Jock's Place - What a difference the Green Party makes! - Comments

Green Fingers

Paulus — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:52:47 +0000

It is with trepidation that I refer you to my review of Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg aka the Sceptical Environmentalist.

I am unconvinced by environmentalist rhetoric because it smacks of political correctness and I was keen to see what Lomborg had to say.

I interpret his message as "more haste less speed." We don't know enough about the problem to impose a solution that is both expensive and ineffective - namely carbon reduction. We have time to seek better solutions and in the mean to we should spend our resources dealing with problems which can be solved much more cheaply to make life better for people now e.g. malaria and hiv/aids programmes.

The Oxford/bike and fly effect, which you point, to is very apposite. High carbon taxes will make the lives of the poor more wretched. The rich will pay lip service, pay the tax and nothing will be achieved.

Spend much more money on research to find better solutions. For more look here: http://www.thinkhard.org/2007/10/kyoto-hot-air-a.html

I've got my tin hat on.

Green Fingers

Paulus — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:51:57 +0000

It is with trepidation that I refer you to my review of Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg aka the Sceptical Environmentalist.

I am unconvinced by environmentalist rhetoric because it smacks of political correctness and I was keen to see what Lomborg had to say.

Spend much more money on research to find better solutions. For more look here: http://www.thinkhard.org/2007/10/kyoto-hot-air-a.html

I've got my tin hat on.

A good posting Jock - very

Laura King — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:01:19 +0000

A good posting Jock - very little I could disagree with. In fact I can't think of anything!

There might be lots of cyclists in Oxford, but they are cyclists who tend to like to fly a lot and enjoy gourmet food! (not counting all the tourists and London commuters who swell their ranks)

Personally I think greenness won't really kick in until it is admitted that consumerism is the main problem - and what government in its right mind is going to round on consumerism and market forces being allowed to hold sway? We have to face economic seachange in order to address our rampant consumerism when it is so frenziedly and unrelentingly in our faces 24/7, offering new 'must-haves' by the thousand each week.

And the real 'greenness' is about saving and not wasting things rather than actual re-cycling - not such a sexy concept as the new wave of designer jute bags branded with every corporate logo and anything else that can be marketted as 'green' - or rather greener than its creation when people could just use their old shopping bags until worn out and most are too small to be of use anyway!

Heh! I was busy expanding

Jock — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:17:45 +0000

Heh! I was busy expanding my post while you were replying to it! I think I fleshed out some of what you were thinking.

Logically then it must be

Geoffrey Payne — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:01:03 +0000

Logically then it must be despite of the Green party rather than because of it.
Likewise for the Lib Dems, who also have a large share of the vote in Oxford.
It must be the "Tory Twins"; New Labour and the Conservatives.

What a difference the Green Party makes!

Jock — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:18:47 +0000

You'd have thought that a city in which the Green Party regularly polls up to 20% of the vote, holds a quarter of the county council seats and a sixth of the city council seats (and the latter in a minority administration to boot where their vote in council can effectively make or break a policy) and where they have been in a joint administration even, would be one of the most sustainable cities in the country.

You'd be wrong:

OXFORD people are among the greediest in the country in consuming the Earth's resources, according to a new league table.

A report by the Worldwide Fund for Nature ranked the 60 cities in England, Scotland and Wales by their residents' average ecological footprints - and discovered each Oxford person consumes more than three times the resources the planet can sustain.

It used data from local authorities to calculate the area each city's residents needed for food, energy and resources and to absorb waste and pollution.

Oxford ranked joint 55th out of the 60 cities, with its residents having among the five largest footprints for housing, consumer items and private services.

I'm sure they would tell us it's all because we don't carry out enough of their policies. My hunch is that in fact voting Green is for most people a substitute for taking personal action. That voting Green is "doing my bit for the environment".

I suspect Oxford's bad showing is nothing to do with local politics, but partly that in the big picture we are a city with a global reach. That we probably have a greater proportion of residents who are visiting from overseas and travel back regularly - at university vacations and so on - certainly judging by the success of the multitude of Heathrow & Gatwick bus services. That we are a magnet for London commuters so have a higher proportion than other cities of people who commute 120 miles a day. And that the city ballooned in the rapid growth of the motor industry resulting in hundreds of acres of relatively inefficient inter-war housing making up the bulk of our built environment.

These are structural issues that are too big for what is seen often as a crusty, crypto-communist, community politics organisation to address purely locally. It needs real devolution of power that can only be granted by the Westminster players so we can have real control of our own development as a city, changes to the way we tax people for environmentally damaging habits and so on.

One thing the Greens could do locally, as some have in the past with the Oxfordshire Land Value Tax study, is to support my calls for Oxford to be allowed to trial LVT as a replacement for the Council Tax, city wide - see if we can't persuade a majority of the city council and city representative county councillors to support such a move. That's part of the bigger picture that we can try to address, and it's their party policy. Efficient use of land is key to reducing our footprint, to getting people able to commute less, to use more local suppliers where possible, to remodel the city with an efficient built environment and so on.