February 2008

It seems a sad milestone to celebrate - 50 years of anti-nuclear protest. Not the protesting bit, but that 50 years later insanity still prevails in our governments and there are approximately 27,000 nuclear weapons in the world.

This Easter marks the 50th anniversary of the first legendary march on Aldermaston, the UK nuclear weapons laboratory. It was a four day march from London in snow and rain and one of the biggest protest movements ever to emerge in Britain.

Fashion is a fickle beast but now a whole city is going retro (well, not quite but it was too good a pun to waste). The long-awaited plan to retrofit all buildings owned and operated by the Greater London Authority (GLA) with energy-saving systems and technology is finally in motion with contracts awarded to companies which are going to slash the capital's emissions.

While much of the discussion about energy efficiency in buildings has focused on new houses, there are still millions of older buildings that lack proper insulation or top-notch heating systems. No matter how good those eco-towns are, if and when they're built they'll only represent a small proportion of the building stock in the UK. Fortunately, the GLA have a cunning plan.

Curios and bizarros currently floating around in hyperspace:

• Heathrow activists beware. Playmobil have turned their cute claw-handed plastic toys to the defence of the realm with an airport security kit, including x-ray machine, walk-through metal detector and handheld sweepy gizmo. (From Foreign Policy.)

An illegal logging camp in the Amazon © Greenpeace/Daniel Beltra

Stung by the recent rise in deforestation rates in the Amazon, the Brazilian government is cracking down on the illegal loggers who are ripping up the rainforest; their year-long initiative - known as Operation Fire Belt - is targeting areas where deforestation has been most acute.

Out and about on our Heathrow Voices tour last year.

If you're one of the many, many thousands of people involved in the opposition to Heathrow expansion, you may want to give yourself a pat on the back. The day after the 'consultation' closed, there's news that we're getting the message through to 'the highest levels of Labour'.

In one of two Heathrow stories in today's Evening Standard, the paper's chief political correspondent wrote:

Ministers are under increasing pressure to rethink plans for Heathrow expansion after 18,000 people lodged objections to the plans.

The scale of the protest is understood to have taken the government by surprise and is causing concern at the highest levels of Labour at the political fall-out if plans for a third runway are given the go-ahead.

Two audacious and well executed climate actions have deservedly grabbed headlines this week - Plane Stupid's 'No third runway' banner drop on the House of Commons yesterday perfectly complimenting our own Heathrow Airport plane protest on Monday. Both sets of activists involved spoke eloquently to the media about why they were there: to expose the government's 'public consultation' as a sham, and to remind us all that climate change is the greatest threat that we face, and we have little time to start getting serious about it.

I just found this great story via Treehugger: a small Inuit community is suing 24 big, bad energy companies, claiming damages due to climate change. The melting ice pack has pushed up sea levels and exposed the residents of Kivalina to an increasing number of storms; the cost of relocating the entire village (which is sinking into the sea) is placed at US$400 million. Arctic communities are of course extremely vulnerable to the effects of changing weather patterns and are feeling the effects of climate change right now.

It's Weekly Geek time, and this week we're looking at micro-hydro power: a truly reliable, highly efficient, and extremely clean (it has no direct carbon emissions) way of generating electricity.

It needs no fuel but offers a constant supply of electricity which often increases in winter, along with demand. It has a long life cycle (typically 25 years or more). It can have low implementation and maintenance costs. And, unlike some large scale hydroelectric power schemes, it has minimal environmental and visual impacts.