I wrote this note in 2010.
It is being posted here so I don’t lose it.
Cycling holiday homes
Cycling holiday homes is initially aimed at exploiting a niche market – people that enjoy recreational cycling, the countryside and may have an interest in heritage.
York
The York area is a good location because it has good cycle routes that are part of the national network passing through pleasant areas which are connected to many areas of interest. Places of interest near York on the White Rose Cycle Route, routes 65 and 66 on the national routes, include Benningborough Hall, York Racecourse, the National Rail Museum, York Minster and many other places of historic interest in York City centre itself. York has been designated as a Cycling City from 2008 – 2011 with £3.68m of government funding. Cycling City York ran the second York Festival of Cycling at Rowntree Park recently.
I met John Hutton, Secretary of State for Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform at the launch of the “London Accord”, in the Mansion House. I tackled him about the cancellation of the Carbon Capture and Storage that BP were going to pilot at Peterhead. In 2003, I had been part of a Citizens’ Panel on CCS organised by the Tyndal Centre. Phil Willis MP was the chair of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.
This post was the contents of NoBottles.org.uk (now retired)
Update 27th January 2019:
All plastic that can get into oceans should be biodegradable, including fishing tackle. Yes I’ve watched David Attenborough.
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Plastic better than recycling glass?
6th August, 2009
Recycling bottles – breaking them up, melting them down and making new bottles – does not benefit to the environment much. We start with these questions:
1. How does this footprint of a bottle made from recycled material compare with the footprint of a bottle made from virgin material?
2. How does the recycled bottle footprint compare with other forms of packaging?
Some information on the carbon footprint of bottles can be found at wineenabler . They say
In the U.S., recycled glass accounts for about 25% of all glass on the market. Also, using recycled glass reduces the carbon footprint of the resulting bottle by about 25%.
They also say
you can manufacture and dispose of about 2.7 plastic wine bottles for the same carbon footprint that you could manufacture and recycle 1 glass bottle.
This post was the contents of NoPlanes.org.uk (now retired)
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A 26 year ration
22nd September, 2009
The Green Ration Book says
The average UK citizen creates 11 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide ( CO2e) a year. New UK targets aim to cut this by 80%. Dividing the ration equally between categories “consumables”, “building”, “transport” and “government”, allows 1.5kg per day. – The Green Ration Book
It also calculates the carbon footprint of a return flight to Australia to be over 7 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That is 13 years of your carbon ration for transport. Assuming you want to save half your ration for car, train, taxi and bus transport, that makes the your trip to Australia to be 26 years of your carbon ration for air flights.
NoPlanes.org.uk suspended pending further information
23rd May, 2010
“Attribution of climate forcing to economic sectors” by Nadine Unger et. al. has made us stop to think. It shows that for a few decades, the effect of aircraft flights is to cool the earth before their longer term effects cause global warming.
A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home.
This is among the conclusions of a study by Akifumi Ogino of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and colleagues, which has assessed the effects of beef production on global warming, water acidification and eutrophication, and energy consumption.
EATING one less steak a week is better for the environment than leaving the car in the garage, a new report reveals. The Meat’s Carbon Hoofprint report, compiled by Adelaide experts, compared the greenhouse gas emissions of cattle and vehicles, and found beef was almost four times as damaging to the atmosphere.
The report’s authors, Adelaide University climate change chair Professor Barry Brook and Animal Liberation committee member Geoff Russell, used the example of a family of four eating 4kg of beef a week and driving a two-tonne Ford Territory 200km each week.
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Beef’s footprint 14 times its own weight
26th August, 2009
A study was funded by the UK Government´s Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) on the carbon footprint of beef, tomatoes & etc. The author, Adrian Williams of Cranfield University, developed a computer model to calculate the carbon footprint of beef and some other agricultural products. This finds 1 kg Beef (deadweight) has a carbon footprint equal to 14 kg CO2e
This post was the contents of NoGas.org.uk (now retired)
No gas heating
13th October, 2009
In a speech to the Overseas Development Institute in June, Lord Turner, chair of the Climate Change Committe, said:
…we can pretty much totally decarbonise our electricity generation. UK electricity generation currently puts out approx 550gm of CO2 per KW hour … we believe it’s possible to get to a low of 100g/KW hour by 2030. And 10-20g/ KW hour by 2050.
That’s important not only to take the CO2 out of electricity generation, but once we’ve done that it’s likely we can apply electricity to a wider set of economic activities- largely electrfying the light end of the service transport – cars- and putting electric heating back into our houses, having spent the last 30 years taking it out.
That means removing your gas central heating … and your gas cooker.
Climate change is the most urgent reason for drastically reducing motoring but there are many others. Top of the list is the space they waste. Here’s a blast from 1973:
The problem is that of designing an environment for people, who occupy a few square feet and need tens of square feet to move, which can also accommodate a large number of motor cars, which occupy hundreds of square feet and need thousands of square feet to move. This has consequences for housing design and for urban form. There are also other characteristics of motor cars which damage the local environment so that a large number of them in an urban setting has the effect of encouraging people to spread out spatially in trying to avoid the nuisances of heavy traffic.
Put simply, the choice is between compact no-car Venice and sprawling all-car Los Angeles.
Our state-by-state analysis reveals that because the manufacturing of an electric car causes more greenhouse gas emissions than manufacturing a comparable gasoline-powered car, an electric car must be driven sufficiently long distances using sufficiently low-carbon electricity for it to have lower total lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than the gasoline-fueled car.
They give carbon emissions from the manufacture of different types of car as (converted to metric tonnes CO2e):
Electric Car 12.3 Gas Car 7.4 Hybrid Car 7.1
The UK Climate Change Act of 2008 aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 to approximately 2.5 tonnes CO2e per year. At these estimates the emissions from the manufacture of an electric car are 5 years of this total budget.
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Postscript January 2016: Carbon emissions from driving a car in a year
Tail pipe emissions from the SMMT for new cars in 2015 (including VW?) uprated a bit to 160 gm CO2/km – because published figures only account for measured tail-pipe emissions. They do not include emissions in processing and transporting oil. Average distance per year is taken as 12,700 km
This makes just over 2 tonnes per year or 80% of the 2.5 tonnes per year the Climate Change Act of 2008 is aiming at for 2050.
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Postscript September 2017: Carbon emissions from driving an electric car in Maryland, USA
The Roadmap to Climate-Friendly Cars: 2013, gives the emissions from an all electric car, the State-by-state driving emissions of the Nissan Leaf. In the middle of the table, in the State of Maryland, the all-electric Nissan Leaf causes 133gm of CO2e per kilometre (0.47 gm/mile). Average distance driven in the Maryland per year was 9,474 miles in 2014.
Driving Maryland’s average distance using electricity from Maryland’s electric grid in a Nissan Leaf electric car creates approximately 2.03 tonnes of CO2e.
In some US states grid electricity is much lower in carbon emissions. This is where electricity is supplied by a mixture of wind and solar power, hydroelectricity and nuclear power. Most electricity used in Vermont is from these sources. For this reason The Roadmap could estimate that emissions from driving a Nissan Leaf in Vermont creates less than 5 gm CO2e per kilometre. However, it was still reporting that the carbon emissions in making electric car was 12.3 tonnes CO2e.
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Postscript December 2020: A note from 1971: Highway Robbery
Children playing: St Albans, before the car.
Once upon a time children used to play in the streets. outside their homes, cycle clubs would go out for a spin in the country at the weekend and people would walk around or stop and talk in the city centre streets or their local high street. Now traffic has taken most of the space that was used for these activities. It has in fact, completely taken over the major supply of easily accessible land – the public highway.
It is this gradual and largely unnoticed take over of land, which had perfectly good uses, that has hidden one of the main disadvantages of mass transport by the private motor car, this being the large amounts of space required to support such a mode of travel.
After this land grab, modern town planers are setting aside areas which can act for the displaced activities: On the housing estates they are providing “minor open space”; in the countryside, national parks; in the city, the shopping precinct. But it isn’t quite the same.
Minor open space is often the land left over after the houses and roads have been placed and, because of its self-consiousness, fails to develop the rich activity pattern of the old-fashioned street; national parks are great distances from the town and shopping precincts are expensive, partly because they have to pay dear to replace the land that has been taken over.
What, then, is the true land take for mass private car transport? I know of no really detailed work that has. tried to fully answer this question but, some work has provided material which will help to answer it.
In 1968 the Urban Planning Directorate of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government analysed the amount of land required for the motor car on estates that provided for the separation of cars and pedestrians.
They found, taking the average of eight medium density estates that in providing space for 1.25 cars per dwelling (one car to 3.8 people) the land required. per dwelling was as follows:
Space taken by
Area sq.ft.
% Area
–
Car in motion
380.7
Car at rest
297.0
–
Total car space
677.7
26%
Gardens
679.5
26%
Dwellings
567.0
22%
Minor open space
704.7
27%
Minor open space: play space, footpaths and etc.
So the land on the estates is roughly one part each for houses, gardens, open space• and car space.
There are three main reasons why this land take is even worse than it appears:
Firstly, unlike the land taken for houses or gardens, the car space must be continuously connected and, so presents many barriers to direct pedestrian movement;
Secondly motoring, is a dangerous activity which must not be approached too closely (especially by children);
Thirdly in the schemes studied the density of cars is not as high as it might be (The density of the dwellings was only medium (80 bed spaces per acre) and the level of car ownership that is regarded as saturation point by the Road Research Laboratory is almost twice the average of the schemes studied.)
One of the injustices of present government policy is that it only encourages estates which have facilities for at least one car per dwelling. This leaves non-motorists in an under-privileged situation because they have nowhere to live which is designed to meet their needs
Instead, they must live somewhere where they must share the cost of providing for the motor car and must pay for the roads on the estate, the extra cost of providing mains services and probably even garage. They must also suffer the danger and nuisance caused by the motor ear and must, do without the services generated by pedestrians, such as good public transport.
At his inaugural address at University College, London, Professor Smeed, gave a paper on the problems of Urban Congestion. He gave the following estimate of the area that peak hour commuters need for their cars while they are actually on the road:
Speed in m.p.h.
Effective area of carriageway per car equivalent present in. sq• ft
20
7,250 – 14,500
15
2,250 – 4,500
10
1,030 – 2,100
Road networks are now being extended to maintain (and in some cases increase) the speed of the increasing volume of traffic during the peak hour. This means that each extra peak hour motorist will take at least the following areas of city road for each minute actually on the road.
Speed in m.p.h.
Area per minute on road in sq. ft.
20
121
15
38
10
18
So if roads are built to keep traffic moving at a speed of, say, 15m.p.h. during the peak hour, an extra commuter traveling three miles to work in the city centre will need an extra 450 sq.ft. of road. The commuter will need an extra 250 sq.ft of road for a surface car park or 50 sq.ft. for a multi-storey car park.
The main reason for worrying about these large amounts of land is not that we are desperately short of land in this country, but because the land taken is the most accessible land where our children should be playing and where we should be meeting our neighbours. Let’s make public highway really public again.
This post was the contents of MoreJobs.org.uk (now retired)
More jobs – the easy way
22nd September, 2009
A simple way of creating jobs is to subsidise goods that use lots of labour and tax those that don’t. This increases the use of labour and decreases non-labour factors of production. See for example the proposals for employment friendly VAT proposed by Professor J.K.Swales. This is a combined tax and subsidy scheme which gives a rebate on VAT for each person employed. He says
… governments are generally concerned about the overall level of taxation within the economy. However, the type of integrated subsidy and tax scheme that we investigate in the simulations could, in principle, be operated as a uniform tax scheme. That is to say, the change in the firm’s tax bill could be calculated as the net difference between the additional VAT and the per capita subsidy. In so far as the scheme increased total employment, and thereby reduced payments of unemployment benefit, it would be associated with a reduction in the required overall tax take. That is to say, the introduction of the new tax scheme would increase employment and reduce taxation.
This post was the contents of NoHighBuildings.org.uk (now retired)
Now renamed No More High Buildings
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13th October, 2009
Embodied carbon ignored
The quantity of greenhouse gasses released as a result of building construction – the embodied carbon in buildings — is usually ignored. But, to their credit, it was calculated for BedZED by one of the project initiators, Bioregional. They say:
This means a 100m2 flat in BedZED has embodied carbon of 67.5 tonnes CO2. Compare this to carbon rations suggested in the GreenRationBook :
The average UK citizen creates 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) a year. New UK targets aim to cut this by 80%. Dividing the ration equally between categories “consumables”, “building”, “transport” and “government”, allows 1.5kg per day.
This argument gives a ration for building of 500kg CO2e per person per year. For two people living in an average-sized 3-bedroomed flat, the 67.5 tonnes CO2e is 67.5 years of their building ration. That’s before the flat is heated, the fridge switched on and the impact of all the other necessary buildings (shops, offices schools etc) are considered.
“We had to undertake role play etc in order to supposedly help us on our way back to work … where we had to stand up and tell the group what kind of job we were looking for … I took a paracetamol to numb my panic .”
Tories cross a “bridge too far” for 1 million working poor
“…we will be working actively with 1 million more claimants who are in work—that is 1 million working claimants who have not been supported to date.”
“…individuals on universal credit who earn less than £12,000 per year on average and who can earn more…”
.
“These were traditionally low-earning tax credit claimants some of those activities could be mandatory, specifically where they offer claimants a strong opportunity to increase their salaries.”
If you earn less than the minimum income floor in any month, Universal Credit will not bridge that gap. This will encourage you to grow your business and make sure it can support you.
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