June 2010 printable subscriber newsletter

Ecologist

28th May, 2010

In this month's newsletter we look at a model for tackling deforestation that truly involves the local community; we examine a new breed of waste incinerator; we ask whether open source technologies could be part of the answer to climate change, and analyse what the new UK coalition government means for essential planning decisions. To download, log in and scroll to the bottom of the page...

The new coalition Government seems, to environmentalists at least, to be nobody’s friend and nobody’s enemy.

Take a look at some of the new policies. One of the Government’s first acts was to unceremoniously pull the plug on the Infrastructure Planning Committee –the über quango designed to handle large scale planning decisions on power plants, motorways and airports.

As Bibi van der Zee explains in her article, the IPC reeked of a lack of democracy and was to be the perfect tool with which to railroad through new nuclear power stations. But – and perhaps the reason why many environmentalists appeared to bite their tongues over the body – it also had the power to speed up massively the construction of sorely needed new wind farms. A victory for democracy yes, but also very likely a return to crippling NIMBYism for the renewable energy industry.

Much the same has befallen the proposal for ID cards. Binned as an invasive waste of money, those who support small Government, privacy and local democracy had...

To view the rest of this article - you must be a paying subscriber and Login