Sustainable Music Festivals?

Although you might not realise it from the weather if you live in the UK at the moment it's the middle of summer and the festival season is well under way. Here at EarthDream we are partial to a bit of a dance in the sunshine and are encouraged by the number of big events that are taking their environmental impact seriously, particularly in the dance music sphere.

From alternative energy powered stages (although this rarely extends to main stages at big events) to the often poorly received (read accused of cynical money grabbing) "green tax" on parking to encourage car sharing there are all manner of initiatives aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of, let's face it, some potentially pretty environmentally destructive events.

Of all the UK festivals this year though few have gone as far as Waveform claim to with it's policy of prioritising solar and wind power, and even resorting to pedal power. Of course the electronica heavy line-up requires some serious late night amplification so where it's abolutely necessary they will resort to bio-diesel (yes yes we know it's controversial but what are the current alternatives?).

But it's not just the power where the sustainable nature of the festival is apparent, with eco-talks and workshops going on over the weekend and a team of dedicated "eco-rangers" ensuring that traders are furnished with the required information to reduce their envinronmental impact, and that enough information is gathered "on the ground" to help the organisers further improve next year.

Oh and the line-up looks pretty fantastic too!

Masdar City - Eco City of the Future

Maybe Earth Dream is a little late to the party in reporting this one but we've just noticed that the United Arab Emirates are building an eco city of the future, which will house 50,000 people and 1500 businesses and be powered entirely by renewable energy sources and has been designed by Foster and Partners.

It all sounds a bit Walt Disney's Epcot, but the fact that they are committing to having the first phase habitable by 2009 shows that we are talking about more than a giant golf ball and a bunch of audio animatronics, and it's about time a rich nation started doing something like this before it's too late.

So why are they doing it? Sitting on 10% of the worlds oil reserves you might think that they would be the last ones to be bothered about the ever widening gap between supply and demand of the old texas tea? Wrong.

You see the UAE is rich as a result of oil. The energy business is what they do and what they know. They want to make sure that they steal a march on the rest of the developed world who are still pissing about building new fossil fuel powered stations and become the go-to guys for the next generation of global energy supply. Result = big $$$ when the rest of us need to catch up.

So will it work? Well it being the first such project of this scale there will certainly be a lot of lessons to learn on the way. As one grumpy Earth Dream contributor who currently works in a Foster designed monstrosity moaned "the first lesson they'll learn is not to use bloody Fosters. Imagine a whole city of bad recycled air, rubbish quality light and horrid sci-fi nightmares...". Let's hope that with this being the Eco City of the Future he'll at least be wrong about the bad air.

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.

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.