George Monbiot’s article in today’s Guardian reinforces the view that Defra has sunk to about as low as it can get. He points out that Defra announced the impacts of NOx pollution on human mortality and a consultation on how to fix it on the Saturday just before the media were swamped with the news…
Category: Z SMALLER CATEGORIES
Badger consultation
The government is consulting on relaxing the criteria that need to be met for farmers to get licenses to kill badgers in trial areas. This government is dead keen to give the NFU and farmers greater ‘flexibility’ in killing badgers with the supposed aim of reducing bTB. We need to reduce bTB. We may need…
Gate zero and the West Pennine Moors
You may remember that I asked for information from NE about the West Pennine Moors (see here and here) some time ago. The delay in returning to this subject is not that NE were very tardy (just a little bit) about responding but that they sent me a piles of stuff and I have been …
August was a record month for this blog
For the first month ever, this blog received over 100,000 page views (103,727) – previous best was August 2014 (88,787 page views: and two previous months with over 80,000 (July 2014 and May 2015). It also recorded the second highest number of unique visitors through the month – 21,687 (cf 22,238 in June 2014). This…
Behind the Binoculars – a winner
Behind the Binoculars is published today! The winning entry in the competition for a signed copy of Behind the Binoculars was Stuart Benn – the very first entry. He (only) got seven out of 20 correct. These were the quotes he successfully identified, the others are, kind of obviously, in the book:…
An unfavourable climate for driven grouse shooting
If you had a rainforest, and slashed and burned it, you’d be putting a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, just as surely as if your nation ran a lot of gas-guzzling cars. Natural ecosystems often act as carbon stores which sequester greenhouse gases – forests are the obvious ones but peatlands are also…
Fair do’s
Received from Natural England just now in response to my earlier request. Dear Dr Avery Access to information request – Acknowledgement – Request No 3002 Thank you for your request for information for extracts from Paper ref: NELG/S/07/4, which we received today. We are dealing with your request under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004….
Dear Natural England
Dear Natural England This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations. Please supply, in electronic format, the following extracts from Paper ref: NELG/S/07/4, Title: Designations Programme: Process to establish Gate Zero’, Sponsor: Dr Tim Hill, Chief Scientist, which was Item 4 on the meeting of the Natural England…
West Pennine Moors again
Local people involved in the West Pennine Moors lingering non-notification case have received various documents from Natural England under Freedom of Information requests. This blog uses information from the heavily redacted note to the NE Leadership Group Strategy meeting of 23 March 2015 (meeting no NELG/S/07) entitled Designations Programme: Process to establish Gate Zero (whatever…
Ten reasons to take notice of the Pope’s encyclical on climate change
Isn’t ‘encyclical’ a nice word? The Pope has published his thoughts on climate change and they are well worth reading in full. But here is a good summary (taken from Time magazine). Climate change is real and it’s getting worse Human beings are a major contributor to climate change Climate change disproportionately affects the poor…