Planet Savers blog

I’m not sure whether to rejoice or scream!

The National Geographic reports that the EU’s farm chief has suggested allowing misshapen fruit and veg into the supermarkets in order to help with the food crisis.

When I was a kid, I remember noticing that the misshapen fruits and veggies were usually the sweetest and tastiest. Somewhere along the way supermarkets decided that only those that fitted the packaging were ‘perfect’ and we lost out on the fun of ‘eating the knobbly bits first!’

So I rejoice in the fact that the issue has been raised. But I scream because of the question it raises: If allowing misshapes into the supermarkets is going to help with the food crisis and keep costs down,  what has been happening to the misshapen fruit and veg all these years? I’d kind of assumed that is was all going into some other process like soup or tins. But this item seems to suggest that we have been discarding it.

Does anyone have the answer to this?

Each day I read the climate change news delivered via RSS feed from Climate Ark, or Science Daily or One World UK and so on. After the Stern Report and then the IPCC report, the news was fascinating as various suggestions and innovations were put forward that looked as though we were going to change our way of living on this planet.

These days it is a continuous stream of information about the way biofuels have distorted the lives of thousands, causing starvation and poverty in various parts of the globe.

Last night I watched a film called Peak Oil. It was put on by the Berkhamsted Transition Towns group. It explains clearly why oil prices are rising. Demand has outstripped supply - and the supply is running out and will never meet the demand.

Instead of looking to biofuels as a replacement fuel, we should be looking for ways of living sustainably. It is a tall order. We need to reconnect with our own planet and each other. Start working together in our communities for the general good. We need to relearn old technology and find ways to improve it. And we can do this with the benefit of today’s hindsight and innovative technique.

Chesham will soon be forming its own Transition Group. Many have already shown an interest and an initial meeting will be held in July. There are now about 700 towns like this, all looking to make a change. We cannot wait for the government to impose changes. It is down to us at local level to do something for ourselves.

And there is much we can do :>)

I’ve been a bit quiet lately. That’s because my mother has just moved house so there has been much to do helping her sort things out. But it gave rise to a couple of interesting purchases.

Her new home has a couple of small lawns and she wanted a light weight push mower rather than plugging in the hover she bought from the old house. this led us to The Green Warehouse where we found a neat little mower just right fora small lawn.

Whilst looking at the site we saw a rather interesting shower head, too. It oxygenates the water which makes it feel as strong as an all water shower but in fact you are using, they say, 75% less water. We fitted it a couple of days ago and I am really pleased with the results. It is also very obvious that I am using less water. The bath is not filling up as it used to and there is far less splashing. It feels great, too.

In Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, women farmers make a subsistence living by growing food in the fields. This is pretty consistent with the way humans beings have survived for countless millennia.

Unfortunately, these women do not own the fields but have been allowed to work on them by the people that do. Now the women are being turned off the lands because there is a lot of money to be made in cash crops - for biofuels.

This is patently wrong from a humanitarian point of view. But you can’t really blame the guys who own the fields from doing it. There is so much money to be had from biofuels right now.

What is it with human beings? Where there is quick money to be made, we lose all our concerns about living in peace alongside our fellows in a rush to make a profit. I know this does not apply to everyone living on the planet but is seems to infect a goodly proportion of us.

Food, clothing, fuel. All basic human needs and, surely, all basic human rights. Yet in all these fields we a guilty of exploitation. If our lifestyle means that our neighbour, who is prepared to work in the fields to stay alive, is denied these rights, the system should raise alarm bells. Instead, it raises a few bank balances.

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On the subject of fuel, with Shell and BP dropping out of the renewables market whilst reporting record profit, its is interesting to note that they intend using their winnings to extract even more oil from the hither to difficult (and therefore too costly) sources. Presumably, part of this will have to be spent on a new advertising spin.

But then I read in the Guardian that the Rockefella’s give Exxon a ticking off :

“There are an awful lot of people who are getting increasingly annoyed with Exxon,” said economist Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, a great-granddaughter of the company’s founder, calling for Exxon’s chief executive Rex Tillerson to hand the role of chairman to an outsider. She spoke of “serious disjunctures” between Exxon’s short-term actions and “the long-term health both of this company and of the world’s economy”.

Good on her, I say.

Amid all the doom and gloom stories about deforestation, this one really cheered me up. In Costa Rica they replanted some of their worn-out cattle pasture with trees in a bid to reclaim their forest. Fifty years later, it looks as though it is working :>)

“The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the biofuel policy is halted.” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the telegraph today. One of the best articles I’ve read setting biofuels into perspective. If you are getting a bit jittery about using food for fuel - read this!

Another show stopper today comes from one of NASA’s top scientists. Stepping outside the square, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, raises the stakes on the carbon debate. Earth in Crisis: Global warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public.

I have become more and more aware that I use toooooo many tissues. I’ve managed to remember to recycle them but I still grab one to clean my hands of oil and mess when cooking instead of a cloth. It’s a habit I have to break!

Incidentally, I was just reading about Kimberly-Clark. They make a point of using virgin wood pulp as this makes softer tissues.

So… we are joining hands with France and about to make a fortune by becoming world leaders in the nuclear power industry.

For those of us that are not scientists, this argument swings like the proverbial pendulum.

I agree with Steve Webb, Lib Dem’s Enviroman, that this will produce no benefit until 2020 and we need something done NOW. Rather than spend a fortune on new energy creation schemes that will only deliver in 12 years time, we need huge sums of money spent on helping us, the people using the energy, to make better use of it. Cut the cost of solar and photovoltaic panels, provide better recycling systems, make it easy for people to live sustainably. This will cut down on the amount of energy we need.

The other side of the argument is that we must become energy independent. We can’t rely on imports to keep our power stations going so, from this point of view, nuclear is the obvious route. It is clean, it provides jobs, it’s there when you need it.

The problem with wind and sun is that they are not consistent. We can’t expect the clouds to part for extra solar gain at half time when everyone puts on the kettle. Nor the wind to blow extra hard at the end of the block buster movie (sorry, ‘film’, I get told off for saying ‘movie’!). Electricity is not something you can pop into a box and stick on the shelf to use later. You need huge farms of turbines and panels if you want to make the supply run efficient so I can see the argument against these.

But what about waves? We are an island. As long as we have Moon, the tides will go in and out in a very reliable fashion. The problem here lies in the government’s desire to wreck the coastline and various eco-systems instead of working with it to a happy conclusion.

Why are government scientists and environmentalists always at loggerheads? I’ll answer that in another question. Why does money still over-rule a sensible argument?

Unfortunately, I think we need some nuclear power stations (never thought I’d hear myself saying that). But I would hate it to be the government’s total solution.

Or if I add the comma: Tax, Glaciers and Paint. That about sums up my day’s round-up:

Al Gore has suggested to India that they cut income tax and instead tax polluters. Hit the budget, I reckon every country should do this, its the only way to make people listen unfortunately.

Timely, too, with today’s announcement that the glaciers are melting faste than expected.

But the one that cheers me up is the guys in Swansesa Uni who have managed to generate a windfarms worth of energy by painting roof tops. Great stuff guys :>)

I don’t believe it. President Bush just said:

“We gotta get off oil, American has got to change its habits,” Bush told a crowd at the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference, a meeting of global energy officials and an adjoining trade show that’s the largest all-renewables show ever held in the United States. “It should be obvious to all, demand has outstripped supply, which makes prices go up.”

Who finally managed to tell him? No wait, I’ve got it: He’s been genetically modified! Must have been…