Ed Dowding

Here’s some figures for renewable power generation in 2006:

• 62.9% – Austria
• 48.7% – Sweden
• 29.9% – Portugal
• 17.1% – Slovak Republic
• 19.2% – Romania
• 17% – Denmark
• 12.4% – France
• 4.6% - UK
  

In November 2009, Spain generated 53% of its demand from wind alone last week (it was a bit windy). So if you’re from the UK, be embarrassed: we’re getting our bottoms kicked by Hans, Abba and the Siesta Monkeys.

Since so little seems to influence peoples’ thinking about energy and the environment, I wonder if world cup style national pride could be leveraged to get some action here? The protests about petrol prices would be that much more potent if the protesters were aware that José Siesta and Pierre Le Grenouille were loading up their electric cars for a quarter of the price, whilst also benefiting from much cleaner air, having to work less since they’re paying less, and generally being far better served by their governments.

There’s also the angle that the UK seems to be slated to have a lot of nuclear. All this is planned by EDF, a French company. Nuclear, as we know, has astronomical decommissioning costs which are never budgeted for so are not fairly compared to renewables whose decommissioning costs are tiny. So it’s not a massive leap – certainly one the Daily Mail would be adept at – to suspect that France is deliberately hobbling the UK with nuclear, whilst also increasing its own competitive advantage by investing in wind power.

If energy prices effect where industry locates in the free market of Europe, shouldn’t we be treating this as a national economic welfare issue?

So ‘competitiveness’ and ‘employment levels’ join national security, economy, and ethics and morality as reasons to invest every penny we have in renewable energy generation.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you have low-cost, clean energy almost every other problem vanishes.

In the 1970s, India dramatically increased food production, finally allowing this giant country to feed itself. But government efforts to continue that miracle by encouraging farmers to use fertilizers have backfired, forcing the country to expand its reliance on imported food.

India has been providing farmers with heavily subsidized fertilizer for more than three decades. The overuse of one type—urea—is so degrading the soil that yields on some crops are falling and import levels are rising. So are food prices, which jumped 19% last year. The country now produces less rice per hectare than its far poorer neighbors: Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

…

“The soil health is deteriorating, but we don’t know how to make it better,” he says. “As the fertility of the soil is declining, more fertilizer is required.”

Increased demand and the soaring price of hydrocarbons, the main ingredient of many fertilizers, have taken India’s annual subsidy bill to more than $20 billion last year, from about $640 million in 1976.

Source WSJ India, via ViewsFlow

“Hubris” is pretty much the dominant theme of the last 50 years, isn’t it? No wonder the Greeks considered it to be the gravest crime there could be.

‘How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?’ 30 Million People Wonder

All agreed that disposing of what would eventually amount to 50 tons of thermoplastic polymer resin wasn’t the end of the world.

“It’s not like I don’t care, because I do, and most of the time I don’t even buy bottled water,” thought Missouri school teacher Heather Delamere, the 450,000th caring and progressive individual to have done so that morning, and the 850,000th to have purchased the environmentally damaging vessel due to being thirsty, in a huge rush, and away from home. “It’s really not worth beating myself up over.”

“What’s one little bottle in the grand scheme of things, you know?” added each and every single one of them.

Source: The Onion, again

In other news, please please please please don’t buy or drink commercial bottled water. It’s such a patently ridiculous idea, which consumes so many resources so utterly unnecessarily to deliver something which is cheaply and abundantly available that it brands anyone who drinks it as a naive idiot. Like driving your children half a mile to school in a Hummer, it’s only really justifiable if you’re in an desert war-zone.

And please don’t come back with that “but they give their profits to charity” plea. Unless of course you have £100,000 and would like to invest in my ethical landmine company? We’re going to change the dirty world of weapons by working at it from within. Biodegradable plastics which only start decomposing once the product has been used, and fair-trade, recycled explosives! (We’re providing as many as TEN jobs for Congolese amputees, just another of the ways we’re changing this dirty business! Even our workforce of amputee employees will be sustainable!)

I finally got around to watching A Farm for the Future (available on Google Video) a few nights ago, and found it to be a great introduction to the concepts of permaculture.

Key things to realise (some not from the programme):

1. Current methods of farming will not continue to feed you during your lifetime.
2. We (and I mean all of us, including YOU, reading this right now) are running out of oil.
3. Before it runs out it will get much more expensive.
4. Oil is the most expensive component of current methods of food production.
5. Your food is going to get much more expensive.
6. We import about 40% of our food (in the UK)
7. As food gets more expensive, other countries are going to stop exporting it so they can feed their own populations.
8. Oil-fuelled production food production is only 10% efficient in energy, and about 20% efficient in land use.
9. We could – if we choose to – produce up to 50 times more food from the same land. (Ok that’s a touch unrealistic since there are bound to be inefficiencies, but let’s be conservative and say just 5 times as much. It still makes sense, right?)
10. We haven’t even got touched on the nutritional or lifestyle benefits yet. I’ll leave that to other posts, but suffice to say you could live a healthier, happier, longer life.

Here are my notes from the programme itself:

• It was in 1981 that we crossed the “using more than we’re finding” threshold with oil.
• “It’s not just that current lifestyle are unethical – they’re unsustainable”.
• 10 calories of fossil fuel are required for 1 calorie of food (global average).
• GM crops are also dependent on fossil fuels, even though they may use less – ergo they are not a long term answer.
• A litre of oil is the energy equivalent of 1 person working for a week; the oil we use equates to 22bn (unfed) slaves (c.3x world population).
• There are 150,000 farmers in the Uk, with an average age of 60.
• Normally cattle are taken off fields in the winter since they turn pasture into mud. But with a blend of tough/soft, deep/shall rooted (etc.) grasses you can leave the cattle there year round. Thus no hay production required, or unused land area. It took 60 years for one chap to perfect that, in one area.
• Don’t dig. It destroys the life in the top 6″ of soil which plants thrive on. (See other posts on permaculture, too.)
• Don’t look after plants, cultivate soil.
• 95% of all food is dependent on synthetic fertiliser.
• Permaculture: conscious design of a better system (Wikipedia link).
• Khaki Campbell ducks eat lots of slugs and lay lots of eggs.
• Willow, lime, and ash leaves / branches are good fodder crops for animals.
• In a well considered permaculture plot, 12 man-days maintenance and 40 man-days of harvest will feed about 10 people per acre.
• Nuts are more efficient to grow than cereal crops. Sweet chestnuts can yield 2 tons per acre (about 60% that of wheat, with much less effort).
• During WWII, 40% of food came from small domestic production.

I suppose the question is “Neat. Is there any large scale permaculture so that we can feed lots of people? All the ones, like me, maybe in the cities, who don’t garden?”

Large scale production permaculture is probably going on somewhere (I understand that Pittsburgh Permaculture showcases examples), but to a certain extent it’s a bit of an antithesis to the small, intensive, and hyper-local principles. However the cities still need to be fed so.. a few answers:

1. The goal is community efficiency not self-sufficiency
2. It can be a great business opportunity, especially if more people know about why it’s being done.
3. It’s not an industrial farm, so don’t expect it to behave like one. If the old models aren’t working, don’t expect to see permaculture behaving in the same way. (That said there are some neat multi-storey urban farms.)

A share of £75,000 is now up for grabs for London’s green-fingered community groups. The cash is available as part of the Capital Growth scheme, supported by the Mayor of London and managed by London Food Link, which encourages Londoners to grow their own food in under-used areas of the capital.

People can apply online for sums between £200 and £1500 to turn underused land into a vegetable patch. It is even possible to use grow bags on a concreted piece of ground to ‘grow your- own’. Under the scheme Londoners receive both financial and practical support to produce food, such as access to training and expert advice.

http://www.good.is/post/transparency-good-s-most-popular-infographics-of-2009/

I love this graph.

WOT = Well Off, Thoughtful
LIL = Low Income Lifestyle

Basically it says “Yes, you may recycle and think you’re green and lovely and one of the people who should survive The Great Reckoning, but actually you’re about 3 times more environmentally impactful than that fat TV watching pikey you feel so superior to.”

The main differences are the amount of things we buy, and the amount of flights we take. However we also just consume more of everything, which pushes us into an American level of planet abuse.

We do turn off our lightbulbs and insulate our roofs, though. So that smug, warm feeling is definitely real, it’s just misattributed.

I’m not suggesting Puritan self-flagellation (though I can think of some people who should try it), just some consideration for the alternatives.

If you’re thinking of popping off to Morocco for the weekend, of flying to Geneva for the week to go skiing, take the train. And if you’re thinking about buying something,  spend the money on a memorable experience instead – it lasts much longer.

Source: Peter Harper, Centre for Alternative Technology: Sustainable_Households a presentation given to the Transition Winchester conference.

This is what happened to the Biosphere. A great metaphor (is it a metaphor if it’s so literal?) of what happens to a neglected Earth.

I’ve been thinking for a while what we do when Copenhagen fails. And then I waited to see if it actually did. And it did, so no surprise there. But no points for calling it correctly, either.

I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to get involved in, and here’s my criteria:

1. It must amplify the effect of the individual. The classic format for this is “for every 10p you give, we’ll give 50p”, but that’s a little unimaginative, (also also makes the organisation which gives the extra look self-serving and shallow).

   It must give the individual leverage they are unaccustomed to. TheyWorkForYou.com do this excellently, and it is probably most people’s first experience fo writing to their MP.

2. It must seek action, not ideas. Everything’s already been said, we just need more people to do it. In many ways I think we should just burn cars in London. It’s simple, relatively safe, but it looks great on TV and it really works for the French, when they want to keep getting farm subsidies.  Ideally they’d be really expensive inefficient cars so that powerful people get pissed off.
3. It must appeal to selfish motives, to wit: money, pride, sex. Because if we get the same 1 or 2 million people who give a damn signing petitions again and again we’re still screwed. The message needs to get to people who DON’T care. And if they don’t and won’t care (possibly for seemingly rational reasons, like ‘I’m a single mum and don’t have time’ etc) we have to make the debate about something they DO care about.

   And I reckon money, pride, and sex are the base motives we’ve been encultured to respond to.  So eg a tshirt with “Sexy girls ride bikes.” or investing in green stocks, or pointing out that Johnny Foreigner pays less for his energy because it’s from renewable sources. 
   

Following on from (3) and (1) there are two areas which are going to have the most effect: How we spend money, and how we make money.