The Better Planet Guide

Responding to the news that oil prices have reached a 22 year high, Jenny Jones, said:

"It is time for people to get real about their addiction to oil. The smart move for any consumer and any large city is to start switching to green technologies and cut out the waste and excess. If you need a car, then dump the 4*4 and either go electric or buy a small one. If you are moving home, then ask about its energy rating. The current rise in oil prices is just a warning of the bigger crisis to come. With oil production being overtaken by oil consumption for the first time in history, the only future worth living has to be a green one"

I don't believe in climate changeii

Technology will fix it

It’s the government and the Americans fault

Who are you to tell me what to do?

It’s not my problem

There’s nothing I can do

How I run my lie is my own business

There are other more urgent problems to tackle

At least I’m doing something

We’re already making progress

In the UK, some 25,000 households are members of organic box schemes;

In the US, there are 2400 farmers' marketis involving 20,000 farmers as vendors; each week one million people visit these marketis, which turnover $1 billion per year;

A farmers marketi is an opportunity for farmers to sell their produce directly to the public. A key feature is that those who try to sell their goods at such marketis should be members of the local community where the marketi is being held - this is essentially therefore a marketi for local farmers and local people.

The Idea of a Local Economy by Wendell Berry - extract

UNSURPRISINGLY, AMONG PEOPLE WHO WISH to preserve things other than money - for instance, every region's native capacity to produce essential goods - there is a growing perception that the global "free marketii" economy is inherently an enemy to the natural world, to human health and freedom, to industrial workers, and to farmers and others in the land-use economies; and furthermore, that it is inherently an enemy to good work and good economic practice. I believe that this perception is correct and that it can be shown to be correct merely by listing the assumptions implicit in the idea that corporations should be "free" to buy low and sell high in the world at large. These assumptions, so far as I can make them out, are as follows:

Monday 01 August 2005

Greenpeace launched a stinging attack on the recently revealed Asia-Pacific climate changeii programme, calling it ‘absurd’ and ‘nothing more than a trade agreement’. The influential NGOii’s criticism follows similar responses from other environmental groups after the unexpected announcement of the scheme last week.

The six-nation programme, which involves the US, Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea, aims to improve co-operation on development and deployment of energy efficient technologies. The scheme has been viewed as a final snub by the US to the Kyoto Protocol, which it has defiantly refused to ratify on economic grounds.

In the developed world we are relatively prosperous, and although many of us live on the breadline, we are sheltered from the risk of starvation, infectious disease and most natural disasters.

Once you have a roof over your head and can feed clothe and educate your family, everything else is an option not a necessity. Vast amounts of money, time and resources go into keeping up with the Jones’s - a kind of competitive race to consume as much as possible.

Cheap flights are an illusion. The airline industry gets tax breaks of nearly 7BN a year, and the average taxpayer pays an extra £500 a year more tax, whether they fly or not. Airlines don’t pay for the damage they do to our environment, but we all feel the effects.

If subsidies were ended and a 'congestion charge' brought in on airlines, the chancellor would have £9bn to invest in better public and sustainablei transporti

Want to overthrow the established order in the western world?

Forget the nominal centres of power like governments and multi-national corporations - strike a blow where it will really count, where it can spread across the industrialized world - in suburbia.

The pinnacle of urban excess, conspicuous consumerism, where the SUVs roam in untamed herds. This is where the sheer magnitude of consumption means that even apparently small beneficial changes can be increased into massive benefits because of simple leverage. It's just like that urban bane, mass merchandising; small margins at huge volumes still makes a big difference on the bottom line. For example, it may not seem like much to save a litre of water (a simple flush of the toilet may use 10's of litres of water). But if 100,000,000 households each save a litre of water each day, that's a small lake each day (and a good sized lake in a month). It may not seem like much to get a household to reduce it's electrical consumption by 1 kWh, but if 100,000,000 households could do it each day, it would eliminate the need for a couple of major electrical generating stations.

Climate change is the most serious environmental threat the human race has ever faced; perhaps the most serious threat of any kind. The dangers can hardly be exaggerated. Within 100 years, temperatures could rise by 6C worldwide. Much of the earth's surface could become uninhabitable, and most species could be wiped out. In the UK, over the next 50 years, we will experience hotter, drier summers, warmer, wetter winters and rising sea-levels. In most of our lifetimes, millions of British people will be at high risk from flooding; there will be thousands of deaths from excessive summer temperatures; diseases from warmer regions will become established; and patterns of agriculture and business will have to change for ever.

...Corporations, the contraptions we invented to serve us, are overthrowing us. They are seizing powers previously invested in government, and using them to distort public life to suit their own ends.

...This is not the first time that corporate power has threatened democracy. Gladstone’s efforts to regulate the rail industry, for example, were obstructed by the 132 MPs who held directorships in railway companies. Abraham Lincoln wrote: ‘I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow.’