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The purr of electronic gears sounds great – if you can get past the price

August 4, 2009

Shimano’s electronic gears are a radical departure from traditional mechanical gears, but I’m sticking with simplicity

The gears shift instantly and imperceptibly underneath me. For a second I can picture how wonderful it would be to have this newest of new-fangled electronic technology shifting gear with precision as I fly up the Alpe D’Huez in chase of a Tour de France yellow jersey. The image doesn’t last long, as I’m actually sitting on a turbo trainer, shoved in a corner behind a display cabinet, in a bike shop in Canary Wharf.

Evans Cycles’ London City branch is the place to try Shimano’s new Dura-Ace Di2 electronic gears for high-end road bikes – if you can prise the city boys in suits off the test machine (hooked to a resistance trainer, so no one can ride the precious technology out of the shop).

Shimano’s electronic gears are a radical departure from today’s mechanical gears. Instead of shifting gears because of a mechanical process – a rider pressing, pulling or twisting a gear shifter and sending tension down a cable – these new gears employ tiny servo-motors, triggered by buttons above the brake levers, which dance the chain across front and rear rings perfectly every time. There’s never any over or under-shifting where – respectively – your chain shifts off the chain ring or doesn’t shift far enough for the next gear. No tweaking when the gears go out of alignment: these gears automatically realign themselves. And the battery lasts at least 2,000 miles a charge, in all weather. This is state-of-the-art shifting perfection.

Best of all is the noise these gears make – halfway between a “feel my power” growl and a “vorsprung durch technik” whine of mechanical precision. It certainly helps sell these breathtakingly pricey gears, much like a perfectly smooth CD eject mechanism could sell a hi-fi in the 90s.

If you can get past the price – the whole Di2 package costs just under £3,000 – there’s another problem. Like a smooth CD eject mechanism, electronic gears aren’t really necessary. Bikes have traditionally kept only what’s necessary – extra weight, price or complexity are discarded for good reason.

Most regular cyclists are capable of changing an inner tube or adjusting their gears. And even if they aren’t, shops can’t charge too much for what is clearly a simple mechanical job. Electronic gearing is another step towards the pursed lips “ooh, that’s going to cost you” car mechanic approach, where servicing requires computers as much as spanners. Don’t expect a sleepy village cycle shop to stock spare parts, either.

With high-end mountain and road bikes embracing all sorts of fancy technology – carbon fibre components, titanium frames, air shocks with rebound damping –simplicity could be so last season, anyway. Even the humble commuter bicycle is getting belt-drives and built-in solar-powered lights this year.

I’m sticking with simplicity though, for the most part: gears I can fix in the rain, with a multitool and a bit of elbow grease; a bike I can wheel into any shop when it goes wrong; and that can sit outside a pub without becoming a high-tech target.

That said, in a lunatic, pre-parenthood cycling blow-out, it wasn’t that long ago I bought a carbon fibre mountain bike with fancy forks. And the purr of electronically shifting gears does sound great …

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Is the Big Green Gathering another victim of the crackdown on dissent?

August 4, 2009

Organisers of the long-running festival have reason to believe that an excuse was contrived to bankrupt them

Is it paranoia, or are they really out to get us? Most of the time it’s paranoia. Every week I’m approached by people whispering about vapour trails from planes being used to control our minds, free energy devices suppressed by oil companies or missile attacks on the twin towers. Sometimes, as we saw at the G20 protests on 1 April or at climate camp last year, they are out to get us. The policing of these events shows that some of the UK’s public authorities really do regard political activism as a threat that must be contained or eliminated.

So what do you make of this story? Right now the last stragglers should have been packing up their tents at the end of the Big Green Gathering. It’s a festival in Somerset that attracts about 20,000 people to listen to music, plan protests and raise money for green causes. It has been running since 1994 and there has never been any significant trouble.

But this year the gathering didn’t happen. On Friday 24 July, five days before the festival was due to open, the district council applied to the high court for an injunction against it. If they failed to abide by the injunction, the directors of the Big Green Gathering could have their assets seized and be fined or sent to prison.

The council’s witness statement contained an impossible bind. It maintained that “the requisite consents cannot at this late stage be granted”, then went on to explain that the order “contains a proviso which will permit this event to run” – as long as the gathering obtains the requisite consents. No one could blame the organisers for accepting defeat, handing back their licence and cancelling the festival. The Big Green Gathering will now go bankrupt. It’s unlikely ever to happen again. Cock-up or conspiracy?

As any old hippy will tell you, festivals aren’t what they used to be. Gone are the days when you could announce a happening, call up a few mates with drums and guitars, and put the word out that something groovy and free was about to kick off. In these buttoned-down times, it would be treated like an al-Qaida training camp. Today, you must apply for a licence and spend months of your life filling in forms and liaising with the various responsible authorities. There are good reasons for this: it ensures that no one is crushed to death and that local people aren’t harried by intolerable noise and disruption. There are also bad reasons: the controlling, snooping, curtain-twitching state tendencies which insist that all spontaneity be planned six months in advance, that no one can ever take her top off or smoke homegrown weed or get a little bit outrageous – even within a festival site – for fear of offending some tight-arsed busybody in desperate need of a life.

The organisers applied for their licence in February, and spent the intervening months trying to meet the conditions. These included 450 security guards, a steel perimeter fence and watchtowers, and free wristbands for 12 undercover police officers, who could move through the crowds ensuring that no one was enjoying themselves too much. The site would have more of the ambience of a prison camp than a hippy festival, but at least it would conform to regulations.

The gathering submitted a 100-page management plan. On 30 June the various authorities (police, fire, environmental heath, county council and the rest) said they were satisfied with the arrangements. The district council gave the festival a licence. But in July the security company suddenly demanded that the gathering pay the whole fee up front. The festival refused and hired another company, which would take some of the money after the event.

So there was a cock-up. But it doesn’t wholly explain what happened next. On 23 July, the organisers were suddenly confronted with a list of demands that they believed they had already met. The Devon and Somerset fire brigade demanded to know that the company hired by the festival, Midland Fire Services, had “an acceptable level of competency”. As Midland Fire Services has been employed by the gathering for several years without complaint, and as it does the same job for the Royal Tattoo, Womad, the Reading and Leeds festivals and other public events, the organisers couldn’t understand why, at the 11th hour, its competence was suddenly being challenged. The fire brigade hasn’t been able to answer my questions.

But the real sticking point was the road closure order. To keep its licence, the festival would need an order from Somerset county council to shut the local roads to any traffic except the gathering’s. The organisers thought it was a formality: there had never been a problem before. Out of the blue on Friday 24 July, the county council told the gathering that its maps were incomplete, and that its signs did not conform to regulations and some of them “are located within North Somerset and therefore we cannot approve their use”.

The organisers responded that the maps and signs are the same ones they had used in previous years, since when the regulations haven’t changed, and that the county council claims jurisdiction over the whole of Somerset, including the north. It approved the same signs in the same places in 2006 and 2007. But – or so it seemed – the county council would not budge. The application the district council sent to the courts insisted no road closure order had been granted. Strangely, however, the only authority that did not submit a witness statement was Somerset county council.

So the organisers surrendered the licence, cancelled the festival, and set about the sorry task of clearing the site. But as they were doing so, an odd thing happened. They found two notices, one on a fence post, another in a hedge. I have photos of them. They are issued by Somerset county council and dated 20 July 2009. They announce the closure of the roads leading to the festival.

So was a road closure order issued or not? Somerset county council sent me a response but didn’t answer my question about whether or not an order had been granted. The county council, the district council, and Avon and Somerset police insist they have done everything to facilitate the gathering, but that the organisers hadn’t got their act together.

The organisers allege a deliberate attempt to bankrupt the Big Green Gathering: they say that the authorities left their new objections until the last minute. This meant that they carried on spending right up to the eve of the festival, and that by then it was too late to get legal advice and mount a challenge. They point out that if the road closure order had, in reality, been issued, the main sticking point was a fake one: the authorities had manufactured an excuse to close them down.

Are they being paranoid? I don’t know. But it looks pretty odd to me.

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Climate change deniers claim they’re censored. What hypocrites

July 31, 2009

Anthony Watts, sceptic and scourge of climate change science, has used copyright laws to censor an opponent

One of the allegations made repeatedly by climate change deniers is that they are being censored. There’s just one problem with this claim: they have yet to produce a single valid example. On the other hand, there are hundreds of examples of direct attempts to censor climate scientists.

Most were the work of the Bush administration. In 2007 the Union of Concerned Scientists collated 435 instances of political interference in the work of climate researchers in the US.

Scientists working for the government were pressured by officials to remove the words “climate change” and “global warming” from their publications; their reports were edited to change the meaning of their findings, others never saw the light of day. Scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Fish and Wildlife Service were forbidden to speak to the media; James Hansen at Nasa was told by public relations officials that there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to call for big cuts in greenhouse gases.

Philip Cooney, a senior White House aide who previously worked at the American Petroleum Institute, admitted to Congress that he had made hundreds of changes to government reports about climate change on behalf of the Bush government.

Among other changes, he had struck out evidence that glaciers were retreating and inserted phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about global warming. In the UK, both Viscount Monckton and Martin Durkin, the director of Channel 4′s The Great Global Warming Swindle, have threatened to sue people who have criticised the claims they’ve made about the science.

Where, on the other hand, is a single verifiable instance of a climate denier being silenced by the authorities? They have yet to produce one. But it suits them to cry wolf. They love to imagine that they are important enough to censor. The claim chimes with their paranoid invocation of a great conspiracy – involving most of the world’s scientists, most of the world’s governments, most of the world’s media and a few hundred million others – to suppress the truth about global warming.

Now we have another marvellous instance of this hypocrisy. Anthony Watts spends much of his time maligning climate scientists and environmentalists on his blog Wattsupwiththat. But while he can dole it out, he can’t take it. As Kevin Grandia of desmogblog shows, Watts has just used US copyright laws to take down a YouTube video which exposes his claims. Grandia has since reposted the video (see above) so you can see for yourself what all the fuss is about.

It is not clear how his copyright was infringed by the video, but the US laws have been widely used by other people to block material that they don’t like. Websites are obliged to remove any video which is subject to a takedown request, and they can put it back up only if they win an appeal. I charge Watts with the accusation he unjustly levels at other people: this looks to me like an attempt to silence his critics.

monbiot.com

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Cyclist beware: don’t stray from the towpath

July 31, 2009

Stuart Jeffries learns a few things about cyclists and manners after a refreshing accidental dip in the canal on the way to work

Have you ever cycled into the canal while commuting to work? You really ought to try – it’s most refreshing. I did it earlier this week and, as I told the kind people who helped me out, I regret nothing. Or nothing very much.

This is what happened. I was cycling along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal near King’s Cross in London thinking happy thoughts. I’d just read a news story about how women are getting more and more beautiful while men remain as pathetically cavemanny as ever. How lovely to be a heterosexual man in this day and age, I thought. Then I saw ahead of me an oncoming cyclist, and between him and me a couple strolling towards him.

The woman stepped sharply to the left towards the canal to avoid the cyclist. I swerved sharply to the left to avoid her and suddenly my visual field was full of grey/brown water coming to me very fast.

Then time slowed down and a series of questions went through my mind. Could I fall in such a way that the bike stayed on the towpath? Could I get my watch out of my pocket and hurl it on to the path before I went under? Could I reach my mobile, film the event and produce a multimedia audiovisual package that would really show my bosses that I’m not just a dinosaur of print journalism? Disappointingly, the answer to all three questions was no.

I stood up in the canal, thinking that the water wasn’t as cold as I’d feared. I wondered how much swan poo was in the water and if it was toxic. I was quite pleased I hadn’t landed on a supermarket trolley or the remains of another cyclist. The water came up to my chest and I had quite a nice chat with Laura and Jamie as they leaned with concerned looks down on me from the towpath. They looked so well dressed and dry that I felt at a bit of a social disadvantage. We did that very British dance: They were incredibly apologetic and self-abasing, I poo-pooed their apologies, saying it was entirely my fault. I’m not sure what happened to the oncoming cyclist.

They helped me pull the bike out of the water. My saddlebag was soaked, but amazingly some of the contents wrapped in a plastic bag – including my book and sandwiches which I later ate and — were bone dry.

I climbed out of the canal smelling of my new fragrance, eau de Grand Union, and began wringing out my T-shirt when my colleague Hannah walked by pristine and stylish in a summer dress. In the circumstances, it was very kind of her to talk to me at all. She suggested I must be concussed and should walk the few yards to work and have a cup of tea. Instead I pulled on a reasonably dry cagoule (classy), cycled home, chucked my damp clothes in the washing machine, showered, dabbed my grazed shins with Dettol, and blow dried my Oyster Card, debit card, phone, and watch.

Then I cycled back to work: I had to get back on my saddle and face down my demons. I retraced my route along the towpath. There are tyre marks swerving across the grass verge of towpath at the point I went into the drink. I stood there for a few moments and whistled the guitar riff from the Good the Bad and the Ugly (where did that come from?).

The only downside of my accident was that my mobile phone doesn’t work any more. I’d wanted an upgrade anyway. My bike (fingers crossed) seems to be in good condition.

Of course it was all my fault. The British Waterways code of conduct gives priority to pedestrians over cyclists, which is something that some cyclists don’t take seriously enough. Hannah told me that a cyclist had shouted “Move!” at her the other day as they barrelled down the same towpath I cycle along every day. That sort of rudeness is contrary to the British Waterways cycling code which says: “considerate and courteous to all users. Carry a bell and use it, or say excuse me as you approach all other users.”

For the most part any friction between cyclists and pedestrians is the fault of a sizeable minority of the former. That said, for cyclists like me riding on the canal towpath is irresistible: it’s a rustic idyll away from the raging roads.

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Wikipedia-style website to record every species on Earth

July 30, 2009

Coming soon to a screen near you: The Encyclopedia of Life – a user-generated database of all living things

A complete list of all the species on the planet is, for many biologists and conservationists, the natural history equivalent of the Holy Grail. So the recently-launched EoL (it stands for ‘Encyclopedia of Life’), which aims to create not just a list, but an individual web-page, for every single one of the world’s plant and animal species, is bound to cause a buzz.

Make no mistake, this will be a truly Herculean task. There may only be about 5,000 species of mammals, 8,000 species of reptiles, and 10,000 or so species of birds. But once we get to groups like flowering plants (about 250,000 species, and that’s not including hybrids), insects (over 1m species described, with perhaps another 5m new ones waiting to be discovered), let alone micro-organisms such as viruses and bacteria, it’s easy to see why EoL might seem little optimistic.

So how does EoL work? Well, like its forerunner Wikipedia, EoL is a self-perpetuating encyclopedia, written by and refereed by anyone who wants to contribute. In practice, the contributors are likely to be mainly professional scientists or talented amateur naturalists – in some cases the leading experts on a species or group. Others can add text, images and even video clips to each entry, with the ultimate goal of making information about all the world’s organisms freely available.

Accuracy will be ensured (hopefully, at least) by an expert team of curators, who will weed out any inaccuracies and clarify any confusions. Like Wikipedia, there will be no charge for anyone wishing to access the information, so writers must be willing to share their knowledge with anyone else under a ‘creative commons licence‘. Original sources will also be credited where possible.

So far, so good. But anyone familiar with recent controversies in biological science – and in particular taxonomy, classification and nomenclature – will immediately be aware of problems beyond the sheer workload involved. Broadly, these break down into three areas of potential confusion:

• What is a species? Although we know that the African elephant and Indian elephant are different species, and likewise the house sparrow is a different species from the tree sparrow, many divisions between species are not so clear-cut. Scientists may lump two previously separate species together (like the Bullock’s and Baltimore orioles of the US), or split one apart (as in bean and pink-footed geese). And when it comes to the differences between closely related plants and their many hybrids, things can get really confusing.

• What is its name? Brits call divers “divers”, Americans call them loons; likewise “skua” (UK) and “jaeger” (US). In Africa things get even more confusing, while many species of insect and plant don’t have an English name at all. And what about the non English-speaking world? OK, we could use scientific names, but even these change, as has recently happened with the classification of such common and widespread species as the tits.

• How many species are there? I’ve already touched on this – but when you realise that the 2m species currently identified represent as little as 2% of all the species on Earth, it’s easy to see why EoL may turn out to be a bit like painting the Forth Bridge – just when you think it’s finished, up pops some other obscure organism begging for entry to the club.

Despite these caveats, though, I think the founders of EoL do deserve praise and support. And as one representative of our own species, the poet Robert Browning, wrote:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?

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Cycling books for the summer holidays

July 30, 2009

Cycling beats commuting on many levels – except you can’t read a book while you’re doing it. So, here’s my summer-holiday cycling reading list

With the summer holidays upon us, it’s time to think about books to read en vacances. If you’re like me, it’s a chance to catch up on some novels, always better read with momentum than crawled through three pages at a time last thing after Newsnight. For cyclists, recent years have seen a renaissance of bike-writing, as well as bike-riding. So if you’re thinking of stowing a bit of bike-lit in your saddlebag, allow me to make a few recommendations – and list some cycling books still on my “must read” list.

Because the Tour de France has just come to an end, let’s start with sport. Richard Williams signed off his superb coverage of the event this year with this:

“With the end of the Tour de France,” the novelist Paul Fournel wrote, “the summer reaches its moment of sadness: long, hot afternoons and no longer anything to get your teeth into.”

More of Fournel in a moment, but there are plenty of books around to prolong the racing fan’s contentment. For starters, Mark Cavendish has produced an autobiography almost as quickly as he finished the stage on the Champs Elysées. I can’t tell you much about the quality of Boy Racer, other than to say I received an email from a former pro I know who was none too happy about Cav’s off-the-cuff comments about him in the book, but I have heard that, as these things go, it’s well-ghosted.

A better prospect might be Bradley Wiggins’s In Pursuit of Glory, famously frank about its author’s post-Olympic depression and fondness for a bevvy. Talking of pursuing glory, Michael Hutchinson’s account of his quixotic attempt on one of cycling’s great athletic challenges, The Hour, remains a cracking read.

The stars of yesteryear have reappeared too. For nostalgics, Cycling is My Life, the autobiography of erstwhile British hero Tommy Simpson, who died on Mont Ventoux in 1967 from the combined effects of dehydration, excessive effort, brandy and amphetamines, has been reissued. Of the competing accounts of the life of his great rival and five-times Tour winner of the 1960s, Jacques Anquetil, I would choose Fallen Angel by William Fotheringham (a Guardian cycling correspondent and author) over Paul Howard’s rather luridly titled Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape.

Another by a Guardian and Observer scribe, Richard Moore’s In Search of Robert Millar, is well regarded and very much on my shopping list. Interestingly, his subject, the enigmatic Scottish climber Millar, whose feat of 4th place in the 1984 Tour de France as best-ever British finisher was only this year matched by Wiggins, has recently emerged from semi-recluse to write, rather brilliantly, about his racing experience in a recent issue of the upmarket cycling periodical Rouleur. Rouleur also interviewed and excerpted a book by Jean Bobet, brother and fellow professional of the great Breton champion Louison. The extracts read beautifully and left me wanting more of Tomorrow, We Ride: the pick of the bunch, possibly.

I’m not a big fan of travel writing generally, and of cycling travel writing especially, as it only makes me envious that I’m not out doing it myself. But I might bring myself to re-read Tim Moore’s French Revolutions, as he is such a funny and charming writer. More off the beaten track but a great companion would be Ken Worpole, in his quiet way one of our great public intellectuals and a beautiful writer; so try his Staying Close to the River, and you will not go far wrong. And there is always the indomitable Dervla Murphy to fall back on. Her Full Tilt: From Dunkirk to Delhi by Bicycle stayed with me for its account of sleeping with a pistol under her pillow each night as she pedalled her way through Turkey.

Another classic, making the transition from travelogue now to fiction, is HG Wells’s obscure novel The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll. Admittedly, it’s more memorable for sociological reasons – its portrait of a “New Woman” – than for great literary merit. But I couldn’t end without two literary cycling favourites. Tim Krabbé might be better-known for his noirish thrillers, The Vanishing and The Cave, but in his native Netherlands, it is The Rider that has outsold the lot. A novella-cum-memoir, superlatively translated by Sam Garrett, The Rider is an account of a one-day race that takes its reader on an extraordinary existentialist journey.

Rather like Krabbé, who is also a chess expert, the French diplomat and author Paul Fournel delights in intellectual puzzles – hence his membership of the avant-garde writing group Oulipo, which has counted Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec among its number. But his short book of pensées, Need for the Bike, is not a test but a delight: a more articulate testament to the pleasures of cycling is hard to imagine.

I’ve barely got going, but please tell us what cycling read you’ll be packing in your pannier this year.

• Matt Seaton is the author of the book Two Wheels, a revised and updated collection of his Two Wheels column for the Guardian

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India gets serious on climate change

July 29, 2009

India has resisted the external imposition of climate change law – and with good reason. But its about-turn is to be applauded

Here’s the best news I’ve seen all year: India is finally lumbering into action on climate change.

Though this country is likely to be hit harder than almost anywhere else by the climate crash, not least because its food production is largely dependent on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers, which are rapidly retreating, it has almost been a point of pride in India not to respond to the requests of richer nations to limit its emissions.

I think there are several reasons for this, not all of them discreditable. The first is that Indian people and governments have rightly perceived that when it comes to acting on climate change, most developed countries are all leaf and no plums. They make grand statements (remember the G8 meeting) about the need to cut emissions, but in most cases they haven’t been translating them into domestic policy (the UK is now an exception). With some justice, India has suspected that it is being urged to implement global policies that the rich nations have no intention of honouring.

Indians are also painfully aware that the rich nations in the past deliberately prevented their nation from developing. England, for example, banned the import of calico (cotton cloth) from India, in order to protect its own textile industries. It went on to smash Indian looms and cut off the thumbs of Indian weavers in order prevent them from making their superior products. As Ha Joon Chang shows in his book Kicking Away the Ladder, England’s industrial revolution was made possible by preventing India’s. Many people there suspect that attempts to limit India’s future greenhouse gas emissions have the same purpose.

Partly as a result, and partly because it’s the quickest and easiest route to mass electrification, India has been investing heavily in coal plants, while neglecting its great potential to produce renewable energy. But suddenly this seems to be changing. Draft documents released today show that the government intends to announce 20GW of solar power investments by 2020.

This is equivalent to one eighth of India’s installed capacity of all forms of electricity generation, or roughly a quarter of the UK’s (we have 80GW of plant, about 70% of which is powered by fossil fuel). China and Japan have similar targets, but because most of India is closer to the equator, the capacity factor (the amount of power you get from any given amount of plant) will be higher in India.

Well that’s the good news. The bad news is that India is also in the middle of a programme to increase coal capacity by 79GW – equivalent to the entire UK power sector – by 2012. The new solar plant will supplement, not substitute, its other forms of power generation. But at least the $19bn India is spending on it shows that the country is starting to get serious about climate change. Whether it makes any commitments at Copenhagen is another matter.

www.monbiot.com

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US car manufacturers plough a lonely furrow on biofuels

July 22, 2009

The US Environmental Protection Agency wants to boost the ethanol blend in fuels in a misguided bid to cut emissions

When the motor manufacturers are in dispute with the US Environmental Protection Agency, you wouldn’t win much for guessing which side I’m likely to be on. But this time you’d be wrong.

The EPA has to decide whether or not to allow more ethanol to be blended with gasoline. At the moment the limit for ordinary motor gas (petrol) is 10%. The agency is inclined to raise this to 15%. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is trying to prevent or postpone it. I’m with the car makers, though not for the reasons they cite; ethanol’s effect on a vehicle’s performance is not what keeps me awake at night. Since 2004 I’ve been banging on about the impact of biofuels on the environment and global food supplies, and I’ve been horribly vindicated. In 2008 the expansion of biofuel production was directly responsible for the decline in global food stocks, which caused grain prices to rise, catalysing famines in many parts of the world. Cereal stockpiles declined by 53m tonnes; the production of biofuels, mostly by the US, consumed almost 100m tonnes, according to a piece in the Economist on 6th December 2007. As the UN’s special rapporteur, Jean Ziegler says, turning food for people into food for cars is, “a crime against humanity”.

It’s also a crime against the environment. In almost all cases, biofuels made from grain or oil crops create more greenhouse emissions than petroleum. This is partly because they lead to an expansion in total crop production, which means that forests must be cut down, unploughed pastures must be tilled and wetlands must be drained to accommodate it. The carbon stored in both the vegetation and the soil is released and oxidised. Two papers in Science (here and here) show that when land clearance is taken into account, biofuels made from grain or oil crops cause a big increase in emissions.

It’s also because grain crops require nitrogen fertilizers, which produce emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas roughly 300 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. All told – apart from used chip fat (which can supply only a tiny fraction of motor fuel demand) – we’re better off using petroleum.

But while other countries are starting to re-assess their biofuel programmes, the US is still ploughing ahead. Fuel suppliers are legally bound to blend 9bn gallons of biofuels into gasoline every year. This will rise to 36bn gallons a year in 2022. The Waxman-Markey Bill, passed recently by the House of Representatives, leans heavily on biofuels to meet US greenhouse gas targets. This is only because their total greenhouse impact has been deliberately ignored by legislators.

The US is committed to ethanol not because of concerns about the environment but because of the power of the agricultural lobby. Big Farmer grows all the policies it wants in Washington, as cornbelt representatives rely on grain barons and crop chemical manufacturers for political donations. Ethanol is the best thing that has happened to US agro-industry in decades: it greatly raises demand for grain while disproportionately rewarding the biggest growers (there are no niche markets here). So stand back and watch the battle of the lobbyists: Big Motor versus Big Farmer.
monbiot.com

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A message to Copenhagen

July 22, 2009

Got something to say to those deciding the world’s fate? Get your voice heard by sharing your message with our Flickr group, A Message to Copenhagen and we’ll feature the best here

This December, governments meet in Copenhagen to thrash out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that will – hopefully – make a historic commitment to cut international greenhouse gas emissions. Governments have already started setting out their stalls. Environmental campaigners have called on world leaders to attend.

But what about you? What message do you have for the environment ministers and officials deciding the world’s fate this December? Get your voice heard and share your message by adding it to our new Flickr group, A Message to Copenhagen.

We want to collect as many photos from Guardian readers and Flickr users as possible, to show governments how people feel about the Copenhagen talks and climate change.

We’ll feature the best here on guardian.co.uk and maybe in the print version of the Guardian too.

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Are ghost bikes fitting reminders of motoring mistakes?

July 22, 2009

Do these spectral memorials raise awareness of cycling fatalities – or do they serve to put off those who are already cautious?

I first noticed the shiny white bike, chained to a black lamppost near Farringdon station in London, shortly before world leaders descended on the city for the G20 in April.

Was it, I wondered while pedalling past, some covert landmark to guide supporters from one of the myriad of protest groups gathering during the talks?

No it wasn’t. The G20 leaders came and went but the bike, painted white from saddle to tyre, remained tethered at the junction of St John Street and Clerkenwell Road.

A few days later I chanced across a site on ghost bikes, roadside memorials to cyclists, and the penny dropped. This was part, it was now clear, of a low-profile campaign to raise awareness of cycling fatalities, and it has been going on for a number of years.

The ghostbike website says:

They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists’ right to safe travel.

The one I saw has been named the Ghost Bike of St John Street. A number of incidents have occurred at the junction, including the death of Harriet Tory in 2005. And there are many other ghost bikes around the country.

But not everyone agrees that they are a fitting tribute. A colleague pointed out that spectral memorials dotted round the roads were hardly likely to tempt those already cautious about cycling into the saddle.

And police recently removed, on grounds of road safety, a ghost bike near a Sussex beauty spot. The bike marked where James Danson-Hatcher died and his family supported its presence.

His sister, Alison Swann, told the BBC: “I think it is a very effective message because it is symbolic. Everyone can for a split second at least visualise what has happened.”

Likewise, they strike me as a canny way of moving cycling deaths from the realms of the statistical to showing the real consequences of motoring mistakes.

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