Britain’s government has been warned that the country will enter into an “agricultural disaster” unless more money is put towards discovering what is killing the country’s bees.

Protesters from the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA), dressed in traditional, white beekeeper suits, delivered a petition signed by more than 140,000 people to Downing Street today, calling for £8 million funding research into causes of the bee decline.

Over the past 12 months, one in three of Britain’s honey bee colonies – amounting to nearly two billion bees, have been lost.  These losses are the greatest yet for the UK.  The causes of the massive die-off are unclear, and the apiarists fear there is nothing to prevent a similar devastation in the year to come.  The beekeepers claim that the Government is doing nothing to prevent it from happening.

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Great Britain’s Eco-towns initiative is a result of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s previous commitment to build five (subsequently changed to ten) zero-carbon eco-towns should he become Prime Minister. These towns of up to 15 000 homes are meant to be built on unused brownfield land such as former industrial sites. 

The initiative is meant to respond to the UK’s housing shortage, as well as help partially fulfill climate change commitments. It is also meant to be an opportunity for housing developers to change the way they do business, and work with the proposed site’s local communities.

The government’s vision of the eco-towns was that the eco-town should be a:

Large-scale free-standing new settlements that are exemplars of sustainable building and living, with the opportunity to design low and zero-carbon technology from the beginning.

The Government wants to ensure that the delivery of eco-towns makes as much use of the existing infrastructure as possible.

It is encouraged that some, or even many, of the initial bids have proposals for developers to invest towards rail provisions The Government said that it saw eco-towns providing a major contribution to the housing supply and increasing affordability, including up to 50 per cent of affordable housing.

However, some opponents to this initiative claim that the eco-town approach may be illegal.

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Continue reading " UK Eco-town Process Running into Problems; But Still Getting Submissions "

By Guest author

The following is a guest essay by author, advocate, and renewable energy industry analyst Paul Gipe. His latest book, Wind Energy Basics, will be published by Chelsea Green in early 2009.

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In a startling reversal, Britain’s Labour government has put on the table a feed-in tariff proposal for "microgeneration." The proposed feed-in tariffs will pay homeowners, farmers, and community groups for the electricity they generate with renewable energy.

The move represents an ideological breakthrough. Long an ardent supporter of Renewable Obligation Certificate trading systems and plain old-fashioned subsidies as the sole means of developing renewable energy, Britain’s Labour government has abruptly changed course.

Britain, along with its English-speaking allies in the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, has been a staunch proponent of the "Washington Consensus" of neoliberal economic orthodoxy. In this world view, the only mechanisms that can be used to develop renewable energy and hew to ideological purity are quota systems coupled with Tradable Green Certificates. In Britain this policy is called the Renewable Obligation; in North America, it is known as Renewable Portfolio Standards.

However, outside the schools of economics aligned along the Chicago-London axis, others have argued that feed-in tariffs are a more effective and less costly market mechanism for rapidly developing renewable energy. These include prominent British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, as well as continental European economists who are less well-known in North America.

The specific proposal by the new Minister of Climate Change, Ed Miliband, is less significant than the fact the government felt compelled to act. Prime Minister Gordon Brown narrowly escaped a backbench revolt in the House of Commons earlier this year over exclusion of a feed-in tariff in Britain’s long-awaited energy bill. Meanwhile, in the House of Lords, debate on the inclusion of feed-in tariff provisions continued despite the government’s attempts to quash the subject.

Nevertheless, Miliband’s proposal is timid and vague.

For example, the proposal limits individual projects to no more than 3 MW. That’s enough for rooftop solar systems, but not big enough for most community wind projects. It’s clear that the government doesn’t want a program of feed-in tariffs to threaten its quota system, despite the fact that there’s widespread acknowledgement that Britain will miss its renewable energy targets and now pays more for renewables than its European neighbors that use feed-in tariffs.

The existing Renewable Obligation has mostly benefited commercial wind development in Britain’s highlands. What the British call microgeneration — rooftop solar, for example — has been dependent upon the waxing and waning of traditional up-front subsidies. As a consequence, Britain lags well behind Germany, Spain, Italy, and France — all countries using feed-in tariffs — in the development of rooftop solar photovoltaics.

Even in wind energy, Britain is falling increasingly behind continental nations. By the end of 2008, France, Britain’s long-time cross-channel rival, will operate nearly 1,000 MW more wind-generating capacity than Britain, despite being a relative newcomer to wind energy development. (See "French Wind Growth Continuing.") France uses an innovative feed-in tariff policy.

British renewable energy campaigners, notably Friends of the Earth, have called for more specifics in the proposal and for increasing the maximum project size to at least 10 MW — equivalent to about five modern wind turbines. Friends of the Earth is also calling for prices (the feed-in tariffs) to be differentiated by technology — solar is paid one price, wind another, and so on — a feature found in all countries successfully developing renewable energy.

Elsewhere, a number of Australian and American states, as well as Canadian provinces, are considering feed-in tariffs:

• The Guardian: People-power a step closer in energy bill
• Discussion Paper on Electricity Feed-in Tariffs in Tasmania Released (PDF)
• Renewable Energy Tariffs in Australia
• Gainesville Regional Utilities Proposes Solar Feed-in Tariff (Gainesville Sun)
• Feed-in Tariffs and Renewable Energy in the USA — a Policy Update (PDF) by Wilson Rickerson, Florian Bennhold, and James Bradbury (May 2008)

Continue reading " You put your feed-in there "

Image source: Lela Dowling/Bee Culture magazine

Wednesday, November 5, beekeepers from all over Britain will don their pitchforks, er, smokers, and placards and head to 10 Downing Street to demand action on the current bee crisis. Though, this demonstration is nothing new for beekepers outside the US, reports the Daily Green….

Continue reading " Beekeepers Take to the Streets in UK to Demand Action "

1951: The first official zebra crossing starts protecting pedestrians at Slough, just west of London.

Postwar Britain had only 10 percent of its current road traffic, but fatalities were mounting. The typical pedestrian crossing was marked with nothing more than metal studs in the road: easy for pedestrians to see, but difficult for the motorist. By the time a driver felt the bumps under his tires, it was usually too late to stop or slow down.

The government’s Transport Research Laboratory ran visibility experiments on new types of crossings, using model roads at 1/24 scale (half-inch to the foot). The lab then tested a variety of designs at a thousand locations starting in 1949. Broad black and white stripes had the most visual impact.

The new, striped crossings were made the legal standard in Britain and widely introduced in late 1951, starting at Slough (The name rhymes with plow, not slow, and the borough is the putative location of the original BBC version of the TV comedy, The Office.)

Pedestrian deaths dropped 11 percent in the first year.

Jim Callaghan, Member of Parliament (and later prime minister), visited the lab in 1948 and is sometimes credited with first noting the crossing’s resemblance to a zebra. Despite Callaghan’s saying in 1951 that he didn’t remember that, no one else has ever claimed credit, and the name zebra crossing caught on.

Enamored of the moniker, Britain’s Ministry of Transport has called forth animal cognates for subsequent improvements. The panda crossing used interlocking black and white triangles instead of stripes. The pelican (pedestrian light controlled) crossing combined traffic lights and conventional, rectangular stripes. The puffin (pedestrian user-friendly intelligent) crossing uses sensors to detect pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The toucan (two can cross) is shared by pedestrians and bicycles. The pegasus is a pelican crossing with a control panel high enough for horse riders to push the button. It’s a bleedin’ roadside zoo.

Cities around the world have been gradually adopting the crosswalk of a different stripe. The old-fashioned two-stripe crosswalk (with just its borders marked by full-length stripes perpendicular to the direction of traffic) cannot be seen by motorists from farther than 100 feet or so away. At 30 mph, that’s about 2 seconds.

Zebra-striped crosswalks can be seen from greater distances. An empty crosswalk informs drivers that pedestrians might enter there. And pedestrians who are crossing the street are highly visible as they move against the striped background. (You can improve your own visibility to distant vehicles by walking on the side of a zebra crosswalk nearest to the approaching traffic: That maximizes how much of your body appears against the stripes flickering behind you.)

The Beatles brought international fame to the zebra crossing in 1969 with the album cover for Abbey Road. The much-parodied image also inspired the current logo of Abbey Road Studios, where the album was recorded. Beatles producer Sir George Martin has a heraldic badge of a zebra carrying an abbot’s crozier — along with a crest of a martin holding a recorder under its left wing, a Latin motto that could be translated as “Love is all you need,” and a shield with three beetles. Go figure.

Source: Various

Continue reading " Oct. 31, 1951: We’ll Cross That Street When We Come to It "

By David Roberts

“In order to stimulate Britain’s economic growth and support our position as a leading world economy it is essential that we make the right long-term investments in our transport infrastructure and that we plan for future growth, in a way which is consistent with reducing greenhouse gas emissions overall.”

– U.K. Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon, insisting that the economic downturn will not slow the country’s push for large-scale public-transportation projects

Continue reading " Notable quotable "