The Woodland Trust are urging us to lobby for a stronger Climate Change Bill. Together with the Wildlife Trusts and the RSPB, they have produced a joint briefing entitled “Adaption and the Climate Change Bill” which raises some key points.
You remember the story that was doing the rounds about the US spending billions producing a pen that would work in space, whilst the Russians solved the problem by using a pencil? (Fortunately, a mere yarn, I’m glad to say:>)
Well, the French are finding ways of solving the pollution/fuel crisis in a similar manner. Use a horse!
According to The Independent on 25th November: “More than 70 French towns have already gone back to the future by introducing horse-drawn carriages to replace petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles for local tasks such as collecting rubbish, street-cleaning and taking children to school. And at least 30 more are set to join the revolution next year.”
The article goes on: “Critics counter that the horse – which produces around 20 kilos of dung daily, enough to fill a suitcase – is hardly pollution-free. They point out that, before the advent of the car, environmentalists were seriously worried that a proliferation of horses would leave cities knee-deep in merde and that
But Stephane de Veyrac of the National Stud was undaunted. ‘It’s about sustainable development and bringing some humanity back to today’s monotonous machine-driven jobs,’ he said.”
The idea of the gee-gees trotting around leaving dung piles everywhere should be extremely exciting for gardeners. Time to get out the buckets and collect the dung for the rhubbarb!
And if anyone says they prefer custard on theirs…
Now here’s an interesting lesson for the modern world and it comes to us from the Argaric people who lived in south Eastern Spain around 4,200 years ago.
These were people of the Bronze Age, as can be deduced form the amount of fires that have been unearthed, a sign of deforestation to facilitate mining in the area.
Within decades, the diverse forest ecosystem had gone – and with it, the Argaric people. This area today is covered by scrub. Full report on the BBC website.
I was given an energy monitoring device which we have been using at my office. Without being tooooo much of an anorak (which we were:>) we established that we could make five mugs of tea from a full kettle at a cost of 0.018p, whereas cooking a couple of burgers on the grilling machine cost 0.025p.
If our desktop PCs were working flat out all day (which, of course, modern ones don’t as they have energy saving options) they would cost 0.31p per day. So, although the kettle draws 2Kw it is in such short bursts that the PC usage is much higher. OK, we can all guess that but it’s good to see how much.
Correction: see comments