CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
sticky“
Chairs of eight all-party parliamentary groups, including on climate change, net zero, clean air and fuel poverty, have written a letter to the Guardian , vowing they will “continue to support and promote ambitious environmental leadership in parliament”.
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Argh! I wish the media would stop showing headline pictures of EVs implying they're any kind of solution to "net zero" or the climate crisis.
There's at least 27 tonnes of carbon embedded in every EV. I hate to spell this out, but that IS NOT ZERO
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Climate change is terrifying, so why don’t we do more to stop it? Read any headline on the climate crisis, and it seems unbelievable that we’re not all chaining ourselves to the headquarters of oil and gas companies, or at least hammering on MPs’ office doors. But we’re not. “Of course, I care about climate change,” we say. “But … ”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/12/excuses-tackle-climate-crisis-apathy
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Elizabeth Cripps is a writer and moral philosopher at the University of Edinburgh, and author of What Climate Justice Means and Why We Should Care
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Her book was just launched last week.
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Saudi Arabia has transferred shares worth $80bn to its sovereign wealth fund as the oil-rich nation hopes to rival Norway and Singapore’s state-managed funds and invest in green projects.
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Fife transport survey/consultation live now:
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How did I get here? Since I had my children, my climate anxieties have rocketed. I have read enough climate science to know that food shortages, flooded cities and millions dying, especially in the global south, are down the line if we don’t act now. I can’t bear the idea of my children living in that future.
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But we’re not powerless, and some of us on that original Zoom call have found allies and set up the Steve Baker Watch campaign to let other constituents know our concerns. It is not OK with us that Baker is trying to derail the green agenda. And it is not OK with us that he is taking a minority view and pushing those views out across the media.
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This second part, by working group 2, deals with the impacts of climate breakdown, sets out areas where the world is most vulnerable, and details how we can try to adapt and protect against some of the impacts. A third section, due in April, will cover ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and the final part, in October, will summarise these lessons for governments meeting in Egypt for the UN Cop27 climate summit.
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The climate crisis also has the power to worsen problems such as hunger, ill-health and poverty, the report makes clear. Dave Reay, the director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Like taking a wrecking ball to a set of global dominoes, climate change in the 21st century threatens to destroy the foundations of food and water security, smash onwards through the fragile structures of human and ecosystem health, and ultimately shake the very pillars of human civilisation.”
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Yeah - but can I park at work for free?
“Yeah - but can I park at work for free?“
Why not?
Business as usual.
Personal choice.
Motoring increases GDP.
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“The research is clear that governments and the private sector have the largest role to play but it is also equally clear from our analysis that individuals and communities can make a huge difference.”
The Jump campaign asks people to sign up to take the following six “shifts” for one, three or six months:
Eat a largely plant-based diet, with healthy portions and no waste
Buy no more than three new items of clothing per year
Keep electrical products for at least seven years
Take no more than one short haul flight every three years and one long haul flight every eight years
Get rid of personal motor vehicles if you can – and if not keep hold of your existing vehicle for longer
Make at least one life shift to nudge the system, like moving to a green energy, insulating your home or changing pension supplier
The campaign was officially kicked off on Saturday and Bailey said there was already a growing movement emerging in response to the evidence with Jump groups up and running around the country.
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The issue there is most people will only bother with those changes if there's trust governments and the private sector will "do their bit", which is by no means certain.
It would be real nice to see people forming pressure groups to have a wee chat with local government and local businesses before yet more exhortations at regular folk to Be Better(especially given how many will be holding to many or all of these points anyway as a matter of financial necessity).
Yes, we have to very careful with "individual actions" as these are often touted by the fossil-fuel industry and used as a deflection from the real issue which is to stop extracting the stuff.
Do not let the fossil-fuel industry and the large fossil-fuel burners (e.g. Aviation) off the hook.
Yes individual actions can help a bit, make people feel like they are doing the right thing, and encourage others, however, the most important thing is to press for change at systemic / governmental level.
@neddie - agreed. Lots of these commitments seem better suited to system change rather than individual action. How can people use electrical appliances for seven years if they aren't built to last that long, or lose technical support after a few years? How can people use alternatives to the car when it isn't safe or practical to do so?
Other commitments seem over the top. I'm no devotee of fast fashion (even slow fashion is a bit much for me - I tend to favour the "thousand wash grey" look), but three new items of clothing a year seems unduly harsh. Can't see many of the young 'uns queueing up for that one.
Setting aside growing kids, if you only bought three items of clothing a year you'd surely struggle. They say you can still fly intercontinental every eight years / for every 24 t-shirts you buy. This seems not quite proportionate.
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People who do not spend their days reading climate reports or scouring the archives of oil companies are often surprised to hear that the fossil-fuel industry has been part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since its inception. And it’s not just the IPCC. Oil companies have been involved in the entire international effort on climate change since it began in the late 1980s – and here’s a pro tip: they’re there for a reason, and it’s not decarbonisation.
The second part of the IPCC’s most recent report was published last week, and it finally acknowledged the oil industry’s biggest contribution to the climate space thus far: misinformation. This was followed closely by another new-to-the-IPCC topic: maladaptation, which refers to measures ostensibly geared towards warding off climate change, but which “may lead to increased risk of adverse climate-related outcomes, including via increased greenhouse gas emissions, increased or shifted vulnerability to climate change, more inequitable outcomes, or diminished welfare”, according to the IPCC.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/07/climate-solutions-big-oil-ipcc-report
US/UK/EU announcing end of Russian Oil and Gas imports with differing timelines - wouldn't be surprised if Russia cut it off sooner in retaliation.
Also seems to be a rapid pivot back to nuclear on top of renewables because of the dictator, so we may have clean and plentiful energy sooner than anyone expected (if we are all still alive)...
On the individual action perspective, prospect of £3K per annum fuel bills makes solar/battery far more appealing.
We were intending to buy solar/battery this year until investments crashed, but the Government 10 year interest free loan may make financial sense when compared to the rising energy costs.
Suggest systemic change could be led by building regs, can't sell house unless it meets X enviromental standard. Owners would be forced to adopt changes and it would also force councils/private landlords to adopt changes for those who are poorer.
ie Govt funding for poorer, and subsidised funding for rich home owners.
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The sight of Ukrainian citizens organising themselves into a resistance movement under the leadership of a President previously disparaged as lacking the credentials for high office, has challenged many preconceptions about this crisis. Outstanding leadership, it seems, sometimes emerges only in extremis. At times of real crisis, we expect our leaders to step up but, as we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, not all of them do. Last week, lost amidst the headlines of conflict, the latest UN report on climate change was published. It’s predictably grim reading - ‘a damning indictment of failed global leadership’ A few days earlier, Chris Stark, the UK’s top climate adviser, was commenting on a longstanding disconnect between Scotland’s impressive climate ambitions and the reality of what’s happening on the ground. Climate action, he said, had to ramp up in several directions and on a scale not seen before. No surprise then that all eyes were on last week’s launch of the National Strategy for Economic Transformation. Was this to be the moment when Scotland chooses a radically different path, towards the much vaunted wellbeing economy in which we begin to live within our natural limits? Early reaction suggests not but, as ever, it’ll come down to leadership.
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Angus Hardie, Director Scottish Community Alliance
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“We welcome the Scottish Government’s aspiration to become a Wellbeing Economy and the aim to respect environmental limits. The Strategy includes some positive commitments such as a wellbeing economy monitor to measure the things that really matter to people.
“But this does not amount to a plan to transform our economy to one that truly puts our collective wellbeing first. The last decades have shown us that economic models that focus too narrowly on growth and productivity for their own sake fail to translate into more secure jobs, higher wages, decent housing for all, or a healthier natural environment. Assuming growth and productivity will trickle down to all has been debunked – Scotland needs to be bolder in its approach to economic change.
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https://weall.org/weall-responds-to-national-strategy-for-economic-transformation
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Rising sea levels and fierce storms threaten Quintana Roo’s coastline, and with it the ribbon of beach resorts and timeshares
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So does this mean we should plough our own furrow? About one-third of the UK’s agricultural land is “croppable”, and almost all of it is in use. The call to plant more land is similar to the call by rightwing Tory MPs to resume fracking: the environmental damage would greatly outweigh the tiny increment of production. And we do nothing to release ourselves from the vicissitudes of the global market if we reduce our imports of food by increasing imports of fertiliser.
As for rewilding, most advocates argue it should take place on a large scale only on unproductive land. There are vast areas in the uplands of Britain that produce remarkably little: the National Food Strategy reports that in England 20% of the farmland produces just 3% of our calories. The ratio is likely to be even starker in Wales and Scotland. If this land were rewilded, the contribution it would make to preventing climate and ecological breakdown, both of which severely threaten global food supply, would probably be far greater than the contribution it makes to feeding us directly. Rewilding is not a luxury we can’t afford. It’s an ecological necessity.
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Between 2019 and 2021, farmers in England raised the area of land used to make biogas by an astonishing 19%. Now 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres) is ploughed to grow maize and hybrid rye for biogas, which is marketed, misleadingly, as a green alternative to fossil gas. The reopening of a bioethanol plant in Hull that will turn wheat into fuel for cars is likely to take another 130,000 hectares out of food production.
Between them, these energy crops demand 9% of the land used to grow cereals in England. This is an astonishingly destructive and inefficient business. About 450 hectares of land is needed to feed a biogas plant with a capacity of one megawatt. By contrast, a megawatt of wind turbine capacity requires only one-third of a hectare.
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