Red-Green Labour activist Sean Thompson argues that far from being an answer to the problems of waste disposal and electricity generation waste incineration is a move in the wrong direction…
In 2015, the UK government set waste recycling rate targets of 50% by 2020 and 65% by 2035. Unsurprisingly, the UK is on course to miss those targets, with only Wales hitting the 2020 target (indeed exceeding it, at 54.1%).
Continue reading “Waste incineration- why it is making the climate crisis worse”
First published on the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy blog
https://www.iatp.org/blog/202012/making-carbon-trading-globally-legitimate-road-show-has-begun
When companies seek to attract investors, they go on “road shows” to pitch their goods, services and projected Return on Investment (RoI). Mark Carney, formerly the chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the Bank of England (BoE) and since December 2019 the United Nations’ Secretary General’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, has begun a kind of digital road show that will take him to investor groups, industry associations and perhaps even to foreign government sovereign wealth funds. What Mr. Carney is selling is a private sector draft Task Force on Scaling Carbon Markets report, for which he is co-leader. IATP commented on the draft, which is scheduled for release as the final report in late January.
Continue reading “Making carbon-trading globally legitimate”
This article by Eleanor Salter of Labour For A Green New Deal first appeared in Tribune and is an important contribution to the debate on class, race and urban pollution.
Earlier this month, Ella Kissi-Debrah became the first British person to have air pollution recorded as a cause of death – but she won’t be the last. In poorer urban communities, it is increasingly a matter of life and death.
Ella Kissi-Debrah grew up in Lewisham, South London and was an active and busy child who loved sport and music. Her home was close to one of the busiest highways in the capital, the South Circular Road. At the age of seven she began to develop a rare and complex form of asthma. Within three years she was hospitalised 27 times and died in 2013 after suffering a severe asthma attack.
Continue reading “How air pollution is killing Britain’s working class”
Red-Green Labour supporter Alan Thornett makes the case for a drastic and immediate cut in the causes of air pollution.
In a land-mark ruling, the inner south London coroner Philip Barlow, has ruled that the death of nine year old Ella Kissi-Debrah from Lewisham from an asthma attack in February 2013 was partly a result of illegal levels of air pollution in the area she lived.
The Guardian environmental correspondent Sandra Laville quotes him as follows: “the whole of Ella’s life was lived in close proximity to highly polluting roads and I have no difficulty in concluding that her personal exposure to nitrogen dioxide and PM was very high.” Air pollution, he said, had induced and exacerbated her severe asthma. It is the first ruing anywhere in the world to identify air pollution as a cause of the death of an individual. (Guardian Dec 17)
