Tag: Politics

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Back in August it was revealed that department for business energy and industrial strategy – responsible for climate remit, had taken 619 domestic flights in the previous 2 years

We have an extensive train network. We also have an extensive motorway network. With all the check in and the traveling to and from airports which are usually some distance outside cities, many domestic flights take longer than their train or car equivalent.

More importantly, these other methods have a fraction of the carbon footprint. This was also after signing a net zero emissions target. Importantly, this does not include travel to Northern Ireland as this is more easy to justify.

34 of these flights were by the minister themselves.

This only came to light through a freedom of information request from the shadow minister for green transport.

In the 6 months after the 2050 net zero target was signed into law the department took 395 domestic flights.

These all happened in the run up to us hosting a conference on cutting emissions.

We can only hope that now the COP26 has happened, the government starts to practice what it preaches.

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Was Bulb as clean as it claimed? how can we tell?

In the UK (and I am sure in plenty of other countries) as the grid has cleaned, there have been a whole host of firms that have sprung up as a middleman – buying green electricity and providing it to their customers. There is nothing particularly unusual about this – we get our electricity from Octopus on a similar scheme. With many of these firms, they supply the electricity and gas, but often have few holdings themselves.

Octopus is busily investing in all sorts of green electricity generators, but the problem exists that if you do not own any of the electricity generation, then in tough times this can be your undoing.

Now, many of these claim to be fully green, but are not necessarily. The reputable ones match each unit used to a unit of renewable generation that went into the grid (Ofgems renewable energy guarantee of origin REGO). Alongside this, the reputable ones also invest in renewable generation.

So was Bulb as green as it suggested? Well the complaint came from the fact that only 5% of its power came directly from renewable energy projects, the rest was bought on the open markets through the aforementioned REGO. The point is, the electricity grid does not consist of electricity traveling like emails to specific places – it is supplied everywhere jointly by all the producers. This means that provided a supplier is paying for enough green electricity to cover all its customers uses (and has the REGO certificates to prove it) by definition, it is fully green.

Would it be better if the company had some green generation of its own? probably, but provided the scheme works it does not have to. It allows green electrical generation to be used as it is created – by who ever needs it, exactly as our grid is designed.

This problem has arisen because the government allows green electricity and the certificate of it being green to separate people. However, provided the certificates only cover the amount of green electricity that is being created, it is not counted twice it is merely worth more to the creator.

What is wrong with this? If creators of green energy are aware that they can make more money than those burning gas, many will switch. This still does what is needed, and provided green electricity certification is accurate it wont be double counted.

Possibly, the last nail bulbs coffin, was caused by the government setting out plans to make this loophole smaller. These so called pale green energy tariffs – where green energy was not bought directly from a renewable energy project are supposed to be eliminated.

I think the British government needs to be careful here. It is quite possible that in the near future, these providers will not be necessary as all the electricity in the grid will be green. However, for the time being it is worth continuing to offer this premium to green electricity creators and the ability for suppliers to make sure they have covered their promises.

Now in the case of Octopus they are also replanting and rejuvenating a section of the Amazon rainforest to offset any gas emissions. It is currently unfortunately true that it is far cheaper to heat using gas – heat pumps are likely to greatly change this, as they are 300% or greater efficient (in terms of electricity in, and heat out) however for now gas is used. A reforestation scheme can be guaranteed to suck up the carbon it is promised to capture.

Our guaranteed green electricity and offset gas monthly cost is roughly £5 more than the best price on the market, and for us £60 a year to know that our electricity and gas use is not increasing the problems of global warming. Having said that, we are still trying to reduce our use through: Smart devices, added insulation and when we get them installed – solar panels and thermal solar panels. The other advantage with a scheme like this, is it guarantees you a price for you exported electricity – so if you have solar, and are currently not being paid for anything that you export perhaps now is the time to switch. This essentially means that you can use Octopus as a battery.

If you are interested in transferring to this or another Octopus scheme please click on the link. This will give you a £50 credit on your account, as well as on ours – thereby supporting the site, without costing you a penny

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Why are so many African countries on the government’s Covid red list

Out of the 54 countries in Africa 20 currently listed on the British government’s red list. This list is a list of countries that you cannot travel to without then spending 10 days in quarantine.

All well and good you might say, after all the government’s main concern is the health of its citizens. The problem is that this does not seem to be about the health of the UK citizens. Instead it seems more aimed at protecting against people’s misconceptions.

France is on the British amber covid list, yet this country alone has 115,000 death registered, or roughly two-thirds of the number of deaths recorded in the whole of Africa (between 150,000 and 200,000 depending which statistics are used. Indeed Germany is on the government’s green list and yet has had 90000 deaths and is currently running at 10,000 new cases a day. What is more given that these numbers are broken down by country, more than 80,000 deaths occurred in South Africa, even the rest of the African continent a share only about 100000 deaths.

The whole of Africa (a contingent of 1.3 billion people) only recorded roughly twice the number of daily cases recently to Germany – a country on the green list. 

Now, it could be argued, these countries are only on the red list because the government cannot be sure of the data coming in. 

Why is this a problem? Well, apart from the astounding level of institutional racism that this seems to show, tourism is essential for many African economies. As a result this failure to follow the science to have long lasting socio economic problems.

The problem is that China has been claiming virtually no cases for months. China is currently on the amber list, yet  there is a little faith or put in the numbers they are quoting. It’s true that with some of the African countries, there is also a little faith in the numbers.

Why is this of concern to a wildlife travel and conservation website? It is simple! The longer these countries stay on the red list because of covid, the bigger an impact this will have on wilderness reserves and national parks. If only a few people are willing to enter the country and tolerate the quarantine on return, we run the risk that these countries will turn to hunting instead of photographic safari.

Time will tell if this is a racist move, allowing the government to appear to be taking covid seriously – without too much worry of backlash from the country in question.

Obviously the sooner these rules change (for me as well as the tourism sector in Africa) the better, however this is the same for the natural world. I just hope and pray that the government has better reasons than it appears for its current covid red list, and will open up travel to these relatively safe countries soon enough to save the wild places that they protect.

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Asiatic lions are found in only one place, yet local government authorities refuse to move any

The asiatic lion only continues to exist in the For national park. When this area was first protected, the lion population had fallen very low, some saying a matter of only a couple of dozen remaining members. In the 50 or so years since the population has multiplied well. Now are said to be around 400, spread across 1 contiguous protected area (under a number of different authorities – Gir Sanctuary, Gir National Park, Pania Sanctuary, Mitiyala Sanctuary, and Girnar Sanctuary. The first 3 form the core, with the others lying within dispersal range. 

Indian Lions do look incredibly similar to African lions, however are different in important ways

The problem is at these three have a combined area of about 561 square miles, which is an incredibly high density for lions. 

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The Rwandan president Paul Kagame intends to make conservation his countries next battle

In many parts of the world, conservation is an afterthought. After looking after your human population, if there is any money left then alright do conservation but not before. However, this does not work. There are many positive benefits of wildlife , and if these are not allowed to thrive it will damage the local people – by thinking of this last you end up damaging the local people.

Countries such as Rwanda are also heavily dependent on the money that tourism brings to their country.

This new aim, is to grow the economy and improve the lives of Rwandans while at the same time protecting the natural environment and keep as much forest standing as is possible.

Currently, Rwanda gets 15.1% percent of GDP from tourism, however back in the year 2000, this was just 4.7%. That gives an annual growth of this sector at more than 7%, far above all other areas. #

Importantly, tourism is a great leveller. Anyone who lives around wilderness can set up their own business. As a result, this can be a way to lift poorly served communities out of poverty.

I hope in the future that this site can assist in that process.

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Why does the political leadership of USA ignore climate change despite 59% of Americans agreeing with it?

In America the number of people who agree that climate change is caused by humans and we must do something about it has risen from 42% in only 6 years.

Unfortunately this question is very easy to answer. While 85% of Democrats would consider this one of the greatest threats, only 27% of Republicans feel the same way.

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It just been uncovered: people working for trump are implanting climate denialism into scientific research

Multiple times in the last few years administration has taken a scientific report and decided to do something that completely contradicts his findings.

The most obvious of these is global warming, where it extends to the import of hunting trophies from abroad and the huge increase in the number of trophies allowed to be taken in the USA (likely to decimate wildlife populations within the country).

However having run up against this time and time again the trump administration is increasingly trying to forced all the arguments by putting in his false information into the report before it’s published.

An Insider in the interior department has been inputting the the totally discredited idea that trump has been regularly spouting- there’s an actuality extra carbon dioxide in the environment is good. Given the basis of the recent globally agreed treaties to deal with the increase in carbon dioxide emissions- and the clear need for the USA’s reduce it’s emissions given that it accounts for 25% of the world’s total, this is a clear attempt to justify abandoning its agreements.

In particular Trumps appointment who arrived early in his presidency, has continually tried to push the idea that at the current models have over-estimated the amount of warming that would occur. This is despite the data clearly stating this is not the case indeed if anything is has underestimated the impact.

The trump administration has attacked aggressively the interior department scientific outlook both in terms of studying future global warming and of studying diseases and epidemics. This second area has quite rightly come back to bite them as the Outbreak of the Corona virus has demonstrated the lack of readiness that the trump administration has for a significant illness spending in the population.

I should mention that this article was written in isolation from yesterdays article and on the basis of other articles, though it should be concerning that the Us government is both trying to make scientific papers play a smaller role in choosing what to do- and the same week an article suggesting that Trumps administration is demanding the right to change scientific articles to fit their own views before publishing.

Why is it necessary to do both? Is it clear, even to Trump, that whatever the position on scientific research you cannot be seen to continue to go against the evidence all the time? America currently leads the world in the amount of research it creates- however if Trump damages the reputation of this research and its impartiality, it could do untold damage to american universities and their world standings. This is likely to last far beyond Trumps administration- reelection or not.

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Update: bolsonaro behaviour has got so bad that 67 British firms and 70 American firms are complaining about it

67 British firms have written to bolsonaro to complain about what he’s doing in the Amazon rainforest. Some of these firms are big name companies such as Asda and Tesco’s, well as the UK’s largest asset manager. Separately 70 American firms have signed a similar letter ( this list includes Microsoft and Google)

The letters talk about the world’s concern over his destruction of the Amazon rainforest, talk about various agreements including the soy moratorium from 10 years ago.

Whether these letters have any impact will be interesting to see. However from companies point of view it would seem that the only way to ramp up pressure on Brazil behind on this point is to start boycotting their products. These companies are in theory capable, in most instances, to stop buying products from Brazil and instead get them elsewhere. As such customers must keep up the pressure on these companies, so that if Bolsonaro continues without changing course- the companies feel they must move suppliers from within Brazilian borders. Just a few of these companies doing this publicly, may well force the Brazilian government to change direction.

Whether these companies customers care enough to force them to take this extreme action will be something we will find out in the next year.

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Iran has convicted 8 wildlife conservationist as spies

Iran is an Islamic country in Asia and the people are not given much freedom, as they follow a strict version of Islam. 

Wld Iranian Cheetah

In some respects this is meant that the wildlife in Iran has done reasonably well since the 1979 Revolution. Much of this country is desert but the ecosystem has been significantly depleted over the last couple of centuries. Into the 19th century Asiatic Lions still roamed parts of Iran.

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