Some good news from the Independent. It’s Easter Day and the other Good News appears to have been banished from British television at least. No religion in the schedules apart from the Mozart Requiem and a programme on the history of choral music. The other headline on Good Friday was that I could go and place my bet at the bookies, and then on Saturday the storm about embryology where Gordon Brown plans to put a three line whip on the party to vote for merging human and animal cells. Catholic MPs are put on the spot as their leaders speak out in horror. Just in time I found two of J.S. Bach’s Cantatas for the second day of Easter, BWV6 and 66. The opening chorus, including a dialogue between fear (counter tenor) and hope (tenor), was particularly uplifting.
However the news I speak of is of a turbine emerging from the former shipyards of Belfast. It has a number of things to commend it. It speaks of power from tidal energy. Evidently, unknown to us – like the Nubia of ancient times never mentioned in the shadow of Egypt, a scientist has been experimenting with a turbine in the Nile in the Sudan. From the experiment in the river attempts were made to transfer the idea to harness tidal power.

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Not content with the long list of jobs and wide range of expertise already on offer, our Hero dons his Superman outfit to save the planet – and don’t we need it! He’s in charge of a brigade which is going to cut carbon emissions.
His government said it was going to do this, but if I remember rightly it didn’t quite turn out as it should have. Same with his appointment as peace envoy for the Middle East it was difficult to see how his CV fitted the job description when he had willfully overseen conflict resulting in untold death and misery. Indeed how did this fit in with his religious pretentions and resulting job as lecturer? Whatever it is you can sure it’s going to be lucrative for him. Volunteering’s not his game!

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Looks like there’s a revolution afoot in the technology around solar panels which allows easier production and cuts costs. Where is this taking place? The production company is in California’s silicon valley. Is there interest in Europe? Yes, but in Germany where there are already big steps forward in introducing solar power.
John Vidal writing in the Guardian (29/12/2007) describes the scene: ” The solar panels produced by a Silicon Valley start-up company, Nanosolar, are radically different from the kind that European consumers are increasingly buying to generate power from their own roofs. Printed like a newspaper directly on to aluminium foil, they are flexible, light and, if you believe the company, expected to make it as cheap to produce electricity from sunlight as from coal.”

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The conclusions about the success or otherwise of Bali are becoming clearer following the happy talk of politicians claiming that a good deal had been stitched up and that the US had compromised.
George Monbiot in the Guardian (17.12.2007) thinks we’ve moved backwards, while a report the The Independent says we have. The British government is planning a number of coal-fired power stations to meet the UK energy needs which a scientist says will put nails in the planet’s coffin.

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The declaration by the former US Vice President, Al Gore, at Bali seems to me to move in the direction of articulating what we’re up against. Clearly that’s not just the accumulation of carbon, it’s about the incomprehension of the likes of George W. Bush.
Well, no it’s not incomprehension is it? It’s that he and other leaders and opposition parties are all geared up to the capitalist enterprise which demands more and more of the same. Thus we have the “green” British Petroleum going into Canada ready to exploit the environment in bigger and better ways than before. It’s a force no presidential candidate we’ve seen yet is prepared to ignore, nor will any of the major British political parties. All drive the same bus, a ramshackle 20th century banger, spewing out greenhouse gases in all directions as it creaks and groans.

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The news that BP intend to extract oil from Northern Canada illustrates how the treadmill we are on annuls any thoughts of combating climate change. BP is a company that had traded on its green credentials. Now its credibility is in tatters. The land being exploited, despoiled, polluted belongs in part to the First Nation peoples.
Oil not only drives engines, it fuels the economy so that we engage in pernicious wars and call anyone who resists “terrorist”. The announcement that UK is to invest in wind farms is totally annulled by BP’s intention. The Independent heads this as “The greatest environmental crime in history”.

The general feeling about much effort to offset climate change seems “too little, too late” while we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels. In Guyana the leadership is making a request for help in preserving its rain forest. Elsewhere around the globe timber continues to be a huge commercial operation ignoring any consequences.
Good to see that in Australia the population has exercised its collective muscle and mafe clear the widespread dislike of continuing pollution and war supported by the Conservative government. The US has lost an ally, but what is the UK’s attitude? At the moment the fight is on to see who can be more Tory with Cameron reclaiming the Thatcherite policies for education by promising more academies. These look suspiciously like the CTCs.
I spent a short time on the Management Committee of the Solihull CTC. I liked the fact that it brought in the International Baccalaureate which includes students doing field work projects in addition to academic work. A level diets of unrelieved study is bad for the young and extremely exclusive. The problem is that many schools will continue to struggle on low funding. The primary school where I’m a governor is in a deprived area of Birmingham, Winson Green, in the shadow of the prison. It has acquired a huge deficit, largely due to long term absences. I know we are not alone. The fact that the academies are able to introduce what their funders want on the curriculum is also hugely dangerous. We have seen some academies in the North East introduce creationism. That’s the kind of thinking the Neocons behind Bush display and which Blair seemed to relish.

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