Someone buy me this t-shirt? (via Threadless.com)
Tom Youngman
Co-founder of Green Vision: The Bath Youth Climate Movement, member of the Department for Energy and Climate Change's Youth Advisory Panel and member of the UK Youth Climate Coalition's delegation to the United Nations climate change negotiations. Human being and active citizen. thomas@youngman.me.uk.
“ Clause 102 of the energy bill currently going through parliament provides for the secretary of state to make public agreements with nuclear power companies on how much they will spend on certain items, such as decommissioning. But the government cannot change these public agreements in future if new situations arise – for instance, if a new safety feature is developed that ought to be installed. If the nuclear company stuck to the original agreement, the cost of these unforeseen circumstances would then have to be met by the taxpayer instead.
They were never really going to stick by their word and make companies pay the full cost of decommissioning nuclear power plants, were they?
Loophole in energy bill could see UK taxpayers funding nuclear bailouts, The Guardian
Talking sustainability with 10 year olds
I attended Frome Sustainability Conference with Green Vision on Friday. We were expecting to be presenting to 14 - 17 year olds but arrived to discover it was a somewhat younger audience.
It was an experience unto itself, really. How clued up they were was impressive - climate change is now taught at school from a very young age - but they hadn’t quite got the grasp of how it all ties together. They understood that greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels heat up the earth, they understood that they had to save energy - but they couldn’t quite explain how the two linked together.
I always find it interesting to get perspectives from very young children on this - when pursuing issues with such a grounding in intergenerational equity, we are all in some way attempting to speak up for those younger than us and those not yet born.
When writing the report with DECC’s Youth Advisory Panel I asked for quotations from 6 - 10 year olds on their perceptions of the planet and their future. Jade, aged 7, said: “if people keep using electricity it is going to melt the ice at the North Pole and it’s going to flood’. Sam, also aged 7, said “I’m scared because the air might be polluted”. Isabel, aged 8, said: “Climate change might make our planet like Mars”.
Even if their technical understanding is lacking, the emotional understanding these children have is spot on. My favourite of the quotations was from a 6 year-old in Brighton: “In the future everyone will be friendly.” The ‘adult’ world of today could do well to seek guidance from the basic moral values of its offspring.
The full set of quotations can be found in the introduction to the DECC Youth Advisory Panel’s report: ‘Energy: How fair is it anyway?’
“ We’ve fallen behind on what is going to be the key to our future.
Barack Obama on renewable energy
“ Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction.
Rupert Murdoch
Maybe my opinion of him needs reassessment. This is how a business shows commitment to environmentally-aware practice - by taking practical action.
Rupert Murdoch Announces News Corp Is Now Carbon Neutral (via Inhabitat)
Turns out embedding isn’t allowed. View the trailer here.
Just watched Beyond The Brink start to finish after Ross Harrison, the man behind it, kindly gave me a DVD copy of it this morning. Definitely worth 40 minutes of anyone’s time, I will certainly be showing it to as many activists and non-activists as I can! It can be watched in full at the Beyond The Brink website.
Niel Bowerman, Ellie Hopkins, Alex Farrow (all from UKYCC), Marcus Brigstocke and myself at the launch of Climate Week. See this statement that Niel, Ellie and myself made as nominees.
Electric Vehicles are 2011
This is exciting. Left, right and centre new electric vehicles and new electric vehicle infrastructure projects are propping up. Not just odd cars but very normal and desirable ones like the electric version of the Toyota iQ and the Nissan Leaf.
Even in America, home of the automobile, massive projects are taking place to provide charging points for EVs, for example this one with 15000 stations.
Our dependence on oil could be gone by the end of the decade. With limits on coal and natural gas seen only as a stepping stone, we could be on the way to solving this problem. Let’s be hopeful.
Ministerial Interest in a local-level transport scheme!?
The Department for Transport’s recurring problem is that it focussing on large scale, long-distance journeys rather than the short ones people make every day. Bath’s ‘Two Tunnels’ project falls in the latter category, using old railway tunnels to forge a link between Midford and the centre of Bath.
He (Norman Baker) will meet volunteers and representatives of the environmental charity Sustrans to talk about the link being driven through two old railway tunnels between Oldfield Park and Midford.This is a most pleasant surprise to see a transport minister will be visiting the project today! Hopefully this signals a welcome change in direction and renewed interest in cycle infrastructure.
If the ‘Capitalism promotes innovation’ argument has any merit, then private business should be able to innovate around rising petrol prices.
Increasingly calls for a ‘fuel duty stabiliser’ have been touted to exist in the news. It is claimed that rising fuel prices put the economic recovery into jeopardy.
I don’t know about you, but this seems a little pathetic to me.
Oil prices are only going to continue rising, and an oil-based economy will not stand up in the next decade or so. Lobbying groups such as ‘FairFuel UK’ (sickening name!) keep pushing for lowering of fuel duty. One of the main arguments in favour of maintaining a capitalist system is that the competition promotes innovation. I argue that this is entire missing. The UK economy has very little true competition, instead existing in a state of oligopoly, and businesses insist that if things cannot go on the way they are, then the system needs to change so that they can.
If Capitalism is to work, it needs to innovate around problems - fuel duty should not change.
