Blog Archives

TV & film production carbon calculator

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BAFTA has a free online carbon calculator for TV and film productions, small or mega.

For some reason it’s called Albert.(?!)

It was developed by the BBC, putting our tv license money to good use, to make tv production greener. Using it, the BBC has found that producing one hour of tv creates about 9 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The Women’s Film & TV Network points out,

“To put the BBC’s figures into context: 9 tonnes of carbon dioxide is enough to fill almost 50 double decker buses, it weighs the same as two adult elephants or 1, 800 cats and it’s close to the footprint you would expect from eight ‘typical’ UK citizens over one year.”

Clearly, this amount has to come down. BAFTA’s holding a free Greening the Screen event in London on 12 November to discuss how this can happen.

Ways of reducing the carbon emissions from tv & film production include:

  • building sets from pre-used materials
  • using renewable energy (solar, used vegetable oil or wind) generators
  • sleep in hotels with sound environmental policies
  • ask your crew to travel together,
  • reduce and recycle waste
  • as the BBC Comedy production Mongrels did, use low energy lighting. This cut their electricity bill by over 40%.

There is a new code of practice for greener film and tv production, British Standard 8909, which indicates what to do to reduce a production’s carbon footprint.

Links to carbon calculators for other lines of work, as well as schools and households, are here.

Strategy and Review Committee to find out how Town Council can nominate a community asset

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The Hebden Royd Town Council Strategy and Review Committee Meeting on 23 October 2012 agreed that the Town Clerk would investigate the process for Hebden Royd Town Council to nominate a community asset to Calderdale Council for inclusion on the register/list of community assets, and bring the information to the next Strategy and Review Committee in December.

 

The Committee will then decide on making a recommendation about this to the next full Council meeting.

Caroline Lucas MP refers Energy Royd criticism of Environmental Audit Committee to its Chair

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Caroline Lucas MP, who is a member of the Environmental Audit Committee, has emailed to say:

“Thank you for your email and comments about the Environmental Audit Committee’s wildlife crime inquiry. I am sorry that you did not feel the investigation was sufficiently rigorous and am happy to pass on your feedback to the Chair. I appreciate you getting in touch and sharing your concerns.”

Continue reading →

Off to the National Union of Journalists Annual Delegate Meeting

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I’m off to the NUJ Annual Delegate Meeting tomorrow, on behalf of Calderdale NUJ Branch. Times are tough for journalists and the NUJ, as for other working people and trade unions. It’s important to stick together, stand up for our rights as citizens, workers and human beings – as well as the environment’s rights – and figure out how to effectively resist this oppressive, unjust government.

It’ll be interesting to see if there are many other hyperlocal online journalists there, as well as traditional reporters. I’ll be looking out for people who write about environmental, climate and social justice stories too.

Natural England’s old Vital Uplands policy

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At the Ban the Burn meeting on September 23rd, some people were asking about the environmentally-friendly uplands policy that Natural England ditched recently. This is the Vital Uplands policy. Natural England seems to have taken the policy document off its website – at least, when I last  looked, I couldn’t find it.

But I had downloaded some time ago, and just found the file on an old memory stick. Here it is. Continue reading →

Thanks to everyone who visited Energy Royd in August

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Over the last 28 days, there were 2,002 visitors to Energy Royd.

1,589 were unique visitors

1,268 were new visitors.

There was a big spike of 280 visitors in one day in early August and 143 people came from a tweet. I think this was probably from George Monbiot retweeting news about the start of the Ban the Burn campaign.

There was also a spike of around 150 visitors on August 12th, when I was live blogging the Ban the Burn launch. The most popular pages throughout August were about the Ban the Burn campaign and related issues, apart from the post on Green Deal – a public private partnership too far, which 54 people read. I hope more people will read this, because it’s an issue that Leeds City Region is making policy decisions about now and mostly, people don’t seem aware of what’s going on.

53 people registered to create an account, but I accidentally deleted all the A-I names a few days ago, sorry.

52 visits came from a link to Energy Royd in the Guardian Northerner blog, 13 from a link in New Internationalist and 41 from a link in Hebweb.

Read Heather Trust Director’s blog about Ban the Burn!

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Simon Thorp, the Director of the Heather Trust, has blogged about Ban the Burn, under the title National Campaign against moorland bog-burning.  The thing I like about his blog is that he responds to comments and there’s a bit of a dialogue in the comments on the post. He says in a reply in the comments section that his work for The Heather Trust includes working with the IUCN UK Peatland Programme and he runs the Peatland Working Group in Scotland, and that

“I am all for healthy peatland and active bogs, but I think we need to be careful about how we achieve this.”