Opening of One World Cafe, 18 Leigh St, London WC1 9PW
Fundraising dinner: Tue 21st August, at ‘One World’.
Talk: UK Targets “Not Enough to Prevent World Extinction” Wed 29th August, at ‘One World’.
Article: “Saving the Planet Need not Cost the Earth”
Full Newsletter: newsletter.pdf

The Centre for Alternative Technology has just released a report, http://zerocarbonbritain.com

Response Below by Stephen Stretton
Cambridge Zero Carbon Society –>

Minutes from the 2007 Zero Carbon Society AGM: agm-2007-minutes.doc

By Gunnar Moller, with Geoff Wexler and others

Submission to Cambridge City Council on Housing Regulations

The present draft of the supplementary planning document for sustainable design and construction includes an excellent account of the most important town planning issues. It is not as good on energy efficiency, which is one of the most crucial planks in designing for a sustainable society.

Submission to Cambridge City Council on Housing Regulations

China’s new appetite for milk forces price rise in Germany

=B7 Cost of dairy products expected to rise by 50%
=B7 EU rules stop farmers increasing production

Kate Connolly in Berlin
Thursday August 2, 2007
The Guardian

Demand for milk in China is soaring thanks to president’s ‘dream’ of
half a litre a day for all, especially children

They have been blamed for putting up the price of everything from
bicycles to garden fences.
Now the Chinese have been dubbed “milk snatchers” by German consumers
for buying so much milk that prices of dairy products in Germany are
expected to soar by 50%.
The Germans are being made to feel the effect of China’s new-found
taste for milk, sparked by a remark by China’s president Wen Jiabao:
“I have a dream - a dream to be able to provide all Chinese,
especially our children, with half a litre of milk a day.”
The result has been a huge increase in milk consumption in China and
demand is growing at a rate of around 25% a year.
Because China has no tradition of dairy farming, there is a shortage
of home-produced milk. A third of all the milk produced worldwide is
now being transported to China, much of it from the EU and a
significant amount from Germany, which produces 27bn litres a year.

EU dairy farmers would like to increase production to cope with a
current shortfall, but are prevented from doing so by EU milk quotas,
imposed in 1984 and in force until 2015. Instead German dairy farmers
have taken the obvious step of putting up their prices, which they
have long claimed were artificially low. Blaming the Chinese has
helped to deflect criticism from the farmers.
A litre of milk in Germany, currently around 64 cents (40p), is due to
go up by 50% in the next few weeks. Other products, such as butter,
quark and yoghurt, are expected to rise accordingly. Across Europe the
prices of dairy products are rising for the same reasons, but not so
dramatically as in Germany, where cheap groceries are seen as a basic
right.
Thanks to the lobbying power of Germany’s huge number of discount
supermarkets, groceries cost around 63% less than in Iceland and 15%
less than in Britain.
Now outraged consumer groups and politicians have called for the
government to raise unemployment benefit to cover the rise.
Yesterday supermarkets across the country reported that shoppers were
panic buying dairy products in an attempt to beat the price increase.
The only effective way to increase global milk yields without breaking
the milk quotas, according to experts, is to encourage the breeding of
cows outside the EU. German dairy farmers have duly been selling
their best high-performance milk cows to Chinese farmers, who are
receiving government subsidies if they switch to dairy farming.

UK Targets “Not Enough To Prevent World Extinction”

Stephen Stretton, Cambridge

1st August 2007

The current UK greenhouse gas targets are not enough to avoid a world
extinction on a scale last seen with the end of the dinosaurs.

Even if we hit the government’s target of reducing Carbon Dioxide
pollution, and most other countries adopt a similar approach - the
world could be committed to up to six degrees of climate change.

The impacts would include collapse of the Amazon rainforest and most
of the world’s fertile farmland turning to desert. Rising seas would
flood major cities such as London, New York, Shanghai and Calcutta. It
would lead to the extinction of most life on earth.

If the UK is to lead, it must lead much more strongly. Current targets
are simply not enough. We to avoid 2C of climate change based on
convergence to safe and fair equal per-capita emissions. This may mean
a 90% reduction in all greenhouse gases by 2030 in the UK.

Summary of Climate Bill Response: Not Enough

Full response to climate bill (pdf)

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Power transmission: Where the wind blows

A grandiose plan to link Europe’s electricity grids may recast wind power from its current role as a walk-on extra to being the star of the show.

Stephen Jeffrey

Jul 26th 2007
From The Economist print edition

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“The Great Global Warming Swindle”: Response by Geoff Wexler
rtf - html

This programme shows that artificially created CO₂ is not the cause of global warming. This is a remarkable achievement considering that so much research on the attribution problem points to CO₂ as being the main cause of the last thirty years global warming. It had looked as if the alternative explanation based on sunspots was not doing at all well during the last few years because the sunspots had leveled off whereas the temperature had just kept rising. So what was wrong? The idea behind the new approach is quite revolutionary, it involves overthrowing the calendar, the evidence and the physics.

No, it is not 2007 now as you have been told. The date is now 1975 or 1988 depending on which source you use. Applying these corrections has the effect of removing most of the contentious warming from the data. What’s left correlates quite well with the length of the sunspot cycle especially if you start with an obscure set of temperature data , pull it about a bit and attribute it to NASA for the sake of familiarity. Going back in time there was a shortage of sunspot data, so it is convenient for educational reasons to make it up. After all, it makes it easier to see the relationship between the two curves if they coincide completely.

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