Well, spring has finally arrived. Am I saying that because, after banging on about how it never stops raining here in the fells, we had a rain-free week, leading to the local Co-op running out of salad? No; nor because we took the decision to wash our winter coats and hang them out to dry before putting them away for storage. The weatherman promptly forecast snow!

The reason is the same as every year: along with the narcissi and the first lineful of washing comes reports in the environment news pages of hosepipe bans in the drought-stricken South East.

According to The Guardian, around one third of those to whom the ban applies will simply ignore it. Are these the same people who will squeeze the last drop of fuel into their tanks at the hint of a tanker-drivers’ strike; or who will park their 4WD gas guzzler on a disabled parking space because it’s two yards less far to walk, despite the fact that they actually can easily walk the extra two yards?

I’ve pointed out before that, just because we find it ironic to be talking about drought when it seems to rain (or snow!) most of the year, that doesn’t mean it ain’t there. Water is becoming a commodity here in England and people need to wake up to that fact. Having said that, other environment news stories are advertising courses in flood defences for the kind of consultants to be found in the environment directory of this site.

The reason most of the ban-flouters cite, apparently, is the fact that the water companies waste millions of gallons a year in leaks. That, too, is criminal and should be treated as such.

It’s difficult to find anything good to say about the new National Planning Policy Framework, announced on 27 March, but a grudging ‘about time, too’ goes to the emphasis on brownfield development. I wonder how long that will last, though, when the brownfield-first policy begins to interfere with the presumption of consent for ‘sustainable development’. The introduction of the 5% deposit scheme for new build only flies in the face of the policy itself. In the past couple of years we have seen inner cities blighted by lack of funds to refurbish existing, perfectly sound homes to modern standards.

At its best, sustainable housing development can encompass the conversion of Victorian mills into flats – often, because of the nature of early industrialisation, with its own bijou waterside ambience: unlike what happened just a couple of miles from here when a landmark mill was allowed to decay and then demolished.

Chris Stokes

It has been evident for a while that the Chancellor is no friend of Friends of the Earth - at times it looked as if he thought green credentials were old-fashioned Driving Licences.

He has really wound up the entire green lobby with the environment news in his Budget, though. In addition to investigating increasing airport capacity in the South East (we all look forward to the Tory NIMBYs shuffling Boris Johnson International from one constituency to another), he is to hand over £3bn in tax breaks to the oil and gas industry, in order to extract as much revenue as possible at a time, to quote The Guardian, of “soaring global crude prices”.

Making the announcement as part of his Budget speech, the boy George said: "We are also introducing new allowances, including a £3bn new field allowance for large and deep fields to open up west of Shetland, the last area of the basin left to be developed.”

Craig Bennett, policy and campaigns director at Friends of the Earth, appeared nigh-on apoplectic. He declared to The Guardian: "It’s absolutely shocking after months of government complaining about subsidies to renewables that Osborne hands out billions of subsidies for deepwater drilling. This will do nothing to get us off the hook of high fossil fuel prices."

Hang on, though – isn’t that the same part of the world that would be providing a newly-independent Scotland with massive revenues in a few years’ time? Not if George gets his hands on it first!

Those of us who were not actually listening to the Budget speech would still have noticed when he came to the subject of electricity generation.  As he mouthed the words "Gas is cheap” the whole country was convulsed with laughter. Where exactly has George been buying his?

Buried in the Budget detail was another piece of environment news that didn’t make the same immediate impact. The Chancellor pledged to reform the Carbon Reduction Commitment to make it less bureaucratic – or replace it altogether if it can’t be reformed. The measure won plaudits from an unlikely combination of sources, including the CBI, the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment and the Renewable Energy Association.

The CBI’s director general John Cridland tempered his reaction in his statement by expressing disappointment that the CRC had not been abolished immediately, while the REA restated its opposition to the CRC as it stands on the ground it makes no distinction between the carbon footprint of energy generated in different ways.
While this site’s Environment Directory will provide details of a number of consultants able to guide companies around the vagaries of the CRC, none will mourn its reform or demise.

This week's environment news concerns Climate Week, as it has been designated by those who designate those things. We are all required to think seriously about our carbon footprint – at least for this week!

I’ve always wondered who decides what day or week it’s going to be: does a group of heavenly beings cluster around a diary every year to decide on which dates we are going to think about what?

It’s unfortunate that these ‘weeks’ or ‘days’ (presumably for less important issues - I’m thinking of Yorkshire Day) can devalue the issue they are meant to support by seeming trivial or, worse, badly organised; or they can reinforce the idea that people only think about important issues for one week (or day) in the year. If the population is going to take climate change seriously it’s going to need to live responsibly all year!

Climate Week has been sponsored by huge business enterprises. I was reminded by Tesco in an email that I had an unparalleled opportunity to eat ‘low-carbon’ food. Does that mean I haven’t got to burn my toast - or burn it just a little bit?

Another of the sponsors is SodaStream. It is, somehow, comforting to think that even a fizzy drink can be made more environmentally friendly. As the blurb on the Climate Week website says: “…one single SodaStream bottle can save up to 2000 bottles and cans.” You can win one of their marvellous machines in a competition to find the best low carbon recipe. You can enter at www.climateweek.com, but be quick – the competition closes on Sunday.

The issue of food miles remains a significant challenge for all of us, particularly with the massive changes in the way food is produced and marketed in this country. The BBC is currently running s campaign to re-introduce ‘forgotten foods’ onto the nation’s dining tables.

A classic example of a food that has become virtually impossible to make in its traditional form is the Bury black pudding. As a native of that venerable town I well remember the Saturday tradition of buying a freshly-boiled pudding from the market, either while out shopping or, later, on the way to Gigg Lane to watch Colin Bell and Ray Pointer from the Boys' Stand. The thing is that modern regulations make it difficult to use fresh blood, which is what a black pudding is made from, so powdered, dried blood is used. That, of course, is just one more unnecessary process to add to the pudding’s carbon footprint.

If more locally-produced food were made, sold and eaten, the original ingredients could be re-introduced. Of course the black pudding is anathema to vegetarians and those who aver that meat is by its nature a high-carbon food, but it uses parts of the pig that would otherwise be wasted. Maybe there should be a separate category in the Environment Directory for traditional food producers.

Another BBC report concerned the amount of bread that is wasted every day in this country. Apparently people think that a white sliced loaf will ‘go off’ in two days and some even keep bread in the fridge, despite the fact that 5oC is just about the worst temperature to keep bread at. The answer, of course, is to buy less at a time and buy good quality wholemeal bread. Even the supermarket ‘baked-in-store’ loaves are far superior in taste to factory white sliced. My favourite comes from our local Co-op, who do not make enough and are constantly running out. You’d think they’d clock onto that and do something about it – like make more!

CHRIS STOKES

Two recent environment news stories have demonstrated admirably how environmental concerns and economics go together.

In this magazine’s sister publication, Construction National, there is a report from West Dunbartonshire Council of what happened when it fitted vehicle tracking systems to its 380 cars, minibuses, vans, refuse trucks, and road sweepers in 2010. Apart from the fuel savings deriving from not having to redirect vehicles, the council found that changes in driver behaviour resulted in substantial fuel savings – a year after fitting the systems the council reported it had saved around £100,000 in fuel costs. That saving was also reflected, of course, in a commensurate reduction in the council’s carbon footprint as a result of reductions in CO₂ emissions.

As far as I know, no vehicle tracking companies feature in the Environment Directory of this site, but it may not be long before they do.

Even the savings achieved in Dunbartonshire are small beer when it comes to those that have to be made by the NHS – some £30bn over the next few years. According to the Dr David Pencheon, director of its Sustainable Development Unit, a big slice of that could happen through energy saving and other sustainability measures. In the environment news section of this site he is reported as saying that as much as £89m can be saved annually by recycling medicines.

The wastage of medicines is truly staggering, not just in hospitals where a package of drugs is disposed of if not needed by the same patient again, but in the home. Many packs of drugs become surplus to requirements when we get better, thankfully, but even when they are returned to a pharmacy they are simply disposed of. Many powerful pain killers are wasted in this way because of the progressive ‘fine tuning’ possible in pain control. It is also the case with nutrient drinks for people who are temporarily unable to eat, as was the situation in my own family recently following treatment for oral cancer. Could they not be usefully employed in emergency famine situations and following natural (or not-so-natural) disasters?

As Dr Pencheon points out, many of the drugs are manufactured many miles away, so the saving would not just be in materials and energy used to manufacture them, but also the transportation. It has long been recognised that the best way to persuade companies to become more environmentally aware: it’s refreshing to see that the principal has found its way into the public sector.

In an Environment UK blog last month I alluded to the prospect of a drought in the South East as soon as it had stopped snowing and the possible dire consequences of water becoming a commodity. Almost immediately afterwards the BBC was reporting on the resurgence of the idea of a ‘water grid’ to move water around the country like electricity - particularly in the direction of London. Boris was behind it, of course: ever the eye for the main chance, so to speak. He was referring at the time to the fact that in parts of the UK it rains more than it does in others.

The Beeb quoted his Telegraph column: “The rain it raineth on the just and the unjust, says The Bible, but frankly it raineth a lot more in Scotland and Wales than it doth in England.” The question arises, of course, as to how much Boris is prepared to pay for said water from an independent Scotland. Could the sound of the cash register be a key accompaniment to Mr Salmon’s referendum?

However, having just walked past a TV tuned into the BBC’s News channel, I noticed it was chucking it down in London - looked like snow!

Now that it has stopped snowing and the snowman in the middle of the former-garage car park has bidden its final farewell (it was actually vandalised within hours of being constructed, but remained defiantly waving its presence to remind the destroyers of their cruelty), the latest environment news is focusing on the issue of drought. The South East and East of England have been suffering water shortages for some considerable time now, and even in the wet North West the reservoirs are lower than they used to be. That much is visible even in the interminable drizzle.

It puts me in mind of Rhod Gilbert’s famous monologue on climate change on Mock the Week (“I was eight before I realised you could take a kagoule off…in The Bible God made it rain for forty days and forty nights – that’s still the best summer I remember!”), which is just that - a monologue. Rhod had already established his credentials in terms of the environment well before he raged against the dreary wetness that characterises the weather in much of the UK. It’s the same for most of us here in the sodden North – we know climate change is a problem and needs urgent solutions; we also see the irony of holding those views while standing in a puddle.

In fact, we’re a little two-minded when it comes to our attitude to water supply: a look at the Environment Directory on this site will show 12 companies under ‘Water Desalination and Re-use’ and one under ‘Water Conservation’, while there are 17 dealing with flood defences.

Actually, of course, the problems of water shortages here in England, whichever region, pale into insignificance when compared with much of the rest of the world. A map published this week in the environment news section of The Guardian illustrates the way in which the consumption of water (the ‘water footprint’) is often externalised by developed countries at the expense of poorer countries. The map was produced in connection with a study by researchers at the University of Twente in The Netherlands and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA. Thus, in the UK we are a net importer of water via the produce and goods that we import; that is, part of our water footprint lies outside our borders.

Water is a commodity in many places and has the potential to provoke conflict. It’s a sobering thought to take with me as I venture into the afternoon rain.

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.