Environment

By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor In 2017 a fantastic experiment will take place in the Netherlands, a hi-tech village will be built and will live totally off the grid. It is hoped it will be 100 per cent sustainable. Currently industrial agriculture techniques for crops and livestock damage the environment, the earth needs to find a way to sustain itself without destroying the planet. This new community, in Almere twenty minutes from Amsterdam, will have one hundred homes and will...

“Fossil fuels are so inherently dirty and toxic, that they require sacrificial people and sacrificial places, they always have.” These are the words of environmental activist Naomi Klein, delivering the Edward Said lecture in London earlier this month. As if following her cue, yesterday an alliance of fossil fuel politicians and lobbyists overruled the villages and voices of Northern England. The land and its people have been sacrificed. Underground rock will be drilled and pumped with high pressure chemicals, sand and water. Local communities...

By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor The first fracking application in England for five years has just been approved by North Yorkshire Council. Their planning committee voted seven against four in favour of the fracking plans, by Third Energy a UK firm. Now the company will go ahead and frack for shale gas near the North Yorks village of Kirby Misperton. There have not been any fracking planning approval since 2011, after a series of tests on the Fylde coast in...

By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor It is widely accepted there is a housing crisis across the country especially in the capital, with the chance for people to own their homes out of reach from even the professional class. So in an effort to alleviate some of the pressure on the housing market, a new programme is helping communities by assisting them to build their own homes. The scheme has been launched by Locality, using funding from the Nationwide Foundation. Locality...

Global warming is spiralling out of control at the same time as our politicians try to figure out the best way to “maximise the economic recovery of oil and gas”. These aren’t just regular politicians doing this, these are politicians on the Energy and Climate Change Committee. Yesterday in parliament, fossil fuel representatives explained that the discovery of new oil reserves was at a sixty-year low. “The revenues have gone out of the industry,” cried one chief executive. Some companies are...

An animated graphic has been released highlighting the extent to which global warming is spiralling out of control. Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist in the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, used data from the Met Office Hadley Centre to show how rapidly the global temperature has risen in the past few decades. The pace of change is immediately obvious, especially over the past few decades. But perhaps most the most concerning observation is how global temperatures have...

By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor It has been claimed by Greenpeace that the new Hinkley power station will be the most expensive object on Earth. The environmental group believes the total cost of the controversial project will cost up to a colossal £24bn, eighteen time more the world’s tallest building, which is in Dubai. But while Hinkley C may well be the most expensive object on Earth, it doesn't touch the International Space Station, which cost £77.6bn. Greenpeace claim that...

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has found a compromise on the controversial naming of its new polar research ship. Boaty McBoatface will live on as an unmanned underwater vessel, spending most of its time stored within RSS Sir David Attenborough. https://twitter.com/bisgovuk/status/728500969722552320 Last month the NERC successfully engaged with the public by democratising the naming of their new research ship. Boaty McBoatface won a landslide victory, steaming ahead with almost double the number of votes as its four rival candidates combined: Boaty McBoatface 124,109 votes Poppy-Mai 34,371 votes Henry...

In a time of recent sadness with the loss of several global icons, 2016 has already become somewhat of a morbid year. Not even four months into the year and we have already said goodbye to Terry Wogan, Alan Rickman, Victoria Wood, Ronnie Corbett, David Bowie, and Johann Cruyff to name but a few. All heroes in their respected fields, they will be sorely missed. There is cause for optimism this month though, as we celebrate the birthdays of some of those...