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!)