Rupert's Read

[This blog has been arguing over the past year that the government are telling porkies about the level of British carbon emissions. See for instance: http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/2008/01/proof-uks-co2-emissions-have-risen.html  (and follow the nested links). What follows is a GUEST POST by Cllr. James Abbott, national Green Party spokesman on dangerous climate change, on this same important topic:]   'In an interview on the Today programme earlier this week, Hillary Benn stated that by 2010, UK CO2 emissions are on course to be 16% below 1990 levels - he went on to say that this more than met the Kyoto obligations. The claim coloured the rest of the interview with John Humphrys (and George Mombiot). I have tried to get R4 to do a follow up interview to question this claim - John Humphrys could not promise this would happen but agreed that Ministers need to be chased up on statistics if they were questionable. Not for the first time, a ministe...

Motorists will be forced to drive at 20mph or less in Norwich as part of a radical shakeup of road policy announced yesterday , which includes opening a bus and cycle lane to lorries.Norwich will become the third city in the country, after Portsmouth and Aberdeen, to have a 20mph blanket limit after councillors agreed to the principle of a £300,000 sign-based scheme across 240km of residential roads... ( READ ON )

Filling up the car is increasingly leaving motorists £50 out of pocket. With the price of basics such as the milk and bread rapidly on the rise and too many maxed out on credit, it can't go on. But have Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling the wherewithal to do anything about it? Public affairs correspondent Shaun Lowthorpe reports... ( READ ON )

Brown is going today to the oil companies to beg them to reduce the price of oil/petrol. It's top of the news. How pitiful. This economic crisis that we are facing -- failing banks, huge debt, rapidly escalating prices for basic commodities -- IS a crisis of failing to be green: It is a 'resource-depletion' crisis -- i.e. it is being caused by oil starting to run out, worldwide; it is a manmade-climate-change crisis -- i.e. it is being caused also by food production failing in the wake of increased production of biofuels and widespread droughts and storms; and it is a crisis caused by consumerism -- i.e. unsustainable levels of debt, resulting from materialistic bingeing, and borrowing on the fantasy never-never of house prices, is giving us an inevitable hangover. There is no way out of this crisis through even more of the same -- and burning more oil right now would just be : even more of the same. We need instead to take a radically new approach. A ...

Earlier this month, I gave a talk on Environmental Refugees to Epping Green Party. Here is a precis: Darfur is the first climate-change war. And the first countries eliminated by climate change are, tragically, appearing now, in Micronesia . Unless dangerous climate change is reined in, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. The 21 st century, unless governments turn to Green policies, will be a century of unprecedented environmental disaster. There will be hundreds of millions of climate-change refugees, as powerful storms devastate poorer countries and rising sea levels simply inundate Bangladesh , Holland – and parts of East Anglia … It is the carbon emissions from industrial countries, of which Britain is the oldest of all, which are causing this devastation. So: how will we choose to regard the likely tide of environmental refugees? Will we bar the door to them, just as the Daily Mail and others shamefully tried to prevent any Jewish migrants to this country in the 1930s? O...

REBECCA GOUGH 23 May 2008 08:36 Controversial plans to allow HGV lorries to use a bus and cycle lane in Norwich have been given the green light. Despite a 500-name petition against the project, a trial scheme to allow 40 tonne HGVs to use the lane on Newmarket Road for 12 months was given the go ahead at a meeting of the Norwich Highways Agency Committee. Four members of the 10-man committee were eligible to vote on the matter, and although two voted in favour and two against, committee chairman Tony Adams used his casting vote to approve the scheme. The HGVs will now travel from the freight consolidation centre on the A11, down Newmarket Road and travel through Castle Meadow and Red Lion Street. But critics of the plan said today it would put cyclists' lives in danger as they will have to share road space with lorries travelling at 40mph. Rupert Read, a member of the committee who voted against the scheme, said: "I'm very strongly moved by the arguments of the cyclists on...

The Norwich Greens are one group in a growing movement nationally of local Greens who work hard to turn radical and progressive ideas into a reality, and who bring a truly constructive attitude to local politics... (read more!)

  Harriet Harman on this morning's TODAY programme implied as much. It would be a pathetic piece of populism, and a craven failure to be taking any serious green action whatsoever if, in a bid to restore its flagging support, Labour were now to freeze the planned fuel duty increase -- without compensating for doing so by taking other measures. My own view is that it would be fine to freeze or even to reduce fuel duty -- SO LONG AS the government were introducing a serious green scheme to rein in Britain's carbon emissions, such as 'carbon rationing', instead. Tragically, however, the government has just announced last week its abandonment of its investigation into the possible introduction of carbon rationing: http://www.carbonrationing.org.uk/fora/threads/defra-deems-personal-carbon-trading-an-interesting-concept-ahead-of-its-time Meanwhile, Government Ministers intend to lobby OPEC to increase oil production to meet supply in order to bring fuel prices ...

  I am today criticising  a report by Natural England  which suggest s that the blanket protection of England's green belt land be scrapped  in favour of  open ing up  land for development . Comments by the government body's chief executive Helen Phillips on this are a real step backward. In Natural England 's   ' State of the Natural Environment Report '  report, Dr. Phillips  claims that  the buffer zones to curb urban sprawl ha ve been neglected,  offering little   benefit to wildlife and   little accessibility for  the public .  She went on to suggest that rather than  preventing new housing from being built on the green belt surrounding cities and towns , it was time to find  ' better  uses ' for green belt land.   The Green Party is already fighting Government imposed unsustainable development targets of over half a million more homes in the E...

The Norwich Highways Agency Committee has today approved the principle of introducing a 20mph speed limit across residential roads in the City. The committee agreed a proposal from myself that a blanket 20mph limit, based primarily around signage, should be introduced. In June 2006 City Councillors unanimously agreed that there should be a 20mph speed limit across residential roads in the city. Since then the Conservative County Councillors, who hold the casting vote on the Norwich Highways Agency Committee, have consistently blocked the proposals - until today. This morning's meeting was the first one at which I had the right to vote - by virtue of the Greens becoming the second party on the City Council on1st May. I am delighted that my first formal proposal to the Norwich Highways Agency Committee has resulted in the Committee at last agreeing to this progressive proposal of introducing 20mph speed limits across the city. At every ...

Is the grass greener? Julie Hay Politics Show East Norwich is the greenest council in the country following Thursday night's local elections. James Abott is a long standing Green councillor in Braintree and has watched the green vote grow in the East. Here's his view of the events of the night... To read on, click here !

 Earlier this morning, Tuesday 20 May, I gave an invited talk on 'environmental philosophy' at Reepham High School in North Norfolk. The level of interest among the gifted and talented kids in the class was very exciting. I talked with mostly twelve and thirteen year olds about ecological economics as the new Copernican revolution in economics, about human beings as part of their (our) ecosystem, and so on, and the kids lapped it up and asked all sorts of challenging and exciting questions.  It gives one hope. If these kids point the way to the future, then h ow will green will be our valley...

David King http://www.ox.ac.uk/oxford_debates/trinity_2008_the_nuclear_option/proposers_opening.html claims that nuclear power is not too expensive. Well, if it really isn't, then why has no private company tried to build a nuclear power plant over the last decade, in our de-regulated energy market? There is no bar to them doing so. The answer is obvious: because nuclear power _is_ too expensive. It is uneconomic, without vast government subsidies. Do go and join in the debate!: http://www.ox.ac.uk/oxford_debates/trinity_2008_the_nuclear_option/

I have been asked to give the keynote speech tomorrow at a major national Conference of heating engineers, the IDHEE, in Eastern Region at the University of Herts. Here is a link to the powerpoint presentation that will be the backbone of my talk: http://www.rupertread.fastmail.co.uk/Talk%20to%20IDHEE And here is a quick summary of key policy points that will be in the talk: SUMMARY: I will focus primarily in this talk on what policy government at all levels – Councils, Westminster, and E.U. – need to put in place, in order to have any chance at all of securing 90% CO2 reductions by 2050, and 60% reductions by 2025 (plus also meeting fuel-poverty reduction targets etc.), including: 1) Free insulation for all. A government programme to roll out an acceptable level of insulation for ALL houses in Britain – not just new build, within 5-10 years. 2) Renewable energy (or CHP) in ALL new developments. This policy has already been introduced by Norwich Green Party. The Merton Rule shoul...

To mark the success of the three-year 'Spatial Metro' programme, delegates from all over Europe, including Norwich 's twin cities of Koblenz and Rouen , will take part in a conference at St Andrew's Hall from Thursday 15 th to Friday 16th May . The Spatial Metro EU project has brought real benefits to Norwich , transforming places like the Lanes and St Andrew's Plain into spaces people want to spend time in. The conference will draw on these achievements, other international success stories and the experiences of the Spatial Metro EU project and offer creativity, expertise and practical solutions to improve cities for pedestrians.   The Green Party supports these pedestrian-friendly measures that have happened and supports the Spatial Metro project, but believes that Norwich still has a very long way to go, particularly with promoting pedestrian safety and good crossing facilities across the city .   As our Party's Transport Spoke...

I've been taking a little break from blogging, these last few days, as a kind of post-election holiday. Anyway: back to work! And what better way to get back to work, than by noting someone who seems to do virtually no work at all, ...despite being an Eastern Region MEP! Do check out this link: http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/1105_brussels_exposed.shtml ...to see an out-and-out euro-sceptic MEP (Tom Wise) boasting about taking advantage of the Brussels expenses system... !

On the night of May 1st, here in Norwich where I am writing from, the Green Party achieved a historic nationwide first: we became the second-largest Party on a Principal Authority Council (and so we will become the Official Opposition to Labour here in Norwich , Charles Clarke’s seat). We gained 3 seats (out of 13 up for election) in order to do this, including the seat of Thorpe Hamlet, where last year we missed out by just one vote... This year, we won Thorpe Hamlet by five hundred and one votes… It seems that there is poetic justice, after all… We are now breathing down Labour’s neck, in Norwich (they have just two more seats than us on the 39-seat Council), and if the result last night were repeated at a general election, a Green MP would be elected here and Charles Clarke would place 4 th … In Norwich , the LibDems and Tories now often suffer from the ‘wasted vote’ argument that used to bedevil us. In London , our vote share in the Assembly elections has held steady, and ou...

See the Greens celebrating their victory in Norwich on BBC news. Click here .

http://ourkingdom.opendemocracy.net/2008/05/03/local-elections-media-squeezes-and-political-styles/    

CAMBRIDGE has two new parties in the council chamber after a night of surprises in the local government elections... Read the rest of the story here .

RupertRead Hooray! Our Mayoral vote has gone up, and we've comfortably held our Assembly seats. My nerves were excessive... Boo: Boris is Mayor. Gulp. less than 5 seconds ago from web RupertRead We are suffering a two party squeeze in london. I am therefore nervous about the assembly election results for us. . . about 15 hours ago from txt RupertRead Greens come within 100 votes of winning TWO seats in waveney But near miss in both. . . about 24 hours ago from txt RupertRead Jill Weston misses in Welwyn by just 82 votes. St albans greens a strong 3rd place in their target ward. I wil be on Anglia at lunch 11:20 PM May 01, 2008 from txt RupertRead Norw Cllr. tots: Lab 15, GRN 13, LD 6, Con 5. We won across Norwich Sth nat target constit by circa 2K votes. 04:07 PM May 01, 2008 from txt RupertRead NORWICH first GP to become official opposition on a Principal Authority. 2 holds + 3 gains from LDs. ...

Caroline Lucas bigs up our prospects here in Eastern Region -- exciting times to be a Green in this part of the country! Read it here !

A councillor has vowed to become Britain's first Green MP after historic results in yesterday's local elections... article continues below...

Helene Mulholland applauds the Green victory in Norwich in the Guardian. Read the article here .

Read all about last night at St Andrew's here !

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-if-newspapers-had-a-vote-this-one-would-put-its-cross-beside-818670.html

I'm campaigning all over Wensum and University wards today, getting out the Green vote... Meanwhile: The _Independent_ newspaper has given Siân her strongest endorsement yet. After backing from the Federation of Small Businesses and The Observer, the Indy says: "Siân Berry, for the Greens, has been an articulate, imaginative and effective advocate for her cause. With her programme for a greener London, with more cycle-lanes, cheaper public transport, more small shops and eco-friendly housing, she has come across as a forward-looking politician, committed to a better quality of London life. We hope she can continue to find a voice in the national debate. "So consonant are her priorities with those of this paper that, if we could vote for mayor today, we would place our first-preference cross against her name." Great!