It’s been one hell of a windy day here in the UK. The photo to the right is a shot I took this evening in Finsbury Square, London, of a humongous branch that had been ripped off of a tree. It was so big that instead of it being moved, a small fence had been put up around it.
Earlier in the day, looking out of my office window I had seen birds being completely batted away as they tried to fly into the gusts of wind. Newspaper was flying high up into the sky and the fence around the building site opposite my office had come down. One of my colleagues told me that he had nearly been hit by a flying hard-hat that had been blown off of a site workman (which would have been quite an ironic tale to tell for years to come, I think.)
The journey home was a bit of a mess – lots of tube lines were experiencing delays and it took me a while to feed myself into the crowd slowly flowing into Moorgate. I’d been warned by a text message from Mat that the Silverlink trains at Euston had scrapped their timetable and were just waiting for trains to fill up before sending them on their way so I knew what to expect. The staff at Euston seemed to be prepared and have everything under control – as I descended the ramp to the usual Silverlink platforms there were a bunch of British Transport Police and Silverlink staff keeping everybody back from the platforms and only letting people through when trains arrived. I misheard what they said and wandered through with a crowd heading for a Watford local service so waited at the barriers and took a short film of the goings-on:
I’m sure tomorrow’s newspapers will be filled with pictures of the aftermath of the storm but if you want to see more, somebody has just set up a Flickr group to collect photos.
As the months and years roll by I find myself questioning more and more things that I do. I’ve been asked to go to Zürich for some meetings in a couple of weeks; a little while ago I would have been looking forward to a business class flight and eating out on expenses for a few nights but now the first thing that pops into my head is how bad the trip will be for the environment. There are stories appearing every day about the Siberian permafrost melting and revealing loads of woolly mammoth tusks as it does so (if that doesn’t mean much then take a look at the definition of permafrost) and the polar ice dramatically disappearing. I don’t really want to contribute to that more than I do already.
Yes, I know that I can carbon offset my flights but what good does that really do? The Carbon Trustaren’t a charity and to quote Rob Newman I can’t see them funding a project to put Bangladesh on stilts any time soon. Who they are, where they come from, who regulates them and how they came up with their pricing scheme is a bit of a mystery.
So, I’ve taken the step of looking into how to get from London to Zürich by rail. As soon as I did so I came across a splendid website which not only explains exactly how to do it but much more besides. If you’re off to Europe and enjoy travelling or simply hate flying then I seriously suggest you check it out. There are suggested routes, tips on how to get the best fares and information and pictures on the different types of carriage you can expect to encounter. The site also makes the point that a tonne of carbon dioxide emitted from a plane does 2.7 times the damage of it being emitted at ground level.
Basically, a trip to Zürich via Paris will take the best part of a day. I figured I could probably travel on a Monday and then get a sleeper service back to Paris through Friday night/ Saturday morning. I raised the thought with a few people at work today and can report that 80% think I’m nuts to even consider it. For example, when I called the travel desk to enquire whether they handled train bookings and said that I wanted to go to Zürich I was asked “Why on earth would you want to do that?” I lamely responded “Green reasons…” and started to feel a little bit nuts myself – hopefully she didn’t think that I had an obsessive colour preference or some kind of nasal condition. My boss called me “Swampy.” More seriously, he made the point that the time wouldn’t be as productive as time spent in the office – this is true, but during the whole office/ airport/ queue for security/ departure lounge/ short haul flight with food/ passport control-taxi rigmarole there is no opportunity to get a lot done whereas on a train I could at least work offline for a few hours. I might even catch up with all the emails and documents I’ve been meaning to read and get one or two of my own written.
In terms of cost, there isn’t that much of a difference between a first-class train fare and return business class flights; the train fares just seem a bit more random depending on what website, currency and method you choose to buy them.
I must admit that I do have utopian dreams of setting an example that the whole company begins to follow but in reality I know that I’d just be doing it because I believe it’s right. Plus, it would be great to see a bit of where I’m travelling to on the way.
What do you think? Have I lost the plot or am I right to be pursuing this?
I’ve just watched this show on Google Video and urge you to view it. If you’re in the UK you may remember Rob Newman as one half of the Newman and Baddiel TV comedy duo from the early 1990s. I used to watch them with my friends on a Saturday night and we’d all emulate the phrases of their History Today characters of “you know that <something horrible>…that’s you that is” etc ad infinitum. Well, Baddiel went on to work with Frank Skinner on their various football-related shows whereas Newman disappeared from my radar.
That was until I found myself listening to a fascinating interview with him on a Guardian podcast. He is still a comedian but since moving on from his partnership with Baddiel he has got much more involved with being what I guess you could call a ‘climate change activist’. He makes some fantastic points – I’ve mentioned them here before – but his video, originally shown on More4 articulates them in a much slicker way. For example, he makes the argument that World War I was originally a land-grab for oil (the British and Americans did not want the Germans to have access to oil from Baghdad via the Berlin-Baghdad railway that was under construction) and that the British and Americans have always had control of oil fields as military objectives ever since we started to use it as a fuel. There’s so much stuff of interest here – I had no idea, for example, that OPEC decided in 1971 that all oil transactions would need to be undertaken in US dollars; Iraq decided a few years ago to switch to the Euro and that must have frightened the pants off of the Federal Reserve who would have started to see the demand for dollars (and therefore its price) decreasing…
It was great to read that Essex County Council are looking at stopping the practice of keeping street lighting on all night long. It’s such a waste when you think about it – why do we need the streets lit all night? I know that the first thing people think about is how safe the streets will be without light at night and I think that’s a genuine concern; it’s great that they are just looking at switching off the lights in “places where it feels it is appropriate”.
The City of London should surely be a candidate for this as well. If you’ve ever wandered around the City at the weekend you’ll know what I mean – the place is almost completely deserted with all the bars, shops etc shut down. If there isn’t anyone there, and there’s already enough light coming from commercial buildings, why do we need the lights on?
Rob Newman made the point about excessive street lighting in his excellent podcast on the Guardian website. He says that a lot of the energy conversations that we have are all focused on ‘how can we meet our energy needs in the future?’ – the demand side – whereas he says that we should be looking at the supply-side of ‘why do we need so much energy in the future?’. I completely agree.
I couldn’t quite believe what I saw when this landed on my desk. I recently ordered tiny pack of 10 Shure wax guards for my headphones from Dabs.com and they turned up today. In a plastic wrapper. Inside a jiffy bag. Inside another plastic wrapper attached to a piece of cardboard. Inside a frickin’ humungous cardboard box. What a waste! I won’t be ordering from Dabs.com again in a hurry. Grrrr!
Something I stumbled across recently – Freecycle is a website that promotes the free exchange of things that we no longer need.
The concept is simple and is based around Yahoo! Groups – find your local group (in my case it’s Berkhamsted), join the group and then send and receive emails about stuff that people want to give away! Much better than dumping unwanted things on a tip or in the bin
Driving back from Stansted Airport the other week after one of the stag weekends I spotted the wind turbine at King’s Langley. They fascinate me with their gigantic size and the speed at which the blades rotate; whenever I see them I always feel like I’m living in some kind of futuristic vision. It occurred to me – why don’t they build wind turbines out of solar panels? Surely this would be a good idea – if you have a wind turbine you already have the equipment to channel electricity being generated by the apparatus onto the national grid. Solar panels would mean that you would still have some supply during the day even if there was no wind. Am I missing something here?
It’s been one hell of a windy day here in the UK. The photo to the right is a shot I took this evening in Finsbury Square, London, of a humongous branch that had been ripped off of a tree. It was so big that instead of it being moved, a small fence had been put up around it.
Posted by adoran2 
As the months and years roll by I find myself questioning more and more things that I do. I’ve been asked to go to 
Posted by adoran2 
Posted by adoran2 
Something I 
Driving back from Stansted Airport the other week after one of the stag weekends I spotted the 
