Green Party Leader’s Comments on the Budget

Caroline Lucas, Britain’s first Green MP and leader of the Green Party, comments on today’s budget:

“In spite of the Chancellor’s protestations, this budget was neither unavoidable nor fair. Instead it was a massively failed opportunity to shift the economy onto a fairer, greener pathway.

“Devastating public spending cuts, of the sort announced today, are not ‘unavoidable.’  They are not an economic inevitability – they are an ideological choice.

“It’s been demonstrated that any efforts that are needed to address the deficit, once the economy is back to better health, can be paid for through progressive tax reform, so that the poorest are not forced to pay the highest price for the excesses of the bankers.

“Nor was this budget fair. A VAT rise, benefits cuts for all, a public sector freeze, and swingeing cuts in most government budgets of 25%, will all of them hit some of the poorest hardest.

“And any notion that by voting Blue you get Green was nailed today by the stark absence of any serious measures to promote urgently needed environmental measures.”

Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion and Green Party Leader

Our previous posts £100 Billion Lost to Tax ‘Flaws and Holes’, Unavoidable Cuts Which Will Affect “Our Whole Way of Life”, No Shock Doctrine for Britain – Stop the Cuts and Cuts “Destructive and Unnecessary” says Green Party Leader help explain why “this budget was neither unavoidable nor fair”.

David M. Davison

Web Sites of Interest (Pt. 2)

Part two of my irregular series of sharing some of my bookmarks – this time the category is energy.  Part one covered climate change, economics and science.

BWEA
Information on the UK wind energy industry, wind farms and wind power, with news and detailed information.

CCS Association, The
Represents the interests of its members in promoting the business of CCS.

Citizens Against CO2 Sequestration
Does not consider CCS to be green technology – “it is an EXPERIMENT and WE are the Guinea Pigs!”

Coal in the UK
Mapping coal across Britain.

Coal is Dirty
The mandate of this site is very simple: to debunk the myth of “clean coal”.

Mountaintop Removal for Coal in West Virginia

DESERTEC-UK
A group of volunteers who are interested in the Desertec (concentrating solar power in the desert) concept aiming to raise awareness of it in the UK and beyond.

Energies
An international, peer-reviewed open access journal.

EnergyBoom
News and analysis about the renewable energy sector.

Energy Bulletin
A clearing house for information regarding the peak in global energy supply.

Energy Economy Online
Devoted to bringing readers interesting, informative and useful information on the new energy economy.

European Wind Energy Association
The voice of the European wind industry.

Global Wind Energy Council
The global forum for the wind energy sector, uniting the wind industry and its representative associations.

Live Grid Carbon intensity
Real-time data for the UK.

NewEnergyFocus
A daily news service for the UK energy sector, dedicated to the professionals working towards sustainable energy.

No 2 Nuclear Power
Providing information on nuclear power in the UK and why it is not the answer to climate change.

ODAC (Oil Depletion Analysis Centre)
An independent, UK-registered educational charity working to raise international public awareness and promote better understanding of the world’s oil-depletion problem.

Oil Drum, The
Discussions about energy and our future.

Oil Sands Watch
The Pembina Institute provides policy research leadership and education on climate change, energy issues such as oilsands and coalbed methane, green economics, energy efficiency and conservation, renewable energy and environmental governance.

Syncrude oil sands mining operations. Photo: David Dodge, The Pembina Institute.

OpenEI
An open community and platform for sharing energy information.

Renewable Energy Association
Represents renewable energy producers and promotes the use of all forms of renewable energy in the UK.

Renewable Energy World
Renewable energy news and information.

RE-thinking 2050
A 100% Renewable Energy Vision for the European Union.

Risø DTU
Contributes to research, development and international exploitation of sustainable energy technologies and strengthens economic development in Denmark.

Sahara Wind
Large scale Sahara wind energy development project.

Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation
The DESERTEC Concept describes the perspective of a sustainable supply of electricity for EU-MENA up to the year 2050.

UK Without Incineration Network
An independent organisation representing a network of groups opposing the expansion of waste incineration in the UK.

World Coal Institute
Provides a forum for the exchange of information and the discussion of challenges relating to the coal industry.

David M. Davison

The Interaction Between the African Elephant and the African Honey Bee

The human population in Africa has increased dramatically and encroached into traditionally wildlife rich areas forcing large animals like elephants into smaller and smaller spaces.  Elephants have a huge requirement for food and water so migrate in search of sustenance.  Unfortunately, their travels bring them into conflict with people as new villages etc. are built over natural wildlife corridors.

This human-elephant conflict is becoming particularly serious in Kenya as people are now killing, spearing or poisoning elephants that come onto their land to eat their crops.

The Elephants and Bees Research Project is one of Save the Elephants’ programs designed to explore natural world for solutions to human-elephant conflict.  Led by DPhil researcher Lucy King from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, the project uses knowledge and observation of elephant behaviour to reduce damage from crop-raiding elephants by using African honeybees.

The project explores the use of bee populations in simple wooden beehives as an elephant deterrent and as a social and economic boost to poverty-stricken rural communities through the sustainable harvesting of honey.

This is the abstract of the (fairly) recent paper, Bee Threat Elicits Alarm Call in African Elephants, published on the PLoS web site:

“Unlike the smaller and more vulnerable mammals, African elephants have relatively few predators that threaten their survival.  The sound of disturbed African honeybees Apis meliffera scutellata causes African elephants Loxodonta africana to retreat and produce warning vocalizations that lead other elephants to join the flight.  In our first experiment, audio playbacks of bee sounds induced elephants to retreat and elicited more head-shaking and dusting, reactive behaviors that may prevent bee stings, compared to white noise control playbacks.  Most importantly, elephants produced distinctive “rumble” vocalizations in response to bee sounds.  These rumbles exhibited an upward shift in the second formant location, which implies active vocal tract modulation, compared to rumbles made in response to white noise playbacks.  In a second experiment, audio playbacks of these rumbles produced in response to bees elicited increased headshaking, and further and faster retreat behavior in other elephants, compared to control rumble playbacks with lower second formant frequencies.  These responses to the bee rumble stimuli occurred in the absence of any bees or bee sounds. This suggests that these elephant rumbles may function as referential signals, in which a formant frequency shift alerts nearby elephants about an external threat, in this case, the threat of bees.”

David M. Davison