One Tonne Life

The average person in the UK directly produces 6 tonnes of CO2. If we're ever going to get climate change under control, then we need to reduce this to 3 tonnes per person.

Can it be done?

Well, if you remember back to early January I posted my emissions figures for 2010, revealing that I was responsible for 2.41 tonnes of CO2. Actually, I was responsible for more than that - I didn't include any figures for food consumption as that's impossible to calculate with much accuracy at the moment.

A few Swedish companies have got together to see if they can reduce the emissions of an average family, in a project called One Tonne Life.

Here's the trailer:

The problem with this project, though, is that they've taken the family out of their normal everyday environment and put them into a highly efficient house which is powered with renewable energy systems, and also given them an electric car.

While it'll be interesting to follow the "experiment" over the course of the next year (via YouTube and their website), we'll only really tackle climate change when we reduce the emissions of the ordinary joe on the street who either isn't willing or isn't able to make drastic changes to their lifestyle.

I'm always a bit sceptical of the "change your lightbulbs" "eco-lifestyle" approach to reducing emissions. We need bigger changes than that, and changes that sometimes the population as a whole will have no idea are being made for them - replacing fossil-fuel power stations for example.

That's why we need to be pushing governments and businesses around the world to actually do something, something big and something beneficial, instead of merely handing out a few lightbulbs and hoping that Mrs MacGlumphy actually uses them.

Green In The Media 31st January - 6th February

There's a chance to Know Thy Enemy with this week's Storyville which takes a look at Climate Sceptics. I just hope it doesn't give them too much credence.

Monday 31st January

Storyville
On: BBC 4
Time: 22:00 to 23:00 (Also Wed 0300)
Meet the Climate Sceptics.
Rupert Murray gets to the heart of climate scepticism to examine the key arguments against man-made global warming and to try to understand the people who are making them. Do they have the evidence that we are heating up the atmosphere or are they taking a grave risk with our future by dabbling in complicated science they don't fully understand? Britain's pre-eminent sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton tours the world broadcasting his message to the public and politicians, but can he convince them and Murray that there is nothing to worry about?

Tuesday 1st February

Home Planet
On: BBC Radio Four
Time: 15:00 to 15:30
Richard Daniel and the team discuss listeners' questions about our world and our impact upon it.

Wednesday 2nd February

Costing the Earth
On: BBC Radio Four
Time: 21:00 to 21:30 (Also Thu 1330)
The Arctic is melting. The wealth of resources - oil, gas, uranium and even diamonds - are suddenly accessible. Tom Heap reports from Canada on the battle to seize them.

Man on Earth
On: more4
Time: 23:05 to 00:10
Tony Robinson travels back through 200,000 years of human history to find out what happened to our ancestors when violent climate change turned their world upside down, and what they can teach us as we face our own climate crisis today. While some civilisations flourished, others were destroyed.

Thursday 3rd February

Live Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Questions
On: BBC Parliament
Time: 10:30 to 11:30
Live coverage of questions in the House of Commons to Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Caroline Spelman and her ministerial team.

One Planet
On: BBC World Service Radio
Time: 10:32 to 11:00 (Also 1530, 2030, 0130, Sun 0630)
One Planet looks at how we use our planet.

Saturday 5th February

Who Killed the Honey Bee?
On: BBC 4
Time: 01:55 to 02:55
With an affliction dubbed colony collapse disorder wiping out bees worldwide, Martha Kearney explores the terrifying implications of their possible extinction and the loss of their most vital service to nature, pollination, without which global food production would collapse. The threat to keepers, farmers and our food supply is acute and growing, and yet the cause of this 'Marie Celeste syndrome' that causes bees to flee their hives remains a mystery.

Sunday 6th February

The People's Supermarket
On: Channel 4
Time: 20:00 to 21:00
The big supermarkets throw away tons of food every day, are monopolising our high streets, squeezing the profit out of producers - and making huge profits. Arthur Potts Dawson wants to reclaim a London high street by starting a radically different supermarket which is owned by its customers.


Excerpts taken from DigiGuide - the world's best TV guide available from
http://www.getdigiguide.tv/?p=1&r=20818
Copyright (c) GipsyMedia Limited.

The Week In Green Numbers

50 days

- increase in Greenland's ice melt season last year over the average #

2,000,000

- cars sold in the UK last year #

55

- electric cars sold in the UK last year #

£300 million

- fine that could be imposed on the UK for breaching air pollution standards #

3 feet tall

- size of a large "puma or panther - like" cat spotted in Pembrokeshire this week #

Plastic Bottles & Batteries Now Being Picked Up For Recycling

Edinburgh City Council have announced that they're going to start collecting plastic bottles and batteries from the kerbside recycling boxes.

I have to say they've taken their time about it, for no real reason that I can see.

Plastic bottles can already be put into the giant on-street skip-type recycling bins throughout the city so it's an easy step to start collecting them from the kerbside boxes as well.

Batteries, on the other hand, have never been collected before. The council have mostly left this to retailers (in fact I was going to blog this week that the Scotmid on Gorgie Road sprouted a battery recycling box for a couple of days this week, but it disappeared again). Car batteries can be taken to the council-run recycling depots.

I've said before, the easier you make it for people to recycle their waste, the more they will do so.

Next on my wishlist for recycling: plastic tubs. I eat a lot of yoghurt but Edinburgh doesn't accept plastic tubs. Obviously they like one type of plastic, but not others!

Hover Finally Over?

It's been over a year since I mentioned the proposed Fife to Edinburgh hovercraft, so let me remind you of the history.

The bus company Stagecoach ran a cross-Forth hovercraft for a couple of weeks as a trial, to see if a regular service was viable. The idea was that buses would run throughout Fife to the hovercraft terminal. The passengers would then cross the Forth before getting on a bus on the southern shore, leaving just a short journey into Edinburgh city centre.

The scheme would have seen a lot of buses taken off the Forth Road Bridge, and possibly more car commuters using a quicker form of public transport.

The trial proved to be wildly popular as Edinburgh and Fife residents revelled in the novelty of it. Unfortunately, subsequent plans to run the hovercraft as a regular service have come to naught.

Firstly, Stagecoach wanted too much subsidy. Then they decided that while they were happy running the bus operation, they didn't want to run the hovercraft. And there it was left, stuck as one of those brilliant ideas which never quite came off.

Now, it looks like the hovercraft is finally dead in the water. Fife Council are to stop looking for an operator due to underwhelming demand from ferry companies, and Edinburgh Council can't afford the £1 million subsidy it would initially need.

Which is a shame. It's not often an innovative transport project which catches the public imagination comes along, and when they do we should be grabbing them with both hands.

Flaming Auntie Nora!

Photo by paloetic

I heard about this on the radio last night, and my initial thought was 'cool!'. But it's not the initial thought of everyone...

Redditch Borough Council has proposed to use the excess heat from a crematorium to heat up a swimming pool.

Sharing heat sources isn't exactly a new idea - the local high school 200 yards from my flat is heated by the nearby distillery - but it's the first time I've heard about a crematorium getting involved.

I'm aware, though, that some people may have another reaction, as a local Unison union official did:

Union Unison said the proposals "are sick and an insult to local residents". It has called on the council to apologise for the "insensitive" plans.

We have such a weird relationship to death in this country, and indeed in the "western" world. Some deaths we mourn deeply, some deaths we celebrate the life that enriched ours. But in both cases, we want any deaths around us "sanitised".

Which I guess is why some people would view using the excess heat from the crematorium "sick".

Now I'm not naive enough to not realise that the union official is making a political point, and saying that the Conservative council are only trying to find ways to save money, but for once in my life I'm with the Tories.

It's a sensible solution not just to save money, but to save carbon emissions.

You Can Have Beavers, But Only If They're OUR Beavers

Way back in May 2008, I wrote a very short article about beavers being reintroduced to Scotland after 400 years.So you can imagine my surprise when I started following Paul Scott on twitter, who goes by the name of @Blair_Bookshop, and discovered that there were already beavers living in Scotland, wild and free. And that the exact same people who were monitoring the reintroduced beavers were trapping the wild beavers. I asked Paul to write a guest post on the forehead-slapping stupidity of it all:

Photo by flickkerphotos

If you go down to the woods today you're sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the River Tay today you're sure of an even bigger one.

The beaver reintroduction project over in Knapdale, which has so far cost the public purse somewhere in the region of £2,000,000 is starting to look like poor value for money now that Perthshire's best kept secret has spectacularly come slashing and gnawing its way out of the bag in the shape of a well established population of European Beavers in the river Tay catchment area. Cost to the taxpayer ? Free !

MI5 would be proud of the web of secrecy that has protected the free beavers in the area for many years, a web that was constructed in order to protect the flat tailed furry engineers of the waterways from the doom merchants of the anti-beaver brigade. This web of secrecy was torn apart in November of 2010 when it was announced that Scottish Natural Heritage, under pressure from The Scottish Rural Property and Business Association, intended to start trapping the free beavers of the area as 'a matter of urgency'.

Bafflingly, the announcement has been backed by the SNP environment minister Roseanna Cunningham. The environment minister has already received a large number of angry letters and emails on the subject, but has so far ignored all calls to halt the trapping of the free beavers. Among the excuses used by Miss Cunningham to defend her position is that beavers have been absent from Scotland for hundreds of years. An ironic statement when we remind ourselves that the cornerstone policy of the SNP is the restoration of an independent Scotland, a status that has also been absent for hundreds of years.

The Tweed foundation attempted to wade into the argument early on by claiming that beavers prevent salmon and trout from reaching spawning grounds but this claim falls flat when all the evidence points to the fact that fish numbers actually increase with the presence of beavers in the waterways. Salmon and trout managed to reach the spawning grounds when beavers were last here so why should there be any problem now ? Pesticides seeping into the water system from farmland is a far more obvious hazard to the health and well being of salmonids so it's possible that the Tweed foundation could make better use of their time scheduling a meeting with the Scottish Rural Property and Business Association to discuss that issue first.

The fight became centred on the Blairgowrie area in December of last year when a juvenile know locally as Eric was trapped by SNH on the River Ericht. To date, Eric is the only beaver to be captured despite the claim by SNH that the animals were to rounded up as a matter of urgency. SNHs timing of the trapping project has angered ecologists who have been quick to point out that the fragile local otter population, who are known to live side by side with the beavers and recycle deserted beaver lodges or burrows as new homes, are at the moment nursing young who will almost certainly perish should a lactating mother become trapped in one of the beaver capture devices.

Local businesses are also keen to see the key species left alone on the river as nature tourism in Perthshire is steadily gaining popularity as visitors flock to the area to catch a glimpse of Red Squirrels in the conifer woodland and pay a visit to the world famous Marge, the UKs oldest breeding Osprey who has been a summer resident at the Loch of the Lowes wildlife centre near Dunkeld for more than 20 years.

The plight of the free beavers prompted the Save The Free Beavers of the Tay facebook group which has gained over 400 members since it first started towards the tail end of 2010. As a result, The Scottish Wild Beaver Group was founded in January 2011. The group is made up by not only the country's foremost beaver experts, naturalists and relevant academics but also includes members of the local business community,local politicians and concerned members of the public from all walks of life.

The aim of the group is to offer SNH a sensible and mutually beneficial alternative to the trapping and/or culling of the estimated 100+ beavers who are living in an area that covers all points between Forfar in the east, Comrie in the west, Tentsmuir in the south and loch Tummel in the North.

All the scientific arguments have already been elegantly won by the group and public opinion is firmly on the side of Eric and his furry friends. A recent online survey gave a 90% result in favour of the beavers.The only stumbling block at the moment is SNH.


More detailed information and daily updates can be found at the Save The Free Beavers of the Tay facebook group and through twitter by following the #Freebeavers #FreeEric and #TayBeavers hashtags.The Scottish Wild beaver Group website is under construction and will be online in the next few weeks.

You can also read more on the subject of the fight to save the Tayside beavers in this short article in The Courier, and in this comprehensive one on the self willed land website.


My thanks to Paul for the article, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this campaign.

Green In The Media 24th - 30th January

Monday 24th January

Horizon
On: BBC 2
Time: 21:00 to 22:00
Science Under Attack.
Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been eroded - from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS. He interviews scientists and campaigners from both sides of the climate change debate, and travels to New York to meet Tony, who has HIV but doesn't believe that that the virus is responsible for AIDS. This is a passionate defence of the importance of scientific evidence and the power of experiment, and a look at what scientists themselves need to do to earn trust in controversial areas of science in the 21st century.

Tuesday 25th January

Home Planet
On: BBC Radio Four
Time: 15:00 to 15:30
Richard Daniel and the team discuss listeners' questions about our world and our impact upon it.

Wednesday 26th January

British Isles: a Natural History
On: Yesterday
Time: 20:00 to 21:00 (Also Thu 0800)
Our Future.
Alan concludes his journey and asks what the future might hold for our landscape and its wildlife: global warming, a big freeze or something much more sinister?

Thursday 27th January

One Planet
On: BBC World Service Radio
Time: 10:32 to 11:00 (Also 1530, 2030, 0130, Sat 2030, Sun 0630)
One Planet looks at how we use our planet.

Sunday 30th January

Countryfile
On: BBC 1
Time: 19:00 to 20:00
Matt is on a mission to find to out why Sheffield is one of the greenest cities in Europe


Excerpts taken from DigiGuide - the world's best TV guide available from
http://www.getdigiguide.tv/?p=1&r=20818
Copyright (c) GipsyMedia Limited.

The Week In Green Numbers

88%

- reduction in waste that PepsiCo sends to landfill #

167%

- increase in sales of pollack in the week after Channel 4's Fish Fight TV programmes #

16,000

- books borrowed form a Milton Keynes library after it was threatened with closure, emptying the shelves #

99.5%

- proportion of the EU's energy that could be provided by renewables #

84%

- people who oppose government plans to sell of England's forests and woodlands to the highest bidder #

Don't You Love It When An Industry Comes Together?

Photo by Andy S-D

If you build it, they will come...

Or in this case, if you plan to build it, they will come.

Spanish wind turbine firm Gamesa announced yesterday that they were setting up two new bases in Scotland. An Offshore Wind Technology Centre will be established in Glasgow, and a manufacturing site will be built in Dundee.

Dundee is a perfect site to get turbines out to the numerous offshore wind farms which are planned for the UK's Eastern seabed, and with fabricators just down the road in Fife also involved in supplying specialist equipment for turbines it looks very much like an entire industry is coming together in the country.

It couldn't have been done, of course, without Scotland's and the UK's commitment to reduce their carbon emissions, and the plans announced to build the numerous offshore wind farms.

And with first-mover advantage, it should also give us a head start when the rest of the world decides to join in the renewable gold rush and is looking for manufacturers.

It's just a pity that it's a Spanish firm moving in, and not a Scottish firm moving up.

Smooth Operator

Photo by the russians are here

The First Minister opened a new research facility in Fife the other day. Dubbed the Hydrogen Office, it is a building which is powered by a wind turbine.

What makes this office different is that it also has hydrogen fuel cells, which store electricity from the turbine. When the wind inevitably drops, the building can still be powered from the stored energy in the fuel cells.

It's one more step on the road to a truly renewable future, and it's one more nail in the coffin of the fossil fuel industry.

With advances in battery design, fuel cell storage, hydro-storage and the North Sea Interconnector, the variations in wind power output will soon be smoothed out and it will be one more argument against wind turbines that will be shown to be scaremongering by vested interests.

As we go into election season, I would expect BBC Scotland to have some discussion programmes as they did during the last Holyrood elections. Unfortunately at that time the debate about future energy was dominated by weary willies from the coal and nuclear industries who would pepper their derisory snorts with the words "base load".

This time, we can show that the base load could so easily come from other sources and the vagaries of the Scottish weather are really nothing too much to worry about.

I Wish I Could Fly, Way Up To The Sky, But I Can't

I don't recommend this, but maybe VisitScotland will use it to attract more extreme-sport tourists to Scotland...

PS For those of you of a certain age, I apologise profusely for the title of this post, and hope that the song isn't stuck in your head all day!

Kung Fu McPanda

Photo by Edward L

This has been bugging me for a week now.

After all the hullabaloo of selling incinerators and oil refineries to the Chinese, it emerged that a couple of years' worth of negotiations had come to fruition and the Chinese were gifting a couple of pandas to Edinburgh Zoo.

There was a collective "Awww, cute, pandas!" from almost the entire population. The media uncritically saw this as a good thing and the management of the zoo saw pound signs whirling in front of them.

But hang on - since when are critically endangered species a commodity, to be bandied around to the people who bend over backwards far enough?

In fact, forget the "critically endangered" bit. Should we be using other species as a "gift" in these supposedly enlightened times?

I've never been convinced of the argument for zoos - that they provide a safe haven for species that are endangered, and give scientists a place to study animals and their behaviour. With whole TV channels dedicated to wildlife documentaries, is there really a need for locking animals in a cage in this day and age? Why is it better to study a lion in an enclosure in Scotland compared to a pride of lions on the plains of Africa?

As cute as they are, the pandas should stay in their natural habitat. And although they're an evolutionary dead-end, they have at least evolved enough to know that a fenced off area of a Scottish city is NOT where they should be.

Green In The Media 17th - 23rd January

After the excitement of last week's Big Fish Fight, it's back to 'as you were'.


Tuesday 18th January

Home Planet
On: BBC Radio Four
Time: 15:00 to 15:30
Richard Daniel and the team discuss listeners' questions about our world and our impact upon it.

Thursday 20th January

One Planet
On: BBC World Service Radio
Time: 10:32 to 11:00 (Also 1530, 2030, 0130, Sat 2030, Sun 0630)
One Planet looks at how we use our planet.


Excerpts taken from DigiGuide - the world's best TV guide available from
http://www.getdigiguide.tv/?p=1&r=20818
Copyright (c) GipsyMedia Limited.

The Week In Green Numbers

100g/km

- car emissions limit of a new motorsport for low-emission vehicles #

1.34°F

- increase of temperature in 2010 over the 1951-1980 average #

35

- swans rescued near starvation from frozen water on Boxing Day #

2,300 acres

- size of a proposed mountaintop removal scheme which was rejected by the EPA in America this week #

173%

- increase in the number of rhinos shot last year in South Africa #

Off Their Railheads

Photo by eldelinux

There was a small item in last weekend's Sunday Herald business pages about the Scottish government abandoning a decades-old fund that provided money to companies to build rail depots next to their factories.

For the incredibly small amount of £7million a year, the government were able to offer these "Freight Facilities Grants" in order to take hundreds of lorries off the roads.

This is a short post because I really can't say anything about this better than Paul at Set In Darkness. I would urge you to go and read the short blog post there, and then shake your head at the madness.

Is My Kettle A Vampire?

It's a blogger's lot to be inundated with marketing emails from people with products to support. I have to say it has tailed off in the last year from the boom of the "eco-chic" years, but I'm still getting at least one a week.

Most of them are from America, and I ignore. Occasionally, like today, I receive one that dovetails with my own thinking at that particular moment.

The advert is for a new type of boiler that generates electricity at the same time as heats your house, that you can then sell back to the National Grid. But that's not what caught my eye.

They're using a video of the olympic cyclist Nicole Cooke to demonstrate how much energy is needed to power a whole kitchen. Here it is:



So how did that dovetail with my own thinking? I'm always looking for ways to decrease my power consumption, but in the last year or two it has plateaued and my energy use more or less conforms with my shift pattern.

There are only a couple of items in the flat which are plugged in permanently: the fridge, telephone and PVR. Everything else is switched off at the wall when it's not in use, particularly after I discovered that the new TV I bought in 2009 still draws power even when not switched on.

At least, I thought everything else was switched off. Then last week I noticed the kettle. I've got one of those Eco Kettles with a base unit that the kettle sits on to get it's power. The base unit is constantly plugged in, and switched on. Could it still be drawing a charge when plugged in but unused like the TV does?


I have no proof if it does or doesn't. I could go to the library and get a loan of a smart meter, like Susan Guest does in this post. Or I could email EcoKettle and ask them. Which is what I'm going to do now, and I'll let you know what they say.

Either way, the kettle base unit is getting switched off between uses from now on!

UPDATE:

It appears I can rest easy. I received this email from EcoKettle confirming that the base unit does NOT draw power when not in use:

Thanks for your email.
The base of ECO2 models is purely a connector which allows 360 degree rotation, and therefore draws no power whatsoever.
The ECO3 base however, contains the electronic control which draws less than 1W when not in use. This conforms with the limits set by the Energy Saving Trust for passive standby.
I hope this answers your question adequately.

Your All-New Haymarket Station - Now With Added Blockiness!

Hmm, Scotland's fourth busiest railway station, you say? A beautiful building that's no longer big enough over a station that's seen much better days?

I know, let's just build a huge concrete box behind it!

And so it came to pass - Edinburgh Council Planning Committee today approved these godawful plans for a revamp of Haymarket station by 8 votes to 4.

You can see all of the detailed plans on the council website here, but quite frankly they make me want to weep.

This could become Scotland's "gateway", with visitors flying into Edinburgh airport, catching the tram to Haymarket and then getting a train from there to destinations around the country.

And what are they going to be confronted with when they reach Haymarket? A giant black and grey box.

Where's the wow factor? Where's the architectural merit? Where's the sympathy with the existing understated and beautiful building?

It's going to be a hell of a first impression!

Selling Pollution To The Chinese

Photo by Kenny Smith/Scottish Government

Scotland rolled out the red carpet to the Chinese this weekend, as we played host to the Vice Premier Li Keqiang. The newspapers and the BBC have all reported the good news that a new "green energy deal" has been agreed between the two countries that will see Scottish technology exported to China.

Unfortunately, there was a distinct lack of details. All of the reports I read sounded remarkably similar, with one paragraph reading almost word-for-word in the Scotsman, the Herald and the BBC.

So, the journalists just reworded a press release which was lacking in detail, and repeated that "Green Energy" headline.

But what exactly are we selling them? The clue comes in the words about one of the companies involved. W2E Engineering (who don't appear to have a website, according to Google)

specialises in generating electricity from domestic refuse

And what of the other company involved, SHBV Cochran? They do at least have a website, where you can discover that they produce "combustion burners".

In other words, unless I'm completely mistaken, the "Green Energy" that we have sold to China, and which is being trumpeted as renewable and sustainable in the press, is in fact waste incinerators.

Which are not Green, Renewable or Sustainable.

It's a pity that the journalists who merely copied out the press release didn't stop, think and google for 30 seconds, instead of falling for the hype. They could have had a whole other angle on the story.

Green In The Media 10th - 16th January

There's something fishy going on at Channel 4 this week - it's Fish Fight Week!

With a series of special programmes, they look deep into the fish industry and don't like much of what they see. From investigating trawling, taking on the EU, looking at what goes into our fish and how fresh they actually are, and the fight to save, the channel has a good, hard look at something that is mostly out of sight, out of mind for the shoppers of Britain.



Tuesday 11th January

Home Planet
On: BBC Radio Four
Time: 15:00 to 15:30
Richard Daniel and the team discuss listeners' questions about our world and our impact upon it.

Hugh's Big Fish Fight
On: Channel 4
Time: 21:00 to 22:00
It is well known there is a problem in the oceans. In his new campaigning series, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is leaving the comfort of River Cottage to find out what is going on at the industrial end of our fisheries. And what he finds is that its not just bad... it's mad.

Wednesday 12th January

Arthur's Hell on High Water
On: Channel 4
Time: 20:00 to 20:55
Chef and eco-friendly restaurateur Arthur Potts Dawson is passionate about the environment and sustainable food, and thus not a fan of trawler fishing where boats fish with huge nets and catch vast numbers of fish; the majority of which end up dead back in the ocean because they cannot be sold. In a bid to understand the realities faced by the trawler men who are trying to make ends meet, Arthur takes to the seas for one week, living and working alongside life-long fishermen on a commercial trawler and testing his ethics as he sees first hand the struggles faced by commercial fisherman. He has to find his sea legs and work round the clock to help deliver the right catch while tackling the rough seas. Will the experience challenge Arthur's preconceptions, or will he still believe that a fisherman's methods and way of life need to change for the good of our seas?

Hugh's Big Fish Fight
On: Channel 4
Time: 21:00 to 22:00
Hugh's fish fight goes global as he starts to investigate the problems with tinned tuna, before crossing swords with his old adversary, Tesco. After finding out that sharks, turtles and rays get caught up in the purse seine nets which supply the majority of tuna to the UK supermarkets, Hugh heads to the Maldives in search of an alternative, and finds one of the most pristine, and well-protected marine environments on the planet; and a sustainable, ethical, source of tinned tuna, caught by traditional pole and line methods. Meanwhile, some friends from Greenpeace launch their own investigation into the source of Tesco's tuna. And what they find out in Ghana gives Hugh all the evidence he needs to call for a much anticipated meeting with his old friends at the supermarket.

Thursday 13th January

One Planet
On: BBC World Service Radio
Time: 10:32 to 11:00 (Also 1530, 2030, 0130, Sat 2030, Sun 0630)
One Planet looks at how we use our planet.

Hugh's Big Fish Fight
On: Channel 4
Time: 21:00 to 21:55
Hugh's fish fight takes him to Scotland, to meet with the largest farmed salmon producing company in the world, before he heads to Brussels to try to knock some sense into the bureaucrats about the scandal of discards. In order to add some urgency to his campaign, he launches a website www.fishfight.net, which goes viral, and picks up 24 000 supporters in just 24 hours. Fishermen from all over the country descend on Westminster to add their voices to the protest, which ends with a rallying cry to all of us to try to help sort out the mess our fisheries are in. Hugh believes we all need to try and eat different types of fish, to relieve some of the pressure on cod, tuna and salmon, and we need to add OUR voices to the campaign to stop discards.

Saturday 15th January

Dispatches
On: Channel 4
Time: 19:05 to 20:00
Fish Unwrapped.
As part of the The Big Fish Fight season on Channel 4 championing sustainable seafood, Dispatches investigates the fish sold on Britain's high street to find out where it is sourced, how it is processed and what is actually in it. In this report, Channel 4 News presenter Alex Thomson unwraps one of the nation's favourite dishes. Through DNA testing he discovers the fish in fish and chips may not be quite as advertised and exposes how one major supermarket is misleading consumers about the sustainability of the cod it sells. The apparent health benefits of fish have driven demand from consumers and made it a lucrative multi-billion-pound industry in the UK. But Thomson reveals the chemical additives used in some fish products. He also uncovers that packaged fish on sale in the chilled section of the supermarket may have been frozen for nine months before it's defrosted and sold to consumers, some of whom assume this is fresh.

Sunday 16th January

Countryfile
On: BBC 1
Time: 19:00 to 20:00
John Craven investigates what the planned high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham will mean for the countryside.

Gordon Ramsay: Shark Bait
On: Channel 4
Time: 21:00 to 22:00
Gordon Ramsay loves sharks - and this passion leads him on his most personal mission yet: to investigate the controversial dish, shark fin soup. It's estimated that each year 100 million sharks are killed worldwide and Gordon wants to find out if the slaughter is really necessary. Gordon confronts the horrific fate of these beautiful and majestic creatures. He is told their decline is irrevocably damaging the delicate balance of our oceans' food chain. To understand more about the kings of the ocean, Gordon plunges in to swim with the deadly bull shark, in his scariest challenge to date. Sharks are both terrifying and beautiful, but experts believe overfishing is threatening to drive a third of the world's open ocean shark species to extinction. Incredibly, some of the most threatened species remain untouched by international fishing regulations. What Gordon discovers on his journey leads him to campaign against the brutal and destructive shark fishing industry.


Excerpts taken from DigiGuide - the world's best TV guide available from
http://www.getdigiguide.tv/?p=1&r=20818
Copyright (c) GipsyMedia Limited.

The Week In Green Numbers

5.7%

- drop in Japan's greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 #

5,000

- blackbirds that dropped dead from the sky in Arkansas #

25%

- proportion of Europe's plastic bag use that Italy is responsible for #

$400,000

- cost of one bluefin tuna at a Japanese market #

4,700

- farms in Germany that have been shut after animal feed was contaminated with dioxin #

Fly Me To Dunoon And Let Me Lecture Them On Carbon

Photo by albertopveiga

You know, if you're tasked with actively promoting a lowering of carbon emissions in the country, then perhaps you should hold yourself to a higher standard than those you are lecturing.

The Scottish Government's Climate Change Division has been rather embarrassingly found to have been flying their staff all over the place - 105 times in the last 3 years to places as far afield as, er, London.

I can understand them flying overseas to Bali (if they really have to), but there is no need for them to be going by plane when they aren't leaving the UK's shores.

If nothing else, if you work in this field for any government, you know that at some point someone is going to discover the figures, either published by the government or through a Freedom of Information request.

Why open yourself up to the potential red face?

Not So Pretty Poly

Photo by cuttlefish

That bastion of eco-mindedness and left-wing environmentally-friendly thinking, er, Italy, has taken a step that Edinburgh has refused to do.

Plastic bags have been banned in the whole country.

Taking a walk along the Water of Leith yesterday, it's clear from the accumulated rubbish along the shores that there's a real need to get rid of these monstrosities from our high streets. One-use polythene bags are a menace to wildlife, are made from oil and take thousands of years to biodegrade.

Unfortunately, Edinburgh Council has in the past refused to contemplate a ban.

Councillor Alison Johnstone intends to put a new motion in front of the Council next month in an attempt to ban these bags throughout the Capital.

She has the backing of BanPlasticBagsEdinburgh, who also have a Facebook site here.

Now that Italy has banned the bags, maybe she can dangle the carrot of going on a fact-finding mission in front of her fellow Councillors, to see if they respond.

Of course, she wouldn't have to take them to Italy, just to Leith. Greener Leith has been running a successful scheme whereby people get discounts in local shops if they're carrying one of their branded renewable bags.

That scheme could easily be made city-wide.

And think of the publicity of thousands of tourists going home with "I Love Edinburgh" bags holding their tartan dollies, rather than those blue-and-white-striped poly bags which rip on contact with a human hand.

Itsy Bitsy Teensy Weensy Yellow Pages

I can't have been the only person to have done a double take at the New Year's most-unwanted visitor.

Edinburgh residents got an unloved late Christmas present last week with the 2011 Yellow Pages dumped on their doorsteps or tenement stairs.

Despite campaigns like Say No To Phone Books, they still turn up every year in their shrink-wrap, loose leaflets tumbling out of it if you dare to unwrap it.

In fact, if I wasn't taking the photo above, then it wouldn't have been unwrapped until I dumped it in the recycling bin in 12 months time.

For once, America seems to be ahead of the curve with some states giving permission to telecoms companies to stop printing and providing these wastes of paper.

But like I said at the start, this year I did a double-take. The 2011 Yellow Pages is considerably smaller than the 2010 version.

Could it be that there aren't as many advertisers being blackmailed into paying to be listed because their competitors are? Could it be that companies are beginning to realise that the Yellow Pages are last century's solution on how to find things and society has moved on?

Er, no. It would appear that the book is still as thick, the typeface has just been reduced.

I guess it saves paper - just not as much as not printing the damn thing in the first place would!

Power Use Report Card 2010

Before we get too far into 2011, I have some unfinished business from 2010 - disclosing what my power use, and therefore carbon footprint, was.

I used to disclose this every quarter but I didn't at the end of Q3 because I completely forgot! It strikes me though that it's not of too much interest to anyone but myself. So I think in future I'll keep it until the end of the year so that I don't bore you too much.

Gas Stats:

Total Usage This Year: 392 kW/h

Total Usage Last Year: 476 kW/h

Average Per Day: 1.07 kW/h

Average Yearly UK Household Gas Use: 19,000 kW/h

CO₂ Emissions From My Gas Use This Year: 74.48 kg

CO₂ Emissions From Gas Use Last Year: 90.44 kg

Difference in Emissions: -17.6%

I'm extremely pleased that I've managed to reduce my gas use by so much this year. I was aiming for 10%, in line with my 10:10 commitments, but I feared that two extremely cold winter spells would put paid to that. As you can see from the graph, my gas use has increased earlier than it normally does simply because I turned the heating on earlier than I normally do! I have managed to reduce it this past week, with my shifts coinciding with the thaw meaning that I could switch the heating off completely every second day.

Can I reduce this even further in 2011? As I'm always saying about the Scottish Government, you won't achieve anything unless you're ambitious and set targets that at first appear impossible. So I'm going to attempt another 10% cut in my gas use this year

Electricity Stats:

Total Usage This Year: 2,131 kW/h

Total Usage Last Year: 2,239 kW/h

Average Per Day: 5.84 kW/h

Average Yearly UK Household Electricity Use: 3700 kW/h

CO₂ Emissions From My Electricity Use: 916.33 kg

CO₂ Emissions From Electricity Use Last Year: 962.77 kg

Difference in Emissions: -4.8%

I'm not as pleased with my electricity consumption in 2010. Although it dropped from 2009, I didn't hit my 10% target.

The year started out well but then my power use started to follow my shift pattern. I didn't go away on holiday as I had done in 2009 so there was no big summer gain as all the electrics were turned off for the week. I also had plans to do things like switch the PC onto standby when I was watching the TV - that started off well but fell by the wayside after a few weeks.

So, getting ambitious again, I'm going to go for that elusive 10% this year. This may be a bit trickier - I've volunteered to do some "online" campaigning for the Scottish Greens in the run up to the elections in May so my power use may take a hit then. If it does, then I'll just have to make sacrifices at another time to offset the extra electricity used!

Car Use

Disclosing my car use is always quite painful to me. Once a week I take a 130 mile round trip to the wilds of Perthshire. In the car it takes 75 minutes. By public transport it takes 3 hours. So I take the car. It's used very rarely outside of that trip, but I'm aware that because of that one trip I use it more than some commuters who only go a couple of miles.

I also scrapped one car and bought a newer one towards the end of the year, so these are combined figures.

Petrol Used This Year: 614 litres

Petrol Used Last Year: 672 litres

Miles Travelled: 5,115

Average Miles Per Gallon: 39.82

CO₂ Emissions From My Petrol Use This Year: 1,418kg

CO₂ Emissions From My Petrol Use Last Year: 1,552kg

Difference In Emissions: -8.6%

Rail Use

Since I work on the railway, I don't include my emissions from my job - that would see them go through the roof, and they're outwith my control anyway! But without me there, other people would not be able to reduce their emissions by taking the train instead of their car, so I can sleep soundly at night!

What I will include, though, are the two train trips I took for leisure purposes - both to Glasgow. That's a total of 180 miles, or 8.82 kg of CO₂

Unlike last year, when I took a ferry trip to Shetland, there were no other journeys taken. Which is quite sad now that I think about it!

Totals

Gas: 74.48 kg

Electricity: 916.33 kg

Car: 1,418 kg

Rail: 8.82 kg

Total CO₂ use for This Year: 2,417 kg, or 2.41 tonnes.

Total CO₂ use for Last Year: 2,721 kg or 2.72 tonnes.

Difference in Emissions: -11.17%

The average person in the UK directly produces 6 tonnes of CO₂, and if we're ever going to get climate change under control then we need to get this down to 3 tonnes per person. Although I don't have any figures for food consumption above, my figures show that getting our emissions below that 3 tonnes per person figure can be done!


Figures for average UK energy use and CO₂ figures are taken from the book How to Live a Low-carbon Life by Chris Goodall

Green In The Media 3rd - 9th January

Tuesday 4th January

Home Planet
On: BBC Radio Four
Time: 15:00 to 15:30
Richard Daniel and the team discuss listeners' questions about our world and our impact upon it.

Thursday 6th January

One Planet
On: BBC World Service Radio
Time: 10:32 to 11:00 (Also 1530, 2030, 0130, Sat 2030, Sun 0630)
One Planet looks at how we use our planet.

Friday 7th January

Power of Scotland
On: BBC Radio Four
Time: 11:00 to 11:30
Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond wants his country to become the green energy capital of Europe. But are his goals feasible? David Miller, BBC Scotland's Environment correspondent, tests the evidence.

Sunday 9th January

Arctic with Bruce Parry
On: BBC 2
Time: 21:00 to 22:00
Greenland.
Bruce Parry journeys to the far north of Greenland, home to the last traditional Inuit hunters. Bruce experiences the realities of life - and death - on a seal hunt, and learns how climate change is threatening their ancient way of life. But while global warming is causing problems for the hunters, it is providing others with new opportunities. As the vast Greenland ice sheet melts, new mineral riches are being revealed. Bruce works with a mining team who are about to strike it big. Greenland is changing fast - but will there still be a place for hunters in the Arctic of the twenty-first Century?


Excerpts taken from DigiGuide - the world's best TV guide available from
http://www.getdigiguide.tv/?p=1&r=20818
Copyright (c) GipsyMedia Limited.

2010 In Green Numbers

Happy New Year! With the end of the holiday period, normal blogging will resume next week. In the meantime, here's a pick of some of the 'green numbers' from last year:

500GW

- power generated by renewables in China by 2020

2,509 square miles

- area of Amazon rainforest deforested last year, the lowest level ever recorded

0.08 - 0.16° C

- increase in global temperature over the last decade

$8.2 billion

- investment in offshore windfarms by South Korea

95%

- proportion of Venezuela's economy that relies on oil

2,000%

- increase in Rhino poaching in last 3 years

$72 billion

- investment by China in clean technology since 2000, $5 billion more than the US

£13 billion

- amount of funding that RBS has secured for climate-polluting companies in the last two years

45%

- proportion of Portugal's electricity which will come from renewable sources this year

$1 billion

- profit made by Goldman Sachs by betting on the price of food

8 years

- how long Britain has left before all it's landfill sites are full

2024

- date by which "dirty" coal plants throughout Europe must close under a new agreement

36 hours

- time it took for the Scottish Boiler Scrappage Scheme to run out of money

1,252

- majority of Caroline Lucas, the first ever Green Party MP

75 feet

- size of a tsunami wave on a lake in Peru caused by a glacier breaking

253 million tonnes

- CO2 emissions produced by importing goods into the UK

42%

- increase in the price of genetically modified Monsanto soybeans in one year