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I must admit, I hadn't expected such an overwhelming response to my previous post to the effect that dual-flush toilets (or specifically drop-valve dual-flush toilets) are hopeless.
Or, since champions of the drop-valve have shown themselves to be fierce in its defence, I should say more precisely that one in five of the things is hopeless (that being the proportion permitted by law, amazingly, to leak from the moment you buy them).
As it happens, I don't pin all my hopes on siphon-based loos. In fact, I've moved rapidly towards the conclusion that we must prepare for a future in which composting toilets become mainstream.
In this, I've been encouraged by the glimpse of a composting loo on the allotment beside my own, when the door was briefly left ajar. How come I'd not seen it before? Well, I daresay the owners prefer to keep quiet about their facility, lest they come across the likes of the reader of my last toilet-related post who criticised another reader as 'disgusing' after she suggested that we need not always flush after doing a wee.
The recently departed mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, came in for similar abuse a couple of years ago when he advised Londoners to preserve precious water supplies by letting it mellow when it's yellow (wee) and only flushing it down when it's brown (you don't need me to explain this bit).
Now, if you haven't thought deeply about this topic before, you may possibly share the sense of disgust. But champions of composting toilets would argue that the disgust works both ways: as the great Joseph Jenkins, author of the internationally bestselling Humanure Handbook puts it, we have developed into the only species in the world that deliberately sh*ts into our drinking water.
I became aware of the extreme fragility of contemporary cloacal arrangements when travelling round Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire last summer after those parts were hit by flooding. I'm not talking here about the ghastliness of other people's sewage washing into your home - though that is certainly an issue. No, I'm thinking of the occasion when I asked to use somebody's loo and didn't think till too late that I'd need to use their precious bucketloads of water to flush after I'd finished.
Talk about embarrassing!
It would have been so much easier if somebody had thought to set up emergency composting loos (like these ones, used at music festivals) till water supplies were restored (a process that took many days).
Looking ahead to the possibility of a water shortage in London, I have already prepared to set up at short notice a composting toilet for my own family's use. In doing this, I've been helped by reading the Humanure Handbook, but also by watching the film (above) directed by Bafta-winning director Nick Fenton with words by the fantastically inspiring permaculture practitioner Graham Burnett, of Spiralseed.
If neighbours wish to make use of my improvised facility, when the water runs out, they will be welcome, because the composted material provides unequalled natural fertiliser. In the Korean war, American GIs could never understand why Koreans so eagerly invited them to make use of their primitive loos: having read this far, you will have grasped the essentially selfish motive.
Flowers blowing from side to side in the wind are the plant equivalent of women wiggling their hips suggestively at men, reasearchers have found.
Observations of sea campion have shown that flowers which wave at passing insects have a better chance of getting pollinated than those which stay still.
The flower's 'wobble' makes them more attractive to pollinators and explains why many plants risk growing long stalks which can get damaged when the wind blows.
Colour, smell and bribery through the production of nectar have all been recognised as lures for insects but scientists have only just woken up to the wobble.
The role the length of stalk grown for the flower was previously thought to be important just in the dispersal of seeds but is now realised to be crucial to pollination levels.
Dr John Warren, of Aberystwyth University, compared evolution of waving in flowers to women suggestively wiggling their hips.
Flowers that waved in the breeze were found to be more successful at producing seed than those with the short stalks, the study of sea campion, Silene martima, showed.
But there was an optimum length for the species because those that grew the longest proved "too wobbly" for insects to keep hold of.
Dr Warren said there was another trade-off between the thickness of the stalk. Thin stalks meant the flowers could wave more effectively at the insects and attracted more of them but thick stalks gave the creatures a more secure landing platform.
"Flowers that don't move much are less attractive to insects than those that wobble," he said. "It's an element of insect attraction that we've overlooked.
"There's an optimum waviness. The insects have to be able to stay on the flowers long enough to successfully pollinate the plants."
He added: "There is a downside to waving to attract so many insects in that it increases the chances of the plants getting sexually transmitted diseases."
Observations of sea campion on the beaches of Aberystwyth showed that flowers needed insects to be on them for at least a minute for successful levels of pollination.
An accumulative total of two minutes or more was found to be the ideal minimum and resulted in the greatest quantity of seeds being produced.
"Although the importance of flower stalk in dispersing seeds has long been known the results presented here strongly suggest that its adaptive significance as a mechanism for attracting pollinating insects by facilitating floral-waving has been overlooked," the researchers said in their report, published in the journal Evolutionary Biology.
"Mobile flowers are visited more frequently and by more species than are the stable flowers. Although average visit durations were less in mobile flowers this was more than compensated for by the increase number of visits."
Dr Warren started the research project after observing sea campion floweres waving in the wind while lying on a beach at Aberystwyth.
"I was lying on the beach at my daughter's birthday party watching the flowers blowing in the wind. They were blowing violently and I wondered why they bothered to have stalks," he said.
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Widespread flooding across much of Britain last summer was taste of things to come rather than a freak one-off, a study suggests.
The last 40 years have been comparatively dry but a “flood-rich period” can be expected over the next few years because of a natural weather cycle, academics concluded.
Professor Stuart Lane, of the University of Durham, led research into rainfall and river flows dating back to 1853 and found there were cycles of flooding.
From the early 1960s to the late 1990s there was a relatively flood-free period whicgh masked the pattern of cycles because most studies assessing future flood risks have relied on records just from the past half-century, he said.
“We have also not been good at recognising just how flood-prone we can be. More than three-quarters of our flood records start in the flood-poor period that begins in the 1960s,” he said.
“We have probably under-estimated the frequency of flooding, which is now happening, as it did before the 1960s, much more often that we are used to.
“We are now having to learn to live with levels of flooding that are beyond most people’s living memory, something that most of us have forgotten how to do.”
The findings, published in the journal Geography, suggested that developments on flood plains could prove to be even more costly than previously anticipated.
 Somebody recently smuggled this sticker onto the empty white space beside a bossy parking notice on my street.
It made me smile. And I daresay it made other people smile - though perhaps not the person who seems to have tried to pull it off, before having second thoughts.
It seems that the originator of this sticker (well, OK, it was me) has been reading books on Happiness, such as those by the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, the economist and peer Richard Layard, and others.
Psychologists have studied the effect on a community of just such signs being put up here and there, and discovered a marked increase in happiness. This shouldn't really be surprising - it's a quite obvious, upbeat reversal of the dismal effect on commuters of notices warning us to look out for potential terrorists in our midst.
All too often it seems that being concerned about the environment means getting your knickers in a twist about something ghastly happening a very long way away - South American rainforests, south Asian rivers, Arctic ice shelves - about which we can do very little.
Might we be better off tackling the environment in our own neighbourhood? It's possible. Indeed, if everybody did that, the whole world's problems could be resolved at a stroke, without any interference from governments and multinational businesses - or indeed multinational green pressure groups.
I should point out that the sticker is home made, using harmless inks on the back of a used piece of recycled paper waste, and stuck to the sign using wheat paste. I got the idea for that, as for many other things, from The Guerilla Art Book, by Keri Smith.
Two thirds of Brits (67 per cent) believe the green agenda has been hijacked as a ploy to increase taxes.
Just over a third (34 per cent) believe that extreme weather is becoming more common but that it has nothing to do with global warming while one in 10 believe that climate change is a totally natural phenomenon.
The report by research group Opinium provides a valuable glimpse into the way in which people now view the green movement.
The over 55’s, for example, are the most cynical about of all about global warming with 43 per cent believing that extreme weather and global warming are completely unconnected.
While the report showed more and more people are willing to take steps to live greener lifestyles, scepticism surrounding the green movement persists.
Is it justified? Does it jeopardise the aims of the environmental movement?
The trend towards ever warmer weather will be halted over the next decade because of natural variations in sea temperatures, scientists predict.
Lower sea surface temperatures forecast for the North Atlantic will cancel out the trend towards warmer weather as a result of greenhouse gases, they suggested.
Cooler sea conditions will mask the man-made impact on weather systemns for a decade, they concluded in a paper published in the journal Nature.
“Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming,” the researchers concluded.
The team of scientists from Germany said the strength of deep sea currents in the Atlantic follow a 70-80-year cycle and are about to enter a cooler phase.
Scientists predicted the cooling after running computer models which used sea surface temperature measurements to calculate the likely deep water temperatures.
The research team from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg said their findings could pave the way for weather forecasts looking a decade ahead.
Cooler sea conditions created by meridional overturning circulation (MOD), the giant current bringing warm water northwards, would have a cooling impact on weather in Europe and North America, they suggested.
Commenting on the study, Richard Wood, of the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: “Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades.”
He cautioned, however, that sea surface temperatures might not accurately reflect the state of the MOC, which is several kilometres deep and dependent on a variety of factors, including salt content.
If the model could accurately forecast other variables besides temperature, such as rainfall, it would be increasingly useful, but climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain, he added.
Moves to prevent the black grouse from disappearing have proved so successful that a conservation project to save it is to be more than doubled in size.
Black grouse are a threatened species but measures taken by landowners and farmers have boosted their population in England by a third in ten years.
Numbers of males rose from 773 in 1998 to 1,029 in 2006 as habitat improvements provided the creatures with better shelter and more food.
The project in the North Pennines is now to be expanded to the Yorkshire Dales and into the North West of Northumberland where the species has suffered a disasterous decline.
The two new areas are regarded by conservationists as vital to the long term prospects of the bird which slumped in England because of loss of habitat and modern farming techniques.
Black grouse in Wales and Scotland have also suffered but to a lesser degree. Just over 5,000 pairs are estimated to breed in Britain overall.
“The launch of this exciting new initiative is a real milestone in black grouse recovery,” said Phil Warren, of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust and project officer for the recovery programme.
“The remarkable come-back of black grouse in the North Pennines is a huge achievement. We have demonstrated that through appropriate management we can reverse the decline of this threatened bird. The battle is now on to expand their range.”
He said the recovery in the North Pennines was made possible by the willingness of farmers, gamekeepers and grouse moor managers to change the way they worked.
“There is no doubt that without their support and enthusiasm we may have lost this enigmatic bird,” added Mr Warren.
Measures taken included encouraging the growth of plants that were required by the insects eaten by grouse chicks, and keeping down the numbers of generalist predators such as foxes and carrion crows.
Trees such as ash, rowan and hawthorn were encouraged because the grouse use them in winter as a source of food and shelter.
By expanding the project conservationists hope to create conditions that will allow the bird to spread southwards from a 45 square km area of the North Pennines into a 50 square km zone within the Yorkshire Dales.
In North West Northumberland an important remnant population of black grouse has been identified which the project organisers hope will increase rapidly and spread into neighbouring areas.
Black grouse are legal to hunt but landowners and the rest of the shooting community have recognised their rarity and try to avoid killing them.
Martin Howat of Natural England, one of several organisations involved in the project, said in time it was to be hoped the bird recovered sufficiently for sports shoots to be sustainable but that current numbers are “a fair way off” that being possible.
Sir Martin Doughty, chair of Natural England said, “Species recovery programmes of this kind are crucial for the continuing success of wildlife in England.”
Among the partners involved in running and funding the conservation programme are the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Ministry of Defence, and Northumbrian Water.
What do you say to somebody who doesn't believe you can make people change their habits? Who argues that nobody will ever give up the carbon-rich luxuries to which they have become accustomed - such as cheap flights, big cars, overlit and too-warm houses? And contends that any steps we take towards sustainability (giving up the flights, driving less, turning down lighting and thermostats) are useless in the face of Chinese and Indian economic expansion?
There are historical precedents for the kind of selflessness required, and they deserve scrutiny because they could teach us a great deal about the psychology of change.
One that comes to mind is the movement towards the abolition of the slave trade in Britain (and elsewhere). In just 20 years, campaigners who initially represented a minuscule minority persuaded their compatriots to give up an incredibly useful resource - free labour - merely because it was The Right Thing To Do. (This picture, showing detailed plans and cross sectional drawing of the slave ship Brookes, was distributed by the Abolitionist Society.)
You can readily imagine how their first efforts were rebuffed. "You'll never persuade people to give up the luxuries to which they've become accustomed," cynics must have argued. "And why should we give up slaves if the Americans continue to keep them?"
Dirty nappies will be turned into roof tiles when a recycling plant opens within the next year.
The recycling plant, the first of its kind in Britain, is expected to divert thousands of tonnes of waste that would otherwise end up in landfill sites.
Nappies processed at the facility will be turned into a range of products including roof tiles and plastic cladding.
The site will have the capacity to recycle about 30,000 tonnes of nappies and similar absorbant materials such as incontinence pads each year.
It is expected to open late this year or early in 2009 and will be built at a cost of more than pounds20 million in Birmingham by the firm Knowaste in partnership with Alpha Wastecare.
It it estimated that up to 750,000 tonnes of nappies - enough to fill Wembley Stadium eight times - are buried in landfill sites each year in Britain as part of 29 million tonnes of the nation's annual municipal waste.
Local authorities are under increasing pressure to reduce the quantity of waste sent to landfill. Each year until at least 2010 tax per tonne, now standing at pounds 32 for every tonne of waste, will rise.
It is no wonder that more and more people are dumping disposable nappies in favour of re-usables. 'Real nappies' are a no-brainer in environmental terms. Sure, they require a bit more effort as Jen Howze argues on the Alpha Mummy blog; but then so does recycling (all those bottles, cans and newspapers piling up by the front door). And on the nappy front, a small change can make a big difference to the environment and your pocket. Not convinced? Here are 10 reasons why you should think very hard about using real nappies:
The guilt factors
- Your child will use 4,500 nappies before toilet training. That produces the equivalent to 130 black bin-bags full.
- A (very smelly) mountain of 8 million nappies are disposed of DAILY; that's up to 750,000 tonnes of waste a year. For every £1 spent on disposable nappies, there is a cost to the taxpayer of 10p to dispose of them.
- More disposable nappies are found in UK household waste than anything else - they make up about 4 per cent of our rubbish. The majority of them end up in landfill - and space is running out.
- Disposable nappies take 200 to 500 years to decompose and release methane gasses as they do so.
Money talks
- Home-laundered nappies could save parents around £500 per child; more if you re-use them for subsequent offspring.
- There are incentive schemes to encourage parents to convert to real nappies. Check out what's available in your area by searching here
But I'm too busy
- Consider using a nappy laundering service
- Or what about going the re-usable route part time, say at weekends and evenings?
But laundering re-usable nappies uses lots of energy
- There is no point using cloth nappies if you are going to launder them at 90oC, tumble dry and iron them. Wash at max 60oC; hang nappies out to dry; avoid using unnecessary chemicals and use and eco-detergent; NEVER iron them.
I just don't believe the hype
- A study by the Environment Agency assessed the impact of disposable and re-usable nappies and concluded that "there is little or nothing to
choose between them". It said that the damage caused by burying disposables in landfill sites
was matched by the electricity and greenhouse gases generated by washing and
drying cloth nappies. However this report was widely criticised because, amongst other things, it assumed that nappies would be washed at 90oC and tumble dried.
OK, I'd like to know more...
Babies Nappies - a blog dedicated to eco nappies
The real nappy campaign - resources for parents
The women's environmental network - useful links and facts
Fill-your-pants.com - "more pant fill, less landfill"
How to green your baby from Treehugger
The Netmums guide to nappies
Posted by Lucia Adams
You could hardly hope for a better illustration of our mixed feelings about oil.
Just a few days ago, on Earth Day, we ran a survey asking which industry sector you'd like to vanish off the planet - for the sake of the planet. By a very long way, oil came first.
But then drivers in Scotland started to fill up on petrol in expectation of a fuel shortage, and my colleague Robin Pagnamenta noted that without ample oil supplies we would starve.
So do we hate oil, or crave it? Or, like addicts who recognise the harm done to them by heroin or alcohol, do we both love and hate oil all at once?
The ecologist and writer Alastair McIntosh has written in his stunning book Soil and Soul that some things that seem harmless in themselves can, at a certain remove or huge scale, become terrifyingly harmful. Quoting John Steinbeck, he observes that the banks that foreclosed loans and caused such suffering in the Great Depression were staffed with people who, almost without exception, hated what the bank was doing. But they did it anyway, because the "emergent properties" of the banking system called on them to do so. McIntosh suggests that these emergent properties are fundamentally unavoidable in any human system, and that they might possibly be what previous generations had in mind when they talked of "the devil" - an anthropomorphic embodiment of what today we choose to regard as mere abstracts.
Certainly, it's possibly to see the "devil" in oil. It's undoubtedly useful and pleasure-giving stuff - as indeed are heroin, so I understand, and alcohol - but we allow these things to take over our lives at great peril.
Whether we're "possessed" by devils or merely addicted, we must all take a share of the responsibility. Which is not to say that we should feel guilty - which does nobody any good - but we should think hard about the implications of what we do and try to change, little by little. After all, people have lived for all but the tiniest part of human history without any oil at all.
Which brings me back to the idea that we are all going to starve. Well, it's true that current agricultural practice relies on fossil fuels to a vast degree (ten calories from oil for each calorie on the plate!). But it's also true that we can all grow foods in window boxes, on local scrubland, and in our gardens without using any of those artificial aids. If you aren't doing so already, why not? Even one lettuce makes a (small) difference.
 
Nor do you need even to buy plastic (eg, oil based) pots for the
seedlings. These ones, in an improvised cold-frame in my garden, are
made of newspaper and slowly rot in the ground.
My friend Richard Reynolds, of the Guerilla Gardeners, has a book coming out about the great tradition of growing things where there was nothing before. I'm looking forward to reading it - and only hope that Richard has added to his previous writing, about decorative planting, something substantial about how we can grow food on common land, as did Richard's 17th century forebears, the Diggers.
An evolutionary anomoly exhibited by painted dragon lizards has been hailed as evidence that variety is the spice of life.
The male lizards come in two colours, some with red heads and others with yellow, but the variation has puzzled scientists because evolution should have led to one colour dominating and the other vanishing under pressure of competition.
Scientists now suspect both colours have persisted because they help remind females which of the males they've already mated with.
Tests showed that the females found both colours equally attractive but that when offered pairs of males she far prefered one of each colour instead of both the same.
Researchers from Wollongong University in Australia, reporting their findings in the journal Ethology, said it was likely the choice of male colours helped the females ensure they mated with at least two different lizards to maximise their prospects of picking the fittest male.
Russian oil production has peaked and may never return to current
levels, one of the country’s top energy executives has warned, fuelling
concerns that the world’s biggest oil producers cannot keep up with
rampant Asian demand. (So says PowerSwitch, the UK peak oil community portal.)
Leonid Fedun, the 52-year-old vice-president of Lukoil,
Russia’s largest independent oil company, told the Financial Times he
believed last year’s Russian oil production of about 10m barrels a day
was the highest he would see “in his lifetime”. Russia is the world’s
second biggest oil producer.
As I've tried to point out before, a future with less cheap energy could be a lot more fun than most people seem to believe.
Whether you believe this or not, you can find out a great deal more about how to prepare for peak oil, such as here, on Powerswitch's What You Can Do page. The advice there includes the following:
(1) Clear your debts.
(2) Make sure you are multi-skilled to have a chance of employment when the economy starts to buckle.
(3)
Have emergency rations on hand in case of a sudden oil shock disrupting
oil supplies (remember the fuel protests of 2000?) and also in case of
things like Bird Flu – you do not know what could happen.
(4)
Begin living as ‘green’ a life as you can as that is basically the
low-carbon society we’ll be moving towards. Change your electricity
supplier to ecotricity, juice or another green electricity provider.
Remember the 3 'Rs' - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. In that order.
(5) If necessary begin to change your expectations – we cannot expect a lifestyle as affluent in 2025 as in 2005.
(6) If you are in your 20s or maybe your 30s it might be worth considering cancelling your pension plan.
(7)
Begin forming strong social bonds with friends and family. Oil has
allowed us to become a very atomised society – reliance on friends and
family will be increasingly important in the years ahead.
(8) If you can, hook your house up with electricity micro-generation, insulate your house and learn gardening!
(9) If you have not had children you will need to weigh up the gamble on whether it will be a benefit or a burden to you.
(10)
ENJOY YOURSELF! The party is almost over but it isn’t yet. We live in
one of the most exciting times in human history, I suggest you enjoy it!
Up to two-thirds of people around the world are worried about the threats posed
by global warming, an extensive survey has found.
More than 60,000 people in 57 countries were questioned during the survey
carried out for Gallup International for International Earth Day.
When presented with the statement, “Global warming is having a serious
impact now in the area where I live,” 66 per cent of respondents said they
agreed.
The sentiment was strongest in the Asia Pacific region where it was shared
by 78 per cent of people. The figure was 73 per cent in Latin America and 66 per
cent in Western Europe.
In North America only 38 per cent felt there was a serious impact close to home but 62 per cent expressed concern about global warming.
Scepticism among the populations of individual countries was strongest in
Iceland where 59 per cent of people refused to believe global warming was having
a serious impact around them.
Other countries where scepticism was strong were Germany with 51 per cent
denying serious impacts near their homes, Russia (47 per cent), Norway (43), the
UK (41) and the United States (40).
Conversely, Western Europe and North America were the regions where
individuals did the most to reduce the impacts of climate change.
It's Earth Day, and I've done what I can to mark the occasion - dug up a concrete slab in my garden and planted up the soil beneath, joined an informal local food-buying cooperative to get organic produce at wholesale prices, and attended a consciousness-raising film club (that bit took place last night, but hey).
I daresay that many others will have done as much, possibly more. But are such gestures worth anything if, in our day jobs, we continue to create the conditions that have led to global warming, and unsustainable economic growth? It's a question that we should all ask ourselves, disturbing though all too many of us, in "developed" countries, may find it.
On that basis, I've come up with a poll asking which jobs, or rather work sectors, are the least earth-friendly. (I know that the earth will carry on revolving whether or not we inhabit its surface, but the term provides a useful shorthand for keeping-the-earth-in-a-condition-that-permits-humankind-to- survive.)
Obviously, within each sector, there will be some people who do invaluable work to address the problems we face. But I strongly suspect that those are exceptions that prove the rule. So if you had a chance to shut down an entire sector, for the planet's sake, which would it be?
A few weeks ago, we posted a list of the five all-time best eco songs, with several runners-up. We're delighted to hear that one of our choices, the Autons, have subsequently been approached by Al Gore.
The Portsmouth-based band's climate change anthem, Maybe appears on their cult classic Short Term Manifesto. Environmentalist film maker Yesca, part of
the Undercurrents media collective, made this video.
"The idea was to put
something out there that people could pass around to people all over
the UK and the world via the internet" says singer David Auton "and to
have something that could be shown at greening campaigns, Transition Town gatherings and music and film festivals".
Since the band featured on Green Central, Al Gore's people have been in touch and so has MTV. We're glad to have helped.
PS. If you're in London you can catch the Autons on Wednesday at The Dublin Castle in Camden.
Just in case you didn't know already, today is Earth Day - the annual event that aims to drive environmental awareness and encourage us all to 'take action.' So in honour of this, and following the success of our Top 50 Eco Blogs post, we are serving up an extra helping of eco blogs - this time compiled from your suggestions on Green Central. Enjoy!
Action starts at home:
No Impact Man - a New Yorker tries to reduce his carbon footprint (as well as that of his Prada-wearing wife) - sign up to his RSS feed and keep up-to-date with his progress.
The Daily Green
- everything from news and recipes to tips to
help go green. Take a look at the Earth Day cartoons.
Consciousconsuming - seeks to increase awareness of the impact of what we buy on "our health,
happiness, and environment". Suggests eating less to save the world: "One
Less Burger, One Safer Planet"
Inhabitat - From architecture and art to transport and clothing. Proves that going green can be design-conscious.
The Alternative Consumer - check out the Earth Day Don'ts post.
Life Goggles - reviews of 'green' products. See the solar electric shaver... and enter the Great Green Giveaway competition for a chance to win lots of free stuff
La Marguerite - says it focuses on "behavioral solutions to global warming". Find out how to get real for Earth Day and what Green Porno means.
The big picture:
Ecology and Policy - British Ecological Society's science policy team's blog. Will keep you up-to-date with what's new in eco policies.
Globalisation and the Environment - meaty debate on enviro news stories.
Climate Progress - Former energy advisor to the Clinton administration Joseph Romm's blog; tool up on insider eco knowledge
As I've written before, I'm on the trail of what looks like either a conspiracy against the great British toilet or a vast mistake - with disastrous consequences for the environment whichever way you look at it. (Indeed, I made a short film.)
In 2003, I bought an expensive dual-flush toilet for my downstairs loo. It didn’t take long before it started to leak, but the water ran into the pan, not onto the floor, so I tried to ignore it.
Eventually, ignoring it became impossible: the odd drip had turned into a fountain. I stopped the water at the inlet, using a screwdriver, and set out to fix the problem - only to discover that a discredited flushing mechanism, banned for nearly 140 years, was quietly legalised in 1999 on advice from a committee whose members included individuals and representatives of businesses who stood to gain from the change.
As a result, householders across the country are finding themselves at the receiving end of water bills amounting to thousands of pounds a year.
Ann Simpson is one such householder. As a result of her toilet leaking, water consumption increased tenfold – from 351 litres to 3,364 litres a day, for a full six months. The combined bill for water and sewerage was likewise ten times higher than normal – equivalent to roughly £3,600 a year.
Mrs Simpson, who works in care for the elderly, lives with her husband and two daughters in rented council accommodation in Christchurch, Dorset. The house was new when they moved in. After she queried the bill, the water company sent somebody to carry out an inspection. He laid a piece of loo paper on the back of the pan. It was immediately drenched. “We hadn’t noticed a leak,” says Mrs Simpson. She got in touch with the landlord, who fixed the loo but refused to pay the bill. Her insurer, likewise, said it couldn’t help. She received a series of reminder letters and ultimately a notice that 
she would be taken to court. “It’s not very nice to get one of those,” she says. “My husband’s a policeman.”
Still she refused to pay for water she’d not used deliberately. Eventually the sewerage and water companies backed down, canceling the charge – but making clear that it would not do so again.
Another customer hit by those huge bills was Rev Melvin Williams, who lives with his wife in the same part of Dorset. He’d noticed water running into his toilet but not thought about it till he heard from the water company that his bill was going to be high. “I’m in my 80s and I’m not really with it on these matters,” he says.
Julia Arden, who lives in nearby Bournemouth, has a dual-flush loo in the home she shares with two daughters. “I would hear this constant trickling, and the water bills were getting terribly high.” The meter showed that daily usage had risen rapidly from 373 litres a day to 886.
“It didn’t make any sense. They sent someone round to look. It was the toilet. So I got a plumber in. He said he couldn’t do anything, because he couldn’t find the exact part. He would need to replace the whole loo.” She still hears the trickling, and her bills remain high.
It’s important to emphasize that the problem of leaky loos is not confined to a small part of southern England. It just happens that one of the few water companies to have carried out research into the problem is based there. But householders all over the country are wasting water as a result of fitting faulty toilets.
The environmental impact is horrendous. The average person in the UK flushes 60 litres of water down the toilet every day. With a leaky loo, as we’ve seen, it can be ten times as much. And as well as treatment to drinking-water standards, all this water needs pumping from reservoirs to homes and offices, and then through sewers – at vast cost in energy and CO2 emissions.
Save the siphon - before it's too late!
Security was tight today for BP's 99th Annual General Meeting. Groups of protesters dressed as pirates harangued shareholders as they made their way into the sprawling Excel Conference Centre in London's Docklands. And even once inside and past security amid the arclights, the pumping music and the decidedly macho displays of racing cars and oil drilling technology, there was little escape for the company's beleaguered executives. They faced a bewildering array of questions on everything from the group's decision to invest in Canada's tar sands to the plight of grizzly bears in the Northern US and the war in Iraq. At one point, someone even began asking about BP's position on Tibet - not a region I believe the company has ever been involved in. BP's chairman Peter Sutherland batted off most of them reaonably competently - although by the end of the session he seemed to be getting rather tetchy. The company's new chief executive Tony Hayward said little apart from a scripted address.
But for all BP's high-flown talk of an ongoing commitment to moving Beyond Petroleum and an undeniable, though comparatively small-scale, commitment to renewable energy, it was very hard to avoid the sense that this is a company that is returning to its roots as a big, dirty oil major.
Perhaps this is no surprise. After all, BP has suffered so many safety and operational problems in recent years that in its effort to get back on track, Hayward has focused on going back to basics - which, for an oil company, means finding and producing oil. It's no surprise that is what BP feels comfortable doing.
This is depressing. Against a background of increasingly dire warnings about the rapid pace of climate change and the urgent need to reduce emissions, one of the world's biggest oil companies seems to be headed in completely the wrong direction.
Instead of showing leadership, its solution appears to be an investment of $3bn in the Canadian oil sands. Forget serious investments in innovative, clean technology, BP seems to be talking about selling its renewables business off.
In spite of everything, its approach seems to be less progressive than it was five years ago.
Next year's AGM will be the company's 100th anniversary. By then, Peter Sutherland will have been replaced. Whoever his successor is, I hope he drives a fresh approach at BP. As Sutherland mentioned today, around $100bn is being invested globally every year into renewable energy but the UN believes four times that is required to have a significant impact on emissions. Companies like BP need to play a profoundly greater role in this process.
On Newsnight last night, the government minister Joan Ruddock defended the practice of sending plastic rubbish to China because, she said, it saved the boats from sailing empty when they return from delivering us all the stuff China has manufactured on our behalf.
It was a telling remark.
Jeremy Paxman had asked her why more plastic was not recycled here in the UK. Her response showed clearly that even the Labour government believes that globalisation is some kind of inevitable, natural process, much like the passing of the seasons, or the succession of night and day, rather than a political choice, just one out of many.
A less polluting alternative would be to make ourselves more self-sufficient in this country by building recycling facilities here and actually manufacturing things with the (re)new(ed material. This would create jobs and put an end to those vast and polluting shipping trips.
But what about the poor Chinese? Whatever will they do without that trade, which brings them so much benefit?
We too benefit from international trade, in much the same way (which is to say, not a great deal). We import and export, with a variety of trading partners - at a great cost in carbon emissions - and count this a benefit because it increases GDP. There seems to me to be no good reason why we couldn't simply consume what we produce, instead, and accept lower GDP.
In case you missed it last time, permit me to retell my favourite new joke, about two economists who challenge each other to eat a pile of dog poo for £20,000 a go. (At a time of global food shortage, the joke has particular resonance, I like to think.)
Having done both - eaten sh*t and rendered themselves precisely no better off than before - they pat each other on the back and congratulate themselves. Why? Because they've increased GDP. I commend the joke to Joan Ruddock, and hope it helps to modify her views on international trade.
Everybody's worried about money. The world economy looks shaky, and the best we can hope for in the current system - economic growth - is tied so closely to consumerism that it will inevitably have a damaging effect on the environment. Enough to make you despair?
Well, don't. Because the good news is that increasing numbers of economists are backing alternative economic systems, including complementary, local currencies.
Local currencies - issued by communities, not by profit-driven banks - have been around for a long time, and tended to flourish during recessions when people with the ability to work couldn't find paid employment in the mainstream economy - as this short film about the Great Depression in the US shows.
For people facing lay off in the current economic climate, this can only be good news. But local currencies are good for everybody, because they stop wealth leaking out of communities.
To find out more about local currencies, see this explanation of LETSystems. And for more about how to build a green economy, watch this space.
A compostable book on how to make compost has been published by the National Trust.
The book, How to 'Cook' Compost, is made from recycled paper and fibres, and the organisation boasts that it is both wholly biodegradeable and the first designed to be "completely compostable".
The book is intended to raise the profile of green living and to provide a practical guide on making compost.
It follows in the wake of the launch of Dorling Kindersley's 'Made with Care' range of books that aim to reach new heights of environmental friendliness.
Among the measures taken are the removal of jackets to save on materials and energy, the use of paper approved by the Forest Stewardship Council, and printing the books in Europe rather than the Far East to reduce transport emissions.
The publisher maintains that the range, with four titles published this month, illustrates a recognition that "we all need to take action against" climate change, an issue which it considers the greatest facing the planet.
Two blue tits have weathered the recent cold snap to nest earlier than any others since records began in 1939.
The pair were spotted feeding seven chicks on April 8 at a time when most blue tits were still to complete building their nests.
Jason Fathers, from Wildlife Windows (http://www.wildlifewindows.co.uk), said the size of the young suggested the eggs were laid in mid-March.
"It's by far and away the earliest nesting attempt for Blue Tits that I've ever seen," he said after finding the birds in Walford Mill, Dorset.
Warmer average temperatures caused by climate change are thought to be the cause of a recent trend towards earlier nesting for birds.
Higher temperatures mean food sources for a variety of species become available earlier in the year, such as caterpillars for blue tits, which makes it possible to raise a family earlier.
Dr Dave Leech, head of the Nest Record Scheme which is overseen by the British Trust for Ornithology (http://www.bto.org), said data on when birds nest helps monitor the effects and extent of climate change.
As the tide turns in favour of local, seasonal food - at last! - many people still profess themselves worried about neglecting to buy Kenyan mangetout, and other unlocal, unseasonal crops, on the basis that this will leave Kenyan farmers in a tricky spot.
Worry no more! The fact is that by ceasing to buy mangetout, you are releasing Kenyans from the burden of growing food for us, and setting them free to feed themselves.
For this insight, I'm grateful to the world food crisis: only now, following the doubling of rice prices on international markets over just three months, riots in several countries, the deployment of military convoys to protect harvests in others, and price controls and export bans in yet more, has it become clear that countries must look after their own needs before scrabbling for increased shares in world markets.
It's a lesson we should have learned long ago. In the Irish famine of the mid-1800s (commemorated in the statues pictured above), crops were exported to England and elsewhere under armed guard while the native Irish, confronted with a failed potato crop, tried to feed their families on grass.
Eco-homes in the UK are a costly red herring. Housing developers may like to greenwash their properties in an effort to sweeten planning applications, but in reality there is simply no way the UK can replace its current housing stock with a greener alternative. Three quarters of the homes we’ll be living in by 2050 have already been built. Why should only seven per cent of new UK homes be eco-homes? It makes little sense. Surely every new home should be built to the same high standards. Instead, we need to focus on finding ways of making our existing housing stock far greener and more energy efficient if we are serious about tackling climate change.
All too often, when discussing an energy-constrained future, and a chaotic climate, I find myself sounding pinched, meanspirited and apocalyptic. A glance at this graph - illustrating humankind's journey from the caves, to the moon, and briskly back to the caves - shows how easy that can be. (It's taken from Richard Duncan's fantastically depressing dieoff.org.)
But every miserable fact can be turned around to show an upside, if only you try hard enough to find the right way to express it. And that distortion should not involve dishonesty - just an open mind, capable of looking at things in another way.
Once again, I find myself indebted to Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Town movement for a wonderful illustration of this (in fact two illustrations, both of which he did himself, and appear in his newly published Transition Handbook).
Hopkins had stared and stared at graphs - bell-curved like the one above - showing the rapid increase in fossil-fuel use, followed by an equally rapid decline as supplies are exhausted. He'd turned the graph into a picture of his own (below).
"For a long time," he explains, "I saw this as a mountain. You get to the top and you see more than anybody has ever seen before, and the decline is something that you really have to drag people unwillingly down."
He then spoke to a climate scientist who suggested he might turn the graph upside down.
That way, humankind's encounter with oil stops looking like a mountain and becomes instead a kind of treacly lagoon.
 This gave Hopkins an entirely different story to tell. "We jumped into this because somebody told us there were great riches in there. Now we've reached the point where we're rooting around at the bottom and when we look up we can still just see the light coming through the surface. And when we move back up, it's in a collective rush to self-preservation and something really beautiful."
We already knew there were problems with biofuel: world food production has fallen as land is devoted to growing petrol substitutes, and elsewhere virgin rainforest is sacrificed for the same reason.
Now a trading scam has come to light which undermines still more the claim that biofuels reduce emissions. To take advantage of US agricultural subsidies, European producers are shipping their fuel to the US, adding a splash of US fuel to qualify for 11p per litre in subsidy - then shipping it back to Europe to sell at a discount to domestic prices.
The practice is not illegal, but the environmental cost of shipping fuel across the Atlantic - and back - makes a mockery of biofuel's few remaining green credentials.
The scam highlights a wider flaw in conventional economics: the overlooked environmental cost of international trade generally. We import and export almost identical amounts of many products, at vast cost in energy - but this is overlooked, nay encouraged, because trade increases GDP (even when, as in this joke, it involves a pair of economists eating piles of dog poo).
Last year we learned that the seafood producer Young's ships Scottish-caught scampi to Thailand to be peeled by hand, then shipped back. Young's argued that this was "carbon neutral" because industrial peeling in Scotland would use as much energy as the shipping - conveniently disregarding the climate-friendly alternative of peeling by hand in Scotland (which would also provide more British jobs).
I daresay that some twister in the biofuels industry is even now coming up with an explanation as to how their own trading scam helps the environment, and possibly British jobs too. I only hope it's as funny as the joke about the coprophagic economists.
Just received an email promoting a mass post-in, on 1 June 2008, as follows.
"Post offices are well used and well loved by communities all over Britain. We can attend meetings, we can sign petitions, we can padlock ourselves to railings but will it stop the Post Offices from closing? We need a mass protest on a scale not seen since the war years. On 1st June 2008 throughout the British Isles, we must quite simply post letters. Send them to friends, colleagues and family AND for every letter we post send one to Gordon Brown."
As the photo indicates, I'm getting ready for the big day right now, cutting up old clothes catalogues and glueing them into rudimentary envelope shapes using home-made wheat paste. What to send? I enclosed a small parcel of seeds for the recipients to grow in their own time.
Having recently read that the old-fashioned postcard is threatened - nobody under 35 sends them any more, apparently - and having also become increasingly frustrated by all the junk email, I'm thinking of retreating to snail mail entirely in the near future.
I won't be able to keep in touch with so many people, or communicate quite so often, but perhaps that's not such a bad thing - gives me more time to mix wheat paste and collect seeds.
Have you planted a tree lately? It's never too late to start. I recently came across this enchanting book, The Man Who Planted Trees, and feel more inspired than ever to start my own, unofficial re-afforestation programme in north London.
As it happens, I've been running a kind of "tree ambulance service" for several months, with a neighbour who works as a gardener.
Every so often Brian (my neighbour) is commissioned to dig up a tree by customers who wish to put something else in its place. And rather than trash the sapling he leaves it on my doorstep - whereupon I pot it and add it to my collection, pictured below. (The largest is six feet tall. Several, as you can see, are barely a foot. Most are oaks.)
The plan is to get hold of a fluorescent yellow workman's jacket and plant them unofficially on bare verges alongside one of the wide, traffic filled avenues nearby - and keep watering them till they've grown to full size.
Among my collection, the first to come into leaf were the ash - which traditionally means that we're in for a wet year (ash rhymes with splash). We shall see.
I've done what I can, what with ordering local food from a box scheme, and getting my own allotment, and irritating my wife by planting vegetables and salad leaves all round the garden where she wanted merely ornamental plants - but here's fresh evidence that we're in for a very serious food crisis indeed.
The former newspaper editor turned farmer Rosie Boycott points out in The Guardian today that Britain has not been self-sufficient in food since the late 18th
century, and the situation is rapidly worsening. "In 2006, 37% of the
UK's food was imported, with London dependent on imports for 80% of its
food. For the capital, a food shortage would clearly be disastrous."
In the food crisis, in 1939, we still had productive
orchards and plenty of farmers. Today, there are now more people in jail than farmers. And half of all vegetables and 95% of
all fruit consumed in the UK now come from overseas.
A large part of the problem is meat eating, which accounts for unsustainable use of land and water and fuel. When Boycott was a child, the family ate meat just once a week. I hope we'll be able to carry on eating it even that infrequently in years to come.
In the meantime, rather than finish on a bleak note, I should point out that when Cuba lost access to Soviet oil Cubans only narrowly avoided starvation - but after embarking on a crash programme of home-growing, even urban Havana managed to produce half its own food needs. To find out more about this, I very strongly recommend that you get hold of the short film The Power of Community, which sets out the Cuban story, and host a screening with your neighbours (for a preview, see this clip on YouTube).
The nuclear industry has succesfully managed to portray atomic power as a 'greener' form of energy than conventional fossil fuels. The claim that nuclear power is 'climate friendly' has been used as a powerful justification for the industry's rebirth and was reiterated today by business secretary John Hutton.
But does this argument really stack up? On one level, yes. Certainly, it's true that nuclear energy can provide large amounts of electricity with relatively low emissions of carbon dioxide. Government figures suggest the estimated full life cycle of carbon emissions from a nuclear power station are equivalent to between 2 per cent and 6 per cent of those of a gas-fired station for every unit of electricity generated. This includes all emissions from uranium processing, through construction and decommissioning to the management of radioactive waste.
But a green source of power? This, surely, is stretching the argument too far. Uranium mining and milling have a variety of potentially harmful environmental side effects including the creation of run-off and dangerous waste liquors that can pose serious hazards. Large numbers of fish are also killed because of the vast quantities of water required to cool nuclear reactors. Then of course, there is the issue of nuclear waste - much of which remains dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.
None of this necessarily means nuclear energy is the wrong choice. After all, every form of energy including renewables such as wind and wave power have environmentally damaging side-effects. There are also ways of limiting the environmental impact of nuclear power through proper planning and long-term policies to handle waste and guarantee the safe mining of uranium.
But this does not address what is is perhaps the most compelling argument of all against nuclear power - that by allowing the technology to proliferate we could usher in its misuse in the future by a rogue state or terrorist and that this could pave the way for a nuclear catastrophe - on both a human and environmental level.
This depressing argument is probably the only one that the UK government has not really even attempted to tackle in its current push for new build nuclear. What do you think?
Whenever anybody tells me that "something must be done" about climate change, I tend to wonder whether there's something we can do ourselves.
A good example of this is carbon capture and storage, which theoretically allows us to keep burning coal in power stations - because nasty emissions will be buried underground and the atmosphere saved (hurrah!).
That's the theory, though there's no working example likely to be established in the UK for some time. But we don't need to wait for the dizzyingly huge and complex schemes of government and power companies: we can do it ourselves.
The secret is to make charcoal. The final product can be used in barbecues instead of imported charcoal, which often comes from endangered rainforest and also wastes energy in transportation around the world. Additionally, buying British charcoal makes the upkeep of British woodland more economically viable, as brilliantly explained here.
But how does this "capture and store" carbon, you ask. Well, burning the charcoal in a barbecue won't do that, but if you set aside a large amount of the charcoal and dig it into the ground you will stop the CO2 being released for a very long time, and also miraculously improve the quality of the soil. (See this fascinating debate about "bio-char", and how it may account for the extraordinary fertility of some parts of the Amazon rainforest.)
And how do you make your own charcoal? You make a simple but effective burner using an old oil drum, and gather wood yourself or beg for some from tree surgeons. If you don't feel entirely confident doing this yourself, you can always take a course, such as this one for Woodland Pioneers.
The derivation of garden furniture imported into Britain has been brought into question again by an investigation naming Vietnam as a hub for the illegal timber trade.
Undercover investigators concluded the majority of Vietnamese furniture factories are using logs from neighbouring Laos and are driving deforestation and illegal logging.
At one point investigators spotted 45 trucks stacked with logs lined up in a column waiting to drive across the border from Laos to Vietnam.
They calculated that 500,000 cubic metres of logs are transported by this route each year.
Investigators said the “plundering of Laos’ forests involves high-level corruption and bribery” and that much of the wood “is made into furniture for export to garden centres and merchants in the UK”.
Illegal logging in Indochina threatens to destroy some of the last intact forests in the region, said the Environmental Investigation Agency (http://www.eia-international.org/), based in London, which carried out a joint inquiry with the Indonesian NGO Telapak.
Their report, Borderlines, noted that while some countries, including Indonesia, have cracked down on illegal logging, the “criminal networks” behind it have shifted their attention to Laos.
Responsibility, the report claimed, lies in part with people in Europe and the United States who buy the furniture made from the timber and thereby encourage illegal logging.
“The ultimate responsibility for this dire state of affairs rests with the consumer markets with import wood products made from stolen timber,” said Julian Newman of EIA.
It constantly amazes me, travelling around London by bike, that I can get to where I'm going faster than friends doing the same journey in a car.
Plainly, this has a lot to do with my bike being allowed in bus lanes and other spaces restricted to cars - and my not needing to drive round for hours looking for parking spaces, or feeding money into meters.
I was delighted to learn that a recent test by Top Gear confirmed my experience - that bikes are faster on a journey across the capital.
The fact is that motor cars and other high |
I must admit, I hadn't expected such an overwhelming response to my previous post to the effect that dual-flush toilets (or specifically drop-valve dual-flush toilets) are hopeless.
Without oil, we would starve.