February 2008

London mayor Ken Livingstone was never going to get an easy ride over his planned changes to the congestion charge, and Porsche's threat of a legal challenge is perhaps no big surprise. Famed for its fast, sleek, inefficient cars, it claims the new £25-a-day charge on gas guzzlers is "unfair and disproportionate".

As well as the promised judicial review, the company has started a petition for the Jeremy Clarksons of this world to voice their opposition to Ken's plan. "We know that huge numbers of people in London and across the rest of the country support our case," they claim. "They agree with us that it would be bad for London - that it is unfair and sends the wrong message about what sort of a city London is whilst having no meaningful benefit on the environment."

The end of the Heathrow stitch up consultation is nigh, so here's another quick reminder that, on Monday, MPs, activists, authors, and, well, all sorts of people opposing Heathrow expansion are holding a mass rally and filling Central Hall in Westminster.

The week's best green stuff on the web, just in time for your afternoon tea and cake break:

• As the anaerobic digester plotline gathers pace on The Archers, the BBC website provides a handy guide for biogas fans.
• Oh, and in last week's web poll on The Archers website, 75.1 per cent said yes, Ruth and David were wise to be involved with the anaerobic digester. (That's everything from Ambridge, I promise. For now, at least.)
• But more from the BBC: World on the Move employs Google Maps in a rather funky way to track great animal migrations across the globe.
• Climate change is now a fashion as well as an environmental phenomenon because, look, Diesel have a new campaign with the tagline 'Global warming ready'. And here's the video. Tongue-in-cheek or dispicable trivialisation? Discuss. (Thanks again to Osocio for the tip.)
• And a plug for Action Aid's excellent Who Pays? campaign, getting regulations to make sure supermarkets don't exploit workers in developing countries. Watch mine and then make your own.
• Finally, the real answer to global warming.

My carbon footprint according to Defra

As I've been winding down my experiments with carbon calculators, I've been noticing more and more just how variable they can be. The results they spit out fluctuate wildly but as they all ask slightly different questions, that's not surprising. What surprises me are the differences between what they claim the CO2 emissions of your average Briton are, and if your trying to figure out whether you're a relatively big emitter or a teeny tiny one, that can be something of a problem.

There's a great opinion piece in today's Independent, in which Johann Hari argues that leaving the fate of planet to consumer choice and voluntary action isn't going to work. His words echo those of George Monbiot and Mark Lynas, and he looks to government to force us all to use less stuff:

In reality, dispersed consumer choices are not going to keep the climate this side of a disastrous temperature rise. The only way that can ever happen is by governments legislating to force us all – green and anti-green – to shift towards cleaner behaviour. Just as the government in the Second World War did not ask people to eat less voluntarily, governments today cannot ask us to burn fewer greenhouse gases voluntarily.

An iceberg made of hard, dense ice reflects late evening light
© Greenpeace/Cobbing

Oooh, this is gorgeous. I know some of Nick Cobbing's photographs pretty well (he's done a fair bit of work for Greenpeace in the past) but, on the advice of our picture editor, I went to have a nose around his website where he's organised some of his photos into stories.

Ken Livingstone wants it for London, Hilary Benn is giving money to it and Adam and Debbie are bringing it to Ambridge. After a couple of millennia in the sidelines, anaerobic digestion has finally hit the big time (well, The Archers, anyway) - which is why we've chosen it for this second edition of the Weekly Geek.

Every year, we bury thousands of tonnes of waste food in landfill sites around the UK. We produce almost one and a half million tonnes of sewage a year (don't do the maths - it's disturbing), which is mostly spread on land, incinerated or buried as landfill. And we produce enormous amounts of agricultural waste on our farms. All of this waste breaks down to release greenhouse gases as it decomposes.

The Olympic Energy Centre

The Olympic Delivery Authority has long said it wants the London Olympic games in 2012 "to be the first sustainable Games".

Well, today it's unveiled a design for its energy centre - complete with a combined cooling, heat and power (CCHP) plant fuelled by sustainable biomass (woodchip) and natural gas.