant use of his water, and to people who helped on subsequent events - Ruth Machen, Jean Lovie, Peter Harvey and Sheila Starks.

For living the orchard and helping to promote it to all the streets around: Richard, Paul, Ruth, and Jean and Bill's great work. And especial thanks to Rachael who got us to, er, fruition.

Films

Our films were going brilliantly until we realised we were doing wrong, so it only remains to say thanks for those who helped make them happen. Rachael for exotic ice creams, Bill for fantastic posters, all the people who showed those posters, especially Linda at Grannies, Yvonne at World of Difference, Vince at Alnwick Playhouse, Jean and David Lovie in their house and Ken MacDonald and Cath Young in their house. Thanks also to Sue Patience and Ian Macrae who did the setting up every month.

Special thanks to the very wonderful Liz Spence at St James, and to Martin Swinbank and Ruth Sanderson, who were the only people to hit a 100% attendance record. Thank you too to our excellent post-film speakers, Ken MacDonald and Steve Passey.

Bin stickering

2000 bins are now stickered in Alnwick with a reminder of what you can recycle in your bin. Recycling rates continue to progress without breaking through the barrier into real improvement.

Thanks to Alnwick Town Council for the money to pay for stickers, and to Bill Grisdale who made the money happen. And a long list of stickerers – Ruth, stickerer extraordinaire, Helen Sanderson, Susan Bell and Richard Starks, who completed the marathon south end of Alnwick, Chris Waterston, Paul Mills and Sue Patience.

Waste Lobbying

At our recycling day of action, Mick Townsend drew the short straw and donned the Dave Cameron mask whilst we posed in reflective jackets. Thanks to Mick, Sue and Rachael for donning the hi-vis, and getting 100 signed postcards in less than 1 hour, and to Bill for photographs. No thanks from the confused public to the Northumberland Gazette for running a photo of us dressed as binmen and David Cameron beside a story about bin stickers. Thanks to David Cameron for recycling each one and continuing to set the least demanding recycling targets in Europe.

Rachael Roberts = councillor

Although we don't wish to be party political, isn't it just bleedin great that we have a Green Party councillor? We've joined the modern world! And we've kept up Friends of the Earth representation on town council with 3 members (Rachael, Sue and Bill) as well as many crypto-greens. Thanks for all the covert support, Gordon.

Thanks for all the people who helped with the leaflet. Thanks for endorsements from Mayor Alan Symmonds (those chains suit you), Frank Lyford, Sue Wiltshire, Sue Bairstow and Christine Talbot. And thanks to Ruth Sanderson (who picked up the second injury of the year courtesy of a Tory dog in Allerburn Lea), Sue Bairstow, Richard Starks and Sue Wiltshire. Thanks to the people who voted for Rachael, and the people who said that they would vote for Rachael even they were too famous and influential to be seen doing so publicly

Neighbourhood Plan for Alnwick

Environmental infiltrators are involved in every step of the neighbourhood plan in which Alnwick is a front-running-dog for the twisted vision of Eric Pickles.

Thanks to Rachael for representing environmental groups, Sue for representing the young folks, and to David Lovie for being related to Jean and representing civic societies and heritage. This one will run.

Allotments

Rachael, Sue and Bill continue to attend the town council allotment sub-committee worrking group and all that sub-sub stuff. Bill Batey, town clerk, is bringing allotments back from the brink on Ratten Row and is sorting out the water supply. Still a bit of a waiting list though - contact Bill via the Alnwick Town Council website if you'd like to join it.

Food festival
Thank you to Philip Angier who believed we could be trusted to run a 3 gazebo installation and be a main attraction in the community market. Thanks to Sue for the amazing decor and bower, and to Philip for clearing it up (sorry Philip).

Thank you to our trio of lovely dynamic speakers from Newcastle University - Sharron Kuznesof, Carlo Leifert and group member Jan Deckers, who also wrote up an excellent report of the event. Thank you to Rachael for running the great Alnwick bake-off which ran through the day, and to Jean, Ruth and Richard, willing bakees. Thanks to John Hobrough for another glimpse into the secret life of bees, and thanks to little Hobroughs Sam and Mark for support.

Thank you finally to Bill and Sue for their rousing beers and wines finale, which got the biggest crowds of the day and the most requests for samples.

Also to the people who helped with the stall: Sue Bairstow for jam, snacks, Clare Mills for tea and hot water, Deb Still for exotic mushrooms which reeled people in and cookware, and Harry Henderson for mikes and blackboard.

Fuel poverty event and lobbying Ian Lavery
Rather less successful, this one. Thanks to Sue and to Marc Johnson for helping to promote the event and to Clare Mills for getting Sir Alan Beith to come. No thanks to Alan for leaving early and for being generally spineless and clueless about what he had already signed. Much more thanks to our other two speakers at the event, Rose Gilroy and Neveen Hamza from Newcastle University. Rose in particular gave a devastating account of why fuel poverty was for many people a life-or-death issue. What a shame Alan was already on the train home by the time she spoke.

We got to thank another MP, who wasn't our MP. We popped in on Ian Lavery's surgery at Choppington Welfare Club. Thanks Barbara Sexon for coming along, and thanks Ian for voting the right way in the committee meetings, unlike the government.

Heritage open days

Slightly more successfully, we had around 100 visitors over 4 days in 3 houses in Alnwick to demonstrate solar PV, solar thermal, insulation, wood burning stoves and green gardening. Thanks to Paul and Clare Mills, Martin and Karen Swinbank and Rachael Roberts for opening up.

Master composting training

We are master composters! Thanks to Sheila Johnson at Northumberland County Council for arranging to make it so. Thanks also to Anne Nagle from WRAP for the training, and to Barbara Sexon, Mick Townsend, Ruth and Helen Sanderson, Steve Passey and Rachael Roberts.

Thanks to the people who've booked us - John Hobrough at Warkworth Show, Ros Hoskin at Whittingham and Jen Homer at Rothbury. We remain available for advice, weddings and green burials.

Beach cleans

Especial thanks for Ruth Sanderson for suggesting this. It's quite taken off and not just because of the pub afterwards. Long may it continue as part of the spring through autumn calendar. Over the 4 cleans we've filled about 30 sacks of rubbish. More details of what we found. Even more details of what we found.

Thanks to: Paul, Sue, Ruth, Helen, Steve, Sue Bairstow, George Ellames, Ann and Brian Lowrie, Mick, Vickie, Mick's friend Neil, Kate Cairns and husband and family, Jean, and Rob and Sue Wiltshire.

Youth and education event

Thanks Jean for putting on a youth and education spectacular, and hosting Rachel Gibbons for the event. Thanks to Paul, Steve, Helen, Sue, Freya, Ellie Noble and Karen Swinbank.

Ellie and Karen have already held a sea-shore event for children at Ellingham School. Give me the child and I will give you the environmentalist. Or something. Thanks also to Rachel Gibbons for delivering the event.

Suma

The squeeze on local-shop-destroying-tax-dodging-union-busting-just-in-time-we're-only-hanging-disposable-bags-in-trees-because-that's-what-our-customers-want supermarkets continues. Already this year, we have kept £4200 out of their hands, and in the lovelier hands of a workers co-op outside Leeds and the co-operatives they buy from. Justin King is hurting. Big thanks to Ruth and Helen Sanderson, Steve Passey, Sue Patience, Bill Grisdale, Lindy and Paddy Conway, Alex Melville-Mason, Anne and Mike McPhun, Mark and Sam Hobrough, Harry Henderson, Deb Still and Lisa and Mike Bellamy.

North East Gathering

Way back we went to a North East Gathering. From what we remember, it was good. Thanks to Sue for getting us there in minibus, and to Ruth, Jean, Paul and Rachael for coming.

Churches newsletter

Thanks Jean for continuing to get the monthly newsletter out to all the churches and keeping our profile up with the faithful. We've seen improving links, with more of the recipients coming along to our events.

Chairing and Minuting and other help

Thanks to Steve for chairing 2 meetings, to Jean to minuting another 2, to Sue for doing both and for Helen to minuting another.

Blog
If you keep pumping it up, people keep stumbling on it and swiftly moving on, aghast.
Last year: 448 visitors, 698 views

This year: 685 visits, 939 views

Wassailing with Santa and his overheated reindeer

2011-12-13T20:43:00.000Z

Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth hold their Christmas event on Friday 16th December from 7.30pm at the Embleton Room, St James Church Centre, Pottergate, Alnwick. And we need your help, to drink 70 pints of mulled cider which has been brewing since apple day. A table with shared party food will be available, please bring a contribution. All welcome, whatever your involvement or attendance at previous events.

We're not film stars yet, because of a dispute between the film-makers and central Friends of the Earth. So instead we'll be showing a 30 minute film about a town in Greenland which is the fastest-warming place on earth and is trying to develop a tourist industry to capitalise. Jollier than it looks - Rudolph and Blitzer aren't featured, but polar bears living in waste tips are.

Plus look out for a discussion on how you can get involved in shaping the environmental vision for Alnwick - whether you live or work in, or just use, Alnwick.

November 2011 update

2011-12-13T20:37:00.002Z

This month's collection of recycled growth stimulants. Tree planting again, christmas party and biomass at Blyth.

1. Tree plant - Saturday 12th/Monday 14th November

As previously mentioned we are planting 105 (a mix of hawthorn, elder, crabapple, hazel and dog rose) for the Sure Start Centre on Howling Lane in Alnwick, on Saturday 12th November. We'll be starting at around 10.30am and carrying on until our backs hurt or it gets dark - probably the first. Although they are tiny trees we would really appreciate any help people can offer. We've have some gloves and tools, but it's always better if you can bring your own, in case.

If you can't make Saturday, or want to see the little baffled face of a small child as we ask them to hold a twig upright in a hole, or you just fancy getting your photo in the Gazette, we are having a follow-up on Monday 14th November from 10.45am-Noon with some of the SureStart mum and kid groups.

2. Film + Christmas do + Neighbourhood plan - Friday 16th December

Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth are now film stars. Sort of. We took part in the making of national Friends of the Earth's 40 year anniversary film, and within a 20 minute film there will be 4 minutes of material of us at Embleton Bay. That's a full 20%. Action shots of rubbish picking, windswept interviews on the beach and small children falling in the sea. Cinema gold. We will be showing this at 7.30pm on Friday 16th December at St James Centre, Pottergate, Alnwick, along with one other short film and an informal discussion on the Alnwick community plan and securing environmental groups' input (important when a recent Green Alliance report shows localism relegating climate change). To lubricate proceedings, we have 70 litres of cider from apple day. This counts as our Christmas do.

3. Biomass power station at Blyth

Having just seen off a coal-fired power station at Cambois, North Blyth is now being offered a biomass power station, using imported wood. This will means 5000 tonnes of wood being burnt per day, transported in 62 trucks per day. Zero carbon! There are also no current plans to capture the heat from the power station, simply to fire it up a chimney. 18,000 hectares of plantation would be needed to feed the power station, enough land to feed 70,000 people. Hmmm, how much have food prices risen already? Biomass often leads to increases in particulates, and Blyth already breaches recommended levels. Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth will be supporting the campaign against the power station. You can fill in the developer RES's own survey to say what you think of the proposal, and read the briefing from Biofuelwatch, which has lots of other ideas for action.

4. Events

A special plug to group member Jan Deckers, who is organising the 1 day conference on 2nd December 09.00-17.30 Animal Ethics and Sustainable Food Policy - A 'Minding Animals International' Pre-Conference at Baddiley-Clark Building, Newcastle University. It's free!

Not only that, but also...

Saturday 19th November 1-6pm, Newcastle - Vertical garden workshop - make a no-soil vertical garden and have a look at how anyone in Newcastle could make one using locally sourced materials. Cheap, creative solutions. £10 entry
Monday 21st November 7-9pm, Newcastle - Mary Mary, quite contrary, how will your garden grow? Phosphorus and potassium shortages and rising food prices. Free.
Tuesday 29th November - 5.30-6.30pm, Newcastle - Sustainable consumption, oxymoron or opportunity . Free
Wednesday 30th November - 10.30-3.30 - Living with floods: shared experiences from the North of England. Bringing together the public (especially the young, scientists and teachers with the aim of improving communication on how to respond better to future floods. Free.
Saturday 3rd December - London March - Stand up for climate justice - assemble at noon - Free (kettling costs extra)
Wednesday 22nd February - Ouseburn Farm, Newcastle - Making local food work - legal training - Free

5. Actions

Please complete these - they have not been scientifically proven to always work. On the plus side, they take a total of 1 minute.

Stop rule changes to allow train fares to rise by 28%

Demand public inquiry into Big 6 energy firms and support community microgeneration

6. Reads

Energy saving trust briefing on the recent 'consultation' on the feed in tariff.

WWF say that we can supply 60% of our energy from renewables by 2030 (without biomass at Blyth)

Durham University say that the UK must prepare for extreme weather and ageing population, according to the University of Durham.

7. Christmas ideas

For the geek in your life - new edition of the game Fate of the World - Tipping Point. You are in charge of a fictional international organisation managing global environmental, technological and social policies. The new edition includes new scenarios, and additions to the game play such as dealing with mass migration, trying to implement positive environmental policies in the face of skeptics. Drawing upon scientific data, the game implements the most likely positive or negative effect of each of the players' decisions.

For the scrooge in your life - Ecobond Two from Ecotricity. Paying 6% coupon each year for 4 years - extra 0.5% for Ecotricity customers. Sounding mighty fine, although this does not constitute financial advice.

8. Next meeting - AGM

Our next meeting - Tuesday 6th December at 7.30pm - note earlier start time - is an AGM. This is much the same as a regular meeting but with a report and roll-call of people involved in all the fantastic things we've done. The Fleece, on Bondgate Without, as usual. All welcome.

9.Endpiece

What the future used to look like - homes in Nottingham.

October 2011 update

2011-10-16T20:04:00.004+01:00

This month - apple day, tree planting at the Sure Start centre, Druridge Bay beach clean - pretty much your standard environmental stash.

1. Apple day at the Bullfield community orchard

On Sunday 23rd October - 10am-3pm (setting up from 9am) thousands of apples will be chopped and pressed to make fresh apple juice and cider. We don't have many apples in the orchard yet, so please bring along your spare apples to add to the pot and screw top containers to take home some juice and store the cider. Windfalls welcome! We'll be fermenting some of the juice so that we can hold an orchard Christmas event – so we want as many apples as we can get hold of. Everyone welcome, whether you have apples to spare or not. There will be apple themed games and a table of shared food and drink. Bring something to add to the shared picnic table or a packed lunch for yourself, as well as anything else for the weather. Chairs, chopping boards, kitchen knives and waterproofs recommended!

If you or someone you know can't attend but have spare apples to donate, let us know.

We are also on the lookout for additional equipment to borrow for the day – so if you have a generator, shredder or apple press, camping toilet and tent, please get in touch. Please also bring along camping tables and chairs if you have them.

Finally, we need people to take on particular responsibilities on the day. If you'd be prepared to help with any of the following:

Coordinate apple themed games, eg apple bobbing, longest apple peel
Oversee food and drink table, camping stove, crockery and cutlery
Erect and dismantle tents/gazebos
Collect / set up / pack up pressing equipment
Collect apples from those who can't attend
Anything else!

Please contact Rachael Roberts on 01665 605812 as soon as possible. The orchard can be found adjacent to Glovers Green, behind Arkle Court and with Weavers Way at the far end. If you plan to arrive by car, please park with consideration for residents.

2. Druridge bay beach clean

Our final beach clean of the year takes place at Druridge Bay on Sunday 30th October. We meet at Cresswell on the beach at 10.30am. And Friends of the Earth want to film us doing it, strangely. All something to do with the 40th year of Friends of the Earth and, more importantly, the celebrated defeat by earlier local FoE groups of plans by Magnox Energy to build a nuclear power station there. Were you involved in that campaign?

3. Tree planting

On 12th and 13th November, we'll be planting 105 small trees (a mix of hawthorn, elder, crabapple, hazel and dog rose) for the Sure Start Centre on Howling Lane in Alnwick. We'll be starting at around 10.30am and carrying on until we're finished. As this sounds like a lot we would really appreciate any help people can offer. We've have some gloves and tools, but it's always better if you can bring your own, in case. And some warm clothing! Didn't it start snowing around mid-November last year?

4. Events

The challenge of sustainability

18th October, 5.30pm @ Newcastle University

Richard Zare - Free admission

Living with floods: shared experiences from the North of England
30th November, 10.30am to 3.30pm @ Great North Museum in Newcastle.

Young people and other members of communities from areas affected by flooding, together with members of the scientific and educational communities, with the aim of improving communication on how to respond better to future floods.

Reclaiming our futures: people, science and environmental change
14th November, 16.00-20.00 @ Collingwood College, Durham University
Free attendance - but please book in advance via website.

5. Actions

And if you didn't sign last month ... please support the National Trust's petition against the current planning reforms.

Also send an email via the site to your MP. Don't believe the c&*p about how this is supporting young people or people on low incomes. If this was the case, the coalition would be specifically promoting affordable homes. They're not. It isn't.

6. Other stuff

Renewables supplied 9.6% of UK electricity in Spring 2011 - a new UK record.

BUT

Is it too late to stop dangerous climate change? In 3 reports, Friends of the Earth conclude that the UK cannot carry out its share of carbon reductions to keep the temperature increase below 1.5 degrees without using technologies such as reforestation, biochar, artificial trees and, er, sucking carbon out of the air and storing it in caverns. Some of these technologies are sort-of embryonic.

Not only will the UK government miss Friends of the Earth's targets, it will also miss its own, according to Cambridge Econometrics' forecasting.

Climate check. The delivery of the government's delivery of its low carbon commitments - the Green Alliance assess how the coalition's climate policy is faring. OK, until George Osborne opened his mouth.

Wedges reaffirmed. No, not an endorsement of pulling your pants up too high. Princeton professor Rob Socolow returns to the concept of the 7 wedges, the big changes we needed to make in order to head off dangerous climate change. There are 9 now.

7. Endpiece

.. and then they found the market place in Alnwick.

The next Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth meeting is Tuesday 1st November at 8pm.

Friends of the Earth at the Food Festival part 1 - a trip report by Jan Deckers

2011-10-03T20:38:00.001+01:00

We're grateful to Dr Jan, who not only gave one of the talks, but also wrote up talks by fellow academics Carlo Leifert and Sharron Kuznesof.

Newcastle food researchers present at Alnwick Food Festival (Alnwick Friends of the Earth, 25 September 2011)

Three members of the Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability (NIReS) presented their work during Alnwick Food Festival 2011, contributing to ongoing debates on how our food system could be made more sustainable and why doing so is a moral imperative.

Carlo Leifert started the discussion, comparing conventional agricultural systems with organic systems, arguing that the lack of sustainability of our current agricultural system will hit us badly soon, if not in our lifetime, then at least in the lifetime of our children.

Conventional agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for the production of fertilisers and pesticides. Leifert revealed that it takes about one litre of oil to produce 1 kg of fertiliser. Producing fertilisers on anything like the scale that we are doing at the moment is simply not an option as fossil fuel reserves are dwindling and the production of fertilisers adds significantly to climate change. In this context, Leifert mentioned that just one fertiliser plant in the vicinity of Liverpool produces as much carbon dioxide as all housing in that city. Nitrogen could also be produced if we built more nuclear power plants to replace fossil fuels, but Leifert was very wary about the dramatic increase in nuclear power that would be required to replace the large role played by fossil fuels if we were to choose to continue the path of conventional agriculture.

This may be unlikely, given that the cost of artificial fertilisers has gone up by about eight-fold in the last decade, but there are still countries, such as for example China, that use large amounts of fertilisers to boost agricultural productivity in an attempt to sustain maximum yields to feed a growing population. Leifert argued that this cannot go on, at least in part because of the high energy cost associated with fixing nitrogen from the air, but also – and more importantly – because no amount of nitrogen can make up for the fact that we are pouring large amounts of phosphates in our rivers and seas. For their growth, plants depend not only on nitrogen, but also on phosphorus. At present, large amounts of human sewage and food waste end up in landfill or in our rivers and seas, representing an intolerable loss of phosphorus. A small amount of phosphate rock that has not yet been mined remains, but the production of phosphorus also produces toxic elements, including cadmium. Leifert also mentioned that at Nafferton Farm, his field laboratory, conventionally farmed soils contained much higher levels of cadmium compared to organic soils.

Finally, Leifert referred to the development of ‘artificial meat’ as ‘blue-skies research’ and he urged for a reduction in the consumption of animal products, mentioning the example of eggs, the production of which requires – in most situations – large amounts of plant foods.

The consumption of animal products is the main research topic of the second speaker, Jan Deckers, who explored whether Simon Fairlie’s critique on vegan fare is fair. Deckers argued that Fairlie provides a brilliant account of the ecological and social issues associated with the consumption of animal products in his book Meat: A Benign Extravagance. Nevertheless, Fairlie does not support a vegan agricultural system, but a ‘default livestock diet’ whereby people would eat animal products in moderation, largely derived from grass-fed animals. Deckers challenged Fairlie’s vision, arguing that human agriculture should be predominantly vegan as any vision about which agricultural system we should adopt must include the ethics of exploitation and killing animals as an important factor in the moral equation.

Simon Fairlie - Author of 'Meat'

This also formed the basis of Deckers’s answer when he was asked what we might want to do with relatively unproductive upland areas. Deckers argued that human beings who can live healthily without consuming animal products and who do not produce unacceptable social or ecological costs by doing so must adopt vegan diets if they agree with the assumption that the human exploitation of other animals is more problematic than using plants for food. Deckers mentioned a range of other reasons why vegan diets might be morally preferable. Vegans are less likely to be obese. Many vegan diets are less wasteful of land and water as a lot of food is wasted to rear farm animals. An example provided by Deckers is that an area the size of Yorkshire is used to grow soya, much of it produced on Brazilian land that used to be very rich in biodiversity, to feed farm animals who live in the UK. Farm animals also produce gases that contribute to climate change and to other environmental hazards, e.g. local air pollution around pig farms.

Deckers challenged Fairlie’s view that a predominantly vegan agricultural system would be more likely to cause human hunger and that it would alienate human beings further from nature. Reflecting on the event, Deckers reports that he had anticipated that he might have been slaughtered by those attending the festival, yet as he came through unscathed, he hopes that the lives of many animals will now be spared.

The final NIReS speaker was Sharron Kuznesof, who reflected on what might be done to drive behavioural change in relation to what people eat. Kuznesof started from the sobering fact that the UK is an overweight nation as the average BMI (Body Mass Index) of this population is classed as overweight. If this is combined with high food prices, high unemployment, the cost of many healthy diets (at the point of purchase) being greater than the cost of many unhealthy diets, and Kuznesof’s finding that people are primarily interested in the cost of food when they make decisions about what to eat, it paints a rather bleak picture. In the discussion that followed, the fact that a lot of people are either physically unable or unwilling to work the land to produce their food was added to the mix to provide for an interesting cocktail.

What compounds the picture even further is that it is not always easy to know what counts as a sustainable diet. Consumers may, for example, find it difficult to know whether it is better to choose apples imported from New Zealand or to go for British apples that might have been kept in cold storage for several months. Kuznesof added that the social benefits and costs must also be added to the equation, referring to Kenian beans that might be grown organically as well as provide important local labour opportunities and much-desired foreign currency. A further complication is raised by genetically modified foods when these might be more sustainable compared to conventional options: should we support such foods in spite of other concerns we may have with genetic modification? Kuznesof recognised the powerful role played by food retailers in shaping food decisions and expressed the view that our government might wish to avoid imposing strict regulation in relation to the sustainability of our food unless it was convinced that the same rules would apply internationally.

In between talks, Stella Deckers Coulter tried hard to engage by-passers in discussions on food ethics, asking those who were interested to pick a piece of paper from her basket and to discuss the statement written thereon. Talks and discussions were also interspersed by demonstrations of bread-making (Rachael Roberts), bee-keeping (John Hobrough), and beer- and wine-making and -tasting (Bill Grisdale and Sue Patience). This last event helped to momentarily forget the gravity of our predicament, a concern that was shared by all speakers.

Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth @ The Food Festival

2011-09-24T12:57:00.002+01:00

You know how you organise something and think you've told everyone but at the last minute you realise you haven't? Well it's one of those times - Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth's Little Big Top / Food for Thought and Food for Nought / Food for Brain and Body-or-something-like-that event takes place tomorrrow (Sunday 25th September) at the Alnwick Food Festival.

We'll be situated at outside M&Co and Iceland on Bondgate Within.

The full programme is below.
10.30am - Great Alnwick Bake off part 1 - The knead
11.15am - Prof Carlo Leifert, Newcastle Uni - can the UK feed itself self-sufficiently on organic food?
Midday - Jan Deckers, Newcastle Uni - meat in moderation? are Simon Fairlie's objections to vegan fare fair?
12.45pm - Great Alnwick Bake off part 2 - The knock back and shape
1.30pm - Sharron Kuznesof, Newcastle Uni - how might UK consumers accept lower impact diets?
2.15pm - John Hobrough, Alnwick Beekeepers - Beekeeping for Beginners (and experts too)
3.00pm - Great Alnwick Bake off part 3 - Great unveiling of the loaves
3.15pm - Bill Grisdale & Sue Patience - Beer and wine-making for beginners (and experts too)

September's Beach Clean

2011-09-05T17:32:00.000+01:00

The secondAlnwick Area Friends of the Earth beach clean took place on Sunday. Seven intrepidlitter-pickers began with a sweep of the beach at Rumbling Kern before movingnorth along the coastal path to Craster.

There weresubstantial spoils to be had. Four sacks of rubbish and three sacks of recyclablematerial had been amassed by the end of the exercise. Fishing line and plasticbottles predominated, including a mysterious 10 litre plastic tub containingwhat looked like a lump of congealed whale bile... A lack in variety of beercans collected led to the question - are cheap lager drinkers more likely tolitter, or is it just that the people who drink real beer never leave the pub?

Eco-homes without tyres, rammed earth or convenient hillsides

2011-08-31T23:28:00.004+01:00

Like last year, three households who are members of Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth are opening their homes to demonstrate renewable energies and insulation.

Like last year, none of these houses are made from cob, wattle and daub, discarded pallets or biscuit tins. These are regular brick-built homes which have been improved with the aid of solar panels, wood-burning stoves, better insulation, greener appliances (and the odd fruit and vegetable garden), to reduce their environmental impact by up to 50%. Information about how these technologies work and the effect that this will have on household energy bills and carbon emissions will be available, along with cakes and tea.

Like last year, this is all taking place as part of the Heritage Open Days national weekend when many previously closed properties are opened up, and properties which normally charge offer free admission.

These are the homes:

24 The Dunterns - solar thermal, solar PV, low energy appliances and underfloor insulation. Open Thursday 8th and Saturday 10th September, 10am-4pm (Paul and Clare Mills)
50 Swansfield Park Road - solar thermal, solar PV, interior wall insulation and vegetable garden. Open Friday 9th and Saturday 10th September, 10am-4pm. (David Farrar/Rachael Roberts)
62 Chapel Lands - solar thermal, and home designed and home built wood fired central heating. Open Sunday 11th September, 10am-4pm. (Martin and Karen Swinbank)

With energy companies raising prices again and oil prices seemingly stuck above $100 a barrel for good, this is having a disproportionate effect on rural areas, with more old homes and more reliance on oil or electric heating.

But so much of the information about reducing energy bills comes from companies looking to make quick returns - we'll be giving an honest viewpoint about how solar panels and insulation have helped reduce our bills and CO2 emissions without any hard sell.

More than 100 other properties are open in Northumberland, although Alnwick Masonic Hall is the only other building opening in Alnwick. More information on the Heritage Open Days website.

Life's a beach clean

2011-05-23T07:03:00.000+01:00

4 intrepid Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth members carried out their inaugural, experimental beach clean in Embleton Bay on Saturday. Forewarned by the county council's risk assessment about the dangers of deceptively heavy objects, we gave thanks for our plasticated gloves and grippers with ritual skimming of gravel across the greens of the Embleton Links. Here's what we found:

7 cigarette butts
lots of string and rope
the remnants of a lobster pot
a strange form of seaweed which bears an uncanny resemblance to a corn-starch carrier bag. I fear that if beach cleans become more popular this seaweed will need to evolve a new colour or die out after being forcibly relocated en masse to landfill sites.
a Co-op corn starch carrier bag hiding amidst the corn-starch-lookielikee seaweed.
a woolly hat with a lining - we left this.
a single child's sock - we took this. Such is the abitrary nature of the beach cleaner's power.
large numbers of fragments of brightly-coloured plastic. We suspect that there were plenty of sand-toned pieces of plastic too, but we couldn't see them. Regulations requiring plastic packaging to adopt colours rarely seen in nature (reds and purples for instance), would be a step forward. But less useful when our rubbish inevitably ends up on Mars and we do beach cleans there.
an enormous number of bags of dog poo. This remains a smelly mystery. I don't own a dog, but I would expect the bagging is the unpleasant bit. Is the carrying of a small outpouring of canine love so embarrassing? Is it the shame of being seen with a carrier bag? I'm sure Anya Hindmarch could design mini-crap-bags saying "I'm not a bag of dog dirt". Some William Tell-style feats of targeting too, with bags found at the back of a WWII gun emplacement only accessed through a narrow slit - need 12 foot grippers for these. Ask council next time.
half a mobile phone - some of those micro-organisms which cleared up so splendidly after the Deepwater Horizon rig appear to have now developed a taste for the rare metal components.
a broken ball launcher for a dog
[many yards away] - a tennis ball
no dog though

A splendid time was had by all. All this only filled two sacks but we felt darned virtuous as we drank beer at the Ship Inn and ate toasties back at the Dunstanburgh Castle Hotel. Next time - sometime in August. Thanks very much to Ruth for organising it.

La-la-la-la I can't hear you. Continuing reflections on fuel poverty from Sir Alan Beith

2011-05-22T21:03:00.002+01:00

So, a recap. Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth held a public meeting with Sir Alan where we pressed for legal minimum standards of energy efficiency for private rented housing before they could be let. We asked for the minimum to be a standard of E (on their Energy Performance Certificate) by 2016.

Alan who had previously signed Early Day Motion 653 (an MP's petition) to that effect, argued that this would be impossible for all manner of bonkers reasons. Weeks later, the Department of Energy and Climate Change led by Chris 'Zoom' Huhne, announced a very sensible change of policy.

From April 2018 the government will make it unlawful to rent out a house or business premise which has less than an "E" energy efficiency rating, ensuring at least 682,000 properties will have to be improved.

Let's take up the rest of the story in letter format, like one of those Regency-period novels, but with a bit less of the 'my dearly beloveds'.

I wrote:

Dear Sir Alan

You'll note that the 2nd bullet point in Chris Huhne's announcement below is what you specifically ruled out at Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth's event about Fuel poverty and the Green Deal on April 1st, albeit on a slightly longer timescale. I recall your argument was that landlords would simply opt not to let their properties when faced with such a restriction. Clearly the Secretary of State for Climate Change does not share this fear.

I'm very disappointed that you felt unable to support Friends of the Earth's proposal, although I am pleased that other members of the Liberal Democrats have been more positive.

One of the consequences of unstinting loyalism toward the party is that one is left unable to take any of the credit when the government suddenly changes its mind. I recall a similar failure to seize the initiative over the privatisation of the forests. Perhaps back-bench Liberal Democrat MPs also need to consider their responsibility to be more assertive within the coalition.

Alan writes back (next day):

Dear David,

Thank you for your e-mail.. You are right on your main point. Within hours of the meeting in Alnwick I gave the issue further thought and went back to what had been my earlier view, that the potential from the proposal outweighed the risk of fewer properties being available. I am glad the Government has come round. My comments had nothing to do with “loyalism” – the issue was how best to deal with the current housing needs in my constituency.

Yours sincerely,

Alan
(Dictated by Sir Alan Beith, M.P. and sent on his behalf)

I wonder what we're being taken for. Our democratically elected member of 37 years standing originally agrees with our position, then attends a meeting where, presented with the arguments which support his original position, decided to change his mind and deny he held the original view in the first place. Then, within hours of walking out of the meeting, he changes his mind back to the original position (which he now accepts he did hold), but doesn't see fit to inform the people who had pressed him on the point until he is approached over the government's about-turn. This stretches credibility.

Allow me to present an alternative scenario which is more believable.

Sir Alan originally signs the Early Day Motion, as he does many, without really thinking through the consequences. "There are lots of these things, they never come to anything [scribble]". He shows up at the public meeting forgetting what he's signed and what he hasn't and his office haven't bothered to tell him. He gets in a flap as he realises that he is being asked to show the backbone he long ago removed in order to prop up the fence he's been sitting on for 37 years, and comes up with nursery-school arguments about people liking the cold and how it's all too difficult. Then when he is prompted that the party has had a change of heart, he realises it's safe to return to the original position he'd never really had 'cos he'd never thought about it. Result!

Based on what we've learnt, and farrago about the forests (walking out of the chamber to avoid voting) and tuition fees, which interpretation do you believe?

The Master (Composter)

2011-05-03T23:05:00.000+01:00

Gallifrey had better watch out. 9 members of Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth are now trained up to Timelord standard as Master Composters (courtesy of Northumberland County Council and WRAP, the Waste Resources Action Programme). We are now available to assist with free talks, Q&As, neighbourly advice and demonstrations at community groups, Bar-Mitzvahs and social clubs. We tend to shy away from advanced gardening groups, though, in case they outwit us with difficult questions about fruit flies.

In keeping with falling real incomes, we are not advocating purchase of fancy gear. You never needed it anyway, and it will only take you longer to get payback from forgoing all that dodgy peat-fuelled rubbish from garden centres. Rather we are on hand to help you create composters out of unwanted swing bins, and building your own wormery out of readily available ingredients. And to get the best results from your kitchen and garden waste.

If you are a member of a group who would be interested in a session get in touch with David Farrar at 01665 605812 or add a message to this post.

Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth also welcome any other ideas for spreading the joy of compost and worm casts.

Alan Beith, oh dear

2011-04-08T21:41:00.004+01:00

According to noted environmentalist and nuclear dupe George Monbiot, I can still be arrested for intimidating poor Alan with a blogpost title like this. But after witnessing another lamentable performance at St James Church Centre during an event about the coalition's plans to tackle Fuel poverty with the Green Deal, it's an exclamation I'm happy to defend in a court of law.

Big Al shows up wanting the agenda changed around as he is tired and needs to go home early. It showed. After I set out Friends of the Earth's position on what we want from the Green Deal - you can see the argument here - Alan strolled up and gave his response. Let's look at Alan's arguments one by one.

1. You shouldn't use the flaws in the Green Deal as an excuse for doing nothing.
I quite agree. But Friends of the Earth aren't suggesting doing nothing. They are suggesting fixing the flaws - strengthening the Green Deal in order to make it easier for people to insulate their homes and to make it easier for the government to hit its targets.

2. Some people like living in cold homes
Puh-lease! We're some way off that yet. Let's look at the figures. Every part of the Alnwick area has more people in fuel poverty than the national average. In Hedgeley, Harbottle and Whittingham more than 40% of households are in fuel poverty. In Alnwick itself, more than 500 households live in fuel poverty. Alan, if you can get those down to single figures, I might believe you that the remainder were genuinely comfortable and didn't need to be helped. But this argument is out of the same book as the foxes enjoying being hunted, and the fuzzy-wuzzies not liking it up them.

3. If landlords are asked to do anything to improve the energy efficiency of their properties they won't let them out
You're so right! Compulsory gas safety checks hold landlords back too! Let's abolish them all. Ah, you say, but people will die if we drop gas safety checks. Well, if you'd stuck around, you maybe would have heard (if your fingers weren't in your ears going "La-la-la, I can't hear you!") that fuel poverty kills people too. That big spike in deaths in winter is not just people slipping on the ice or falling off sledges. It's because they're TOO COLD.

Warming to his theme, Sir Alan explained that landlords would all opt to let their homes as holiday cottages, as if there is a polite queue forming on the A1 of people wanting to spend an idyllic week in a freezing cold 2-up-2-down in Amble.

Yes - landlords will cry wolf, as they always do. But they like the regular income too. And you can regulate holiday homes too, if you want. It's OK. But you're so in thrall to the wealthy under the guise of spurious liberalism that you don't dare.

4. Some homes are led by landowners to farmers who sub-let them to other people so it isn't possible to make landlords improve them.
Well, whoop-de-doo. I sense a path through this thorny problem. You go to the top of the chain and make the owner improve them, or it doesn't get let. Sorted.

5. He's never given any commitment to supporting an amendment to force landlords to improve the energy-efficiency of their homes.
It got comical. Alan seemed to be the under the impression that he hadn't signed the parliamentary petition EDM 653, which covers energy efficiency of rented homes. Let me find that text - ah, yes: "calls on the Government to take the earliest legislative opportunity .. so that .. properties ... with an energy efficiency rating of F or G, are .. set a 2016 deadline after which such properties may not be let without improvement to a higher rating." Oh, and there's Alan's name.

You hear a lot of accusations and counter-accusations from US politicians about their opponents 'flip-flopping'. This looks like a case of Alan flipping when he hadn't realised he'd flopped.

So what didn't Alan say? He didn't say that the Green Deal would not get the coalition's target of a reduction of 20% in greenhouse gas emissions from domestic properties between 2009 and 2025. Our speakers from Newcastle University, Neveen Hamza and Rose Gilroy, agreed that this was the case.

He didn't say that the Energy Company Obligation would do anything significant to tackle fuel poverty in the hardest-to-treat homes, of which we have so many, or that he would lobby on the detail of this.

But then neither did he say that all the coalition's endless droning on about fairness isn't worth a wet fart when there's a powerful vested interest blowing back at them.

The great fuel poverty fix-up

2011-03-12T18:15:00.001Z

Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth host "Fixing fuel poverty with the Green deal" at St James Church Centre, Pottergate at 7.30pm on 1st April.

We're joined by special guests Rose Gilroy and Neveen Hamza from Newcastle University and Rt Hon Sir Alan Beith Etc from Berwick-upon-Tweed.

We'll be discussing whether the Green Deal, which is the proposed solution to fuel poverty and carbon emissions from people's homes, does the job. And whether it's fair. Rose and Neveen have researched fuel poverty and energy efficiency for years and Big Suralan was behind the original Energy Conservation Act.

The Green Deal is supposed to reach the areas other energy efficiency schemes failed to help, such as tenants in private rented homes, homeowners who'd like to do something but are afraid they won't get payback before they sell, and people who'd desperately like to reduce their bills but have no money.

You'll get the chance to decide whether it will work for you, and tell Big Al how it should be different - it's not the law yet. Admittedly he doesn't have much form on standing up to his coalition masters, but this could be the first time.

There are 3 major issues with current approaches to getting people's homes insulated to reduce their bills and the CO2 from domestic energy use.

1. Saving energy for people who own their homes is a short-term thing. People often don't look more than a couple of years in advance. If they'll be selling soon, or they might, why invest in energy efficiency which may not be reflected in the price they get for their home?

2. Saving energy for homeowners is also a tomorrow thing. The loss of heat and the waste of money are like a dripping tap. You get wound up, but often not quite enough to do anything about it.

3. Saving energy for landlords is a who-cares thing. The tenant normally pays the bills. There's no incentive for the landlord to insulate the house until they come to sell it. And even then, it's an unusual house purchaser who starts checking the loft and asking about solid wall insulation.

We could add a 4th issue, that Warmfront/Eaga, who used to run the government insulation scheme, were fecking useless - making people wait for 4 months or more and often suffering serious hardship in the process. But we'll be shot of them under the new scheme.

Home in North Northumberland have two particularly obvious problems.
1. They are typically harder-to-treat. A majority of homes don't have cavity walls.There has never been a grant for interior solid wall insulation. There are significant numbers of homes with lofts used as room space, which are also harder to treat.

2. With the exception of Alnwick, Amble and Berwick no other homes are on the gas network. They pay for oil which swings wildly up and down in price with conflicts and speculation and there's an increasing monopoly in suppliers. Oil boilers are usually much more inefficient than gas boilers. It's an old technology, nobody really innovates here. And you if aren't on the gas network, there are no dual fuel deals from your friendly local neighbourhood bloodsucking energy supplier.

So here's the government's Green deal. Does it tackle these problems? Well, kind of. In short the improvements get made at no upfront cost and are then paid back at a commercial rate through household energy bills.  If the house is sold while the debt is still being paid back it's remains with the house, and the new billpayer continues paying.

To stop people's bills actually increasing as a result of all these home improvements, a fancy calculation is carried out which estimates the annual saving the improvement will make to your bills. Only if this is higher than the repayment is the work eligible to take place at no upfront cost under the Green deal. So your bills should not go up as a result of the improvements. Although of course they might continue to rise under the influence of fuel shortages and the rising costs energy companies' bills for champagne and fat cigars.

So let's test it against the proposals above. Eaga aren't involved, by the way, so that's an immediate plus point.

1. Short-termism for homeowners - it might well tackle this. It remains to be seen whether there will be sensitivities amongst mortgage companies and homebuyers about taking on debts attached to the house. If these are substantial, mortgage companies would ask for a larger deposit, homebuyers would expect them to want to see it factored into the asking price. Not necessarily terminal - if you get a lot of take-up, it will start to appear as normal as all the other mad stuff which happens around home-buying, and people will accept it. But if not, it could be offputting.

2. Inertia amongst homeowners - it's not at all clear that it will do the business here. If the scheme gets lots of lenders interested, there will no doubt be junk mail bombardment with ever more dazzling financial schemes which people will not understand or choose between and they won't go for any. Council houses and housing association properties normally have great insulation. They tell the tenant when it's going in and it goes in. No indecision around the product choice there. But you know, Englishmen, castles, all that. It's just not done with homeowners.

3. Inertia amongst landlords  - The landlord can opt for home improvements which are added to their tenants' energy bills as long as the improvements reduce the overall size of the bill. The tenant can also approach the landlord and make requests for improvements which the landlord must grant if they are 'reasonable' (ah - that, lovely legal word. I will look forward to those court cases where tenants sue their landlords. Not.) I wonder whether people would think this is fair. After all the landlord has all the benefit of the property when they boot the tenants out and sell if for more cos it's nice and cosy, but they haven't paid a bean for the improvements. And is it landlords' self-interest we should be worried about, here, or are they just running the property for some cash? I've had plenty of landlords in the past who would run away from a tenant waving a form as they would the taxman.

That's enough of a preview. But Friends of the Earth are making specific demands about the Green Deal. You can find out more about them, bellow ungracefully, drink wine for a donation and enjoy an evening of hot air for the sum of one English pound. Another way to reduce your heating bill.

Hope to see you there.

2nd Alnwick man wins coveted bureaucratic award

2011-01-28T13:12:00.002Z

A few months back, we trailed Paul Mills of Equinox Energy, Alnwick's first MCS-accredited installer of solar photovoltaics. Now we've another joker in the pack, feather in the hat and installer on the roof with the addition of Martin Swinbank of Northumbria Renewables, solar thermal designer and installer, to the pantheon of industry-approved renewable true believers.

For Martin, the true believing, and in fact the solar business, came well before the industry-approval. "I used to see MCS certification as a little pointless" he says. "You had to qualify at great expense, so that purchasers were eligible for £200 grant" from the government's now-defunct Low Carbon Buildings Programme. "Most people added the cost of certification straight back onto their work, so work by MCS installers was more expensive, and consumers got no greater protection."

Now, the Renewable Heat Incentive is imminent, and this is expected to reward purchasers for each KWh of heat they produce, in a similar way to the feed-in tariff for solar PV and small-scale wind.

In some ways solar water heating is more effective than solar PV. The power ratio - energy out for each unit of energy in - is better than solar PV. Solar thermal equipment is very low carbon to produce, so you make back the carbon cost in next-to-no-time. But heat is less valuable a commodity than electricity - you can't move it around, or send it back to the grid, and gas is cheaper per unit of energy than electricity. Whether it will stay cheap is another matter. And for folks off the gas main and relying on oil, who knows what will happen as the economy picks up (in Germany and the developing world - not here, no worry on that score right now) and oil prices sharply crunch upward.

So right now, we are waiting to see what form the incentive will take. All we know is that there will be one. And it will apply to installations that you take out now. So contact Martin on 01665 604310 if you are interested today. He's likely to be busier soon.

Doomed! (part 1) How Alnwick will melt

2011-01-26T23:25:00.001Z

Now the Met Office long-range forecast is predicting no snow for the next 30 days, and now that we have started believing the forecast implicitly since their predictive powers anticipated November and December's snow, the time is right for some long-range forecasting of Northumberland's long-term doom.

In this post, the unheralded UK Climate Change Projections, or CP09, produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre. Why unheralded? Mostly because the charts and maps are hideous, and unreproducible by funky boutique-style local newspapers such as the Northumberland Gazette. In doomed part 2, we look at sea level rise, with some sexier diagrams from the Benfield Hazard Research Centre.

There will be no optimistic noises about techno-fixes, peace, brotherly love and understanding between nations or the US passing carbon-trading legislation. Copenhagen and Cancun have seen to that.
Accordingly, the focus here is on the high-emissions scenario, where global population peaks at almost 9 billion in 2050 before falling to around 7 billion by 2100, the global economy continues to grow at 2.9% per year, global energy use continues to grow, and fossil fuels, especially coal and gas, remain dominant.

Here's the results of the modelling for North East England. First the not-so-bad news. Here's the change in winter precipitation compared with a 1961-1990 baseline. Now nobody knows the exact result, so the mad professors at Hadley factor this in using the percentages below - the percentage chance of average winter rainfall being less than the figure. So by 2080 we're 90% likely to get an increase of 45% or less in rainfall. But there's only a 10% chance of rainfall increasing by 5% or less. A 20% rise in winter rainfall is the central estimate. No fun, but we should be able to cope. Unless we live in areas prone to flooding already, where it's going to get tougher.

It gets worse. Summer rainfall is set to fall, by anywhere from 2% to 42%, with a central estimate of about 22%. A common perception is that we will become more like East Anglia, while Great Yarmouth and Ipswich become Nice and Cannes on the North Sea. But it doesn't work like that. Combine wetter winters and drier summers with more evaporation from higher temperatures, and we are looking at a climate for arable farming best described as 'interesting'. It doesn't sound like wheat country.

Finally, let's look at temperature. By the 2080s, mean temperatures will be between 2.5 and 6 degrees warmer, with a 4 degree rise as a central estimate. Perhaps Celine Dion was looking at these figures when her lip went quivery and she remarked that this is getting serious. Mark Lynas' doom-tome 6 degrees envisaged human wipeout emerging at the top end of this scale as feedback effects led to huge stocks of methyl hydrates in the ocean being released, along with permafrosted peat bogs releasing their methane. Even 4 degrees signals severe droughts and millions of migrants seeking refuge as food and water supplies collapse. Cancun's avowed target of a maximum 2 degree rise will be hit as soon as 2050 on the central estimate, and as soon as the 2020s in a worst-case scenario. And a 4 degree world rise is being taken more and more seriously.

For the north east, this means we'll be toasting our toes and wondering what to grow, whilst we grumble about the tankers taking our water down to the thirsty home counties. But as we gaze out at our brave boys defending our shoreline from desperate unarmed starving refugees, we might just look back and wonder about why it was that we opposed renewable energy in our own back yard, or whether that long-distance journey really was necessary.

Weigh-in at the waste bin

2011-01-23T17:24:00.003Z

The UK environment department, DEFRA, last year concluded a call for evidence about a national strategy for waste. With central government's addiction to complex market mechanisms and three letter acronyms, it's scary stuff. Friends of the Earth have responded to these proposals in similar fearsome prose, but for a simple explanation of the issues see: Zero-waste: a way to a low carbon future.

So what's the argument?

We still landfill, and increasingly burn, vast amounts of material which can be recycled or made into compost.
Most Northumberland waste is recovered (i.e. burnt) in an Energy-from-Waste plant (i.e. incinerator) at Billingham. This is not top-grade fuel. It is old furniture, plastic and food leftovers.

We signed dumb contracts.Northumberland County Council, in common with many other councils, are tied into a long-term deal with Sita to feed these incinerators. This gives our waste processing 'partners', Sita a guaranteed minimum price for collecting waste, however little we produce, and it gives Northumberland County Council no incentive to push Sita to recycle more. (This is what the previous government used to call 'making the private sector carry the risk for large-scale projects' and what everyone else calls lucre for an old length of twisted fibres.)

We use inefficienct commingling systems.The big blue bin in which we put our recycling reduces the quality and the value of our waste. People put the wrong stuff in. They put dirty cans in. It leads to recycling which is low-grade and less easily sold for anything useful. A lot of recycled goods are expensive because they are made from better-quality recycled products which have had to be shipped in from other countries. Kerbside sorting, where the waste collectors sort the rubbish as they collect it, leads to higher quality waste and better prices.

We don't collect enough stuff
Around 85% of the waste which a typical person produces in Northumberland can be recycled. But only about 22% can go in a bin. The other 63% needs to be composted in a (paid-for) composter, or disposed of in a (paid-for) garden waste bin, or taken to a local tip. It's hardly surprising that this often fails to happen.

We produce too much rubbish in the first place
Loads of stuff is over-packaged. Bottles can't be returned. But we can't ever seem to kill the goose that breaks all the eggs - and legislate to prevent businesses wasting resources in this way.

Friends of the Earth are pushing for a national target to reduce residual waste - stuff sent to landfill and burnt in the name of low-efficiency electricity, by 50%.

This is easily achievable for Northumberland. 94000 tonnes (61%) are currently landfilled or incinerated, compared with 61,000 tonnes (39%) which are recycled. Given that 85% is already recyclable, making such a shift means getting people to recycle more, by making it easier, cheaper and clearer. And getting people to re-use stuff, and keep it for longer. And pressing central government to introduce deposit bottle schemes, plastic bag taxes and enforce packaging regulations.

At Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth, we're supporting central Friends of the Earth's campaign.

And we're producing a recyclable leaflet on recycled paper to explain what can be recycled, how to make stuff last longer, and where to buy, sell, give and receive second-hand goods. As well as where to shop for goods materials from recycled materials. And we're training as master composters. And we're stickering bins. It's a weigh-in at the waste-bin. If you'd like to get involved, contact us via a comment on the blog, or on 01665 605812.

Gaia's garden

2011-01-23T16:16:00.003Z

Mostly when we hear about Gaia these days, it's the doom and gloom philosophising of James Lovelock. In a stream of increasingly puzzling books (take for instance, the long digression around diluted urine in the Revenge of Gaia) Lovelock has expounded the theory that the Earth, as a self-correcting system, is getting ready to boot us into near-extinction in order to maintain its own equilibrium.

All well and good, you might think - nice one, Planet Earth. But Gaia is even worse than a US-led occupation when it comes to inflicting collateral damage. The graph below shows recently published research from DEFRA on wild bird populations in the UK, with woodland bird populations falling by 25% in 40 years, and farmland birds by 50%. It looks like we're goung to take a lot of creatures with us.

Some individual species such as starlings and tree sparrows have fallen by more than 70%. As have Turtle doves and grey partridges. We'll be needing to change the words to Twelve days of christmas by 2030 at this rate.

But there is some cause for Gaia-related optimism. Some businesses have caught on to the fact that individual people want to do something to halt the decline, even if large-scale agri-business doesn't give a hoot. So welcome to Eve Studd of Gaia Wildlife Gardens, who contacted Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth. Eve is available to advise on planting schemes, native hedgerows, wildlife ponds, bee and butterfly planting, and, with help from partner Ivor Scott, she'll do the planting herself if you ask nicely. Plus Ivor is available for dry stone walls and seating.

They also have plans for courses in the future too. You can find out more and contact Eve via her website at: Gaia Wildlife Gardens.

Stop dirty oil getting in your tank

2010-12-04T18:13:00.002Z

Well unfortunately you can't of course, because the dirty oil from the tar sands - responsible for popularising many normally rare varieties of cancer in the local community (bile duct anyone?), vast water usage, huge carbon emissions and destruction of hundreds of square miles of arboreal forest - is mixed in with an unsavoury blend of biodiesel and finest ethical saudi arabian-refined high-octane.

But if you couldn't make it to the snowbound Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth showing of Dirty Oil at St James Church Centre, here are some actions you can take to tackle our dependency on tar sands.

As a citizen
1. Ask your MP to sign Early Day Motion 799
This is a parliamentary petition, which calls on the UK government to introduce mandatory corporate reporting of carbon emissions, so that we can citizens and investors can identify corporations who are invested in tar sands.

Alan Beith has signed EDM799, but there is no harm in showing him the strength of feeling. You can email him a standard message via the Toxic Fuels website.

Only 85 MPs have signed EDM 799 – if you have friends or relatives who live in a constituency where the MP has not signed this EDM, send them this link. Find a list of MPs who have signed.

2. Talk to the Canadians
Send a message to Alberta's premier and Canada's prime minister to stop Tar Sands and honour Canada's climate change commitments under the Kyoto protocols. Previously the Canadian government have stated that they have no intention of meeting these. Nice guys!

As a consumer
3. Boycott Superdrug
Yes, really. Superdrug's parent company is a major investor in tar sands. Your boycott may not be noticed unless you tell them why! Here's a standard letter and more information:

4. Other companies to boycott
Electronics: Hitachi
Banks: Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC
Mobile phones: '3' mobile phone network
Paper: Nouvelle paper products (part of Koch Industries, who also happen to be right wing climate-change denying loonies. And they own the rights to Lycra!)
Huge trucks: Caterpillar – just in case you were thinking about getting one.

5. Use less oil
If you rely on oil-fired central heating, insulate your home better. Solid wall insulation will sometimes pay for itself in about 5 years, especially if oil prices rise. A rather more downbeat view from the Energy Saving Trust is available.

If you drive:
Look out for a more fuel-efficient vehicle.
Try to drive less – public transport options are shown in comparison with driving at http://www.transportdirect.info./
Join a car share scheme - we have our own Northumberland Car Share.

Friends of the Earth AGM 2010 - Review of the Year

2010-12-04T17:02:00.008Z

We're posting this on the blog, as it is too long for email. Herein you will find chest-beating about our wonderfulness, and thankyous to all the people who helped, most of whom are in the group. By the way, these people on the left are at Calgary Buddhists AGM, wishing they could be with Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth in the John Bull.

i. Films - We've shown 11 films. We've had between 5 and 25 attendees at each film, and good press coverage. It's been reasonably easy to keep going as a regular event, and we're breaking even, if not actually making any money.

Thanks to: Bill Grisdale for posters, Rachael Roberts, Sue Patience for ice creams and cakes, Mick Townsend and Vickie Fyffe of Dunstanburgh Castle Hotel for wine. Helen Sanderson and Ken MacDonald for suggestions and lending of future films.
And to: People who hang about at the end and help clear up, like Jean Lovie, Martin Swinbank, Martin Paminter, Chris and Christine Waterston.

ii. Environmental Question Time - How long ago this seems now! We managed 40+ attendees when going head-to-head with first party leaders' debate on TV - only 20 less than the official event at St Michaels, and better reviews from people who went to both. And even from one of the candidates!. More about Environmental question time.

Thanks to: Bill again for posters, agents and friends of candidates Clare Mills, Bill and Margaret Weatheritt. And to Sir Alan Beith, Alan Strickland and Michael Weatheritt for showing up. No thanks to Dr Rob Loughenbury and Anne-Marie Trevelyan who couldn't fit it into their diary at 8 months notice.

iii. Community orchard and tree planting
We gave away fruit and nut trees to 15 schools and Parish Councils. We planted fruit and nut trees at Barndale and Shilbottle School, and by the roadside at Rugely Road.
Thanks to: Rachael Roberts in particular for ordering trees, co-ordinating deliveries and volunteers. Thanks also to: Peter Harvey, Pete Edge, Martin, Jessica, Robert and Karen Swinbank, Bill, Sue, Paul, Jack Richardson, Mike McPhun, Martin Paminter, Richard Starks, Terry and Angela Smith, Chris and Christine Waterston, and loads of other people who we might have forgotten.

On the planned community orchard, we almost have a lease.
Thanks to: Rachael for continuing to pursue Northumberland County Council for the lease. Thanks also to Sue, Richard, Paul, Rachael and Vickie for forming the committee, sorting out banking arrangements. With help from David Francis and Marc Johnson at CAN and especially Richard we now have a constitution which works, and thanks to Tim Noble and Ian Selby at NCC for responding patiently to all our questions.

iv. Allotments - We carried out a mapping exercise of the town and county council allotments, and Sue and Bill have persuaded the town council to restart the allotments and playgrounds sub-committee, and set up an allotments steering group. Thanks to Rachael, we have representation on that too.
Thanks to: Sue, Bill, Rachael.

v. Heritage open days - In a co-production with Transition Alnwick, we managed 100-120 visits over 4 days to 3 houses, which have helped promote solar thermal, solar pv, energy efficiency measures, low-energy appliances and biomass burners to people from as far afield as Sunderland and Carlisle. More about Heritage Open Days.

Thanks to: Paul, Clare, Martin, Karen and Rachael. And especially to Jean and David Lovie for having the idea in the first place!

vi. Church links - Another Transition Alnwick co-production. Jean has been contacting churches throughout year, and held a planning meeting in November with 4 churches to see how we can work more closely together. Plans are now in place for a regular church update from both groups, and for a speaker in March 2011.
Thanks to: Jean

vii. Eco-market stall - In a less successful co-production, we held a stall for an hour on a rainy and freezing October, and gave away 5 soggy film leaflets in an hour before we packed up and went for lunch.
Thanks to: Paul and Philip Angier for organising the stall.

viii. Food festival stall - Rather more successfully, we had a Food festival stall in partnership with Transition Alnwick, got more people onto the mailing list, promoted our activities and showed that we are not a bunch of weirdos.
Thanks to: Martyn Tuckwell who gave us the stall, and all who helped on it: Sue Bairstow, Ann and Brian Lowrie, Liz Anderson, Ian Brown, Ellie Noble, Angus Robson, Helen Sanderson, Steve Passey, Sue, Bill, Rachael - and anyone else we have forgotten.

ix. Community wind - We have worked with Transition Alnwick again and a number of other individuals on the working group for a 2-turbine co-operatively owned event developed by Energy4All at View Law farm, near Longhorsley.

x. Apple day - Sue and Bill's allotment was the focus for the 2nd annual apple day. Juice is drunk, but cider is still fermenting. A splendid time was had by all.
Thanks to: Huge thanks to Bill and Sue, and to Ron and Sue for the loan of the apple press. All who brought apples and food.

xi. Early Day Motions - Alan Beith has signed EDMs on 10 subjects this year on renewable heat, solar pv, the sustainable communities act, pension funds and corporate reporting, offshore wind infrastructure, minimum energy efficiency measures in rental properties, UK wildlife, sustainable livestock production, and use of measures other than economic growth to indicate well-being. Thanks to Alan, David Cameron has now adopted that one! Alan Beith refused on 2 (beak trimming and inclusion of trident in the strategic defence review), but we still won eventually on Trident.
Thanks to: Sir Alan, and Clare and Gill in Alan's office.

xii. Stop climate chaos lobby - Sue and David visited Alan Beith agreed to talk to Chris Huhne, Secretary of State for Climate Change about: (a) Requirement for an Energy Performance Certificate of E or above for properties before they can be let, (b) Grants for owner-occupiers living in fuel poverty to get solid wall insulation, (c) More start-up funding for the Green Investment Bank. And to feed back.
Thanks to: Sue, Sir Alan, Clare and hopefully Chris

xiii. Consultations - We provided input on Northumberland Strategic Partnership's Heat Is On delivery plan, being developed by Ruth Machen, via a group meeting and follow-up written comments. We also contributed to Northumberland County Council's Sustainable community strategy - securing agreement to include additional impacts of climate change in Northumberland, strengthening commitments to energy-efficient homes, and supporting green businesses. We also contributed to NCC's Transport strategy - we have commented, challenging NCC to commit to reducing carbon emissions from transport rather than simply offer sustainable transport, and requested more explicit support of cycleways.
Thanks to: Ruth Machen and to Sue.

xiv. Publicity - We've continued to get reasonably favourable coverage in the Gazette, and managed 27 blog posts in 2010, compared with 11 in 2009, with visits 30% up on last year, and page views 70% up on last year. We've also managed regular monthly updates since March with online signings and other news. Helen Sanderson has set up Facebook page for the group.
Thanks to: Helen

xv. Waste - We've recently started working with the County Council on promoting awareness of what can be recycled, and becoming master composters.
Thanks to: Rachael, and Sheila and Lorna at NCC.

xvi. Buyer co-operative - together we are defeating the power of the supermarkets! We are now buying food and household essentials collectively from Suma, who visit once a month.
Thanks to: Ruth Sanderson, Steve, Helen, Sue, Bill and Paul the Suma-Driver.

Talk to Alan

2010-11-30T21:04:00.007Z

On 26th November, a Friends of the Earth posse depleted by broadcasting commitments, hairdressing appointments and snow visited Alan Beith's office - above Superdrug on Bondgate Within.

We were there to lobby him on behalf of Stop Climate Chaos and its Big Climate Connection, a wild mixture of climate demands around the Cancun summit, emissions performance standards for new power stations, Green Investment Banks and energy efficiency. Figuring that Alan's influence over Cancun was limited - and, hey, does anyone expect anything from a meeting of a neutered US that can deliver no promises, and the developing economies that require commitments from the developed world before they place the brakes on their own economies - we focused on green investment, the green new deal and rental properties legislation.

Incidentally, Sir Al did reveal that he'd approved Chris Huhne's travel expenses for Mexico. I forgot to ask what class Chris was flying. And Alan was tackling climate change by staying at home in Berwick and having a surgery by telephone. The A1 was closed. We weren't sure if he was leaning back in his leather armchair with his hands behind his head stifling yawns or silently wowing at our perceptive and penetrating diagnosis of energy efficiency measures. But he talked a good talk.

So these were our demands:
1. A minimum energy efficiency standard to be set for private rented houses to eradicate the houses in worst condition (band F & G houses) by 2015. The coalition are suggesting they will beef up Big Al's Energy Conservation Act to allow councils to compel a landlord to carry out the work, do the work themselves and fine landlords. Any tenant who asks for energy efficiency improvements could not be reasonably refused.

We don't think this goes far enough. It places the onus on (a) local authorities, who face 40% cuts to check the depths of a rented property's loft insulation, and (b) tenants, who are not inclined to shout too loudly when they are on an assured shorthold. And are cavity wall and loft insulation the only reasonable improvements? 30% of UK homes don't have cavity walls, and 12% don't have lofts.

We suggested that all properties coming up for rent by 2015 should have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) issued. Current cost of these in Alnwick is £40. Check out the window Taylor's Newsagents. If your property is F or below, you can't let it. Joined up government. Beithy said that this was certainly feasible for new rentals. We said it should apply to all rentals, with an appropriate grace period.

Alan said it was an interesting idea - he would talk to Chris Huhne about it.

2. Grants for energy efficiency measures in solid wall properties. Gawd, how much longer will we need to go on about cavity walls? There are no grants for solid wall properties. But if we are serious about 80% reductions in emissions by 2050, we can't just forget the 30% of the housing stock with solid walls. Never mind how crap we've been at cavity walls. Currently only 55% of such homes have cavity wall insulation. Let's start looking at carbon savings from the poor-but-willing in solid wall homes. Sir RtHon said that he would be opposed to grants for rich people in old stone houses who were perfectly capable of paying for the job themselves. We agreed, and suggested that solid wall insulation grants should be targeted at those living in fuel poverty. Still more than 1 million households, according to DECC statistics.

Alan said it was an interesting idea - he would talk to Chris Huhne about it.

3. Green investment bank - We requested that the long-touted Green Investment Bank is established with £10billion of capital, not the £2billion currently being floated. This one was easy. Treasury officials accept that a seed of government funding will only attract around 25 times the amount of private investment. So £2bn will raise £50bn. Experts in DECC, BIS and Cabinet Office have all suggested that £4-6bn would be needed to raise even £100bn of funds, and an Ernst and Young report commissioned by the government said that ultimately the cost of investing in power and gas infrastructure, renewable heat and gas technologies is £450bn. Hence our request for £10bn capital.

Alan said it was an interesting idea - he would talk to Chris Huhne about it.

He's reporting back too!

I'd suggest visiting Sir Alan's surgery. You get a cup of tea and he sounds like he's listening. You may have one or two issues you want to raise - there's plenty to go round. View Alan's surgery times

Books are greener than baths - but don't buy either from Amazon

2010-11-17T22:59:00.002Z

[Like most blog posts, this one rambles around for a while, but bear with it. There is a money-saving offer and a warm glow at the end]

Mike Berners-Lee's book "How bad are bananas: the carbon footprint of everything", suggests that the average CO2 emissions associated with a paperback book are 1kg. That's a 250g book printed on paper from a UK-typical mix of virgin and recycled pulp. Thick books on virgin paper are worse, even worse than a typical bath, which uses 1.1kg CO2.

For the greenest choice, go for books written in really tiny type printed right up to the margins on recycled toilet paper. No luxuries like starting new chapters on a new page either. That's irresponsibility on a par with using an extra paper hand-towel to dry your hands after the toilet. But as Mike says, this level of obsessiveness is not very helpful if you are driving a car, or taking even the occasional flight. Other factors, like whether you actually want to read the book, and who's selling it, are rather more significant.

Which brings us to Amazon. An Ethical Consumer report recently had the following reassuring thoughts on Jeff Bezos and his book-selling bozos.

Amazon.co.uk, part of the Amazon group, is the giant of the book selling world making a massive £7,427.9 million profit in 2008. ...Amazon is responsible for some of the most aggressive anti-union tactics in the western world, hiring professional union buster Burke Group to aid them in their work.

The Graphical Print and Media Union said it was faced with the most aggressive and "serious professional resistance" it had ever encountered during their union recognition campaign.

Amazon was also marked down for having operations in China, operating in a tax haven, selling products tested on animals, selling pornographic material, and selling uncertified diamonds.

So Amazon languishes at the bottom of Ethical Consumer's best buy tables. But most of the other sellers are specialists, or have limited ranges, or don't have a branch within 30 miles of Alnwick. For at least a year, I've continued to shop at Amazon whilst knowing that they are rather unsavoury and more profitable and powerful than is really healthy.

But take a look at the Book Depository - they are only a point off the front-runners and well ahead of Amazon. They have one of those charmingly old-fashioned affiliate deals with Friends of the Earth, whereby Friends of the Earth get 5% of any purchases you make, as long as you enter via this address: www.foe.co.uk/books. The interface is a bit clunky, and they don't sell sandwich makers, pet food or, even, certified diamonds. But they don't sell uncertified diamonds either. And they're not Amazon. And they're not even loads more expensive. It's time to spread some of the book buying love - and power.

[that was the warm glow .. here's the money-saving]

Friends of the Earth offer a 30% discount on members of local groups at their bookshop. Their range is more in the tens than the tens of millions. But none of it is pornographic, and some of it is quite interesting. Not all of it is books. You only need to be on the Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth mailing list. If you're on that list, drop me a line at the usual place, and you'll be saving in seconds. If you're not, comment on this post, or come along to one of our events.

Walking or cycling are the best ways of getting to them, says Mike Berners-Lee - although it depends if you power your legs with porridge and bananas (75g CO2/km) or air-freighted asparagus and cheeseburgers (1000g CO2/km).

How I learnt to love Freecycling

2010-11-11T22:53:00.003Z

Jonathan Justice, Alnwick Freecycle's moderator, tells us how the recycled bugs bit....

"I hate recycling and the environment. Well, that's not entirely true; I did, but now I don't. And it's because of a little thing called Freecycle.

Freecycle is a very simple concept: If you don't need something any more, why not give it to someone who does? Freecycle is a message board system where people can list items they no longer need and ask for items that they want. The whole point is to keep things out of landfill sites and spread a little happiness whilst doing so.

Some ten years ago, I was moving down to London and realised that there were an awful lot of things in my house that I didn't want to take with me. Some of them were quite large and I was going to have to pay to get rid of perfectly functional household items. And then I discovered Freecycle. I posted a list and started getting emails from people keen to relieve me of my stuff. Within a couple of days, my house was bare and I had managed to help a whole host of strangers.

Not so long ago, I moved to Alnwick and realised that there were a whole host of things that I hadn't brought with me when I moved. I don't drive and a trip to Ikea was going to be difficult and expensive. I posted a few polite requests on Freecycle asking if people could help me out with certain items and I was overwhelmed by their generosity. One lady had a bookcase that was gathering dust in her shed, another had a bicycle that she no longer used and so on. Had I not taken these items from them, they would have ended up in a landfill site and I would have bought alternatives, consuming valuable energy and resources for no good reason.

I've given away dozens of items on Freecycle to people from all walks of life. Some of their stories and backgrounds are amazing. I advertised some random computer parts once and had an elderly gentleman came to collect them. He explained that within the London Portuguese community, he supplied newcomers with computer systems so that they could stay in touch with their families back home, write CVs, apply for jobs, etc. I was so touched by his story that I ended up giving him far more than I'd listed and ringing round my nerd friends to gather more computer stuff that they had lying around. Out of just the redundant IT parts we had lying around, we managed to help kit out over thirty Portuguese immigrants with basic computer systems.

And computer rubbish is very harmful indeed - it contains toxic chemicals and heavy metals; it's difficult to recycle and a lot of energy is consumed during its manufacture.

For almost a year, I had a huge pile of bricks from inside storage heaters. They weigh a ton and they're not recyclable. The very thought of trying to dispose of them filled me with such dread that they'd taken up permanent residence on my stairway. One day, I saw a chap on Freecycle looking for such bricks and I was delighted to be able to help him out. I hadn't realised they could possibly be of any use to anyone, but he was wanting them to build an outdoor kiln. The blocks are often made of a mixture of clay and magnetite which is found in sandy rock strata and the extraction process is generally strip-mining, so being able to re-use them was just terrific.

Trying to act responsibly with respect to the environment if you're not already doing so is very daunting and there's no immediate personal gratification. Many people feel overwhelmed by having to think about their use of energy, transportation, recycling, etc, etc; so overwhelmed that they don't know where to start and end up doing nothing at all.

Freecycle is an excellent first port of call on the path to environmental responsibility. It's a win-win(-win) situation:

By taking things from other people, you're not expending energy and resources that you would have done by buying them;
By giving things away, you're keeping things you no longer need out of landfill sites;
By doing either you're getting the warm feeling of being able to help complete strangers.

It's all good. It's an easy and positive first step into the world of responsible modern living.

And once someone has got the Freecycle bug, it's a lot easier to make other changes in their life to help lessen their impact on the environment. I started off with Freecycle and have since made any number of changes to my life: I've given up driving; I work from home; I recycle my rubbish; I've had loft insulation fitted. I've got a long way to go to being able to have a truly carbon-neutral life, but I've made a lot of progress from the lazy, selfish slob I once was.

Encouraging people to live greener lives is difficult and, like I say, it's very daunting to take those first steps. Freecycle is an excellent way of easing someone into a more environmentally-responsible lifestyle and, dare I say, it's fun.

You can access Alnwick Freecycle here. You do have to join (it's free) in order to be able to post messages or reply to existing ones. The group is mainly centred around Alnwick, but covers the surrounding area and we have members as far away as Newcastle and Berwick. There are many other Freecycle groups around the country covering different areas. Have a look on the main Freecycle site to find them all.

Freecycle's not the only game in town. There's also the very similar Freegle. The local group is Seahouses and Alnwick Freegle, and there are also groups in Cramlington and Morpeth as well as all over the country.

Less fuel, less poverty

2010-10-15T16:07:00.005+01:00

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) have just published the latest fuel poverty statistics. I can't help but wonder how long they will continue collecting such a group of miserable depressing statistics.

If you're going to make cuts, cutting research that you have no plans to do anything with seem a good place to start. And the coalition look to have no interest in doing anything about fuel poverty.

How now green cow? What about the green investment bank? What about warmzone, warmfront, and all the rest of the confusing tapestry of organisations with 'warm' in the title, sewn up by the energy industry using confusing threads of levies and certificates?

Well, the DECC statistics seem to suggest that much less fuel poverty is caused by poorly insulated homes, and much more by people being just plain poor. Especially single people, who have not benefited from the range of child-friendly benefits for 'hard-working families'. And it's a safe bet that recent innovations from the coalition are not going to reduce overall poverty. So fuel poverty will go up.

Before the evidence, here are a few definitions.

A household is in fuel poverty when it needs to spend more than 10 per cent of its income on fuel to maintain an adequate level of warmth (usually defined as 21 degrees for the main living area, and 18 degrees for other occupied rooms). Let's leave aside whether we need our homes to be that warm. Some people do. A lot of us don't.
Fuel poor households with a modelled annual fuel bill above the mean of all households are classified as “high required fuel bill”.
Fuel poor households with an income level below ten times the average fuel bill (roughly the poorest 20% of households) are classified as being fuel poor due to income.

The 1st chart shows how the population of fuel poor households is distributed across 3 key factors - people who have a low income, a high required fuel bill (which takes account of how big the house is) and people in a home with a low SAP rating (which basically means it is poorly insulated).

Note that of the 3.4million fuel-poor households, 2.6 million of them have a low income. Only 0.9 million have a poorly insulated home, and more than half of those are also poor.

You can put some people in an eco-home and they will still be fuel poor, because they have no money.

If we look at the whole population we see that a total of 2.5 million households live in poorly insulated housing, but 80% (2 million) of them are not fuel poor.

These are people who are in work or on good pensions and have just not got around to insulating their lofts properly, or live in stone houses and do not fancy exterior cladding or internal insulation. Not the wisest financial or climactic choice - an argument is sometimes made that higher energy prices would change this group's behaviour, and it may do. It would just need to cripple some other people too.

Finally the distribution of poor people in different quality housing is revealing. Although it is true that if you live in rubbish housing (SAP less than 20) you are more likely to be fuel poor than not, there are plenty of people who are not. And, with 50 or above as the benchmark of good existing housing stock, there are almost as many fuel-poor people in housing of this standard as there are people in poor housing (SAP of less than 40).

This is also demonstrated by the North East, where we have the the lowest average household income, and the 2nd highest incidence of fuel poverty (21% of households), despitet better than average housing.

So what are the lessons, if we want to reduce energy use whilst driving down fuel poverty?

(a) You can't change people's behaviour and make them insulate their lofts using the pricing mechanism, without driving other people into quiet (or noisy) desperation.
(b) If you want to substantially reduce fuel poverty you also need to reduce inequality.
(c) To tackle the feckless-poorly-insulated, we need to move away from the complex artificial market in insulation measures. When road improvements are carried out, residents are not given a choice of 5 providers with subtly different offerings and the fallback position of doing nothing. We should do the same with cavity wall and loft insulation - a card will give residents 2 weeks notice that their homes are about to be improved.
(d) We can ration energy usage - giving households a certain amount of energy free (determined by household size) and then introduce punitive rates for additional usage. This ensures that no-one freezes from necessary usage and excessive discretionary usage is expensive. It also ensures that people don't stay in houses which are too large for them, blasting out heat in unused rooms because they can afford it.
(e) we can gradually reduce the rationed amount over time, as the world heats up, and to give everyone the opportunity to acclimatise to living at temperatures of less than 21 degrees, and to buy enough jumpers.
(f) we can encourage people to turn off their heating once in a while and go to other people's houses and cook and eat low-emission lentil casserole. Less poverty, more social capital, knowwhatimean?

3000 doors open (including this one)

2010-08-12T00:03:00.003+01:00

With more than 3000 locations nationally, 100 of them in Northumberland, and, er, 8 in Alnwick, Heritage Open Days running from Thursday 9th to Sunday 12th September, are becoming more popular than ever. The concept? Buildings which are norrmally closed to the public open up. Buildings which normally charge for admission open for free. Buildings which are normally open for free put a little extra on when they open.

Whilst His Grace and Her Graciousness mull over whether to enter next year's event, some other folks are gallantly filling in. You can view a full list on the Heritage Open Days website, but rather than dwell on the Dreadnought buses display, or the Heritage walks, let's consider just 5 events, more or less randomly chosen. OK, OK, not randomly chosen at all.

24 The Dunterns (Thurs 9/Sat 11), 50 Swansfield Park Road (Fri 10/Sat 11) and 62 Chapel Lands (pictured, Sun 12only) are all houses in Alnwick which show how homes of a certain age can be made much more environmentally-friendly with the addition of sexy stuff like solar panels, medium sexy wood-burning stoves and vegetable gardens and terrifically unsexy but effective insulation - loft, underfloor and interior walls. Information about the delightful effect this will have on your household energy bills as well as your carbon footprint will also be dispensed, along with cakes and tea. Follow the links above for opening times.

Way out west on Thursday 9th September, Barbara Sexon has planned a Energy Trail in the Coquet Valley which departs Thropton at 1.30pm. Both existing and potential renewable energy sites are on the tour.

Finally way out north west on Saturday 11th Elsdon Village Hall's Renewable Energy Day demonstrates the greening of a community buildings, and offers tips on similar practices. There is also a giant leek display. Don't these people know about the carbon impact of fertilisers? Ah well, if it's the only thing you do....

Be seeing you.

Fishoil for friends

2010-07-26T23:37:00.001+01:00

Dr Steve Ilardi is one of those groovy academics who is bridging the gap between academic and self-help celebrity with his new book The Depression cure: the six step programme to beat depression without drugs.
You can read all about him in this Guardian interview. All good sounding stuff, that is surely necessary to beat depression, if not sufficient for everyone.

Do some meaningful activity - don't just dwell on stuff.
Exercise 90 minutes a week.
Get some sunlight
Be sociable
Sleep 8 hours a night.
[this is a weird one] Take 1,500mg of omega-3 daily. He must have shares in them. I don't think there'll be enough fish to go round either.

Ilardi yanks in the lessons from hunter-gatherers. Keeping busy, pretty sociable, sleeping well, equals no depression. A few other factors different, and I don't know, how do landlocked hunter-gatherer tribes like pigmies get their omega-3? But you see his broad argument.

Similar ground is covered in a different way and rather more interestingly, by the late Kurt Vonnegut in his excellent novel Slapstick, or Lonesome No More where Wilbur and Elize create a plan to end loneliness in America through vast extended families. Under the plan, all citizens are provided with new middle names, made of the name of a random natural object paired with a random number between 1 and 20. One character is named Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen. Everyone with the same name is then pronounced cousins, and everyone with the same name and number are siblings.

But Steve Omega-3 Ilardi is not having this. The following is a pivotal exchange in his Guardian interview.

So we should all burn our possessions and head out into the forest? "Of course not," Iladi shudders. "That would be like a lifelong camping trip with 30 close relatives for company. Nobody would recommend that."

I thought you just said a minute ago it was about friendliness and getting that daylight and being sociable and keeping busy? Now you're telling me I just need to stock up on some more pills. Ah-hey...well now I get it.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon proprietor has made great play in the past from his 8 hours sleep a night. He probably works the other 16 hours, but as long as 30 mins consist of an outdoor power breakfast, and he spends 90 minutes on a treadmill barking orders sociably at his aides while ramming down pills that's all good groceries to Steve Omega-3. Always busy, making money.

So what does this tell us? It tells us you've got to make your peace with contemporary lifestyles and economic systems if you want crossover celebrity psychologist success. You can use the hunter-gatherers to underpin your argument, but there just cuckoo-clock figures who make their ding-dong cameo and then they're gone. No room to reflect on the other things we might learn from them. (I'm guessing a shade more than 15-30 mins sunlight each day. I'm guessing the sociability is not business meetings. And they're not keeping busy with sales projections in Excel). The crazy world of Kurt Vonnegut is out of reach.

Our gaping wants can, however, be remedied with a food supplement and just one more wafer-thin thing to worry about - getting your 8 hours. And what's going to give? Probably not working, I'm guessing.

Bedtime.

Why don't we cycle?

2010-07-26T22:30:00.003+01:00

There are good reasons to be suspicious of official research. Not the Travelodge surveys which reveal that 5% of women's diry weekend dream partner is Leo Sayer, or the Canon polls which show that 35% of men have photocopied their arse. Someone realised long ago this was a cheaper way of getting your name in the papers than buying advertising space, Almost everyone knows that this is not real research (except curiously commercial radio DJs who can fill hours of airhead time with it).

I mean the real Big-R Research. Why? It's normally fairly clear to the agency what results the commissioner is after, and even if the buyers of the research are on the saintly side they have normally delimited in such a way to rule out the real reasons which they're afraid of. And finally, respondents always lie. Not always consciously, and not in a bad way - but they still lie.

I took part in a credit card survey where one of the possible reasons for choosing the credit card was "I liked the colour". Nobody but nobody is going to admit to being so irrational, but plenty of us are. Probably I am.

So we talk about cycling. The reasons why we don't cycle are always: it's too dangerous.

But if you managed to carve the recommended 5ft off each side of the street in Alnwick, painted it blue like Boris has done his in London, and even put a continuous concrete barrier between this cycle path and the road, most people would still not cycle. No, they would sit in the 5ft single lane section of road in their cars honking at oncoming vehicles to get out of their way. Well, no, maybe they'd cycle in preference to that. But it would take something like that to make them cycle.

Here is another reason which does not explain why people don't cycle:

I don't have a bike.

Whhaat? Buy one! There isn't a shortage, they don't have to be expensive - you can get something new for town cycling for around £100 and people can't give them away in the backs of local papers. Almost everyone you know has a 'broken' one which they don't use so you just fix their puncture for them and borrow it.

Let's look at the real reason why people don't cycle. None of these appear in the surveys, because (a) they are bleeding obvious (b) most surveys don't ask (c) most respondents are reluctant to admit the awful truth. You'll note that I therefore have no justification for my prejudices, except for the barriers that my amazing capacity for self-knowledge reveals to me and me alone about why I cannot always get on my bike in the morning. That and my detached scientific observations of other folks.

Cycling is hard work - it hurts muscles you didn't know you had until you start. You feel good doing it once, but the next day, unless you keep on, hurts.
It is normally slower than going in a car.
It involves exercising in the outdoors and in public. All kinds of people will see you looking red-faced and a bit out of breath.
You can start out feeling too cold and end up being quite hot and sweaty. It's a terrible dilemma what to wear.
Bicycles do not have roofs or windows. In short there is no inside. From time to time you will get wet and you will not be able to safely hold an umbrella as you cycle.
Wearing helmets can mess up your hair. It would be unsafe to cycle without a helmet, so instead you drive and mow down other cyclists and properly mess up their hair with bits of blood and brain and that.

Now we have reviewed the real reasons why people don't cycle we can identify the incentives we need to put in place. You'll note that these incentives do not include giving people the opportunity to buy £700 bikes for £300 which they then keep in garage for 11 1/2 months of the year except when they are on holiday. This is called the Cycle2work scheme. It sucks.

Don't give away bikes anymore - give away soothing muscle ointment. Give people gel seats to help with the inevitable early buttock pains. Soup up push-bikes with those crazy electric engines that only mad old blokes used to use.
Give people really souped-up engines so that they can go as fast as cars. Oh no, that's a motorbike. Ah well, make cars slower. See below for more ideas on this one.
Encourage people to wear dark glasses, promote non-drip foundation for those red-faced occasions.
Provide more showers in workplaces. Make owners of buildings above a certain size provide them (I know this is crazy 'regulation' talk - nobody does this anymore - it will never work). Alternatively change the whole rules of fashion so sweaty and hot is the new cool.
Bicycles with roofs will never be cool, even if everyone secretly wants them. Instead, sell aerodynamically-styled silver clip-on brollies which can be adjusted through 360 degrees in line with the prevailing wind and direction of travel. They need to be sporty though, not nerdish.
Er, the hair-helmet problem. Howabout ... Make cycling safe enough that nobody feels the need to wear helmets! Screw Esther Rantzen and her stupid campaigns in the 80s. When did she ever ride a bike? Could have got most of the audience for her Alnwick performance in on a tandem though. Miaooww.

Anyway. That is the real issue. The bike is one mode amongst many. Unless and until driving is way more expensive, way slower, or otherwise way more inconvenient (like the fantastic Cuban stunt in the 90s where they had so little oil that motorists were obliged to pick up every passing hitch-hiker), we're not going to ride bikes in significant numbers. Critical Mass were right. Make that motorised traffic slooowww down. .

Tell that to Boris and his beaten-up old basket-less Barclays bikes beside the blue cycle lanes.

Oh yeah, two caveats.

1. I agree cycling probably is quite dangerous on most of the main roads in North Northumberland. If the council could put in a cycleway between Alnwick and Alnmouth that would be grrreeeat.

2. I was rehearsing this rant with my friend Sheila, and she told me that she really did stop cycling when she came to Alnwick from a small village in Yorkshire 'cos it seemed too dangerous. So I guess for some people it is. Just not as many as who say it is. I reckon.

Let's not be beastly to Tony Hayward

2010-06-25T23:18:00.000+01:00

Let's save some bile for the US political establishment too
David Golding and chums from Newcastle University socked it to the navel-gazing American public and their 'ecosystem' of oil businesses last week, via the pages of the International Herald Tribune.

No Position to 'Throw Stones'
The response of the American public and its political leaders to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico perfectly illustrates why people in glass houses should not throw stones.

BP and its corporate associates certainly deserve severe censure for their failure to provide adequate safeguards for their hazardous operations, and their behavior brings to mind the recent reckless folly of the banks. However, the resulting damage is hardly a drop in the ocean compared to the impact of America's contribution to global atmospheric pollution resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels.

At least BP has offered fulsome apologies, is compensating those affected, and is making strenuous efforts to prevent further damage. Has the United States accepted responsibility for the impacts of its energy profligacy on climate change? Has it committed itself to providing full restitution for the now well-documented misery which global warming is already inflicting on countless millions of the world's poor? Is it making urgent and determined efforts to de-carbonize its economy and life-style?

In each case, we think not. It really is in no position to throw stones.
David Golding, Mike Goodfellow, Sharon Joyce, Sara Maioli, Elizabeth Oughton, Allen Parker, Marian Raley, Vincent Theobald-Vega, Gunther Uher, Bryan Vernon, Jim White, Members of the academic staff, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

How to avoid creating your own manufactured landscape

2010-06-25T22:58:00.002+01:00

Last night a select group of hardy environmental lightfoot adventurers skipped Japan vs South Korea and saw Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes, an amazing film based on Ed Burtynsky's photographs of city-scapes, factory-scapes, and er, ship-breaking-beach-scapes.

What we saw frightened us. We thought of the following 10 easy steps as a way of keeping Chinese water drinkable and give children and old women something better to do than smash up old bits of computer to get the heavy metals out. These steps won't eliminate those jobs, but they might reduce the amount of it by 20% or so. They'll be grateful for the time off.

1. Upgrade PCs – computers are amongst the most polluting appliances, full of poisonous heavy metals. If your PC is slow you don’t need a new one – normally this can be fixed by adding extra RAM. Find what RAM you need at Crucial, and search YouTube for videos on how to install it.

2. Buy reliable - Buy goods which are less likely to break down – generally these are the more expensive ones, but not always. At Which? you can sign up for a £1 1-month trial subscription and download all the reports on goods you are thinking of buying.

3. Buy with low running costs – Sust-it is an excellent source of information about the best electrical appliances for energy consumption and running costs.

4. Maintain stuff – everyone plans to maintain and service products, but it very often becomes something we do next time. Check out the manual for advice on lengthening the life of your product and try to follow it.

5. Fix - Most of the cost of fixing stuff is labour. Income inequalities between the Uk and China make it easier to throw it away and import a new one. But not if you fix it yourself. Haynes Home and Garden have published a series of well-reviewed books on lawnmowers, washing machines, dishwashers etc. (They're much cheaper on Amazon).

6. Buy spares - Don’t ditch the item when part of it breaks. Google the manufacturer and ring them. Many run spare parts departments. They don’t get a lot of calls and are keen to help.

7. Don’t throw it away, give it away - Try to avoid upgrading goods needlessly. But if you do, offer your old one on freecycle. Alnwick District has a flourishing group and lots of takers – Register for Freecycle.

8. Don’t buy – Share it – A lot of equipment, such as power tools, consume far more energy in production than they ever do in use. Some may only see a few hours use in 10 years.

9. Don’t buy it – Get it for free – if you are after something, advertise on the Alnwick Freecycle group (see point 7). A lot of people are holding onto stuff that they haven’t got round to advertising or getting rid of. You’re doing Chinese refuse sorters a favour, and can get some amazing bargains (if you’re quick)

10. Some of our rubbish is nasty. Don’t pour away hazardous chemicals or put electrical goods in the bin – contact Northumberland County Council on 0845 600 6400. They operate a free monthly hazardous waste collection service, and can advise on where to dispose of other materials.

Deepwater horizon every day

2010-06-13T23:06:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you think BP's troubles in the Gulf of Mexico signal a fundamental change of attitude to large-scale corporate pollution. But how people respond to such disasters depends on a lot of factors - how much information (as well as oil) escapes, how closely entwined politicians are with the companies concerned, and, er, how stupid and unsympathetic the chief executive's comments are.

But above all they depend on how wealhy and influential the victims are. Manufactured landscapes, the next film in Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth's series Green on the Screen, shows what tends to happen when the victims are poor people in the developing world.

Manufactured landscapes is shown alongside the acclaimed Edwardian silent documentary A day in the life of a coalminer at St James Church Centre, Pottergate, Alnwick on Thursday June 24th at 7.30pm. Admission is £3, and drinks and home-made ice creams are available.

Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer who captures surreal and devastated environments - "the landscape that we change – that we disrupt – in pursuit of progress." Jennifer Baichwal is a Canadian filmmaker who captures Edward Burtynksy capturing these scenes. But out of such unpromising material, a haunting and beautiful film is created.

Beneath the beautiful images, we sense a wide-eyed horror at the ravages the country is preparing to inflict on its own environment. The director aims her camera at the apparently insignificant human participants; assembly-line workers, blowtorch-wielders, concrete pourers and the like.

The minimal commentary and slow, lingering pace leave maximum room for reflection on our impact on the planet and to witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste.

Ordinary people who refused to say McSorry

2010-05-15T23:31:00.003+01:00

Mc Libel - 7.30pm on Thursday May 27th at St James Church Centre, Pottergate, Alnwick

The 5th film in our Green on the Screen series, McLibel tells the story of Dave Morris and Helen Steel, a postman and a gardener who were sued by McDonalds for handing out leaflets outside its restaurants. The libel trial which resulted was the longest in history. Half way through burning up 10 million pounds on the trial,McDonalds offered secret talks, which Dave and Helen secretly taped, whilst rejecting the attempt to gag them. McDonalds never recovered a penny, and 7 years later, the legal battle concluded in the Hague with a famous victory.

Director Franny Armstrong went on to make The Age of Stupid in 2009,although on this debut she had assistance in parts from the legendary political film director Ken Loach . This is an inspirational film for sit-down and stand-up activists everywhere.

As usual the film will be accompanied by a Green B-movie. This time, Nick Broomfield's "A time comes". This short documentary interviews the Kingsnorth Six who were prosecuted but cleared for scaling and painting on the cooling towers of Kingsnorth coal-fired power station.
(I know there are only 5 in the picture - I think the 6th must've been taking the photo, owing to the lack of friendly security guards on site to point and click)

Admission is £3, with home-made ice creams and sorbets and drinks for a donation.
Directions for St James - http://st-james-pottergate.notlong.com/

[St James is on the right hand side of the road, despite what this map tells you]

That environmental announcement in full

2010-05-12T21:47:00.007+01:00

Chapter 11 of the Conservative-LibDem pact, accompanied by my mulling, moaning and cries of betrayal. Well, not really. It's not good enough, but I feared worse.
"The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to fulfil our joint ambitions for a low carbon and eco-friendly economy, including:

The establishment of a smart grid and the roll-out of smart meters;
Sounds great - smart grids and smart meters allow us to build more intermittent renewables into the grid. But Labour were promising them a looong time too. Both are expensive, and require much bribing/beating of the energy companies.
The full establishment of feed-in tariff systems in electricity – as well as the maintenance of banded ROCs;
Both of these are incentives to generate renewable electricity - ROCs for larger generators, feed-in tariffs for domestic and small commercial generators. This is something all 3 parties put in their manifesto. It's kind of them to confirm that they still plan to do it.
Measures to promote a huge increase in energy from waste through anaerobic digestion; - Great! Will help replace the deranged system whereby Northumberland's waste is squashed into HGVs and driven down to Teesside to be burnt for a derisory return of energy. I have a vision of kitchen and garden waste recycling taking off in earnest! But then I remember the deal Northumberland County Council signed with Sita to provide them with an agreed amount of waste to burn for 25 years, and pay them for it, regardless of whether they produce that much. Which kind of acts as a barrier.
The creation of a green investment bank; All parties made this noise, but it doesn't appear to mean anything. It's a great slogan. But it's just a wrapper for a few loans to companies. The amounts, the terms, the durations matter a lot more than the shiny name.
The provision of home energy improvement paid for by the savings from lower energy bills; this is a good scheme, but the barrier to better domestic energy efficiency is often not the finance, but the lack of trust in the providers, and just inertia. This is something Alnwick environmental groups hope to get involved with soon.
Retention of energy performance certificates while scrapping HIPs;
keeps the surveyors happy repeatedly reporting on the same houses and charging each time; pretty worrying stories about energy performance certificates - typically awarded in a 15 minute inspection by a non-specialist.
Measures to encourage marine energy; that old favourite of anti-wind protestors everywhere. NOT ENOUGH BLOODY TIDE (OR WAVES), alright?
The establishment of an emissions performance standard that will prevent coal-fired power stations being built unless they are equipped with sufficient CCS to meet the emissions performance standard; Oh god, we have to go through establishing a performance standard for coal-fired power stations again? Haven't Labour already created this? Sounds like another chance for the lobbyists to get get stuck in. Well, the economy has to revive somehow, and it starts right here.
The establishment of a high-speed rail network; Hurrah!
The cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow;
Twice hurrah!
The refusal of additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted; More hurrahs - but hold on, aren't there about 15 other airports in the UK carrying significant passengers and freight?
The replacement of the air passenger duty with a per-flight duty;
Great - but I'm not sure how much evidence there is for airlines running empty flights around, and whether this will change their behaviour substantially. It will depend on the level of the duty, and could well mean lower duties for busy flights.
The provision of a floor price for carbon, as well as efforts to persuade the EU to move towards full auctioning of ETS permits; Those poor carbon traders have suffered so - we must not see their business hurt. In the circumstances this is a good policy, but a better one would be to issue fewer permits (it makes'em more expensive see? Like, er, everything else in the world) and stop daft credit schemes which devalue the credits even further.
Measures to make the import or possession of illegal timber a criminal offence; Sounds good. How much timber from endangered forests is actually illegal, incidentally?
Measures to promote green spaces and wildlife corridors in order to halt the loss of habitats and restore biodiversity; Such as? 'Promote' is pretty weak.
Mandating a national recharging network for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles; Great- but I am slightly worried by the word 'mandate' - just who is being mandated? Local authorities? Will they join up? Cue mass confusion over 2-pin and 3-pin charging plugs and 110V and 230V connections.
Continuation of the present government's proposals for public sector investment in CCS technology for four coal-fired power stations; and a specific commitment to reduce central government carbon emissions by 10% within 12 months. That shouldn't be too hard, the numbers of people they're planning to get rid of.

We are agreed that we would seek to increase the target for energy from renewable sources, subject to the advice of the climate change committee. Currently the target is 15% by 2020. Even that is pushing it, but I guess we should be chuffed with the aspiration. Stand by for arguments over whether nuclear should be classified as a renewable.

[Now we enter a surreal world....]

Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations provided they are subject to the normal planning process for major projects (under a new national planning statement) and provided also that they receive no public subsidy.

We have agreed a process that will allow Liberal Democrats to maintain their opposition to nuclear power while permitting the government to bring forward the national planning statement for ratification by parliament so that new nuclear construction becomes possible.

This process will involve:
• The government completing the drafting of a national planning statement and putting it before parliament;
• Specific agreement that a Liberal Democrat spokesman will speak against the planning statement, but that Liberal Democrat MPs will abstain; and clarity that this will not be regarded as an issue of confidence.

[Let's put this another way - if you're one of, say, 4 people on the jury who are pretty sure the accused is innocent, but the other 8 folks want to see him go down, but they offer you the chance to mutter a few words before silently agreeing to his imprisonment - is your conscience clear?]

The old farm track - reflections on dualling the A1

2010-05-12T20:55:00.001+01:00

So, let's get this straight.

In Berwick-upon-Tweed constituency last Thursday Sir Older Bloke who said he could deliver a dualled A1 (but hadn't) narrowly beat Former-Financier Married-Old-Money who said that he couldn't, but that she would (even though her party said they would last time around and hadn't).

And they both comprehensively beat Young Upstart who said that we shouldn't because it wasn't busy enough, and everyone went "Boo! That'll larn you, you guys with the discredited government that got 46 fewer seats and 7% less of the vote - this counts as a comprehensive defeat in our system".

But then Sir Older Bloke and Former-Financier's friends got together and made a coalition of unequals, and lo, verily, in the full text of the deal there was not a single mention of 'road', 'transport' or 'farm track'. And much talk of 'green deal', 'cutting spending' and 'emergency budgets'. Methinks it still won't happen. It's still the old politics, and, for once, I rather like it.

Environmental Question Time - a personal view.

2010-04-18T22:43:00.003+01:00

Thanks to those of you who came. I've given thumbs up and down based on my own personal views. These do not necessarily constitute the views of Friends of the Earth locally or nationally, or even necessarily my own views tomorrow. The conclusion? As Gordon Brown likes to reassure himself daily - ~~"I agree with Nick"~~ (whoops, I mean): "It's still wide open."

Do excuse my erratic summarising. Don't excuse the non-appearance of Ane-Marie Trevelyan for the Tories, who managed to send 20 odd tweets on the night of the debate, when she was supposedly at another event. Looks like the event was in front of the TV in the drawing room at Netherwallop Hall. This is where this dedicated champion of fairness and pensioners' rights lives, dontcha know.

Does the A1 need dualling?

Alan Beith (LibDem): Yes, I will continue to campaign doggedly, as I have done for the past 30 years, although you may not have noticed (0).

Alan Strickland (Labour): No. It's not a high priority road (+1)

Michael Weatheritt (UKIP): It's our number one priority, we can't believe you want to talk about anything else (-1).

What will you do to support cycle routes and a route between Alnmouth and Alnwick in particular?
Alan Beith: In common with the other main parties, I have no policy on cycling. I believe that a rail link between Alnwick and Alnmouth is imminent, rather like the dualling of the A1 (-1).
Alan Strickland: I have no policy on cycling either. I do not give away that I have not heard of Alnmouth, but I would support a cycle route (0)
Michael Weatheritt: I support cycle routes, becasue they get cyclists off the road. They are a menace. (+1)

What 3 things will you do to convince the public that climate change is real and it matters?
AB: I will deliver a long rambling answer listing 2 things. (0)
AS: I will also deliver a long answer, but my ideas are better - raising awareness of effects which are already happening, more on future effects, creating incentives for pro-environmental behaviour (+1)
MW: I am not convinced that climate change is real or matters, so not much point asking me. (-1)

What are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint?
AB: Living near the railway station, taking the train where possible, insulating my house (+1)
AS: Not owning a car, trying to avoid flying, trying to encourage similar behaviour amongst friends. (+1)
MW: Not lighting the coal fire until 3.30pm (-2)

Do you support local decision making in planning big energy projects?
AB: Yes. Although planning system is a hurdle for wind turbine developers, it doesn't alter attractiveness of developments to energy firms. (+1)
AS: No. I wish to cover the surface of the UK with nuclear power stations (-1)
MW: Yes. [you can tell he's not a professional politician with answers like that, can't you?] (+1)

Is the UK overpopulated? If so, what would you do about it?
AB: No. I immediately make comparisons with one child policy of China, like every other politician, as I become blind to the differences between incentivisation and compulsion in reducing birthrates. However, I do get a point for accepting that there is more to well being than economic growth (+1)
AS: No. I also enjoy making comparisons with China, and have missed an opportunity to show off my flagship child poverty strategy (0)
MW: On the other hand, I do not miss an opportunity to show off my flagship anti-immigration strategy. I am happy with our population, if we could stop them darned folks coming in. (0)

TOTAL SCORES:
Sir Alan Beith (Lib Dem): +2 ; Alan Strickland (Labour): +2 ; Michael Weatheritt (UKIP): -2

A dead heat, but there can only be one winner. There's another 2 and a half weeks of this yet.

Alnwick's first solar electricity supplier

2010-04-18T21:25:00.006+01:00

Many people making investigations about fitting solar panels are disheartened to find that the suppliers tend to be based in the Midlands or the South.

Alarm bells ring about whether it is so good to be tackling climate change by paying people to drive hundreds of miles around the country. And who are these people anyway? Do I have pursue them to Bristol if things don't work out?

But Alnwick's first supplier of solar photovoltaic panels (PV - the electric kind of panel) has just opened for business. Paul Mills, who lives in Alnwick, is Equinox Energy North East.

Take advantage of the following:

New generous feed in tariffs from the UK government (41p for every kwh you generate - which compares well with the 15p you pay for each kwh you use off the grid).
MCS accredited installer.
Supplier lives in community, readily contactable for advice and issues, cannot hide.
Brings own teabags, does not charge for petrol or accommodation.

You can contact Paul Mills on 01665 604 869.

Find out more about the feed in tariffs.

Environmental Question Time

2010-03-30T21:06:00.015+01:00

Like Gardener's Question Time, but without the pesticides

After delicate negotiations and a no-show from Conservative Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Alnwick Friends of the Earth's Environmental Question Time is going ahead at St James Church Centre, Pottergate, Alnwick - 7.30pm Thursday 15th April.

The debate features Alan Strickland of Labour, Michael Weatheritt of UKIP and the Rt Hon Sir Alan Beith of the Liberal Democrats.

Forget the jowls and scowls of party leaders debating the deficit and put questions to the candidates about wind turbines, energy prices, rail links, the A1, recycling, incineration, nuclear power and solar panels, food miles and foreign imports, fuel poverty, GM, vehicle excise duty, pollution, town planning, population and world development.

You can post your questions via the form below, or bring them along on the night. All questions are new to the candidates on the night.

If you're tired of the parties and the posters, why not find out what the actual candidates believe?

£1 to all-comers.
Send a question to the candidates (they will only hear it on the night)

Local carbon budgets are rubbish

2010-03-25T22:51:00.007Z

The UK Dept of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has wonderfully thorough, although v old, statistics pages. Though Alnwick District is no more, it continues to feature in the Local authority statistics. I compared the figures for Alnwick district with the UK average.

Here's the Alnwick CO2 emissions per head in 2007:
And here are the figures for the UK average emissions per head in 2007. I've taken the emissions from land use change, forestry and so on out of the equation because they confuse the basic results by being a mix of emitters and sinks.

So what do these figures tell us?

First, as you might expect given the climate and older housing stock, domestic energy consumption is higher in Alnwick than elsewhere. The difference is greater than the pie chart suggests, as Alnwick relies disproportionately on oil and coal. Including all these energy sources, domestic energy consumption accounts for 2.76 tonnes per head in Alnwick, compared with 2.36 elsewhere in the UK, or 17% more.
Second, minor road travel accounts for 58% more emissions in Alnwick, because (I guess) things are further away, and people can rely less on buses, local metros, trains and so on.
But most significantly, the emissions from A-roads are more than 3 times higher in Alnwick than the UK average. We have one big A-road and two smaller A-roads running through our sparsely-populated former district. Many or most of the people using this road are not Alnwick residents, but we cop for their emissions.
Alnwick still manages a lower average per head (8 tonnes, compared with 8.4 tonnes), because it is light on industry, so commercial gas and electricity use are low.

All this leads me to doubt that it is worth councils setting local carbon budgets. Indeed it is even more pointless than country level budgets, where countries such as the UK can reduce emissions by exporting intangible products and importing manufactured goods.

If Alnwick could double energy efficiency turn all existing housing stock that would drive down emissions overall by a little over 17%. To approach the 40% target which some green groups advocate, Alnwick would need to closing its remaining industry (emission saving almost 19%) or digging up the A1 and turning into a sheep drovers' track (saving 21% - something I'd rather support, but I guess the wider appetite is not there).

It gets madder if we look at other parts of the North East. Stockton-on-Tees has emissions per head of 21 tonnes, or nearly 3 times the national average. Wansbeck has 55.7 tonnes, and Redcar and Cleveland have 62.5 tonnes per person. At more than 7 times the national average, this is a figure of which Jane Northumberland would be proud.

What these areas all have in common (for now) are large commercial users of gas and electricity. Offshoring these factories and claiming a victory in the battle against climate change is as crazy as Copenhagen.

We need international targets, or at least national targets which take account of embedded carbon in imports and exports. Localism isn't working.

Is it a bird, is it a plane? It's a plane, but I'm not counting it (although I can)

2010-03-23T19:07:00.003Z

Good news, praise the lord, another thing to thank the recession for. Astute economic policy means that the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) were able to confirm a 1.9% decline in UK emissions in 2008, 19.4% since the baseline year of 1990, and our carbon budget report card is full of ticks.

Extend that line onward to 2050, and we might hit a 65% reduction in UK emissions by then. About 75% over the target we've set ourselves, but hey, it's progress.

The Committee on Climate Change, who we appointed, said it was OK to have quite weak targets to begin with because of all the investment involved (bribing energy companies, fighting with local councils, sucking up to motor manufacturers, that kind of thing). Back in summer 2008 that was plausible 'cos we had money. Now it isn't, cos we don't.

It's weird, though. You know those aviation emissions, which we've been saying for years we couldn't count and therefore couldn't be included in any totals or targets? Well, er, we managed it. We looked at how much (untaxed) fuel had been taken on by planes at the UK's airports, and calculated the emissions from burning it. Simple, really. Don't know why we didn't propose it at Copenhagen.

So what would emission reductions look like if we took account of aviation? Well we've given you all the figures, but we haven't added them together, so that lazy journalists won't notice.

Emissions from aviation have gone up 118% since 1990. Making some conservative assumptions about the effect of high-altitude (a multiplier of 2.7) that leads to a reduction from 1990 to 2008 of just 12.1%, not 19.4%. And if we extend that line to 2050, we're headed for a mere 40% reduction in emissions by 2050. So we will be three times over our target.

And remember that emissions will rebound in earnest when the economy picks up, and in any case we are still counting the wrong thing because all our manufacturing takes place outside the UK and so doesn't get counted, and the first emissions cuts should be the easiest and 80% might nothave been enough anyway.

So we're still rubbish. Just in case you were worrying that we'd got our act together.

Wilf sez....

2010-03-21T21:55:00.001Z

"Abundant Earth, a food co-op in the County Durham, has been selected to take part in an exciting bit of research called Greener Together. It's about exploring ways of cutting our carbon footprint.

"At this stage we are looking to recruit up to 50 people who can take part in the research over the next 6 months. Data gathered from the research will be used to inform future government policy on what helps and hinders people taking action about climate change.

"Participants will carry out a survey to generate baseline data. Then you'll be asked to make pledges and set tasks to reduce your carbon footprint. Then half way through and at the end of the research period there will be a further survey to measure the changes that have taken place.

"The details of these pledges and tasks haven't been revealed yet. But there are a variety to choose from and they will be appropriate to your current commitment to climate change.

"So whether you were planning to just start to reduce, or you are already well on the way to reducing your carbon footprint, getting involved in this research would be great for you, for us, for co-ops and for future government policy"

Find out more about Greener Together.
Contact Wilf Richards and sign up on 07906 439 084.

Peaking too early: the oil beneath our feet

2009-12-24T13:38:00.000Z

STOP PRESS: We have had to postpone this talk due to bad weather. We hope to rearrange for the summer of 2010.

Dr Roger Bentley of Whitfield Solar and Reading University challenges the conventional wisdom of ever-increasing oil supply at 7.30pm on Wednesday 13th January 2010, at St James Church Centre, Pottergate, Alnwick.

Roger has studied peak oil for many years. He is a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading, Head of Research & Development for Whitfield Solar, and a former Secretary of The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, and Secretary of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre. He has also given evidence several times to House of Lords select committees on economics and energy.

Roger says: “The world's supply of conventional oil is close to peaking and may already have peaked. What is economically significant is the possible sharp decline once the peak has passed. A 3 or 4 per cent reduction per year will quickly cause large price increases, and possibly rationing. And any large scale switching of supply from oil to gas for things like electricity generation, transport or heating, will simply bring forward the date of the supply peak for gas.”

Why does this matter now? Wasn't the oil price bubble caused by cloven-hoofed bankers buying up the stocks and betting on rises? Well, maybe. Or maybe global depression got us off the hook temporarily, and as the economy slowly starts to recover, we may see a pick up in demand for oil, and a rapid return to the 130 pence or more a litre. Roger will be showing how likely this is, and what we might do to limit the impact.

What really happened at Copenhagen?

2009-12-24T13:07:00.001Z

Friends of the Earth central think they know. It was the rich countries, selling out the developing world with secret documents, weak targets and dodgy carbon offsetting deals. But what do they know, they were removed from the Conference part-way through, either because of a protest or to make room for the hundreds of flashbulb-hungry premiers who showed up temporarily before finding there was no cool deal to be associated with and scuttled off again. It isn't clear.

Environment journalist Mark Lynas thinks he knows too. In an article in the Guardian, he says "How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room" Quite what a journo was doing in the room while China allegedly beat down all efforts to quote targets, Angela Merkel threw a tizz and Barack lost his legendary cool is never quite answered. Do we 'embed' reporters with environmental delegations like we do in war zones now?

So I don`t know.

But I do know that it`s seems pretty dumb to suggest China can continue increasing emissions until 2030 or so when their per capita emissions (4.6 tonnes) are already more than double what they need to be by 2050 (2 tonnes).

I also know it`s pretty dumb for Ed Miliband to drone on every industrialised nations cutting emissions by 80% when the USA, Canada and Australia all emit more than double the EU's emissions. I want to see them hurt more than us. That's climate justice.

I know too that it's pretty dumb to keep talking about China and India as an entity, when India's per capita emissions are 1.3 tonnes - less than the 2050 target. OK - set a target, but it should be a 50% increase by 2050. That's climate justice too.

Finally, I know that the deals around carbon credits are really dumb. This is where the UK or another developed world country earns credits to pollute for investing in some Congolese forest, or for paying an Indian businessman millions to capture some HCFCs, or for giving China a stack of cash to build a hydroelectric power plant which is already built, and then pretending that none of these things would have happened without the cash! How stupid is that? And whilst claiming that we can save the world through carbon trading, for countries to magic carbon credits out of thin air creates rampant devaluation of permits. This is tacklimg climate change Mugabe-style.

There a solution to climate change. Draw a straight line between where countries are now on emissions and where we all need to be in 2050 (2 tonnes per head), and that's your quota. Distribute the right amount of quotas, and make the climate sceptics in Australia, Canada and Oz, the big coal entrepreneurs in China, and the Easyjet addicts in the UK pay for their damage. A huge dividend to the developing world or a real reduction in developed and semi-developed world emissions. Al Gore's your Uncle. I thank you.

Taking Alnwick off-Grid - talk summary

2009-07-21T22:20:00.000+01:00

Why should local environments be damaged to provide energy elsewhere? Why should the people of Blyth have to live beside a coal fired power station to provide Alnwick with electricity? Perhaps it is time to take responsibility for our own energy use as individuals and as communities.

In the town of Alnwick, each person uses 9890kWhs of energy each year. How could this be met using locally available renewable energy?

Solar thermal could provide about 50% of domestic hot water

Miscanthus (Elephant grass) could produce the remainder of our water heating, and space heating with 12.6 sq km.

Heat pumps could produce this space heating, but we need electricity to power them.

3 large turbines would be required for electricity alone, with a further 7 to produce electricity for heat pumps.

Domestic photovoltaic panels would need to be very large to get close to eliminating even one wind turbine.

A system of feed in tariffs will be introduced next year, guaranteeing a fixed price to individuals or communities that supply the grid with electricity from renewables. Maybe Alnwick won't become energy independent soon, but perhaps we should all be working towards it.

Read Barbara Sexon's full paper - Taking Alnwick off grid

Alnwick Off-grid – peak oil and new possibilities

2009-05-21T20:44:00.000+01:00

Dr Barbara Sexon will be speaking on whether Alnwick can live on locally-produced renewable energyat St James Church, Pottergate in Alnwick on Thursday 4th June at 7.30pm.

How many tons of wood fuel would we need, and could we use Hulne Park to produce it? (would the Duke be cool with it?) How many wind turbines would we need, and how high would they need to be? Where could we store the wind energy we produced for the calm times? Barbara’s talk offers an interesting perspective of how we might live sustainably and what Alnwick would look like as a result.

“On any day in The Journal you will find some people complaining about having one form of power station or other. People have got to get their energy from somewhere. I aim to show how we could do it with close to zero emissions.”

Barbara has a PhD in small-scale wind energy, and lives in Thropton. She worked for several years in Sudan producing a small-scale hydropower system which would allow farmers to replace unreliable and polluting diesel generators for irrigation.

Admission is £2 and includes free refreshments.

Letter in support of Wind farms at Toft Hill, Moorsyde and Barmoor

2009-05-10T12:04:00.001+01:00

You can send your own letter to Ruth MacKenzie, the Planning Inspector via
moorsyde4us@hotmail.co.uk.

Dear Mrs MacKenzie,

APP/V2913/A/08/2079520 Appeal by Moorsyde Wind Farm Limited for site at Felkington, Berwick upon Tweed TD15 2NR
APP/V2913/A/08/2078347 Appeal by Catamount Energy Limited for site at Barmoor between Ford and Lowick
APP/V2913/A/08/2077474 Appeal by NPower Renewables Limited for site at Toft Hill, south west of Grindon.

I write in support of wind farm at all of the above locations. I am in favour of wind turbines in any location where:

it is economic to place them
where fragile ecosystems, which might, for instance be covered by allocating status of SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), are not placed at risk.
where there are appropriate mitigations for interference with radar systems
where there is not collateral damage to the wider economy

None of the criteria above are met by the 3 applications, and it is therefore my view that all should go ahead.

On the economics of wind turbine location - previous views have already identified these areas as UK locations with well above average wind speeds, and the fact that several energy companies have already sought to make applications, and have persisted despite 5 years of blinkered opposition from a minority of well-connected residents indicates their commitment.

Nobody has, to my knowledge, claimed that these or any of the other locations being proposed in Northumberland, are host to threatened species or ecosystems, and none of them are in SSSIs.

On the subject of radar, the Ministry of Defence have offered up inconsistent positions, as shown at Wandylaw, where evidence was presented indicating that the MoD had previously accepted that the wind turbines would not cause problems to neighbouring radar stations, whilst the MoD representative himself appeared to oppose the development on the grounds that they would. In the light of this contradictory stance, I would suggest that the UK's future energy needs are not delayed by such prevarications. The recommendation should be to go ahead with the development, subject to certification that radar facilities can be modified, and upgraded if required, to eliminate this concern, which has been hyped up by anti-wind farm protesters who have as little understanding of radar technology as wind turbine technology, the national grid, or threats to bird life.

Finally, on the damage to the wider economy, I have rarely heard more disingenuous rubbish published as fact than on the subject of the impact of wind turbines on tourism. At no point has any reliable evidence been presented that tourism will suffer as a result of wind (a loaded questionnaire on people's intent to travel to an area once a demonic vision of hideous turbines has been presented does not constitute evidence). The south-west of England and Cumbria have both seen increases in tourism following installation of wind farms. Whilst this cannot be attributed to wind farms, no evidence suggests that areas with similar reliance on tourism which have not installed wind energy facilities have received greater numbers.

The final objection thrown at wind farms, about the aesthetics of them. Surveys continue to show that a large majority of people actually find wind turbines attractive. We should not let a vocal majority obscure this fact. I would like to see a longer-term view of aesthetics which considers the option of extreme weather events with ever-increasing frequencies, coastal settlements turned into ghost towns by encroaching seas, and food shortages in the developing world which leads to mass migrations of desperate, hungry people. Now that is aesthetically displeasing.

David Farrar

Why is this man smiling?

2009-03-31T22:00:00.000+01:00

He's got a north east strategy for tackling climate change, that's why
The earth’s atmosphere is very thin. If we rolled it up into a ball, and placed it on the surface of the earth, it would only reach from here to Gibraltar.

Adrian Hilton from the North East Climate Change Partnership emphasised the peril of our position with a few more anecdotes, when he spoke to Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth and guests on 26th March.

At the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference, many scientists suggested that even a 2 degree rise in temperature is too high for us, and that we had a less than 50% chance of keeping within that target. With a 6 degree rise, we wouldn’t be here at all (though Nick 'Lord' Stern has pointed out that conventional economics would suggest a 19 degree rise would be required to knock out half of our GDP - but hey, so much for conventional economics - Fred Goodwin would be turning in his bed. His diamond-encrusted 6 poster bed covered in erotic swan carvings).

Adrian’s work is not anti-business. Regionally, he has teamed up with the CBI, Federation of Small Business and British Chambers of Commerce. All have signed the North East Declaration on Climate Change. His work is focused on adapting to the climate change which is already set to happen, trying to mitigate further effects by reducing further emissions, and spotting the economic opportunities (there were some good news stories of local businesses growing rapidly on recycling of heavy-duty PET plastics).

And he remains an optimist. Asked the three things people can do to help, he said (1) increase energy efficiency - you might not lure someone home as readily with a promise to view your lagging as your solar panels, but it helps just as much, at much less cost. (2) lobby your MP – show them that there is a demand for action (3) work together – people can only tackle climate change by working as a community.

A final way of looking at the atmosphere: there are around 7 billion cubic kilometres of it, and 7 billion people. Each of us needs to think very carefully about what we are putting into our 1 cubic kilometre.

Climate change in the North East: Think global, act local

2009-02-23T22:56:00.000Z

Adrian Hilton, the man tasked with the modest task of developing the North East of England’s response to the challenge of climate change, visits St James Church Hall, Alnwick on Thursday 26th March.

“18 months ago, responding to climate change was sense as an environmental issue. Now it’s seen as a pressing social and economic issue too”. says Adrian the climate change co-ordinator for the North East Climate Change partnership (NECCP).

This means activities have stepped up a gear.

Where previously the whole of the North of England was lucky to form a single square in the climate models being developed around the world, NECCP have commissioned much more granular models which examine the north east's topography, from county to county, town to town.

They’re also looking at the steps which the North east will need to take to reduce the region’s emissions by 80% by 2050, in line with the new UK climate change law. It’s a big ask, but they’ve got some ideas.

Climate change is already happening, and there’s more of it in the pipeline, even if we go carbon neutral tomorrow, dig up Newcastle airport and bike to work. We’re going to have to live with some climate change. NECCP have written an adaptation study. It’s hot stuff.

Find your way to St James Church Hall, Pottergate, 26th March.
Find our more about the North East’s Adaptation Study
Get subscribed to the NECCP’s e-zine (this is a yoof way of saying newsletter, in case you were wondering).

Ugly turbines block view of stunning Willowburn industrial estate

2009-02-15T18:42:00.000Z

Some weeks ago Ray Farnsworth wrote a letter to the Gazette:
Some time ago I wrote to say that the new wind turbines on the Defra site at the entrance to Alnwick were, in my opinion, ugly. As I write (Thurs Jan 15) I can also say that they do not appear to have moved for over 3 weeks. I can therefore add that, despite having some of the coldest weeks for years, they have made no contribution to electricity demand (even when the wind blows). I can therefore report that they are useless."

Karen Roberts of Defra told me “Routine maintenance activity was being carried out by the company who installed the turbines.” Obviously coal-fired power stations and nuclear installations, which Mr Farnsworth favours, do not receive maintenance. That is why we can enjoy a radioactive leak from a tank at Bradwell power station for a continuous period of14 years.

However such exemplary attention to maintenance does cause a few unexpected outages. In May 2008, half a million people were hit by unscheduled power cuts on Tuesday after seven power stations, including Sizewell B nuclear reactor in Suffolk, unexpectedly stopped working within hours of each other.

Incidentally Defra report that each wind turbine generates 15kW each, and taking a conservative load factor of 15%, that’s equal to 60,000kWh per year.

I can therefore report that Ray Farnsworth is useless.

Don't panic! Open letter to Ed Miliband, Climate change minister

2009-02-07T11:23:00.000Z

Dear Ed,

Thanks for 80% cuts in carbon emissions and feed-in tariffs. You are obviously making a great start!

Just one more thing, though. Please reject the proposal for a new coal-fired power station at Cambois/Blyth. With indicative annual targets in the new bill; an 80% target for 2050; and no certainty that the carbon capture will work at an effective cost, there seems no reason to go ahead with the plan, which will only make reductions elsewhere harder.

Here are some alternatives you might like to consider to reduce emissions, if you would like to proceed with Cambois/Blyth.

Insist on all food being local. People would need to eat cabbage all winter and jam for their vitamin C. This would be enforced by law.
No meat for anyone again. Ever.
Shiver quarter. Everyone can get together in eskimo parties and stitch one another into their clothes for the winter, as we can't turn on the central heating. No gas is allowed.
Knit a huge thermal blanket and wrap it around the Houses of Parliament, to maximise the effectiveness of one 2-bar electric heater in the Strangers' Bar.

I hope you will agree that stopping Blyth and other coal-fired power stations is a better way of reducing our emissions.

P.S. I always though you were better prime ministerial material than your brother.

-------

Read more about People against New Coal Stations
Send an email to Ed Miliband yourself from the StopClimateChaos website (requires login)

How the other half starves - David Golding at Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth

2009-02-01T21:33:00.001Z

“Zewdie Tamirat’s eyes were swollen shut through malnutrition and her delicate skin was no longer able to mask the skeleton beneath. Brushing away flies from her face with a small twig, the little girl stood quietly as, in 2000, her father explained how three years of crop failure in Ethiopia had left his family facing starvation. Pitiably, she attempted a smile for the cameraman.”

This is how Dr David Golding CBE, a member of Newcastle University, commenced his address to Alnwick Friends of the Earth on Thursday 29th January at St James’ Church. He explained how he had read statements by the Royal Society that the climate of Ethiopia and many other countries is already been damaged by climate change. This is manifestly unjust – we cause the problem by burning fossil fuels, but people in poor countries suffer the worst consequences. And the situation can only get worse, much worse, unless we change our ways. Dr Golding warned against a taking a hypocritical approach – of railing against complacent and irresponsible government policies, whilst refusing to reform our own polluting lifestyles. But there is also the danger of sentimentality, of rightly doing what we can at an individual level, whilst remaining silent while our government ‘fiddles whilst Rome burns’.

Quoting Professor Ross Garnault, the Australian government’s economics advisor on climate change, he points out that “There are times in the history of humanity when fateful decisions are made” and warned that “the failure of our generation on climate change mitigation would lead to consequences that would haunt humanity until the end of time.” However, he also pointed out the unique opportunity we have, to each contribute to meeting this great challenge and bring about a change which will bring unparalleled benefits to countless billions in present and future generations.”

View the slides from David Golding's presentation - How the other half starves - climate change and the developing world

You are not alone. What the public really think about climate change

2008-11-23T22:38:00.001Z

David Farrar of Alnwick Area FoE spoke at the 5th in our 'Concerning the climate' series on what the public really think about climate change. So often are environmentalists cast as crazed green militias led by mad mullah Monbiot, that it's nice to feel that someone agrees with us.

Still:

28% of people think that climate change has mainly natural or entirely natural causes
37% of people can't think of a single thing they are doing to tackle climate change
70% or more people think that climate change causes skin cancer

So there's a way to go. Still, we've got ideas, and there's a way we're headed.

View the slides from the talk You are not alone: what the public really thinks about climate change

Carbon rationing - 1 quarter on

2008-10-05T21:36:00.000+01:00

Back in June 2008, 8 CRAGgers ventured forth to calculate their emissions, and reduce them, whilst having fun doing so. Some of them have installed solar thermal panels, some have started growing their own food, some have forgone holidays by plane, others have fewer showers (we try to meet those members a bit less often). The league table so far is presented below, with international comparisons. We're all doing very well so far - but it has been summer!

3027kg - Clare and Paul (equivalent to Jamaica)

3714kg - Rachael (equivalent to Antigua & Barbuda)

3830kg - Mick and Vickie (equivalent to Serbia & Montengro)

4937kg - Bill and Sue (equivalent to Venezuela)

5545kg - David (equivalent to Iceland)

All figures scaled up to annual equivalents - and international comparisons take account of emissions in workplace, industry etc - which we can't count.

If you are interested in joining the CRAG, leave a comment on this post, or call David Farrar - 01665 - 605812.

Chocolate Courgette Cake

2008-10-03T20:22:00.000+01:00

At the recent Alnwick Food Festival we had our tempting chocolate courgette cake available to try for those visiting our stall. Lots of people wanted the recipe, so here it is!

Ingredients
120g butter (softened)
125ml sunflower oil
100g caster sugar
200g soft brown sugar
3 eggs, beaten
130ml milk
350g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp cocoa
450g courgettes, peeled and finely grated
1 tsp vanilla

Instructions
1. Line a 20 x 35cm baking tray with baking paper and set the oven to 190 degrees centigrade.
2. Mix the butter, oil and sugar together until light and fluffy. Gradually add the eggs one at a time and then the milk until mixed thoroughly.
3. Sift the dry ingredients together and fold into the mixture. Stir in grated courgettes and vanilla and spoon into the tin. Bake for 35-45 minutes.

Cut into squares whilst still warm.

I originally sourced this recipe from Jane Baxter via the Riverford Organics website - so thanks Jane!

North East man profits in mass killing

2008-10-01T09:05:00.000+01:00

It's a variation on the satirical local newspaper headline, "Essex man dies in New York atomic bomb blast." You can overplay the local aspects of a story, sometimes. And you can overplay the local benefits when you're a rabid political hyena scavenging for votes in any marginal seat and kissing babies that you plan to kill later. At least, that must be the explanation for shadow energy minister Charles Hendry defending energy firms from claims they were ripping off consumers.

"Are they making too much profit? These are the companies which we are asking to invest billions of pounds in the energy infrastructure of our country. If they don't, the lights are going to go out. And so what we are concerned about at the moment in terms of price rises will completely pale into insignificance when we start getting outages in 2014, 2015."

He also reassured us that the energy companies, bless'em all, are trying to protect consumers by investing in a mix of fuel supplies, including the use of coal - which could provide [wait for it, wait for it] ... a boom to the North East economy.

Now I don't know a lot about economics, but I know enough to recognise the difference between an investment in energy infrastructure (which doesn't show in profits when it's actually invested), and a dividend which is paid to shareholders. Research by the Local Government Association found that the 'Big 6' energy firms paid out £1.6bn in dividends last year,a 19% rise on the previous year.

We've heard plenty of dark threats before about the lights going out. Margaret Thatcher made just the same noises about us freezing in the dark in 1979, as an argument to build 10 new nuclear reactors. 16 years later we had just one nuclear reactor at Sizewell, 100% over budget, and the lights were still on.

And as for the possible benefits to the North East... the proposed new generation of coal-fired power stations such Kingsnorth and Blyth will rely in imported coal. We have the wrong type here. Even if we did, the I'm not sure that the tremendous opportunity to tear up swathes of our countryside once more and condemn new generations to emphysema and chronic bronchtis outweigh the harm to the rest of the world by our burning this uniquely carbon intensive power source. And we do have to breathe the same air after all, albeit newly enriched with additives. Like Kellogg's cornflakes, but instead of vitamins, we will have sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, and uranium (a partial list). All in all, it looks like the profits accruing to the North East man will be rather less than the 'Big 6'.

New ways to use less and save more

2008-09-19T00:47:00.000+01:00

OK. So you turn the tap off when you're brushing your teeth and your appliances aren't on standby anymore? Except the annoying ones which you can't turn without losing all your settings like your set top box and your video recorder? Good.

Here are other ways you can save money and reduce your emissions.

Get a more fuel efficient car. Check the emissions of your current one on the SMMT CO2 service. And find out about the 10 most efficient cars in each category.
Get a more efficient boiler. You can find the efficiency of your current one on the boiler efficiency database (SEDBUK).
Look into renewable energy around your own home. Solar water heating is often considered the best bet. Use the directory of renewables providers in the North East.
Compare your energy use and share energy-saving tips with like-minded folk in a non-competitive environment. Join Alnwick CRAG. Contact David Farrar on 01665-605812 for more details.

Use less: save more

2008-09-03T21:57:00.001+01:00

Energy prices are soaring. There are increasing concerns over the future supplies of oil and the stability of the countries which supply our natural gas. There has never been a better time to look at energy conservation and generation in the home, so that we’re not as vulnerable to future price hikes.

Colin MacDonald of the Energy Saving Trust will be speaking about energy efficiency at 7.30pm on Tuesday 16th September, at St Michael’s Church Hall, Walkergate, Alnwick.

All talks are open to members and non-members alike, and start at 7.30pm. Entry is £2 and free refreshments are provided.

Colin MacDonald is the Renewables Co-ordinator of the Energy Saving Trust in the North-East, a non-profit organisation that provides free advice to help the public save money and fight climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the home.

Colin will be speaking about how poor energy efficiency around the home contributes to climate change and a big hole in your pocket. He’ll also look at what people can do to improve domestic energy efficiency and generate their own energy, as well as how the EST can help with advice and grants.

Colin will also be illustrating his talk with stories of energy conservation and microgeneration from the north east, and taking a frank look at policy successes and failures in these areas.

Biofuels are still naughty - part 3

2008-08-30T22:09:00.000+01:00

Fiona spent more than 2 hours with Bill Grisdale and David Farrar of Alnwick FoE on local community statio Radio Lionheart. Apart from the EU Renewables Directive, in which Fiona has a special interest as a member of the Industry, Research and Energy Committee, we also pondered such imponderables as:

why do Euro-scepticism and climate change denial so often go together?
how many million tonnes of CO2 does it takes to move the European parliament to Strasbourg once a month?
is Druridge Bay in Northumberland due for dusting down as a site for a new nuclear power station?

We also probed Fiona on the 10% biofuels (or renewables in transport) target by 2020. She won't budge, and some of the arguments got a little strained. See what you think, from the audio clips posted below. And contact Fiona about biofuels via the Friends of the Earth website or via the Fiona Hall website.

Listen to Fiona Hall being gently savaged by a slightly ill-informed community radio presenter on biofuels

Biofuels are naughty - part 2

2008-08-24T23:28:00.000+01:00

Alnwick Area Friends of the Earth will be joined on their regular Radio Lionheart show (107.30FM and http://www.lionheartradio.com/) by North East Liberal Democrat MEP Fiona Hall, on Friday 29th August between 7.30pm and 8.30pm.

Fiona will be discussing the work of the European Parliament in general, concentrating especially on her role on the energy committee, and how it is helping to tackle climate change. Friends of the Earth will also be raising the subject of biofuels with Fiona, as part of their summer campaign against compulsory EU targets on this controversial fuel.

Fiona Hall says that she supports only sustainable biofuels. But in Brazil you can grow your sugarcane on land previously used for soy beans, and move your soy bean plantation to a freshly-cut down friendly neighbourhood section of rainforest. And then say your biofuels are sustainable. Nice one.

All these points and more to come on Friday. Send comments and questions after 7pm to onair@lionheartradio.com or 07961 77 1073. Or add a question here.

Biofuels are naughty - part 1

2008-08-24T23:07:00.000+01:00

Along with other Friends of The Earth groups around the country, Alnwick Area FoE have been campaigning against mandatory EU biofuels targets, which are being considered by the European Parliament. If approved, these will force all EU member states to get 10% of their transport fuels from biofuels.

On August 17th we visited Newton-by-the-Sea accompanied by a baby orang-utan to highlight the danger to the rainforests of Indonesia from land clearance for palm plantations (OK, it was a glove puppet). We got 100 signed postcards for MEPs in record time. In contrast to what you might hear about the environment being a minority chattering-class guilt-trip, people are very clued up on the subject, and we had a lot of good discussions.

Biofuels come from sugar crops, grains, or oil crops. The crops are converted into bioethanol and biodiesel. But these will only leave people hungry. The amount of grain required to produce the biofuels to fill a 4x4’s petrol tank would feed one person for a year. And creating a market for such inefficient fuels will drive food prices higher, as increasing amounts of land are turned over to biofuels.

For Europe to produce even 10% of its transport fuel from biofuels, we would need 40% of our agricultural land (World Land Trust/Univ of Leeds study). Of course, we don't intend to use our own agricultural land though, but those of countries well-stocked with unused land (such as rainforests and savannah) in the global south. So that's alright then.

Low-flying jets in Northumberland

2008-08-03T12:27:00.000+01:00

If you wish to complain about low-flying jets in North Northumberland, here's how - telephone Carol Bell on 01768-897391 or email rco.penrith@stc.raf.mod.uk

The RAF justify the maneouvres because of the need to train so that they are competent on operations - a key part of operations seemingly being harassing local populations, and ducking and diving behind wind turbines which apparently are foolproof disguises for invading forces.

A main plank of the Ministry of Defence's, er, defence is that they receive few complaints. Possibly because people don't know how to. But now we know do. Make sure you report every time you are disturbed or annoyed.

Climate Change Bill (slight return)

2008-06-20T08:21:00.000+01:00

The economy might be stalling but emissions are rising
The Climate Change Bill had its Second Reading in Commons on Monday 9th June. However

it does not contain a 2050 emissions reduction target of at least 80%
it won't count emissions from international aviation and shipping.

The best way to strengthen the Bill is by showing the Government that a very large number of Labour MPs are prepared to vote for the two changes that the Bill needs. Nationally Friends of the Earth will lobbying in the next few months on those 165 Labour MPs who have already signed Early Day Motion 736. A list of the Tyne and Wear MPs who have already signed is in the right hand menu.

What to do
Two new amendments have been tabled:

Amendment 2 – to raise the target from 60% to 80%
Amendment NC1 - Emissions from international aviation or international shipping

There are already supported by more than 30 Labour MPs.We need as many Labour MPs as possible to sign up to these amendments in the coming weeks.

Please help by taking the form letter for Denis Murphy and amending it as you see fit before posting to other MPs. You can send this to as many Labour MPs as you like – they all have the same address.

Why not lobby Alan Beith, or the Conservatives?
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have already signed up to a stronger climate change bill which includes emissions from aviation and shipping.

Why not lobby Labour MPs who have not yet signed EDM736?
The minority of Labour MPs who have not signed are unlikely to come aboard now. For instance, Doug Henderson is apparently under the impression that climate change will not affect his constitutents.

Return to rationing

2008-06-19T08:08:00.000+01:00

No powdered eggs or corned beef this time, but 8 members of Alnwick Friends of the Earth are rationing their carbon emissions. They are forming a CRAG, or Carbon Rationing Action Group, and will be setting themselves an annual emissions target or “carbon ration”.

Over the year they keep a record of their household energy use, food consumption and travel. At the end of the year, they pay for any emissions over and above their ration, with the fund being distributed to environmental charities.

This is not a publicity stunt to raise sponsorship to enable us all to fly to the arctic for a polar-bear shooting holiday. Oh no. We are demonstrating that reductions in emissions can be made painlessly, to show that there is a public appetite for tackling climate change close to home, and because it is fun – we can all learn from the experience (and maybe gain a glow of guiltlessness).

Below is how we plan to reduce our emissions over time. We don't intend to adopt the lifestyles of the countries listed, only show that it is possible to live well with a low footprint.

The CRAG will kick off on 1 July, but you can join at any time in the year. If you are interested in finding out more, ring David on 01665-605812, or leave a message on the Alnwick CRAG page

Find out more about CRAGs

We're in hot water

2008-06-15T23:55:00.000+01:00

Martin Swinbank of Northumbria Renewables spoke at the 3rd concerning the climate talk on 12th June. Starting by sketching out all the domestic renewables in brief, Martin explained the much greater benefits of solar water heating. This includes much greater efficiency in turning the sun's rays into heat, and the simplicity and reliability of the technology. Martin also showed that the technology will work well even in Northumberland.

At last year's gas and oil prices, payback time is 12-15 years. If prices stay where they are today, it could be much shorter. The lifespan of the panels is also well over 20 years.

Martin is an accredited installer of solar thermal technology. For quotes and enquiries, vist Northumbria Renewables, or call 01665 604310.

Early Day Motion 736 (update #2)

2008-05-11T00:52:00.000+01:00

Progress in tackling the 3 refuseniks:

Peter Atkinson, Conservative, Hexham – In common with all but 6 Tory MPs, Peter has not signed EDM736, and he is not responding to letters from outside his constutency. If you live in Hexham or know someone who does, please forward them a copy of the Peter Atkinson draft letter, to rewrite as they wish and send. Peter Atkinson has to offer an explanation of why he will not sign to his constituents.
Fraser Kemp, Washington E and Houghton – Fraser’s refusal to support the EDM is based on the fact that the amendments referred to areas yet unseen. This has not stopped him on several previous occasions, from signing Early Day Motions. Read David Farrar's latest letter to Fraser Kemp, and feel free to re-use bits of it in your own.
Doug Henderson, Labour, Newcastle North – Doug refuses to sign on the basis that it is not of direct relevance to his constituents. We think he is perhaps missing something.

How we heat with what we eat

2008-04-12T22:17:00.001+01:00

Jan Deckers spoke at St Michael's Church Hall on 10th April on the effects of diet on climate change. Jan took you through the philsophical steps in the argument to the conclusion that it is necessary to consider reducing consumption of animal products as one of a number of actions we must take to address climate change. This was framed around people’s fundamental rights to food, water, shelter etc, and others’ obligations to ensure that their actions did not deny them these things.

Look out for the next talk in the Concerning the Climate series - 'We're in hot water: solar thermal in Northumberland' with Martin Swinbank of Northumbria Renewables - 12th June.

Early Day Motion (EDM) 736 - update

2008-03-10T22:10:00.000Z

Dennis Murphy has now signed EDM 736 to request a stronger climate change bill from the government. Thank you to everyone who helped lobby him! We still need help with the last 3 MPs in Northumberland and Tyne and Wear who are eligible to sign EDMs.

Download the letter for:

Rewrite the letter/s if you like, and send them to the House of Commons - address given at the head of the letter.

Update (12th April): Peter Atkinson is referring all letters from outside his constituency back to the letter-writer's MP. Doug Henderson is ignoring them. Fraser Kemp is waiting for more information about the amendments.

If you live in these MPs' constituencies, continue to pester them.
If you don't, be thankful, and watch this space.

Early Day Motion 736

2008-03-01T20:28:00.000Z

Jess Dolan of Friends of the Earth spoke at St Michael’s Church Hall, Alnwick on Thursday 21st February. Thanks to all of those who came, and it was nice to see some new faces too! Jess outlined the next steps on getting a stronger Climate Change Bill. View the slides from her presentation

At the moment the current (too weak) bill is in the Lords, and we have already secured some victories – it is likely we will get indicative annual targets by the time the bill reaches the Commons, which will stop each party blaming the other for missing targets.

However we have still not got any movement on stronger cuts (80% by 2050, rather than 60%) or the inclusion of shipping or aviation emissions. An Early Day Motion (similar to a petition signed by back bench MPs) pressing for these same commitments has already attracted 210 signatures, including Alan Beith, and 9 of the 12 Labour MPs in the North East who are able to sign petitions (ministers aren’t allowed to).

What you can do to help change the world in 5 minutes
Friends of the Earth have asked if we can petition Denis Murphy, MP for Wansbeck, who is seen as a key MP who we can persuade to support a stronger bill. Please take a few minutes to download this letter about EDM736, add your name and address (and reword it, if you feel like it!) and post it to Denis Murphy, at the address given in the letter, to show him how important this issue is.

If you have Denis Murphy as your MP, even better! Please remove the paragraph about not being his constituent and send it on, as well as to anyone else you know in the area.

A COAL FIRED POWER STATION FOR NORTHUMBERLAND?

2008-02-12T06:38:00.000Z

You may have heard that the UK government is on the verge of approving a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. The new power station will make a mockery of UK efforts to reduce carbon emissions, increasing climate change, which is already hitting the poor hardest. This one UK power station will release more carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere than Ghana.
And it's not alone: seven more power stations are proposed across the UK, from Edinburgh to the Midlands to the South. This includes a proposal to site one in Blyth!
Kingsnorth must be stopped. The UK government cannot present itself as a global leader on climate change, while they are giving carte blanche to multinational power corporations to build dirty, inefficient coal-fired power stations.

MORE INFO FROM WorldDevelopmentMovement

Alnwick Bag for Life Scheme

2008-02-09T15:25:00.000Z

The problem with plastic bags

According to Waste Watch, every year some 17.5bn plastic bags are given away by shops. What this means for us is 25,000 bags given out a day in Alnwick District - a total of 9 million bags a year taken by just 30,000 people.

For every 1bn plastic bags, 9,000 tonnes of plastic is used and 18,000 tonnes of CO2 is produced. If we could reduce consumption of plastic carrier bags by 25%, we could save almost 40,000 tonnes of plastic per year, and reduce CO2 by the same amount as taking 24,000 cars off the road.

Most plastic bags are still made from polyethylene, which is non-degradable and can take 1000 years to break down. The effects and visibility of discarded carrier bags is also greater than other waste, clogging rivers and drains and harming wildlife, or being blown up into trees.

An Alnwick solution

The Bag for Life is a reusable cotton bag scheme for Alnwick to help reduce plastic bag use in the area. The bag is being sold at a cost price of 75p, and is ethically sourced, and shipped, not flown. The design was chosen via a local competition amongst schools, to which we received over 270 entries. We’ve received financial backing for the scheme from Alnwick Town and District Councils.

Where you can get hold of one

The Alnwick Bag for Life was launched at the Alnwick Food Festival on 22/23 September 2007. It is now stocked via a range of retail outlets, listed below;

A World of Difference, Narrowgate
Alnwick Markets, Market Place
Alnwick Post Office, Market Street
Best Wishes, Narrowgate
Freckles Gift Shop, Fenkle Street
Fruit and Veg Warehouse, Clayport Bank
G&S Organics, Rock Midstead
Grannies, Narrowgate
Market Place Butchery
Mint, Fenkle St
Penrose and sons, Bondgate Within
The Alnwick Deli, Paikes Street
The Gate Gallery, Bondgate Within
Tourist Information Centre, The Shambles
Trotters Family Bakers, Bondgate Within
Coquet Valley Preserves

The bag has been extremely popular and has sold quickly - the issue we have now is ensuring that people remember to carry it with them!

Would you like the bag in your shop?

If you'd like to stock the bag, please contact Rachael Roberts on 01665 605812

Concerning the climate

2008-01-31T21:44:00.000Z

Concerning The Climate is a series of public talks at St Michael’s Church Hall on Canongate in Alnwick.

Next event
Thursday 21st February - Everything now: why we needa stronger Climate Change Bill.
Why is stronger action on climate change necessary and possible? Exploding myths about the government’s tough talk on tackling emissions.
Jess Dolan (Friends of the Earth)

Forthcoming events
Thursday 10th April - “How you heat with what you eat – the effects of diet on global warming”
Jan Deckers (University of Newcastle)

June - “Solar micro-generation in Northumberland”
Martin Swinbank (Northumbria Renewables)

September - “Energy saving – the basics”
Geoffrey Stevens (Energy Saving Trust)

November - “You are not alone. What the public really think about climate change”
David Farrar (Alnwick Friends of the Earth)

All talks take place at St Michael’s Church Hall, Canongate, Alnwick, 7.30pm
(followed by questions/discussion)
Entry: £2 (includes free glass of wine or beer)
Directions for St Michael's Church Hall