Whitehall fails Environment

People everywhere are being encouraged to reduce their environmental impact, and quite right too. This year has been fairly easy, as the winter has been milder this year than last and I re insulated my hot water tank. As a result of this I have used two thirds of the gas that I used last year.

It appears government has not fared so well. Figures are not available for 2006/7 but they are for 2004/5 and 2005/6. They make some grim reading. (See The Sustainable Development Commission, and their report here)

Progress has been made in places. For example Whitehall is recycling 8% more. What is worrying is that it is at the same time sending more to landfill. So rather than working on reduce, reuse recycle they appear to be working on just the recycle bit.

What concerns me more though is that across Whitehall as a whole carbon emissions are up. That is not the fuel bill, but carbon emissions. For example in the Department for the Eradication of Farming and Rural Areas (DEFRA) run by David Milliband, carbon emissions are up by 10.2% since 1990, as opposed to a target of a reduction of 12.5% by 2010/11. This is in fact also an increase on the previous year. This is clearly the wrong direction of travel. Mind you the DTI seems to be doing quite well.

When there are now many ways of reducing carbon emissions like more efficient cars, traveling less, video conferencing and turning off the lights when no one is there.

One of the most shocking things I saw when Newsnight ran a report on this, was the number of offices in Whitehall where the lights were on well into the night when there was no one there. You have to wonder whether they were heated as well, and more importantly which nutter thinks it is OK to leave the lights on when there is no one there?

You can read the BBC report here, and more on the environment here.

Has the Scottish Executive taken leave of it's senses?

I ask because ChrisD on politicalbetting.com highlighted this article on the BBC.

It appears that the Scottish Executive decided to move Transport for Scotland from Edinburgh to Glasgow.

Well, OK. They have done so for social and economic reasons.

I presume that means that it will end up costing less whilst providing employment in Glasgow. Fair enough so far.

That is until you read the bonkers small print, or in the case of the BBC article most of the story.

Of the 150 people relocated 57 of them appear to get their travel expenses paid but what is more presumably the same people, possibly more or less, get to start work on their commute.

It seems that as soon as they start catching up on "paper work" on the train, they are in the office. Obviously they can leave early as well to make sure they get enough time to catch up on their way home.

Thing is most commuters who need to already have to do this, do so, but start their commute to get in on time.

The train is not a secure place to do confidential work either. However if they can work on the train, why not forget coming into the office at all and work from home? After all with technology as it is today (I know, I set this sort of thing up every day) why travel when you don't have to.

Also the payments for people to stay put draw into question two key issues. The economic and social benefits of the move. There is little economic or social benefit to have an office commute in and out of a given area. It just costs more. If on the other hand they got all the employees to move, then yes that would or rather could have both economic and social benefits.

Government Ministers pay to bury bad smell

Well, according to the Sunday Telegraph here and here, the government is looking to offset it's vast carbon emissions from flights by carbon offsetting. A process described by some as like paying the RSPCA and then beating your pet.

Tony Blair may be right that science may well have the answer to global warming, but that is not by mitigating ones sins through paying the pardoner it is by finding alternative ways of producing energy, of which there are many.

However what appears to be going on is that as part of the scheme the government's offsetting policy is to bury some vegetable waste in Thailand and then use the methane gas to provide electricity to the plant producing the vegetable waste. If they did not do this, it would stink. Methane is odourless (Must tick off ignorant Telegraph journalist, methane does not smell to such a huge extent that natural gas has a smell added to it to let you know when there is a leak) but the process of decomposition often produces other gasses such as the rotten egg smell of hydrogen sulphide. (You also get this smell in river estuary mud due to anaerobic bacteria)

Well good. The government is doing two good things. It is preventing methane getting into the atmosphere, and by turning into electricity, is also reducing carbon emissions. Double gin and tonics all round!

However I will make a couple of observations.

Firstly you don't have to go to Thailand to get roting vegetables (John Prescott anyone). I appreciate that many would like to throw them at Labour politicians, however we as a country dispose of vast quantities of organic material a year which can be turned into methane (after removal of hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide) that could be fed into the gas grid or used to generate electricity.


Secondly, if you produced the energy here, you could sell it here, and as you are saving land fill tax, get paid to take the waste away and paid for the energy and compost produced, so the carbon offset would be both cheaper, and more beneficial to our economy.

So nice try David Milliband, if you were doing a GCSE I would give you a C, if you were doing anything more, I would have to say "must try harder to think in a joined up coherent way"

Government spent £206 on IT per man, woman and child last year!

If you don't read Dizzy thinks, you should. He has this article on the subject, and got the £206 by reading carefully between the lines.

Just so as you know, you could have bought a laptop in the PC World* sales for £199 after Christmas, so that is a lot to spend on IT in ONE year!

*Please note, I in absolutely no way recommend any one ever use or buy any thing from PC World.