Just dashed off this letter below to a local paper - from reading some stories you would start to think this climate change thing will be great - climate like Portugal, cafe society comes to Gloucester, the Severn Riviera, the olive groves of Stroud etc etc - they even had a full page article - front page of their Business section - about plans for Staverton airport and once again not a single mention of climate change! Yes not one single mention. This is gross irresponsibility - how can the press repeatedly get away with it?? Yes I know our economic system, blah, blah, blah....Anyway a much more positive story is listening to a Green who visited Woking - this Borough is the acknowledged leading local authority in the UK for reducing carbon emissions.
Woking have set up a joint venture energy services company and have found ways of successfully reducing energy consumption without incurring extra costs to tax payers. The Council has reduced it's own energy consumption by 49% in 13 years and achieved a massive reduction of 77% in CO2 emissions. They also had the UK's first fuel cell Combined Heat and Power system.
Another example of their innovation is the off-grid lamps in a car park (see photo above), with a payback time of 2.5 years. There is a battery under every column, each column with a 100 Wp wind turbine in the top, along with four solar panels (each at 85Wp). The battery will keep the lamp going for 3 to 5 days in the event of low ambient light or lack of wind, and this system has proven to work continuously. The higher capital cost is offset by the lack of need to connect to the National Grid. Woking is now considering these lamps for paths in more remote locations that would be expensive to connect to the grid.
There are some who welcome that Gloucestershire's climate could be more like Portugal (Citizen 14/11/06). We shouldn't get too excited. Climate change will bring some short-term benefits to a few of us, but the main price will be paid by the billions of people suffering from the ill-effects of a humanitarian and economic catastrophe on a global scale. Indeed the true magnitude of what could unfold is hard to contemplate.
Greens have sometimes been likened over the last 20 years to Chicken Licken calling "The Sky is Falling". Governments have ignored the cries and ignored the evidence, but it is with a huge sigh of relief that we see things are changing and a recognition that Greens were right all along.
The Stern report by a former World Bank heavyweight has warned us we have little time to act. Many consider this report doesn't go far enough, certainly the Government's new Climate Change Bill is insufficiently ambitious and wrongly targeted. The Green party's Lord Beaumont will be seeking radical amendments when the Bill reaches the House of Lords (i).
In one version of the Chicken Licken story the sky does infact fall in. It doesn't have to be like that, but we need many bold actions like massive investment in renewables and an end to airport expansions like Staverton and Bristol. Then perhaps we can have a happier ending.
Cllr. Philip Booth, Stroud District Green Party.
(i) Recommend reading the peer's news release here.
2 comments:
We are constantly being given reminders of climate change all around us - Just got the email below:
I went to see the Bewick Swans being fed at Slimbridge 5 years ago with my granddaughters. It was one of the most magical things I have ever seen, there were so many swans gliding about on the ponds it was real life Swan Lake and fortunately for us there were only about 15 people in the hut so we could see the feeding and hear about the families of swans that went to the same place in the pond year after year and were actually recognised by the keeper as he fed them. All the more amazing as it can take a team of scientists weeks to find even one pair of swans in their summer feedings grounds.
I went last January and it was not a very pleasant experience, the hut was packed out, lots of people had tripods and cameras sticking out all over the place and worst of all there were hardly any swans and we were told that they had not arrived yet.
At the Severn Barrage Symposium I attended last month, 2 speakers said that the swans were now wintering further north because of climate change, I felt really, really sad about this so I asked Philip Booth of Glos Green Party, as Slimbridge is on their patch, if he could verify what had been said and he sent the following e-mail answer from a local biodiversity expert:
"The Number of Migratory Brewick Swans and Migratory white fronted
Geese wintering at Slimbridge has declined over the last few years... they are wintering further north in Europe due to the milder winters ...... A stark reminder of climate change"
But here is a piece of positive news from today - the North Devon Gazette has a front page illustrated feature "Wind backers out in force" including
excellent quotes from various Greens, plus a spot-on email illuminating Conservative PPC Philip Milton's complete lack of
comprehension of the problems of Climate Change and a letter revealling the growing rift between Dinosaur MP
Nick Harvey and the Lib Dem Council with their renewable energy aspirations. Plus here in Stroud a letter from Green Cllr Martin Whiteside re climate change in the SNJ.
Post a Comment