It’s a strange comment on the attitude of modern Western governments to their electorates (or subjects, as I’m sure they would love to call us) that, whenever they want us to stop doing something, they impose a tax on whatever it is. It’s the attitude that brought us the congestion charge, the landfill tax and, from next year in Northern Ireland according to an environment news story in The Guardian, the plastic bag tax.

The theory goes that if people have to pay a tax on something, they’ll stop doing it. It seems to have some success – the same plastic bag tax coincided with a drop of 90% in bag consumption in the Republic since its introduction in 2002. I say ‘coincided’ rather than ‘resulted’: nobody can tell whether the change in behaviour was the result of the tax or whether the Irish people were in a frame of mind to address the issue of plastic bags clogging up the environment anyway, which was why they put up with the tax. The politicians in Northern Ireland, on the other hand, seem convinced it is their benevolent bestowment of tax regimes that bring about changes.

Alex Attwood, the Northern Ireland Executive’s Environment Minister, put it rather patronisingly thus when explaining that the tax would ‘only’ be 5p for the first year: “…I recognise that consumers will need time to change their behaviour and adjust to bringing their own bags when they shop. I therefore propose to discount the charge to 5p in the first year. This will ensure a phased approach to charging."

What that really means is that it will give the NI Executive the opportunity to get used to having several million pounds more to spend before the sum is halved by the effectiveness of the tax, only to have it raised to restore the shortfall.

That is the crux for governments: they are addicted to spending public money, so when a new source of revenue comes along they want to keep it. The success of these deterrence taxes is that they have to keep going up to replace the cost of their own success – if there is any. It’s an argument aired many times over the issue of tobacco and alcohol duty, which were originally introduced unashamedly to raise money for the monarch of the day.

Surely the way to stop people using too many plastic bags is to stop the supermarkets from providing them. The budget supermarkets have never provided bags; they offer boxes to those without their own bags. That brings me to my nostalgia bit. Decades ago people always had their own shopping bags. Older people still do; I remember my parents taking a ‘bag of bags’ with them well before it became fashionable. But where’s the revenue in that, I hear governments bleating.

Other environment news reveals that, ironically, it seems that when we take steps to reduce our carbon footprint by making processes more eco-friendly, we then use them more. If we convert to an electric car we drive it more; if we insulate our homes we turn up the heating. This process is known as ‘the rebound effect’. One study, quoted by Silvia Rowley in The Guardian, found that the rebound effect, together with a tendency to spend money saved on other carbon-producing activity, can result in up to 34% of the carbon saving being re-used.

Now I’ve dined out for years on the story of how I scored 114% in a statistics exam (thus proving that you should NEVER trust statistics), so I’m pretty confident when I say that what that 34% figure really shows is that 66% of the saving sticks. Some people are never satisfied!

Maybe we should make sure that, when we do ‘spend’ the carbon savings we’ve made, we do so in as eco-friendly way as possible. We could investigate the possibilities by perusing the Environment Directory on this site.

I can honestly say that I have never knowingly put out our waste bin on the wrong day. As far as I know our neighbours haven’t, either; they wait for me to put ours out before deciding which bin - rubbish or recycling - to put out. What did happen last year was that the council issued a leaflet with all the collection dates for the two collections printed on it - all the wrong way round! If people had put the wrong bins out after reading the leaflet, and not picked up on the fact, they presumably could have been fined up to £1,000. Instead, the council had to print and post a whole new set of leaflets - and then collect the wrong ones for recycling!

Of course my local council wouldn’t have been so silly as to try to punish people for its own mistake. That would have been unconscionable. The Government feels, however, that councils have been over-using the powers they have and have launched a consultation on curtailing said powers. Personally, I think the initiative was launched just so that environment secretary Caroline Spelman could be quoted as saying: "Heavy-handed bin fines have for too long been used to punish people for innocent mistakes. We are now consigning them to the scrapheap of history.”
Boom-boom!

There is now a competition among energy providers to see who can claim to be lowering their prices most. Some would argue that energy prices should be high to encourage conservation, but few like to see increasing numbers plunged into energy poverty. Now there is also controversy surrounding the Government’s new ‘green deal’ and Energy Company Obligation schemes, with some commentators branding them as “stealing from the poor to give to the rich”.

The Guardian’s George Monbiot stated in his blog: “The government's own projections show that its green deal and Energy Company Obligation (ECO) schemes starting later this year, which are supposed to improve the energy efficiency of our homes and help people to cut their energy payments, will lead to higher bills for the poor, but almost no change to the bills of the rich. They will also greatly reduce the amount spent on insulation and energy efficiency while doing almost nothing to address fuel poverty.”

There is an opportunity for everyone to help address the issue of invasive species by reporting the presence of one of the 10 ’most wanted’ invaders. It’s a joint initiative by The Observer Ethical Awards and the University of Hull. You can shop intruders such as the American signal crayfish via www.guardian.co.uk/environment. Follow the links to the DEFRA reporting site.

A Happy New Year to everyone and welcome to the 2012 blog (eagle-eyed readers of last week’s offering will have noticed I didn’t seem to know what year it was!).

December has been and gone, and taken its ‘close to average’ temperatures with it. Now the environmental news is taken up with counting the cost of the gales that have battered most of us in the past 48 hours. Scotland, of course, got a preview – a friend in Kintyre reported a wintry and windswept scene on 2 January. Today was our recycling collection day, so the bin and paper bag had to go out willy nilly. I think the bag and its contents are somewhere in Burnley, but I managed to rescue a neighbour’s bin before it caused a road accident.

What is so alarming about what could be described as simply winter weather is the fact that it’s the wrong kind of winter weather. January should be bitterly cold with maybe some snow but certainly plenty of ice: what we have got is more reminiscent of the tail end of the Atlantic hurricane season. You don’t have to be an environmental news commentator to realise somfink ain’t right.

The Guardian’s environmental news tweet (@guardianeco) reported that climate change had rendered the Canadian commercial seal cull “unnecessary” this year. That might sound like good news for the seal pups, but the reality is the opposite – the thinning ice has resulted in catastrophic rates of death among the pups.

On a more positive note for cute and cuddly creatures, the same site reported the launch of a campaign by Compassion in World Farming to limit the time sheep and calves can be transported live to eight hours. The launch was fronted by Joanna Lumley, who is used to getting her way!

"We don't have to illustrate how simply ghastly this trade is," she said. Last year saw a resurgence in numbers of both animals being exported live, a sign that "…our eye has been taken off the ball", according to Ms Lumley. "This year, 2012, is the year of powerful change … we can do it. We can make it happen," she added.

In contrast, lugging pet animals around Europe is now cheaper and easier from 1 January, according to DEFRA. The UK, together with Ireland and Sweden, has brought its travel rules into line with the rest of the EU.

According to DEFRA: “The Pet Travel Scheme has been successfully operating across Europe since 2004, and will allow the UK to maintain high levels of protection against animal disease whilst bringing it into line with scientific advances and updating a system first devised in the 1800s.” Quirkily, the article on the DEFRA website claims to explain what people and their vets need to do to bring their “…pet dog, cat or ferret (HONEST!) into the UK.” Too late for poor Compo, of course.

The article doesn’t mention what to do if you have a truckload of pet sheep or calves. As always, one of the specialists on the environmental directory of this site will be able to supply an answer.

 I hope everyone had a happy Christmas and is looking forward to the New Year. According to figures produced by the Met Office, 2011 has been the second warmest year on record.

December, however, has been close to average in temperature. That kind of environmental news story is grist to the mill of climate change scientists; however, those kinds of broad brush strokes are difficult to swallow when, for instance, temperatures last week here in the North West hit double figures, while August saw this writer reverting to his winter coat to carry out some work outside.
Despite those regional and even local variations, the Met Office reports that the mean temperature so far this December has been 4.7°C – 0.5 °C above the 1971-2000 average. This is a big swing from last year, when temperatures were 5°C below average to notch up the coldest December on record.

A consistent move towards a warmer climate is what most would expect, although any environmental news source will point out that the process is not that smooth.
John Prior, national climate manager at the Met Office, said: "While it may have felt mild for many so far this December, temperatures overall have been close to what we would expect.
"It may be that the stark change from last year, which was the coldest December on record for the UK, has led many to think it has been unseasonably warm."
This old cynic, however, wants to know when records started, as I can certainly remember consistently colder winters than last year, with snow on the ground for long periods.

That, of course, was in t’North, where we are more used to the cold – or are we? Other research published by the Met Office reports work undertaken jointly with Open Air Laboratories (OPAL), which voices the heresy that “the stereotype of the cold-hardy northerner and the southern-softy may be no more than a myth”.
The report, quotes Mark McCarthy, a climate scientist at the Met Office. He said: "This research questions our stereotypes about how we feel temperatures. It has long been known that people can acclimatise to their environment, so we might expect people in the cooler north to feel the cold less than people in the south. Initial results suggest this might not be the case, however, and we all feel temperatures in the same way.

"What is really interesting is that these early results suggest it may be more appropriate to say people in the north and in rural areas are more pragmatic as they're more likely to reach for a coat when it gets colder than city-dwellers and those in the south."
That piece of news about how we perceive our environment actually bears out two pieces of homespun wisdom long known to me. It was always said that the weather in the Pennine valleys was “an overcoat colder” than down on the flood plain, while the Scottish saying states that there is no such thing as bad weather – only the wrong clothing.

Having said that, football supporters in the North East are known to shed outer garments on the coldest days. It is known, however, that this kind of “paradoxical undressing” can immediately precede death from hypothermia as the brain fails to detect the difference between warm and cold.
The Met Office/OPAL survey is continuing throughout the winter. A pdf survey card to take part can be downloaded from www.opalexplorenature.org, at the Natural History Museum website.

For more climate change news see the section on this site’s environmental directory. See you in 2011.