Are car manufacturers, or more to the point the copywriters who write their adverts, finally getting the message about fuel economy and how important a selling point it should be? With petrol prices running at record highs, and panic at the pumps only a union leader’s ultimatum (or Cabinet minister’s misdirected warning) away, you might… Continue reading
Browsing Category Environment Blog
Is this the world’s greenest building?
There are several examples of office buildings, either under construction or complete, with their own power-generating plants, built in such an energy-efficient way that they will send more power back to the electricuty grid than they consume. The flamboyant (at least in its colourful cladding) Pixel Building in Melbourne, Australia, would appear to be the… Continue reading →
Sir David Attenborough visits Easter Island
In 1999 Sir David Attenborough visited Easter Island, but not for the obvious reasons of observing wildlife. The film he completed there was The Lost Gods of Easter Island, shown in 2000. I was fortunate enough to join him on the most remote inhabited island on earth. I write about that visit, based on my… Continue reading →
Students reject bottled water on campus
Ordinary voters rarely get the opportunity to vote for change. Lifestyle-altering decisions such as the ban on smoking across the UK, and the compulsory charge for plastic bags in Wales (October 2011) are taken by governments without reference to the electorate. The best we can do is to vote for a party with a radical… Continue reading →
“Do you want sustainability with that?” – How a humble chippie went green
While we wait for governments and big business to take the necessary big initiatives on climate change and sustainability that are really going to move us forward in this worrying area, some small businesses are just getting on with it. Add them all up, and the significance of these individual actions is still tiny…. Continue reading →
Building underway on world’s first high-rise (17 floor) greenhouse in a city
At this moment our fridge, fruit bowl and vegetable basket contains the produce of many nations. Plenty of healthy eating grown (mainly) under plastic in southern Spain and shipped to the UK in lorries. Other produce comes from even further afield, some of it even by air. What if much of that food could be… Continue reading →