Changing More Than Lightbulbs doesn’t usually advertise anything, but I couldn’t figure out how to show these slogan t shirts without linking to the Not An Alternative website that’s selling them.
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Dr Charlie Clutterbuck – Oxford REAL Farming Conference 2011 from Real Farming on Vimeo. Charlie will be speaking about land skills and land workers’ employment conditions at Growing Futures Field Day on Easter Saturday.
Here’s a link to Dr Charlie Clutterbuck’s Edible Curriculum for schools.
The NHS Commissioning Board website reports that West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire & Bassetlaw Commissioning Support Units are to merge.
Commissioning Support Units have been set up under the 2012 Health & Social Care Act, and are supposed to support the Clinical Commissioning Groups in their areas.
The West Yorkshire CSU business plan is being prepared by Pete Thomas, a Leeds KPMG employee on secondment from the global accountancy tax and financial advisory company. CSUs are widely expected to become privatised within the next 2-3 years.
It’s not clear how the CSUs’ merger will affect Clinical Commissioning Groups.
Oxfam’s Growing a Better Future project is looking to recruit volunteers over Easter, to spend some time working on a global food justice campaign at the wonderful Eden Project in Cornwall.
Volunteers will work on an interactive exhibit that encourages Eden Project visitors to learn about the issues underpinning Oxfam’s GROW campaign, including climate change, land grabs, food price spikes and calling for support for small scale farmers world wide.
Here are the role profile and Application form. If you have any questions please contact Elisa Sandri on esandri@oxfam.org.uk
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This video from Yale Climate Forum explains that we are half way to the threshold temperature at which arctic permafrost will thaw and release huge quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the earth’s atmosphere, triggering uncontrollable climate change.
Recent research from Oxford University indicates arctic permafrost thawing will occur if the earth’s temperature increases to 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial temperature of the earth.
We are now 0.8ºC hotter than in pre-industrial times, so it’s vital that we reduce human-caused carbon emissions quickly and steeply, in order to have a chance of stopping the rise in the earth’s temperature before it reaches 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial level.
Since Ban the Burn submitted a formal complaint to the European Union Environment Directorate-General, I wondered how many complaints the EU actually follows up with either prosecutions of governments and agencies that infringe EU Habitats and Birds Directives, and other environmental legislation.
Here is is list of environmental infringement cases that the EU has taken action on recently, in case anyone else is curious too.
York Press reports that the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has just withdrawn Private Finance Initiative (PFI) funding for waste incinerators/Combined Heat and Power generators in Allerton Park, North Yorkshire and Bradford. This is because EU waste reduction targets have now been met, so the incinerators are no longer needed.
Defra is reported as saying that it’s up to the local authorities to decide if they want to go ahead with the waste incinerators without the PFI funding.
Apparently Calderdale Council have already spent £670,000 on the Bradford PFI incinerator project.
Interesting post Bouncing off the rebound about why it doesn’t make sense to talk about energy efficiency, if we want to reduce energy use, and why we do need to talk about energy conservation.
The argument in a nutshell: increased energy efficiency doesn’t necessarily mean reduced energy use, for a variety of convincing reasons.
