Planet Pickles Strikes Again

As ever, I'm slightly behind with my reading of news feeds. This, from the Grauniad, has just caught my eye. I have wondered before about the out-of-this-world phenomenon that is Planet Pickles. Perhaps he should just look at what can actually be achieved by careful implementation of fortnightly refuse collections. The service where I live - in Waverley - from my point of view as a consumer works excellently. And recyling rates are almost at 60% - not brilliant but pretty good and up on the rate from the borough's previous regime. Perhaps Pickles should look to rewarding councils that achieve high recycling rates and low total refuse volumes rather than bashing them for not following an outdated weekly reime.

Turn Down The Heat

This post's title is lifted directly from a report by the World Bank - more fully "Turn Down The Heat: Why a 4degC Warmer World Must Be Avoided". This report warns that there's a 20% chance that global temperatures could reach 4degC above pre-industrial levels by 2100 under current mitigation commitment and pledges. This is less scary than PriceWaterhouseCooper's 6degC warning (I somehow I have difficulty taking climate change predictions from a bunch of accountants seriously) but sobering none-the-less.

Now many people will look at 2100 and say "Well I'll not be around by then, so what". That's true; and perhaps even our children won't be. However, think about the trajectory - our kid's are very likely to be here in 2050 (even I might just be). If the gloomy predictions are proved correct then there will already be significant changes taking place. We look out for our kids in their early life, should we not be doing the same for their future?

We Had No Green Thing Back In Our Day

I'm not a great one for forwarding on round robin emails etc.  but I received the following today and thought that just for once I'd share it:

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own shopping bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment. The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."

The cashier responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to
save our environment for future generations." She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day. Back then, we returned milk bottles, pop bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every shop and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right.
We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's nappies because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right.
We didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the county of Yorkshire. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the post, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right.
We didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank water from a fountain or a tap when we were thirsty instead of demanding a plastic bottle flown in from another country. We accepted that a lot of food was seasonal and didn?t expect that to be bucked by flying it thousands of air miles around the world. We actually cooked food that didn?t come out of a packet, tin or plastic wrap and we could even wash our own vegetables and chop our own salad.
But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the tram or a bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their mothers into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad that the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a young person.
Remember: Don't make old people mad. We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to piss us off!

Caution Required

On occasion I dip into a blog written by Maxine Perella. The most recent I've seen is one picking up on the BBC2 programme Operation Iceberg. I've not yet seen this - and from Maxine's account it seems that it is something I should do. However, what I want to mention is a cautionary tale about scare mongering.

Clearly the programme describes a natural phenomenon - the creation and eventual death of an iceberg. Maxine, however, leaps to a link with climate change and complains that this was not mentioned until 35 minutes into the programme. Now I'm sure that climate change is leading to accelerated ice loss but we shouldn't make linkages where they are not substantiated. In this case it sounds as though they were not.

A Scary Place

There are many scary things out there, including:

     another bunch of identikit Chinese leaders has been wheeled out;
     the Eurozone is back in recession;
     the Middle East looks to increasingly be like a tinder box.

It was the Chinese that really caught my eye. China could well be at a turning point in its economy and one just has to wonder whether the new band of grey suited, black haired, red tied Party boys have what it takes to manage the change or whether they are, as I intimated above, died in the same old wool.

Among the challenges facing the country are

     how to cope with its staggering population growth (480M in 30 years);
     how to manage the threat that rising wages will erode its competitiveness (tho' there are signs that China may manage to pull off the "keep productivity rises above wage rises" trick);
     what to do about its demographics (the proportion of over 60s rose from 10.4% to 13.3% in the decade to 2010 while under 14s declined from 22.9% to 16.6%).

Would you want to cope with that over the next 10 years? Wish the Party boys some luck - the world needs a China that doesn't implode.

Who Pays For QE?

So the Bank of England is reigning back on QE but holding interest rates at 0.5%. I guess the former should be regarded as good news. Do you realise that over the last few months HMG issued about as much debt as the Bank bought? Sounds a bit like a Ponzi scheme to me. And who is paying for it? Why, you and me. That's also true of the Funding for Lending scheme. Banks have the scheme as a cheap source of lending capital; they don't need to rely so much upon savers' deposits; therefore they don't need to entice us in with decent interest rates. Thanks, Mr Osborne!

Victim of Dumbing Down or Recession?

We went to a production of Tom Kempinski's play Duet for One at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre last night. It proved to be a totally engaging evening with excellent performances by Haydn Gwynne and William Gaunt. Sadly the theatre was less than one third full. What is the problem? Surely the good citizens of Guildford and SW Surrey are not suffering that much from the financial downturn that they can't afford a night out at the theatre? Or are they simply unwilling to engage in something that requires a little smidgin of intellectaul effort? Either way, this is not good news for theatre in this corner of the world. We already have a dark Redgrave Theatre and a severely dumbed-down Thorndike - surely the Yvonne Arnaud (for all its faults - and it has a few) cannot go the same way - or will it?

Keeping Up With the Joneses

Interesting piece in Building 4 Change about "peer pressure" driving the installation of clusters of PV arrays. This particular instance is from California but I certainly noticed a surge of questioning immediately after we installed our panels and at least one neighbour has followed suit; I think partly based on our experiences.

Of course, it's easier to do with visible technology. The big prize is behaviour change through social pressure which is just a little more tricky!