Category Archives: environment

Drove to Chester this morning along the A55.

At the foot of Rhuallt hill, a new sign has been erected. It is enormous – about 9 square metres – and is painted a sludgy brown. It is extraordinarily obtrusive and ugly.

The sign informs the motorist that he, or she, is entering an area of outstanding natural beauty.

Yesterday I spent half an hour at Stafford railway station. I won’t bore you with the details of how this came to pass. Suffice it to say that it was part of the routinely depressing experience that is the Sunday commute to London. I’ve come to expect a bad journey at the hands of Virgin Trains and Network Rail, and yesterday was no exception.

Anyway, the scheduled ten minute wait at Stafford turned, predictably enough, into a 30 minute sojourn. I attempted to kill time by buying, at the station café, a £1.50 paper cup of what was described as an “Americano”, but was in fact a quarter litre of undrinkable, brown-coloured, boiled water.

The reason I mention Stafford station, rather than try to obliterate the “coffee” from my memory, is that I had sufficient time, courtesy of Sir Richard Branson, to examine my surroundings. They were pretty repellent, as the photograph above reveals.

Last week, as a foreigner in Spain, I also had the chance to examine my surroundings. I was more than a little impressed with them. Both Barcelona, a major European city, and Bilbao, an industrial seaport, were extremely well kept. Both radiated an air of civic pride. Above all, both were very clean indeed.

At all hours of the day, and well into the night, men were fastidiously sweeping the streets. There was very little litter and the pavements were not pockmarked with dried-up, discarded chewing gum. It was a clean, cared-for, environment and, consequently, enjoyable.

I could not help compare the condition of the Spanish cities with that of what is now my second home town, London. I’ve blogged previously about the condition of London’s pavements, with their glutinous mini-minefields of chewing gum and their cigarette butts. London is not, at least in many parts, a clean city. Bits of it are positively nasty.

I mentally made excuses for London. It is, after all, an enormous city, thronged with humanity, and hard to keep clean. The waste bins have been removed from the streets because of the terrorist threat. Places like Victoria Street – one of the dirtiest in the capital – are particularly windy, and litter tends to drift.

But none of this is really an excuse. Barcelona is a pretty big city, too. And Spain, particularly the Basque country, has had more than its own fair share of terrorism.

So I’m driven to the unavoidable conclusion that what we see in London and in Stafford is a reflection of what we ourselves have become. We spit our chewing gum onto Victoria Street because we don’t respect our surroundings. In Stafford station, we throw our detritus onto the tracks because we can see that someone else has done so before us, and whoever runs the station can’t be bothered to clear it up, but just lets it accumulate.

We need a radical change of attitude. We need to take more pride in, and care for, our surroundings. We need to take more pride in ourselves. In short, we need to be more Spanish.

Today’s YouGov poll shows Boris Johnson leading Ken Livingstone by 11 percentage points. I fervently hope that it is right. The capital needs cleaning up, and Boris could be just the man to do it. Ken certainly hasn’t.

London, with a bit of effort and a change in attitude from all of us, could be just as clean as Barcelona. And, where London leads, let’s hope Stafford will follow.

The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. From today, anyone driving along that road will do so with 2.5 per cent biofuel in his tank.

The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation comes into force today. It requires that 2.5 per cent of the petrol and diesel sold at filling stations should consist of biofuel. This will increase to 5 per cent in 2010.

This all sounds very good and green, but the truth, according to campaigners, is that, far from combating global warming, the policy will speed up climate change and cause irreversible damage to wildlife habitats.

Oxfam has drawn attention to a warning by the UN that increased use of biofuels could result in as many as 60 million people in poor countries facing clearance from their land in order to make way for biofuel plantations of palm and sugar cane.

The RSPB has also heavily criticised the policy, saying:

The world seems to have gone biofuels mad! Across the US, biofuel production plants are springing up that will be able to process more corn than the US can grow. UK and EU policy is now adding to the demand, increasing the price of crops across the world and encouraging more rainforest destruction, more ploughing up of grassland and more drainage of wetlands. It is utter folly to destroy ecosystems that are bursting with life and storing carbon so that biofuel crops, such as palm oil, can be grown.

The dash for biofuels, together with increased demand for protein-rich foods from emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil, is also contributing to sharply increasing food prices. Mexico has witnessed mass demonstrations against increases in the price of corn meal, while, only last week, there were food riots in Haiti.

Even rich, industrialised nations are not immune. Today, the Times reports that Japan has almost exhausted its reserves of butter and comments:

Japan’s butter shortages have exposed an alarming effect of what economists at Goldman Sachs describe as the long-term, “structural” shift towards higher food prices currently being felt: that many of the existing arrangements crafted by wealthier nations to feed their populations are now in peril.

The Fuel Obligation is undoubtedly well intended. The planet does need to become less reliant on fossil fuels for transport. But the unforeseen consequences of the policy appear, in some respects, to be worse than the problem it is intended to address.

The nations of the world must, above all, feed themselves. Natural habitats are a finite and diminishing resource and must be protected.

So if starvation, food riots and the destruction of the environment are the unintended products of the Obligation, then, like biofuel itself, the Obligation should be refined.