environment

Would someone give me a job developing ideas for the future. Here's another one I prepared earlier:

It seems that the transmission loss problem is a little less daunting using High Voltage Direct Current - I work out that southern Morocco to London would involve about a 7% transmission loss in a more or less straight line over land. Sounds like it has potential to me.

I hate the G8, there's no doubt. I find the whole idea a nauseating display of mankind's folly that a few people with power can do more or less anything, from manipulating the world's climate to holding in their grasp the lives of billions whose lot in life those leaders of the industrialised nations can barely comprehend, let alone decree how to change.

It epitomizes to me why nation states are vile, unnatural divisions of humanity and the planet which, frankly, seem to have more to do with protecting the wealth of the few and patronizing the poverty of the many on this earth. Their leaders pose, Atlas-like, for photo-calls after their vacuous pronouncements, like some cabal of gallactic princelings in some dystopian Sci-Fi vision of a future inter-stellar imperial court.

Yet I'm no crusty protester you'll find scaling fences at Gleneagles or taking a bullet in Genoa complaining that these neo-cons and neo-liberals want to sell our world to the most hated capitalist profiteer. Oh no. Business, amongst other examples of voluntary human co-operation, has a huge part to play in addressing the needs of everyone on the planet. If only it could all be carried out on a billiard-table-level playing field.

And this is the greatest power these eight chattering onanists have - they could, if they chose, level that playing field tomorrow, or at least leave Japan this week having agreed to do so. But they don't want that, do they. because they also represent the businesses already raping the planet and its people by dint of playing on a skewed field.

They make me puke when I think of them, quite literally. I am nauseous writing this to be honest. I do not believe there are eight people on the planet, in fact not 2008 nor yet even 200,000,008 endowed with the wisdom of gods and strength of titans who could do any better at securing the future of this planet than the possibility oif billions of us being able to communicate and co-operate directly among ourselves.

At the top of my front page you will find what must be one of my favourite quotes from any politician, in this case the truly radical, Richard Cobden:

"Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less." 150 years later, like infants only learning to crawl, we still rely on those protectionist, egotistical, smugly self-important governments despite the evidence that they cannot and will not deliver on their promises.

Whilst I certainly do not agree with all their policies, I find the idea of SimPol, in which we use modern communications technology to get ordinary people throughout the world, in diverse and distant countries, to voice together our aspirations and make those same sort of global changes on a consensual and co-operative basis.

Y I H8 G8.

I live next door to Headington Hill Park in Oxford, which I think is the nicest park in the city, laid out as it was a century and a half ago now by the Morrell family as part of the parkland setting for Headington Hill Hall, which is now occupied by my employers at Oxford Brookes University. The park was split from the hall grounds some decades ago before the Hall was rented to Robert Maxwell to house his family (the "best council house in Britain" he apparently used to say) and has been managed by the city council ever since.

For a couple of weeks now there has been tree felling going on in all the city's parks as part of a biennial survey of trees that might be getting sick or dangerous. Anyway, I went round the park carefully checking all those with red crosses on, which I assumed were the ones that were going to be taken out and was quite sanguine about it - about a dozen out of several hundred trees in the park and all had either been obviously damaged in last year's heavy storms that felled on in our grounds next door or were clearly lifeless.

However on our daily lunchtime walk I was appalled to see this:

The second most interesting chestnut tree in the park has been hacked around - I don't know yet whether it is actually pollarded (can you do that to something as slow growing as a chestnut?) or in the penultimate stage of being removed completely. But I'm bloody fuming. I am sure there was no red cross on it. A few weeks ago they did cut off one of the most precarious looking branches (but no worse than some other beautiful chestnuts nearby) and whilst I was annoyed by that I thought the pain was all over for this majestic example.

Here's the best photo I have of it from last year.

And in case you are interested, here's one of the one I think is the most interesting tree, possibly that I've ever seen, but certainly in the park.

I have to say, whilst I initially dismissed the notion that trees were being cut down specifically to provide benching for the "promenade" production of Midsummer-night's Dream that's going on in the park this summer, clearly the few trees with Xs on previously would not have been enough to provide the amount of seating space they needed. I am now suspicious that might be the case. If so, it's gross. Who on earth would imagine it would be a good idea to cut down trees to assist a performance of probably the greatest drama set in a magic wood?

A friend, and former council colleague then defector, some of you will know who I mean but I won't name him, got the news early this week that his mother, in Glasgow, had been taken into hospital having been lain at home for the best part of a month not feeling well but doing little about it. Anyway, without going into too many details said friend is not really working full time at the moment and not claiming benefit - because of the irregular work he does for the local TA and ACF. THis is about enough to keep him in bed and board but without anything left over for "shocks" like having to travel to Glasgow from Oxford in a hurry.

Last night I booked him a train ticket for next Wednesday after his next ACF session, paid for with my debit card, and to be collected at Oxford station. At that far off it was £95 return. But this morning he got a call to say she might not last the weekend so we had to try and make some rearrangements for today. So first, trying to cancel the original ticket I found it wasn't possible online because it was an overnight service and had a reservation automatically applied. The cancellation has cost me a tenner as well. Then looking for a new ticket for today we concluded the only deal was to take a standard single, which was itself £85 (because he did not know precisely now when he was going to come back and so an open return was going to be pretty expensive.

Still, again, since I was the one booking it, I had to accompany him to the station to collect the ticket so that I could insert my debit card. And we had to wait for two hours to be able to collect it after the booking was made. So, getting to the station too early to be out before the time limit on the short stay car park I had to park in the long stay. The fee is £4.50 if you use something called "RingGo" and £6.00 if you only have cash. The process of paying via RingGo was quite stressfulm even for a techie like me, requiring some code off the platform (so I was lucky the man let me, the non-passenger, onto the platform to get the code which changes every hour. The instructions on how to pay seemed only to be back at the car park so having collected that code number I had to return to find out how to do it and then go through a most complicated automated system which has now, with no specific authority from me, got my mobile number linked to my car registration number. There was nobody at the car park checking, and no ticket either for the car window or the exit from the car park, so I presume it is monitored by ANPR.

So, it seems that if you are not very well off, don't have a credit or debit card, and need to travel quite quickly, you must be faced with a ticket that would be about 50% higher than even the extortionate "supasava" online and 50% extra on the car park. And this is supposed to be encouraging use of public transport? What a joke!

He texted me after about ten minutes on the train to say that it was like sardines in a tin.

And all that for ninety quid and it would take eight hours if everything went smoothly. I know all about the fixed, annual costs of driving, like my tax and so on, and actually I don't do much mileage a year anyway, so driving up there would have been cheaper at the point of use (I would have got there on two tanks at the most and with two of us in the car that would have been less than half the train price) and helped me justify my annual fixed costs in any case. And when I went looking for a plane ticket for him yesteray I gave up because I could not find a single ticket under £93.

Bonkers. Bonkers and discriminatory. Oh, and why on earth do two type of first class ticket vary by as much as £200 quid for the same (single!) journey - one was £250 or something and another £450. Just what is that about?

First, let me welcome all the many new visitors who have been reading my blog, thanks to the free publicity of my Labour opponent's latest leaflet!

In contrast, I and the Lib Dem campaign across the city are focussing on the issues on which the city council can make a difference in local services and stressing our positive record:

• Keeping the council tax down.
• Improving council services.
• Reviewing, and hopefully abolishing, residents' parking charges.
• Improving the quality of private rented housing.
  
• What we have already been doing locally

Let me look at these in more detail:

Keeping the council tax down. Labour and the Greens in Oxford have voted for above inflation increases in the council tax set by the city yet again. We need to maintain pressure on council budgets to force managers to deliver more efficient services without asking more of the hard pressed tax payer. Council Tax is the most unpopular and unfair tax. The Lib Dems would abolish it nationally. Labour have fudged the issue after spending millions (of your money) on a report telling them what we all know.

Improving council services. The independent council watchdog, the Audit Commission, has reviewed the last two years of Lib Dem administered Oxford and given us high praise for improving the state of Oxford City Council and the services it delivers. We have more than doubled recycling and are about to take that to a new level with the pilot introduction in parts of the city of weekly food waste collections which will go to be composted and remove the need to have anything in your ordinary rubbish collection that can go off. We have cut the time council houses are out of action between tenants to just one fifth of what it was under Labour in Oxford.

Reviewing, and hopefully abolishing, residents' parking charges. The Conservative run county council ignored the wishes of residents in Headington Hill and Northway and many of you have told me on the doorstep how unfair you find it that you have to pay to park in your own street. Even those of you without cars and others with driveways to put theirs on understand that this is an extra tax on their neighbours. My Labour opponent opposed my campaign to have the major employers developing in the area pay for implementing a scheme if it proved necessary. Those same PFI developers she was so keen to support have made millions out of the contracts, and millions more through sophisticated financial wizardry while we are paying for what they have imposed on our neighbourhoods. Our streets belong to us - why should we pay twice for using them?

Improving the quality of private rented housing. All too often in Oxford people having to rent their home, and there are lots of us because of Labour's mismanagement nationally of house price speculation, have been used for far too long to accepting substandard accommodation run by landlords who, at times, let homes in a dangerous, unhygienic properties to the most vulnerable people. The Lib Dems in Oxford have started to introduce stronger checks on rented properties going way beyond the Labour government's minimum standards and the small number of only the largest properties they legislated for.

In Northway:

• We have recently agreed a near £60,000 package of investment in the childrens' play area in Foxwell Drive - an important facility that allows younger children in particular to get out and enjoy fresh air and physical activity in a safe, contained environment.

• My colleague Altaf Khan, city and county councillor for the area, has successfully campaigned against Tory cuts that closed the Northway IT hub. Instead the equipment is now in the Northway Community Centre and Altaf is now working towards getting funding to create a pleasant and appropriate space to host the IT hub and get more people learning about and using these fast becoming essential tools of modern communication.

In Headington Hill:

• I have been campaigning against flier and flyposting litter and many, though not all yet, of the venues and promoters are now being more responsible about how they distribute their adverts.

• And I successfully managed to get the city council to take some responsibility for the parking chaos on Pullens Lane caused by the new residents' parking arrangements in other parts of the local area.

I will be campaigning for better, safer, parking arrangements, especially near council built apartment blocks where space at the moment is woefully inadequate, and for new investment in the Northway Community Centre to restore it to a vibrant and well used community facility and hopefully to encourage many more residents to join the community spirit and participate in the sports and leisure facilities in the area. And I would like to help create a "Friends" group for Headington Hill Park and Dunstan Park to get regular users and neighbours involved in managing and developing these wonderful urban green spaces.

But yes, I admit, and am proud to do so, that I am passionate about reducing the dead weight the heavy hand of government at all levels imposes on our lives and communities. I am passionate about those communities instead being enabled to take ownership of local public assets and to meet their own local needs through their own initiatives. And I am passionate about individuals taking responsibility for their own behaviour so enabling us to reduce our addiction to government interference in our lives. And if you stick around a bit and read some more, you'll see I would bring to the City Council innovative ideas about how that could be achieved and financed without adding to the burden of the public purse and the taxpayers' pockets.

Do you have Facebook? Sign up to the elections event to tell me you are supporting me!

The architect that put the windmill on Cameron's Notting Hill pad is proposing an idea to build artificial islands in the tropics to harness the natural energy that exists in those latitudes to produce electricity.  For a while now I've been interested in something similar, but subtly different - the idea that if we could harness just a tiny proportion of the solar energy that reaches the earth we could solve all our energy needs.  read more »

I just picked this up on a BBC news piece. There's a new website by a group called Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) which has what it calls a pretty comprehensive database of power stations and power companies from across the world showing CO2 outputs right down to individual power station levels.

It's worth a play with. I was astonished to see Australia has the worst record in terms of CO2 output per capita from power generation. Interesting too to note that France is way down the list with the greenest output of industrialized nations because of its preponderance of nuclear generation, and Brazil is way down because of its heavy use of hydro power.

More locally - Drax is rated as the 23rd most CO2 producing power station on the planet, but Didcot is about as clean as they come powered by fossil fuels:

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.

UPDATE: I see that Dave's already poo-pooed this idea in a Q&A session with Telegraph readers . Is there going to be anything left of this report that will actually make it to party policy by the time it's released on Thursday?

In more of the drip, drip, drip of revelations from the Gummer-Goldsmith "Quality of Life" report the Telegraph today reports that the Tories are to end out-of-town free parking:

Tories to end out-of-town free parking
By Graeme Wilson, Political Correspondent

Shoppers using out-of-town supermarkets would be forced to pay car parking charges under new Conservative proposals to defend the traditional British high street.

Under the plans, councils would be given the power to demand that big supermarkets and other stores on the outskirts of towns charge their customers for parking.

Seeing blue over Tory plans
on out-of-town retail?
Originally uploaded by Alastair Montgomery

The proposals - which are contained in the party's quality of life policy review that will be published on Thursday - are likely to face a backlash from shoppers, who have grown accustomed to free parking at the out-of-town supermarkets and shopping complexes. The 800-page repo