A Climate of Climate Change

When I was a child I remember being scared rigid by children's encyclopedias warning me there would be no oil, coal or gas in 20 years time. Fossils were finite, apparently, and we greedy humans were to blame by using them all up.
But how will we live? I used to wonder.

Fast forward more than 30 years later - and guess what? We are still using oil, gas (and imported) coal. We have just sold our electricity off to the French, Spanish and Germans and closed our coal mines down in favour of cheaper (imported) coal.
So much for national energy and food security - once considered so vital to our country by 'the experts' - all of which now appears to have gone out the window.

Today's children are being similarly scared that the whole world is running out of everything and somehow they are to blame.

I consider this monstrously unfair, particularly when they have so many more pressures to contend with than my generation of children - bullying via social media for example, a 50% family split rate, the thought that they may never own their own home, among others.

Now children are being encouraged to skip school to take part in climate change protests.
Is anyone telling them the truth though?
Actually kids, yes, the world is in a mess, but it's not your fault.
What you can do to help though is lobby your government to ban cheap imports and anything which is not repairable or recyclable. You can take a stand against a throwaway society which encourages you to over-consume, unchecked and largely unregulated.

It is then just a matter of being sensible in your own homes.Switch it off if you're not using it, have 4-minute showers, wear a jumper before you put the heating up, boycott single-season fashions.  Think about the number of flights your family takes, walk and cycle as much as possible, etc etc. If you have a garden, cultivate it for the bees and butterflies, grow your own organic food and plant a tree or two if space permits. And don't upgrade your devices just because you can. Make them last as long as possible.

If every family embraced simple commonsense measures to consider the environment, what an instantly much better world it would be. None of us need to have a complicated understanding of environmental issues. We just need to do our bit and being sensible is about the best thing anyone can do. My grandparents didn't know the meaning of the world environmentalism but were greener than anyone I know - purely out of economic necessity and scarcity - see poem I wrote about them here. People can be green by simply not wasting stuff is a message I think is often lost these days.

And yes, we do need to be more responsible in terms of overpopulation - to prevent it in future - not to penalise those already here. Ensure the entire world has access to free contraception for starters. Ban free fertility treatment. Give people a tax break for remaining child-free or adopting a child who needs a good home. Economic incentives are a proven mass behavioural influencer.

We also need to beware of greenwash and unnecessary fear mongering. This doesn't help anyone, particularly if youngsters end up so paralysed by fear, they become medicated or turn to addictions rather than growing into fully functioning members of society ready to do something genuinely useful with their sense of social responsibility, their 'wokeness'.

Confessions of a Former Green

As the child of vegan, tree-hugging, organic-gardening atheists long before it was fashionable, let alone de rigueur, I had little choice but to grow up believing that green was good.

Nightmares about overpopulation even drove me to the GP at 18 and again at 23 to request sterilisation. On both occasions I was turned down on the grounds that I was 'too young' and would be 'bound to change my mind later'.  Last week I heard on the radio that 20 years later young women like me are still being turned away from their GPs on the same grounds, no matter that it is apparently possible for a four-year old to receive trans-gender treatment on the NHS these days and over a decade before reaching the age of consent (is this even legal?) who is clearly not deemed 'too young' to know his/her own mind, let alone required to go through the myriad phases, moods and experiments of a standard-issue child, before finally deciding who and what they are.

But to get back to the point, scared rigid by the oft-repeated threat in children's encyclopaedias that 'the world's oil supply is predicted to run out in 20 years' - a rolling '20 years' in hindsight it would seem, I was 100% wholeheartedly in favour of being green and lived frugally and carefully for years, doing my bit to recycle every jar, every piece of string. purchasing very few new clothes, until I realised my behaviour was sailing dangerously close to my parents' joint hoarding habit which meant we hadn't had friends to visit since 1981, and taught myself the reverse joys of throwing away 'that might come in handy one day'.

As I grew older, it dawned on me that my efforts were completely eclipsed by even truer greens in the family - my grandparents - to whom all such ideology was anathema. Childhood poverty the Depression and wartime rationing had dictated their green credentials.

I penned the first green policy of several early workplaces on my CV, before such things as Green Officers and even Global Warming (now Carbon Reduction) Managers came about, let alone a whole 'industry' of green experts, whose job it seems is to write impenetrable and interminable reports to help each company satisfy various industry benchmark criteria which they have created. Even Pest controllers now market themselves as 'Environmental Services', no matter that most of their activities are the opposite of harm-free when strong poisons and chemicals are deployed.

My green policy documents included such common sense tips as 'only fill the kettle with the amount of water you need' or 'swap your power shower head for a normal shower head' or 'Wait until you have a full load before using washing machine and program on economy cycle'. I pick up other people's nowadays and scarcely understand the jargon contained within. As if in sympathy, power bills have also become unreadable so we cannot tell what we use and what it costs any more.

Bit by bit, my commitment to greenness was being chipped away, not least when an anti-car activist of my acquaintance was espied taking driving lessons!

Now I don't know if global warming is true or not. We've had a few ice ages when no one was apparently around to cause them after all. And new motorway banks always seem to sprout up within weeks of the rock blasting, thus proving some kind of natural resilience. This doesn't mean I am a climate change denier, just an independent. Especially since I have noticed all the green taxes being levied by various governments make it somewhat expedient to carry on promoting that the world is in trouble. Well it may or may not be, but the world's management does not seem to be taking it seriously enough if so. Consumerism and built-in obsolescence is being allowed to continue unabated for starters. Countries are allowed to use carbon-offsetting to carry on polluting! For all our green pretensions we have never lived in a more materialistic or more throwaway age. Even buildings which used to last at least 100 years are constantly replaced with some in central London being bulldozed and rebuilt on average every 5 years. We have never lived in an age of greater global population. The list goes on of why it's hard to take the green thing wholly seriously for all the pious proseltyzing on the subject.

But to get back to basics, of course saving things and not wasting them is a good idea and absolutely fits into the 'good ideas box'. We should value earth's resources more than we do and not take them for granted. We should think of future generations and the type of world we want them to inherit (ie one careful
owner, though it may be a bit late for that). We should strive to be reasonably
minimalist when it comes to too many possessions, unless of special sentimental value, in which case they are generally recycled from previous generations anyway. This is the type of brass tacks greenness I understand.

I am not and never could be an extreme green who advocates 'depopulation'.
And what is that anyway? I think they should explain themselves. To 'depopulate' suggests some sort of fascistic activity with sinister overtones once human beings are already born and possessed of human rights. Free contraception, properly distributed and encouraged around the world, and I'm on board!

As for me, my main personal contributions to greenness have been lifelong veganism (unless you count the air miles of my mangos and spirulina), minimal personal flights (around 2 a year), oh, and no ankle biters, despite the unhelpfulness of my GP.

Who will buy my luvverly useless mobile?

I saw this on a noticeboard the other day and was immediately suspicious when I recalled the advice given to me by 3 (ie if your phone does not work, why not sell the rest of your contract to a friend or relation?). I can imagine this desperate 3 mobile owner will be rapidly disowned by all, in addition to evidently having been dis-phoned by 3! Distressingly I realised I do not possess one single friend or relation I hate enough to sell my contract to and the only selling points I can think of to tempt anyone else to invest in a phone that cuts out at every opportunity if it rings at all is 'reduces mobile bills - and brain tumours'
Amusingly the uselessness of 3 coverage even cropped up as a comedy topic on the Alan Carr show the other day! Talking of which do please sign my online petition No coverage? No contract! against mobile phone companies committing this superhighway robbery of making customers pay for their entire contract length despite getting no signal! And outrageously this practice is currently entirely legal. I've also been lobbying BBC's Watchdog into an anti mobile-phone company abuse campaign too. What other company is allowed to charge for a service they cannot provide, after all?

Other news: My local radio station is currently running a series of 'Happy Scrappy!' ads on how if your car is over 10 years old and you have owned it for over a year, you can trade it in for scrap against a £3k discount on a new car. How green, I thought, appalled, giving my little 11 year old racing red Felicia a reassuring tap. Googling the scheme, apparently it is all about boosting the flaccid car industry rather than the Government honouring its own hollow green rhetoric, but whose car industry, since the vast majority of cars are no longer British-made?

Oh, and I have a new job, hence have been away from the blogosphere for a while, learning the ropes. Things going ok so far and my new colleagues seem nice. It is certainly a relief to have got something to pay the bills in the middle of a recession anyway (albeit after a great deal of trying). It's still in the educational sector, but since this blog is not meant to be about work...

Creative things have kind of been on the back burner a bit lately anyway, not to mention blogging, although I did enjoy a most congenial evening with my fellow Oxford writers at Mostly Books where we led a round table discussion on how we achieved our short story book success and options for new authors generally, to a packed house. Furthermore we seemed to have inspired the birth of a new writer's group in Abingdon, which is nice! Mark was the sort of friendly, enthusiastic, switched-on independent bookshop owner who gladdens the heart and really ought to be cloned. He had thought of everything, not least choosing suitably shaped premises in which to host events in the first place. Anyone who despairs of the future of independent bookselling ought to go and see what he is trying to achieve at his fine establishment, not to mention all his 'outreach work' organising author and reader events at festivals and schools as well as in his shop.

On a visit to Peterborough at the weekend, I was surprised at how seriously they seem to be taking the swine flu outbreak











And how blatantly they celebrate their medieaval scandals...
















En route to Peterborough we witnessed a smouldering burned out lorry and several burned out mangled lumps of metal which only hours before had presumably been cars on the closed opposite lane of the A14 attended by a plethora of emergency vehicles. Not a sausage on the news that night though, or to be found on the internet. Has anyone else noticed this disturbing trend of unreported major happenings? A couple of years ago my former line manager witnessed a young boy run out to be killed by a car on the ringroad from the bus he was travelling in, but it too never reached the news that night or the newspapers next day.

And on that cheerful note, I look forward to catching up with you all in the next few days. It seems a long time.

Suicide and Saving

A Re-cycling Appeal to ‘Jumpers’

Suicide is gainless
Unimaginative, clichéd, brainless.
Now you may say it's in bad taste
To question why this bloody waste
Of humanity
Is at worst termed 'cowardly'
Or criticise the wretched whose idea of glory
Is to incur commuter curses for train delay.
But to anyone who wants to die I say
Offer yourself to Cancer Research today!
Turn feeling useless into being useful
Leave a legacy above the miserable
Ensure your life wasn't late-aborted in vain
If the Buddhists are right, you’ll only have to do it all again
And your DNA is a much closer match
Than that of the non-consenting lab rat.
So think of humanity and maybe we'll think of you
Commemorate you with a bit of a ‘do’
Attended by all the lives you’ve saved
Who’ll drink to your life beyond the grave

© LS King 2008

But suicide for artistic immortality/book sales is fine of course! ;-)

Happy National Live-Near-To-Work Day!

My contribution to the petrol crisis is to introduce National Live-Near-To-Work Day on the basis that if work is more than an hours' commute, either your workplace is in the wrong place or your house is.

And while we're about it why can't we stick a few more carriages on all our (re-nationalised) trains, re-open the axed stations and reinstate the school bus system to minimise traffic? If the school bus was good enough for me, why isn't it good enough for today's precious little darlings?

Furthermore let's encourage every city and town to source as many of its goods and services locally as possible. It is ludicrous to have legions of salesmen and contractors chugging up and down the country farting fumes to offer services nationwide that could be provided more locally, greenly, and you would have thought cheaply, supporting their local economy into the bargain, (unless for extremely specialised products and services). Everyone and their dog for example sells office furniture and nearly all of it looks the same - why would anyone need to go too far afield for it?

And many of our continental cousins already have shared car lanes to encourage car sharing in the speediest most desirable lane of the highway - where are ours?
They also have more freight trains removing unnecessary haulage trucks off the roads. Where are ours?

Far from being an environmental purist, I rather enjoy driving, but I do feel we rely on our cars way too much and could try harder to reduce our number of car journeys. Being organised and getting as many errands done as possible on each journey also saves an amount of petrol I find.

The one positive aspect about being broke in the 'credit crunch' is at least it may force us to economise, automatically becoming greener and wasting less on every level, much though saving stuff and not consuming does not equate to 'sexy environmentalism' entailing the purchase of inflated eco-branded products.

My consultancy invoice is in the post Mr Brown! I think you'll find it's a fraction of what these overpriced transport infrastructure and economist fatcats charge!

*By the way I hereby decree this day a National Bank Holiday for househunting - for those who live an unsustainable distance from work!

A typical British railway line v a typical British road

Incandescent!

Evidently deciding to turn a blind eye to the legion of householders who have filled their homes with banks of dichroic downlighters, their gardens with further effect lighting and their hot-tubs with yet further effect lighting, the British government is seeking to outlaw the sale of everyday lightbulbs to we Brits. As of the end of 2008, it will become virtually impossible to buy a non-eco lightbulb from any supermarket or DIY store.

A good idea you might think. Except that in many cases, aside from the 5 x extra cost-per-bulb, consumers still have to make a choice between 'long-life' or 'low-energy' in many cases, and the manufacturer's built-in obsolescence factor to keep us all buying bulbs and commestibles (of all kinds) has not been phased out!

Did I mention that eco-bulbs can end up using MORE energy than ordinary bulbs if not turned on and off with less frequency than Edison bulbs? This is due to the fact they take so much power to power up, aka the annoying process of their light growing from very dim to still-not-as-bright-as-a-proper-bulb when you switch them on. Hence if householders don't change their habits as well, eco-bulbs are useless! And now eco-bulbs have been linked to health problems for those with photo-sensitivity, skin diseases and epileptic problems. Which begs the question, will 'daylight' bulbs for the depressed also be banned so soon after their invention, or will the depressed have to obtain their 'daylight' bulbs on doctor's prescription?

Aesthetically, although they are getting better, eco-bulbs also give off the most awful harsh light making everyone's skin appear yellowy-grey, a bit like the old fluorescent tubes used to. Not exactly what you'd wish to find in theatres, restaurants or even your own living room! And working in a historic building environment as I do, I cringe to see great big ugly eco-bulbs jammed into a beautiful bronze chandelier, built for delicate flame-effect candle bulbs.

Lighting industry, you'll have to do better than this to convert me!

Meantime I'll be stocking up on proper bulbs to last the rest of my life and doing that funky eco thing I do, which also aids my electricity bill, ie turning them off when not using them!

Unfairly-Slaved Fashions - Enough To Make You Green?

For some while now I've been perturbed by the strange dichotomy that while we Brits will happily pay through the nose for a beverage in order to ensure it is fairly-traded and the café staff paid a living wage, ten minutes later will see a sizeable number of us browsing the likes of Primark/New Look/Bon Marche gleefully marvelling at the wonders of cheerful bargain print dresses for £6 - doubtless made by blind one-armed Guatamalan lesbian five-year olds on 3 quetzals a day.

I mean, does no one make the correlation? Does no one idly wonder how these amazing 'bargains' could possibly be possible without some kind of major exploitation going on at the other end of the supply chain, every bit as unconscienable as squeezing third world farmers of their due?

Let's break down the likely maths of a £6 dress.
First-off the raw material, then; -
Someone has to spin it into yarn, someone has to weave it, someone has to print/dye it, someone has to cut it, someone has to sew it, someone has to pack it, someone has to transport it (not usually less than halfway across the world), someone has to warehouse it, someone has to pay import duty on it, someone might then wholesale it, then the retailer buys it, then further 'distribution' transport to the shops before it can finally go on sale.
In short at least 13 processes required for a £6 garment, and that's before accounting for any retail PROFIT on the dress. As virtually no items are sold for less than 100% mark up of the production costs at least, thus a £6 dress has to pass through 13 pairs of hands expending no more £3 of its final cost. Of that £3 approximately 45p per process then, to be broken down between master and slave of each process (hmm, I wonder who gets what percentage there)

Are you as horrified as I am yet? As for the £4 shirt or the £5 under-8's school uniform, let's not even go there!

As if all this weren't bad enough the single-season throwaway fashion industry makes a complete mockery of any pretensions to earth-saving greenness we may kid ourselves about.

As someone who's always made a point of buying reasonable quality clothes to last a good five years (preferring to possess a few good clothes rather than a wardrobe full of rubbish) and who prided herself on buying them from what she thought were reputable outlets such as Next, Gap, Long Tall Sally etc, I find in the last fortnight that I have no room for the smugness I thought was mine as I read to my disgust that the likes of Next and Gap (and even M&S) are also now exploiting the Third World just as badly - only with an obviously far larger mark-up than the chains who brag blatantly (but not openly) of their exploitation via their prices.

So where does the clothes shopper who wishes to be ethical (but isn't uber-wealthy by any stretch of the imagination) go from here? And could this help...? Clean Up Fashion

Dispiriting though, that having been led to believe this whole sweatshop business had been stamped down in the 90's, it bounces back in the naughties stronger than ever.

And while we're on the subject of exploitation, should we be asking if punters insist on fairly slave-traded prostitutes in our red light districts?

On a lighter note, here's my favourite story about the consumer who tried to take advantage of Nike's offer several years ago to have his new Nike trainers embroidered with a slogan free of charge! He chose the word 'Sweatshop' and you may recall, became internet-famous for a while when his fascinating e-mail exchange with Nike went global.

Taking the Nike