Britain wants to redefine "Renewable", Earth Hour and more

It seems that here in the UK hypocrisy when it comes to the environment is rife. On the surface the government seems to be at least trying to come to terms with the issues, not least by taxing the arsehole off of anything that they can get away with in the name of green. But then they go and do something like this.

For those that can't be bothered to read the article basically ministers have realised that meeting our renewable energy objectives will be bothersome and so they are trying to have the rules changed so that British investment in renewable energy anywhere in the world counts towards our quota, and even more ludicrous they are lobbying to get coal fired power stations counted as "renewable".

Just build the fucking windfarms already.

Earth Hour is today
That's right. At 8pm tonight the World Wildlife Fund and others through the Earth Hour campaign are encouraging people to turn off the lights for 1 hour to save the planet. Of course it's entirely symbolic, and designed to raise awareness of climate issues.

We'd like to tell you more but the Earth Hour website appears to have gone offline.

Of course here in the UK we don't appear the have organised anything, which is probably for the best after the UK Energy Saving Day fiasco. Also we couldn't possibly turn out the lights here for fear of binge drinking hooligan teenage gypsy hoards who would steal our children and stab each other up in the streets.

China, Lead and our desire for Cheap Shit.

It seems that barely a week goes by without us being told of another item that has been manufactured in China for sale in the west which is loaded with dangerous levels of lead.

This week a report from the California based Center for Environmental Health came to my attention, mainly as it focusses on Hannah Montana, and I have a child who is slap bang in the target audience for the popular Disney Channel production.

Anyway CEHCA went out and randomly bought a bunch of Hannah Montana products and found dangerous levels of lead in them.

Recent studies have shown that lead exposure can reduce a childs IQ, cause ADHD and reduce reaction times.

You'd think that with the number of these discoveries occurring in products manufactured in China something would be being done. The problem is China is an economy built and strengthened on human rights abuses. It's not surprising then that they don't give a flying fuck about people and whether they are producing dangerous products to sell overseas. The only thing the Chinese power-mongers seemingly give a toss about at the moment is money and power, and so the solution to the problem of dangerous toys won't come from there. Unless of course it starts to hurt their bottom line, then they might force their manufacturing industry to clean up their act.

Of course this is unlikely to happen as the other link in the chain, the western retailers, want to sell cheap shit at a high price and China is a great source of cheap shit so our retailers will buy it in and sell it on to us no questions asked. The odd bit probably gets picked up and a low key recall is issued but most of it probably won't be returned and the profits are made.

More info here

The shitty economy of stuff we don't need.

Gordon Brown, The Dalai Lama, And the trouble with politicians

In the UK news over the last day or two there has been occasional mention of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's refusal to meet the Dalai Lama.

This puts the exiled Tibetan leader in the company of such horrendous wastes of flesh and blood as Robert Mugabe as the previous newsworthy Brown non-meeter.

Of course there is absolutely fuck all the Dalai Lama has in common with Mugabe. One is the exiled leader of an occupied country who advocates peaceful action, the other has presided over 3 decades of human rights abuse, corruption and economic mismanagement that has destroyed the quality of life and halved the average life expectancy of the population of an entire country.

Of course you can understand Brown snubbing Mugabe, who is clearly a grade A cock, but why does he want to snub someone who despite intense provocation has refused to stoop to violent conduct in the face of human rights abuse? The very reason Mugabe is off his Christmas card list.

1 reason. Most of the influential countries in the world agree that Mugabe is a plum, therefore Brown feels that he can do what he likes as far as he is concerned. He's like a mid-ranking School bully only picking on the kids that the bigger kids say it's OK to wedgie.

Unfortunately for the Dalai Lama one of these bigger kids in the form of China is his own personal bully so Brown has no choice but to steal Tibets dinner money and flush it's head down the toilet otherwise China might call Brown a soft lad and push him off his bike.

In short Gordon Brown, like the majority of politicians is a 2 faced cock who only gives a shit about the suffering of foreign nationals if the people causing the suffering aren't ever going to be of any (usually economic) benefit or cause any ripples in his power pool. It makes me proud to be British.

And here endeth politics 101.

Earth Hour - March 29th 2008 - Get ready to turn out the lights

Started in Sydney in 2007 this year Earth Hour, in which entire cities turn out their lights, goes global.

Notably no English cities are listed, probably a good thing after the flop that was Energy Saving Day, but even if you live in a city that hasn't signed up you can still turn your lights off and ask your employer to do the same for an hour at 8pm on March 29th.

Earth Hour 2008 Website

Another "Green" F1 Story

Whilst it was never our intention to give so much attention to Formula 1 (despite the coincidental domain name with Honda F1's "positive marketing" campaign) we couldn't pass up the opportunity to report on the latest piece of green waffle from the motor sport governing body the FIA.

With a new season starting in Australia last weekend (incidentally the highest greenhouse emitting nation per capita in the world) the FIA issued a release in which the F1 drivers pledged their support to the "Make Cars Green" campaign.

The aims of the campaign are laudable, to quote the press release

Make Cars Green is a global campaign, aimed at helping to reduce the impact of motoring on the environment.

We can't really argue with that. We won't end mankind's love affair with the automobile, and it's not what Earth Dream is about to argue that we should. And as we commented last week the big brains in the F1 teams have a rich history of pioneering technologies that have made it into modern road cars.

Where we do take a slight issue is the method by which they are doing it. You see F1 engine development is now frozen for a number of years, despite the thirsty nature of the current power units, and additional power can only be delivered by hybrid "Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems", or as the FIA release puts it

The Make Cars Green campaign forms part of the FIA’s ongoing commitment to work with policy makers, industry and motoring consumers to encourage greener motoring. The FIA Formula One World Championship will take a lead in this when in 2009 hybrid devices called KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems) will be introduced. These devices can store energy under braking and re-use that energy for acceleration. It is the first in a number of initiatives set to make the sport more road relevant and environmentally sustainable.

All well and good, but why have they shackled the F1 designers? These are incredibly intelligent and inventive engineers. These people don't need to be given the "solution" to investigate by the governing body. By telling them "KERS is the way to make cars greener now go and do it" you miss the possibility that they might be able to concoct better more efficient technologies by being given a wider brief.

What the FIA has done is effectively bet the farm on KERS becoming the hybrid technology of choice, and with the resources F1 teams can put into it and the strong links to many major auto manufacturers the FIA is effectively forcing their pet technology to the fore.

Surely if F1 was serious about "going green" a better approach would be to tell the teams that they were going to limit the amount of fossil fuel available to them over subsequent seasons. If teams were told that their fuel allowance would be progressively lower until in 5 years time they would need to complete the race with a 1 gallon fuel tank and no refuelling stops you would see some radical solutions to the problem of "Green Motoring". With the average F1 race clocking in at around 200 miles and some road cars (such as VW's Blue Motion) claiming 70+ mpg already this must be a realistic target.

Imagine what the boffins could come up with if incentivised like that!

Sadly "Mad Max" has bottled it. Which is bizarre as compared to some of his suggestions over the last few years such as making drivers swap cars for each race it would seem a pretty sensible approach.

Still the headline "Make Cars Green" is nice marketing spin for the most environmentally unfriendly of sports and let's them make comments like this

The Make Cars Green campaign seeks to reduce the impact of motoring on the environment in a number of ways. These include: the promotion of more environmentally friendly and fuel efficient driver behaviour; the introduction of new technologies to help motorists monitor their environmental impact; the improvement of tyre design to help save energy; and by encouraging the global use of unleaded and sulphur free fuels.

For further reading the FIA's press release can be found here and the FIA related Make Cars Green website can be found here which features a 10 points for greener motoring section which bears some remarkable similarities to the motoring part of Earth Dreams own Five Things... article.

The Environmental Music Videos That Time Forgot...

Rewind the clock to the late 80's. Nobody knew what climate change was. We were safe from nuclear destruction thanks to Rocky winning over the Russian crowd as he defied the odds to beat Ivan Drago, and then dressed as Rambo he single handedly wiped out entire Russian army in Afghanistan, but as the Taliban had yet to take hold and flood the world with heroin we naively thought this was good.

Nobody had heard of Saddam Hussain. The middle east crisis was limited to betting on whether Iraq or Iran would manage to destroy each other. Petrol prices were low, people could afford to buy houses without mortgaging 3 generations of their offspring, and kids could go out to play without there being a paedophile on every corner.

In short the late 80's were an innocent time when we lived for a short period without the threat of imminent destruction at our own hands. At least that's what most of us thought.

Thank God then for bands like Nuclear Assault who managed to tap into the Environmental message a good 20 years before most of the media.

It's thrash metal, and MTV Headbangers Ball host Ricky Rachmann introducing the song is more concerned with the chick in the video than the message, but hey that's OK because it was the late 80's, there was nothing to worry about in the world anymore, Nuclear Assault were probably just looking for something to be angry about to match the tone of their music.

Whatever was going on EarthDream presents the (subtitled) Environmental Music Video That Time Forgot number 1 "Critical Mass" by Nuclear Assault.

Enjoy.

Is F1 going Green?

Judging by our referrer logs a few people end up here as a result of Honda F1's Earth Dream positive marketing campaign. Those people probably landed on the page on our main site explaining that they are nothing to do with us guv'nor, and that F1 isn't really that aligned with Earth Dream's ideals.

Having said that Formula 1's chief lunatic and son of a fascist Max Mosley has just outlined his plans for a greener future in F1.

No it's not going to become an electric series, and they are still going to fly huge amounts of equipment and personnel all over the world and still burn huge amounts of fossil fuel when they get there.

They have however frozen development of the engines - which seems retarded if you are "going Green" as you would hope the engines would be the thing you would develop most, however from 2009 they will be able to increase their power only by using Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) which essentially means there will be a bit of hybrid technology in F1.

At first glance it smacks of tokenism, but this being F1 it's got some pretty clever brains and therefore what Mad Max has achieved is getting some serious clever people with big budgets to work on technology that could filter down into road cars and make them cleaner, which would probably more than offset the damage that F1 does to the environment long term.

And as historically F1 was a breeding ground for new technology that we now take for granted in our cars who would bet against this happening?

More from Autosport

Official: Pollution is a sin!

It's not likely to be often that Earth Dream agrees with the Catholic Church. In fact some of our favourite passtimes are probably technically sins. But over the weekend the Vatican's number 2 on the subject of sinning Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti spoke of modern evils and listed "ecological" offences including pollution.

Good stuff then, although if we know anything about religion (we don't but stick with us) this means that anyone of the Catholic faith can chuck as much litter about as they like provided they make a confession once in a while and say a few hail mary's.

Actually something else Earth Dream learned related to this story was that under the guidance of the current pope the Vatican has installed a load of solar panels to provide green energy (I mean they need light to count all that gold obviously). Now if they can just see their way to telling Africans that it is actually OK to use condoms then they might really go up in our estimation.

More on this story from Reuters.

Running is bad for your health - in China at least...

With the 2008 Olympics in Beijing mere months away world marathon record holder Haile Gebreselassie has ruled himself out of competing in the event as he fears that pollution in the city makes it too dangerous for him to run.

In fact pollution in the city is so high that spectators have been warned to only take limited exercise while visiting the city.

One wonders what the IOC were doing in the first place awarding the games and shipping the cream of the worlds athletic talent to a city that is so hazardous to health. Hardly in the olympic spirit now is it?

YOU are the worlds biggest producer of CO2

Question: What is the single fastest growing cause of CO2 in the world? Apparently despite being the focus of many an environmental news story it's not aviation. Nor is it the humble motor car. Nope, not even all those SUV's or Porsches.

No it is in fact The Internet. Hardly surprising if you think about it. All those millions of personal computers drawing power from the electricity grid which gains the majority of it's energy from burning fossil fuels in power stations. Then there are the data centres, with their huge energy requirements not only to power their servers but to keep them cool (which requires about the same amount of energy as just keeping them turned on). Add to this the communications networks that hook them all together and you can see how it all adds up.

So what can we do? Well until true Green IT takes hold, which in my experience will require a massive change in the way IT, Facilities and Finance teams work together in most organisations to gain a meaningful foothold, all we can do as individuals is to apply similar principles as we do to other environmentally damaging areas such as driving.

1) Drive a more economical vehicle. In this case if you still have a clattery old desktop or tower PC the chances are it's drawing more power than it needs to. It's the computing equivalent of driving a Hummer to work. Replace it with a sleek efficient laptop.

2) Reduce your usage. If you use webmail services such as GMail with their massive storage limits you may have forgotten what it's like to have to delete spam, junk and stuff that you just plain don't need any more. It's a good habit to get back into though, if we all reduce our storage on our webmail providers servers it will slow the rate of growth of their data centres and therefore the rate of increase in their carbon footprints. Don't forget to unsubscribe from unwanted newsletters to stop it building up so quickly too.

It's not much but it's a start. Maybe enough of you can delete enough e-mails to offset the carbon footprint of this blog?

The Great Green Rip-Off

As I write this update there is a debate on politically suspect morning talk show "The Wright Stuff", the gist of which seems to be that it's all well and good for political parties to be seen to be promoting Green issues but when it comes to winning an election if those Green issues will cost the public money then you'd best forget them or forget your chances of government.

The message being put across by this oh-so-enlightened host is that the argument can be reduced to people will vote for the party that says it will cut taxes rather than the one that says it will save a remote polar goose.

Thanks for your helpful contribution to the debate Jeremy Kyle.

Mercedes S Class Hybrid available from 2009

From treehugger.com, Mercedes have announced a hybrid version of it's flagship S class road car which will be the first production car to use Lithium Ion batteries.

OK so it's still a big heavy car with a 3.5 litre petrol engine and even in it's hybrid incarnation will still manage less than 30mpg but as the flagship vehicle of the marque where the S class innovates lesser models (and manufacturers) are sure to follow, with the technology sure to filter down more readily now to more affordable vehicles.

110mpg from a Jeep?

OK so it's a concept at this stage but Jeep has unveiled an environmentally aware off-roader at the Detroit motor show.

Powered by a hybrid electric motor and 1.5l 3 cylinder diesel Jeep claim that the car is potentially capable of 110mpg.

What is interesting is that Jeep essentially gave birth to the "Chelsea Tractor" style of transport, and although this is an obviously lightweight concept it is all Jeep, so if the Daddy of the public enemy number 1 amongst environmentally aware urbanites is looking for ways to radically green up its oh so macho GRRRRRR range and to demonstrate that you don't need a 4 litre V8 for off-road fun (for the 0.1% that do drive them in the mud) then perhaps a few more manufacturers will get equally creative. Hybrid Hummer anyone?

UK Energy Saving Day Fails

Apparently 27th/28th February 2008 was the UK's first "E-Day" energy saving day in which UK residents were encouraged to turn off unwanted electrical appliances for 24 hours.

Unfortunately the organisers forgot to tell anyone about the day with the net result being a slight increase in the amount of electricity drawn from the national grid (due to colder than usual weather).

To be honest even we at Earth Dream have only just found out about the day after the event - not that it would have made much difference, we turn off our lights and TV's already ;) - which just goes to show quite how badly publicised it was. Which is a shame as obviously quite a bit of effort has gone into the website at e-day.org.uk and it wouldn't have been much of a leap to convert some of that effort into some actual proactive PR (and no, Facebook pages don't count) so that people at least had a chance to take part in the event.

Hopefully they've learned their lessons and will make a proper fist of it next year.

The Success of Green Marketing

I've recently spent a little time lurking around the Friends of the Earth forum. Now you would think that the people who post there would be fairly clued up on the type of issues that we concern ourselves with over here at Earth Dream but my God are there some easily fooled (environ)mentalists out there.

OK so it would be a sweeping generalisation to suggest that even the majority of posters follow any sort of stereotype but there is a significant minority that inspired this update.

Here are a few pointers:

Just because something sounds like your message is getting through it doesn't mean that it is. Case in point the widely lauded move by Marks and Spencer to start charging for plastic carrier bags. Hello, is this not a classic case of profiteering masked as environmentalism. OK so they aren't keeping the 5p's and are apparently giving them to environmental charities - but does anyone really think this is anything more than a marketing policy designed to appeal to the mostly middle class middle england environmentalism-lite politics of it's current consumer base, get a few positive news stories published in the media and hopefully attract a few people into the stores that might normally shop elsewhere? For the record M&S generally aren't that bad a retailer, just look into the welfare of the animals used to make their food.

Likewise Mayor Ken and his green congestion charge in London. Does anyone really believe that putting a big charge on certain types of car to drive in the city is anything other than a political gesture? Look beneath the surface and you'll find that you can still buy a huge 4x4 that averages 20mpg (less in London) but because it has a bit of a battery in it it's technically a hybrid so exempt from charges - any sensible "green tax" would surely cover a machine such as this which is a Gas Guzzler by any definition.

The whole thing is a bit of spin directed at people that aren't usually part of Red Ken's general voting demographic and is actually damaging as it makes people believe something is being done about green issues when in fact it's a self serving cover up. And only having Roller's on the streets of London is good for the capitals image I guess. Even if they have stuck a minicab licence on the back to avoid the charge.

The Catch 22 of the Green Agenda

Let's get one thing straight, we need energy. How we provide this energy is anything but straight though. The world has pretty much agreed that oil isn't a long term solution, not least because we'll have burned it all. So we'll burn all the coal until that is gone, and suffer the political turmoil of supplying natural gas until we can no longer rely on that.

So what does that leave us? We need to either reduce our energy consumption or get new types of power"station" hooked up to the grid which broadly speaking means renewables or nuclear.

Let's deal with the former first. Yes we should be ensuring that our energy consumption is as low as possible but civilisation simply doesn't want to regress so even with more efficient technology the imminent rise of the electric car, huge new markets for everything from industrial machinery to consumer gadgets opening up in developing countries and countless other factors putting demand on the global electricity supply in general terms the amount of electricity required to power the planet particularly post-oil is unlikely to fall.

Nuclear is some sort of energy supply bogeyman after a couple of high profile disasters so let's put that aside for a minute.

So we invest in renewables right? Well yes we do but will solar and wind farms really be able to reliably deliver the global electricity demand? In the future perhaps but short term we need to improve the technology which requires R&D and manufacturing which requires...energy. So let's be ideal-amentalist for a minute and assume that we are adopting a 100% renewables agenda - we find ourselves racing against time to produce a viable renewable solution before we are hindered by lack of availability of existing energy supplies with which to perform the development work.

Biofuels have a nice easy-marketing ring about them until you consider the amount of land that would need to be given over to growing crops for fuel and the resulting deforestation.

So this brings us back to nuclear. Negative pr caused by a couple of disasters has pretty much made nuclear an unviable proposition for political reasons and previously the high cost relative to coal and oil has made it non-viable for economic reasons despite it being the cleanest technology capable of providing for our power hungry planet.

"But what about the radioactive waste" - well I'm a firm believer that if the world hadn't given up on Nuclear post-Chernobyl then the rate of progress and investment in the technology would have found a solution for that by now. Even if it was sending the waste into space on electric rockets.

It's not ideal but for the short term we've got to accept that there is no "Green" way to provide the energy we need so however unpalatable we can only find the least bad solution.