Earnest driving

Given my recent post about biofuels and how they might do more harm than good, here's an interesting article about how driving an electric car may still require fossil fuels. The article doesn't propose any real alternative, but short of getting on your bike I did find a car that doesn't pollute, although I'm sure the construction process can't be too green. It's also unlikely to go on sale in Europe any time soon, as it's even less safe than the electric "cars" currently on our streets.

Solid foundations

This building planned for Dalston really impressed me. It's supposed to be environmentally friendly and affordable.
I found the link via TreeHugger, but take a look at the Dezeen design magazine site, which has lots of interesting stuff.

Salad days

Like Cleopatra, we are often green in judgement. But it's hard not to be green in intention and judgement these days. On the one hand you have TV documentaries purporting to be scientific but carrying a hidden agenda, while on the other you have genuine efforts to reduce the human footprint having a genuinely negative effect.
Take biofuels, for example. If ever there was a topic to assuage the guilty conscious of the liberal west, here it is. Developed by Papuan Soloman independentists, the major fuel companies have seen its commercial value. But at what price? It'll be more profitable for the nations that can grow high yield crops like sugar cane to do so at the expense of crops that feed their people. Why would they do that? Because as usual, this land is in the hands of the few rather than the many. The crops can be harvested easily without mass labour. The industrial world will drive up the price of biofuel but processing will be carried out by labour well away from the plantations. Trade agreements will impose higher tariffs on the raw produce than on the processed fuel, so Brazil will sell sugar cane to the US at a fraction of the cost it takes to get it back. It's another form of colonisation of capital.
Ok, so that all sounds like a bit of a rebarbative Marxist agenda, and I know that there's potential for generating biofuel without taking land that can be used to produce food (by exploiting algae, for example), but wait and see. Biofuels may answer one problem -- peak oil -- but they'll cause many others.

Charge your iPod, blow your mind

I love this. When are you most likely to make use of solar power? When you're sunbathing. So now you can charge all your USB-driven devices (maybe even a solar fan) with zero-carbon while tanning your hide.
I guess oil is used to produce the bikini however.
Also, if everyone switches to powering their gadgets through sustainable energy, will this reduce global warming and thus reduce sunbathing opportunities, so making this product less effective?

Too taboo to be true?

What are we to make of this story from Yahoo News? What kind of fascism is this? In the old capitalist days you simply cut any funding to people who were carrying out research into things you didn't like...

The final straw in the GM debate?

Through a GM process, a food technology company in the States has managed to turn celery into a "tweaked" straw, allowing you to add to the taste of a Bloody Mary.
Take a closer look...

Let your hair grow long...

I'm a big fan of the Hippy Shopper blog, which is full of good ideas coming up to Christmas time. But this particular article is a cut above the rest...

Guardian of good intentions

How can a newspaper that distributes so much unsollicited extra paper now recommend to us how we should recycle their bloody wallcharts?
Similarly, having been sent a scare-mongering brochure about people stealing my identity from Morgan Stanley that will be ok if I buy another product from them, they then sent me loads of credit cheques that I'll never use that I now need to shred in order to prevent my identity being compromised.
Fucking hypocrites.

Sunday bloody Sunday

Let's consider some of the problems we face in the UK these days: a consumer culture that leads to high levels of debt, pollution and excessive energy consumption, <i>low-order</i> social crime... Can we name the root of these ailments? Evil, thy name is out-of-town Sunday shopping!
Let's consider the evidence.
On an environmental level, who can doubt the negative impact of these retail monstrosities? Built on playing fields or flood plains, their tarmac testifies to our conservational negligence and irresponsible, unthinking short-termism. There's no creeping nostalgia in this observation: I don't believe that retail parks have corrupted arcadia. They have, however, usurped our breathing space to supplant it with an iron lung.
For now our weekend pursuit is to shop. We shop at weekends because we're too busy to find time in the week. Because there's nothing else to do. Because it's a social event; though there's rampant social exclusion. You can't partake if you have a poor credit rating, where a hoodie, or have to work at weekends...
Let me return briefly to the credit aspect. Consumer culture, to which these retail parks stand as temples, thrives -- indeed relies -- on our weekly devotion and on the widow's mite. Supermarkets don't care if you can afford to <i>taste the diference</i>, or need the latest gadget: you're there to buy, on anyone's money. Seven-day-a-week social shopping doubtless encourages this.
For this is the opportunity for people to herd around a water hole. The retail parks like to give us the impression it's all yummy mummies in Starbuck's, but in reality, it's mostly teenagers whose playing fields have been concreted over. They don't go to Starbuck's but head instead to KFC or McDonald's: so not only do they lose out on an environment in which to exercise, they gorge to obesity on trans-fatty acids. Then, high on sugars and preservatives, they roam the mobile 'phone stores until one can summon the courage to accost an off-licence.
So what we're looking at is an invention that ruins our environment, causes social and economic strife and ruins my Sundays. Can anyone rid us of this social blight?