Mr Ancram added: "Some politicians dismiss the energy crisis as a hyped green agenda. It is not.
"Our political system will be severely challenged the day a British citizen turns on the light switch and nothing happens or switches on the kettle and the kettle stays cold."
Unlike with many biofuels, coconut oil doens't need to be transesterized - mixed with sodium hydroxide and alcohol to change its chemical composition - to run in a diesel engine. Filtered and warmed to temperatures about 25C, coconut oil is a better than satisfactory substitute for "mineral diesel" - it burns more slowly, which produces more even pressure on engine pistons, reducing engine wear, and lubricates the engine more effectively.
A massive global increase in the number of strong hurricanes over the past 35 years is being blamed on global warming, by the most detailed study yet. The US scientists warn that Katrina-strength hurricanes could become the norm.
Worldwide since the 1970s, there has been a near-doubling in the number of Category 4 and 5 storms – the strength that saw Hurricane Katrina do such damage to the US Gulf coastline late in August 2005.
I was struggling to find a way to recycle my mountains of plastic milk cartons from Tesco, when I realised I was missing the obvious solution… I got a milkman! http://www.expressdairies.co.uk/ They use old school glass bottles which they collect to re-use hooray!
They even tell you the name of ‘your’ milkman. How quaint.
"I pledge to play my part in reducing this city's greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent before 2010, to help the UK meet its international commitment on climate change."
THIS SEPTEMBER will see a ground-breaking new event held at the Dyfi Eco Parc in Machynlleth, Mid Wales, which aims to give householders, architects, planners, builders and equipment manufacturers an unique opportunity in Wales to see how the growing 'eco-friendlier' homes and buildings sector can be a real 'alternative' solution to today's comparatively inefficient buildings.
'Greener Homes & Buildings', a new project which is part of the Mid Wales Energy Agency became live in April this year, and is dedicated to providing consumers and service providers alike with practical advice and information on all aspects of constructing, renovating, modifying, furnishing homes with an ecologically sound and environmentally friendly ideal.
Ok, I'm rubbish at this blogging malarkey. I re-formatted my computer and forgot to save my bookmarks which had links to blogs… so will email you stuff instead
Sava plug – reduces energy consumption from your fridge
http://www.savawatt.com/
productdetails.asp?id=2
If you phone them up they sell them to you at the cheapest price around, and will tell you if your fridge is compatible
Cheap low energy lightbulbs;
http://www.ebulbshop.com/
General green gadgets
http://www.greenshop.co.uk
Battery shop - when you buy batteries from them they send you a freepost label so you can send back your old batteries for recycling
http://www.eurobatteries.com/
Freepost for recycling printer cartridges & old phones
http://www.recyclingappeal.com/
uk/index.htm
PLUS
I might have got this from your site actually, but Brita have a freepost address to send used water filters for recycling..
Brita Recycling, FREEPOST NAT 17876, Bicester, OX26 4BR.
"While the G8 leaders wasted time agreeing a worthless climate communiqué, Scotland's weather again showed that climate change is a growing reality," [Dr Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland] said.
"With Scotland already experiencing climate change, ministers must back the strongest possible action to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, including setting proper climate change targets for Scotland.
Mr White is a town councillor in Gillingham, Kent. It was his idea to get the mill owners together, and he believes small hydroprojects can make a big contribution to Britain's green energy needs. There are thousands of existing and former mill sites in the UK suitable for generating electricity, and if all were used they could provide almost 10% of the country's power.
Mr White, who does not have a mill himself, had read of the rows about wind power that have split communities.
"It seemed to me that hydropower has all the advantages, it gives new life and use to these historic sites and buildings, and produces green energy - and everyone is in favour," he said.
So here is my advice to peak oilers: after all is said and done, you're going to be ridiculed, just as the Y2K people were (and still are) ridiculed. Not because you were wrong, but because you were right enough to keep the disaster from happening. In 2025, when most people in the world are driving cheap, Chinese & Indian-made battery/fuel cell/bioflexfuel hypercars, relying on smart agriculture to reduce or eliminate petroleum fertilizers, and using bioplastics as raw fabber materials, those reminded of the "peak oil" scare are going to look around and say:
"Peak oil? What a bunch of nuts. Look -- nobody actually drilled in the Arctic Wildlife Preserve or off the California Coast, ExxonMobil went out of business because nobody needed their liquified coal "oil," and people were more freaked out by oil at $60 a barrel than at $120 a barrel. Where were the wars, the starvation, the collapse of civilization and the ATMs spewing out money we were promised?"
When you hear them say that, feel free to smile and nod, and know that you were right.
Years of trial and error by wine growers throughout the world have resulted in ideal combinations of grapes, soil ("terroir") and climate. In France, in particular, where the terroir is revered as the key to a wine's character, wines have evolved over centuries.
Prof Prentice argues that climate change will alter the optimal mix of grape varieties to grow in any one place. For the French system, which in law lays down in detail the boundaries of each appellation - in some cases just a few acres - and the grapes that may be grown there, adapting to climate change will pose a real challenge, he says.
A spokeswoman for the Queen said: “We’re constantly looking at ways of saving energy. We use energy efficient light bulbs at Buckingham Palace and recycle 99 per cent of green waste.”
Members of the Royal Family have long embraced an environmentally friendly lifestyle. The Duke of Edinburgh uses a taxi cab fuelled by liquid petroleum gas to travel around London, and water in a bore hole at Buckingham Palace is used to supply air conditioning to the Queen’s gallery before topping up the water levels in the Palace lake.
The electricity from the new plant will be fed straight into Windsor Castle and not into the local grid. It will be the biggest of its kind in the South of England. Four turbines, which will be built by npower renewables, will be submerged in two of Romney Weir’s bays.
Details of the new pact have so far remained under wraps; but there are indications that it will focus on technology transfer, probably with an emphasis on cleaner ways of burning coal.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the four biggest producers of coal in the world are China, the United States, India and Australia; so it is unlikely that these nations would come up with an agreement to reduce the production and use of coal.
.........
But will this be enough to curb climate change? Environmental groups are sceptical.
"It's part of the Bush administration's strategy to prove that the technological approach is the answer to global warming," the director of WWF International's Climate Change Programme, Jennifer Morgan, told BBC News.
"You only need to look at the way that emissions are going to see that's not the case."
The Running Tap provoked passionate reactions - a few supporters and many more enraged. One sent a birthday card with the warning inside that if the tap was not turned off, the gallery would be blown up.
The irony was that in the course of producing the work, McGowan has become messianic about water wastage: yesterday he spluttered with outrage about people washing their teeth or cleaning vegetables under a running tap. At the weekend he denounced a family member for running the washing machine daily for only a handful of clothes.
Colette Brooks loves cars. Big cars. Cars with fins, spinners and spoilers; cars that come in nice colors: mustard, seaweed, light teal. The kind of cars that some people might adorn with faux fur and fuzzy dice. But she also loves, as she puts it, "this beautiful blue ball we're so privileged to live on," and her car fetish wasn't exactly squaring with her environmental creds.
Ken Lewis, CFS resources director, said: "As an insurer, CIS is already experiencing the reality of climate change impacts. Over the past decade, CIS has seen claims arising from environmental flooding increase almost 500 per cent and these now total more than £1.5m per annum.
"About 40 per cent of Europe's energy use is associated with buildings. This turbine project, with the solar CIS Tower work, demonstrates these piles of steel and concrete have tremendous potential for future energy generation."
Greenpeace and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) today launched 'Windforce 12', a global wind energy blueprint that describes how wind power can supply 12% of the world's electricity by 2020. The report is a crucial tool in the race to cut greenhouse gas emissions, showing that by 2020, 1,250 GW of wind power can be installed saving a cumulative 10,771 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, a key contributor to climate change. Wind Force 12 demonstrates that there are no technical, economic or resource barriers to supplying 12% of the world's electricity needs with wind power alone by 2020 - against the challenging backdrop of a projected two thirds increase of electricity demand by that date.
But [Texan oil analyst Matt] Simmons believes surging demand will keep prices bubbling well above $50. 'We could be at $100 by this winter. We have the biggest risk we have ever had of demand exceeding supply. We are now just about to face up to the biggest crisis we have ever had,' he said.
Peugeot Citroën, Europe's second-biggest car maker, is promoting a Europe-wide plan to take older, more polluting cars off the roads by giving their owners a €1,000 (£665) incentive to scrap them.
The money, which would be paid by governments, could be used to buy a brand new car or a newer second hand one but the owners, if they wish, could choose to pocket the cash instead.
Already, televisions account for about 4 percent of annual residential electricity use in the United States - enough to power all of the homes in the state of New York for a year, according to a new NRDC study. Today there are about 266 million TVs, and that number is growing by 3.5 million per year. By 2009, when half of all new TV sales are expected to be extended- or high-definition digital sets with big screens, TV energy use will reach about 70 billion kilowatt-hours per year nationwide - about 50 percent higher than at present. Throw in a DVD and VCR player, a pair of high-definition set-top boxes, and other household TVs, and the total TV-related energy use for the home rises to about 10 percent, the NRDC estimates.
"The bacteria are capable of continuously generating electricity at levels that could be used to operate small electronic devices. As long as the bacteria are fed fuel they are able to produce electricity 24 hours a day," says Charles Milliken of the Medical University of South Carolina, who conducted the research with colleague Harold May.
The full development, costing up to £1.5bn, will require up to 270 wind turbines to generate 1,000 megawatts and would connect into the National Grid's transmission system in Kent. The turbines would be located in the outer Thames Estuary, more than 20 kilometres offshore and equidistant from the coasts of Essex and Kent. Due to the distance of the wind farm from the shore, there is expected to be little visual impact from the coastline.
The letter has been arranged through the Prince of Wales Business and Environment programme. The business leaders say they are very concerned about the prospect of dangerous climate change and support the government's target of reducing CO2 emissions by 60% by 2050.
They regret that industry and government are currently caught in a Catch 22. Governments are nervous of clamping down on climate change emissions for fear of a backlash from business.
Today, with growing awareness in industry, academia and the general public of the need for sustainable development, the international chemistry community is under increasing pressure to change current working practices and to find greener alternatives.
In response, the Royal Society of Chemistry has produced Green Chemistry as a vehicle to inform all parties of the latest developments in the green chemistry revolution. Reporting on research activities and interests in chemical aspects of clean technology from academic, industrial and public sectors, Green Chemistry contains primary research papers, communications and reviews.
Subscription includes:
- 12 issues a year plus annual author index
- free site-wide online access
responsibletravel.com is an on-line travel agent launched in 2001 for travellers who want more real and authentic holidays that also benefit the environment and local people. We market carefully pre-screened holidays from over 270 leading worldwide tourism brands and businesses. We do not act as a middleman - you can use the site to contact the experts who run the trips and hotels directly to make a booking
Sweden's AB Volvo has unveiled a truck equipped with an engine powered by DME—an alternative fuel produced from biomass that is used today as gas in spray cans.
The truck is a standard Volvo FM model equipped with a 9-liter diesel engine adapted to run on DME. "We know that in 20 years, alternative fuels will successively become increasingly commercially available," said Volvo CEO Leif Johansson. "Energy efficiency will become decisive and DME is truly an energy efficient fuel."
Volvo said DME is energy efficient and produces low emissions of carbon dioxide and particles.
Local governments tell feeble lies
All local councils claim to want to encourage cycling. They read in a book somewhere that this is what you ought to say once you ascend into local office, like, "I've lived in this community all my life, and have a real commitment to the area." To this end, they put out measly leaflets telling you pig-obvious things like, "Avoid getting trapped between two articulated lorries." If you didn't know that, you'd already be dead.
The truth is, they hate cyclists with a passion. That's the only way you can possibly explain all the things they do to endanger us, like inventing giant buses that bend in the middle, and laughingly encouraging us on to cycle paths so badly maintained they look like a trap set by Wile E Coyote. When you hear anything from any official on this matter, never forget they lie. They lie, they lie, they lie. It's even possible that Steven Norris is lying about the helmets.
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A social observation
The kind of person who routinely prefixes "cyclist" with "kamikaze" is exactly the kind of person who prefixes "asylum seeker" with "bogus"
The fact is that, to my eyes at least, this report is full of holes. Why are its findings based on an assumption that washable aficionados use 47 nappies, whereas we had easily got by on 20? Why did the Environment Agency survey 2,000 parents using disposable nappies compared with just 117 using washables, meaning that (taking into account the weighting towards those using older-style nappies which use more cloth), many of the assumptions are based on the habits of just 32 people? Why does the report include the energy used to iron nappies? Who on earth irons their nappies? Why was it assumed that people environmentally conscious enough to be using washable nappies would automatically want to tumble dry them?
CarFree City, USA's goal is to provide Americans with an alternative: carfree cities. By creating new neighborhoods and cities or redeveloping existing areas on a scale that is for people and not cars, yields a host of personal, community and global benefits. It's an ambitious task, but not mere wishful thinking. It doesn't require futuristic technologies, just common sense and a willingness to try something new. And it's no more expensive than traditional development. The pages of this website describe how carfree districts work and the benefits and challenges of creating them. We hope that you will join with us in creating the first carfree city in the United States of America.
Earlier this year, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said his country would become the world's largest producer of renewable energy. Brazil generates 43.8 percent of its power from renewable energy sources, including hydroelectricity, ethanol and biodiesel, according to Agencia Brasil, a government communications division. By contrast, the United States produced only 6 percent of its power from renewable sources in 2003, according to the Department of Energy's Annual Energy Outlook 2005.
According to the CIA's World Factbook, Brazil's economy is one-eighth the size of the United States', yet the country produces more ethanol, mostly from sugar cane.
With Tony Blair having made climate change one of the two major themes of his presidency of the G8 and the EU in June, it is a serious embarrassment to be told by the country's top scientific body that his claimed international leadership in the field is false, and that he needs to announce immediate action in the Queen's speech tomorrow to address the problem.
In fact. the scientists emphasise that most of the gains the UK has made in reducing emissions are nothing to do with Mr Blair, and happened because of the switch to gas before he came to office.
"We deliberately chose Romblon because it is an island province and it is coconut-producing. This being an island economy, diesel prices in the region are higher because of cost of transporting the fuel so it makes sense that the province look for an alternative fuel using the raw materials available, which is copra," [DOST Secretary Estrella] Alabastro said.
The mayors, from cities as liberal as Los Angeles and as conservative as Hurst, Tex., represent nearly 29 million citizens in 35 states, according to Mayor Nickels's office. They are pledging to have their cities meet what would have been a binding requirement for the nation had the Bush administration not rejected the Kyoto Protocol: a reduction in heat-trapping gas emissions to levels 7 percent below those of 1990, by 2012.
On Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg brought New York City into the coalition, the latest Republican mayor to join.
