Tesco puts carbon footprint on products

Tesco is to test putting "carbon labels" on its own-brand products next month in a move to enable consumers to choose products which are less damaging to the environment.

The retailer will put carbon-count labels on varieties of orange juice, potatoes, energy-efficient light bulbs and washing detergent, stating the quantity in grammes of CO2 equivalent put into the atmosphere by their manufacture and distribution.

(Source: Graun) 

I suppose we should applaud the provision of extra information, but I'm not convinced that this is going to have beneficial effects. The carbon footprint is a crude measure of one element of something's environmental impact. But us environmentally concerned consumers don't just worry about carbon do we? (Yes, OK, I don't worry about it very much, but bear with me). We also worry about things like rainforests, and wild places and things like that. It has been suggestsed that we should measure the impact of a product on land usage using food prints.

The problem with the Tesco scheme is that consumers will be encouraged to focus only on the carbon footprint. So if it's successful it will tend to promote schemes which don't use much energy but which use vast acres of land.

This probably wasn't the intention though. 

A new scale on global warming

Lucia Liljegren is formulating a new scale for measuring how hot you think things are going to get. Lucia comes in as a lukewarmer. James Hansen is presumably a Hell fire and brimstone warmer. Make your suggestions here.

Samizdata on "security theatre" policing

It is sometimes said that these days, the cops, or at least some of them, are the "paramilitary wing of the Guardian newspaper". This represents a significant shift in the cultural/political standing of the police over my lifetime.

Jonathan Pearce looks at UK policing.

Monbiot calls for the end of organic farming

Not in so many words, of course, but let me explain.... 

There are few subjects on which George Monbiot is on the clever side of absolutely barking, but he worked out a long time ago that biofuels are not a good idea and he has been diligent in putting this message across.

In today's Guardian he revisits the subject of food shortages and he has some interesting statistics on where the grain harvest is going to:

At 2.1bn tonnes, the global grain harvest broke all records last year - it beat the previous year's by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people.

I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that "the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol ... could feed one person for a year". This year global stockpiles of cereals will decline by around 53m tonnes; this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels will consume almost 100m tonnes, which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis.

This is interesting because it completely kills the argument that the crisis has been caused by crop failures (inevitably, "linked to climate change"). It's biofuels that are the problem. All good stuff.

So what are we going to do about it? George has the answer for us. It comes in two parts:

[W]e must demand that our governments scrap the rules that turn grain into the fastest food of all [biofuels]. 

No George, for the umpteenth time, the government can't do a thing. They must plead with the EU for a change in policy. They can do nothing unilaterally. So shame on you for avoiding the subject.

And the other? It will come as no surprise to hear that George wants to change people's behaviour. It's all our fault, you see. George's  reckons we should eat less meat. Does it occur to him that meat is only one of the products we get from the carcass of a cow or a sheep? Leather anyone? Wool? Gelatine?

And here's a question George. What are all those lovely organic farms you so favour going to fertilise their fields with, if not a by-product of the meat-raising process?

BBC keeps the green flag flying

The BBC has announced that it is going to start a season of environmentally themed programmes for children on the CBeebies channel. This follows hot on the heels of their hasty retreat over a BBC Global Warming Day called Planet Relief. When this show was cancelled one of the BBC bigwigs said:

It is not the BBC's job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject

It would appear that he has since been overruled.

Let's just remember that CBeebies is aimed at the under sixes. Preschoolers. Babes in arms.

I'm trying to imagine the sort of sick mind that thinks that broadcasting wall-to-wall propaganda to pre-schoolers is acceptable in a liberal society. (We are a liberal society still...aren't we?) And I just can't fathom it. Are there really people with such corrupt minds commissioning programmes at the BBC?

It would seem so: Ms Alison Stewart, executive producer. Mr Michael Carrington, head of CBeebies.

Sick, sick people.  

Eye-catching initiatives in education

Brian Micklethwait has a post about Tesco offering degrees in retail management.

Presumably they know what they're doing. Providing they don't try to make the courses too academic and theoretical it's probably a reasonable thing to do, although whether it's a degree in the generally accepted meaning of the term is another question.

Meanwhile the Scottish Council Parliament Government has issued guidelines on the teaching of computer games design in schools. A few schools have been teaching games design for a while now, and this announcement looks very much like the standard politician's "eye-catching initiative" - intended to drive the news agenda rather than herald anything new. That said, funky subjects like this may well attract the attention of some children who might otherwise be turned off by school, so it can do little harm.

Defending biofuels

EU Commission:

"Poor people are expendable" 

The Arab spring (again)

Abe Greenwald sees signs of liberalism breaking out in many Arab states.

It seems a bit early to draw firm conclusions but there do seem to be some encouraging signs.

Andrew Orlowski takes a look at Ofcom

The media regulator is standing in the way of a vibrant media sector. 

And yet... there's nothing worth watching on TV. There's a yawning absence of formal channels to tell us stuff we didn't know, or join the dots. This, concludes Ofcom, leaves our children, and those provincials who still point at aeroplanes (I paraphrase) - in grave peril. It couldn't quite bring itself to go all the way, and suggest that we're all in peril (or not) if this mythical thing called Public Service Broadcasting disappears.

Elephant in room!

Alastair Darling wants a review of international biofuels programmes, and has called on the World Bank to write a report. Cor.

Perhaps he would do better to plead with Senor Barroso, the man responsible for enforcing biofuels use in the UK? 

Dig for victory

Deltoid has picked up on my article about Roger Harrabin's response to the Jo Abbess affair. He says I'm accusing Harrabin of lying. What I said was I'm not convinced by his arguments, which is not the same thing. At the moment, I'm reserving judgement. As Mr Deltoid says, it is possible that Roger H received an email from the WMO in the half hour during which he made such an astonishing volte-face, but IMHO it's a tad unlikely.

I tried to ask Roger to publish the WMO correspondence via a comment on the Editors Blog thread, but it doesn't seem to be accepting any input at the moment. So to shortcut the process I've sent in a Freedom of Information request to the BBC to get all the correspondence between them and the WMO on this article.

Let's see what happens. 

Food riots spread.

A mob of 10,000 Bangladeshi workers demanding better access to food clashed with police Saturday.

Maybe burning food isn't such a good idea after all. 

Smoking bans - bad for UK sport.

It's not just the UK and US which have introduced smoking bans. Australia has followed suit, and the effect there is similar to that back home in Blighty. The difference is that Aussies are now spending less in rugby clubs (rather than pubs), according to a recent report.

The report found that while [rugby club] membership had increased by 25 per cent in the past five years, revenue was down.

The report found the drop in revenue was due to a number of challenges, including changes in gaming laws and the recent smoking ban.

So membership is up, but revenue is down. I conclude that Aussie rugby players are drinking and smoking less. This would appear to augur pretty badly for the future results of British rugby teams against the men from down under.

Australia and India to negotiate free trade pact

This sort of news kind of makes you feel that we're being left behind.

Free-range education

The Telegraph looks at home-ed 

Although they are bubbly, friendly and well-behaved, it is their individuality that is most striking, an independence of outlook that throws down the gauntlet to classloads of battery-reared schoolchildren.