Green news & views

I missed this story a few days ago but somebody on a TV political show mentioned it today:

As he left the G8 summit George W Bush said "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter", raised a fist in the air and smiled that smug non-compliant grin like only George W Bush can.

Goodbye and good riddance.

The G8, the group of 8 industrialised nations (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States) have made a decision to go green.

Actually it's a decision to wholeheartedly go green by... cutting emissions by 50% and not the 100% you might expect.

And despite the rapid rate of deterioration in so many (eco, social, political) systems in the world, the G8 have given themselves a nice and easy 42 years in which to achieve this.

It's funny how the world goes these days... we had this rapid race for globalisation where barriers were broken down primarily for greed economic reasons; western companies quickly saw that they could reduce costs by employing far-flung foreign workers to do jobs for a fraction of the cost of a westerner. Why pay a Brit/US/Euro web designer/developer a top wage for the skills he or she was told were in huge demand and they'd spent years studying and qualifying for when someone in India would do the same job for a quarter of the cost?

The MPV, people carrier, or the Minivan as they call it in the States, is the latest victim of the American car companies' knee-jerk reaction to the oil crisis, according to the beeb.

It's so annoying to get junk mail don't you think? It's usually for all the stuff that you don't want; another credit card, mortgage, car insurance... Actually that's as far as I can remember about what sort junk mail we used to get because it's been quite a long time since we saw that deluge of wasted paper on our doormat - We joined the MPS the Mailing Preference Service.

Ever since we heard about the Freecycle concept a couple of years back we've been meaning to join our local Freecycle group. But with modern life being so ridiculously busy we never got round to joining up and it ended up on the back burner for a while.

On my drive home from work I saw three cars for sale. They were all 4x4s!

Now strike me down with high petrol prices if I'm wrong, but that's gotta be a sign!

Britain's unelected leader (at least, unelected by the people in a democratic general election), Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is apparently the only head of government at an oil summit in Jeddha at the moment, discussing with the Saudi King Abdullah the future of oil.

In my day job I've just signed a deal to have a web server to be hosted by rackspace here in the UK. The decision to go with this hosting company was purely a technical & commercial one but upon signing the contract I asked my account manager over at rackspace just where our server was physically located.

After making the switch to our new green electricity provider earlier in the week we received confirmation that the change from Southern Electric to ecotricity has already been made :)

We've just submitted our meter reading online through the ecotricity website, so now all we have to do is sit back and enjoy the fact that we're actually contributing to investment in renewable energy, chiefly windfarms.