People need wild spaces and green spaces and other species need them too. Sharing our world with other species is part of the joy of being alive, when we cage and abuse them, or destroy their habitat, we demean ourselves in the process
Jenny works to increase green spaces and protect animals and wild space
Read on to see her latest posts on this these topics
On 7th October Havant Borough councillors unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in the local water company Southern Water. I spoke at their meeting to say: “I’ve come today because it’s an opportunity to actually highlight the problems there are with Southern Water. The water companies are acting illegally, because they are not doing the job that they were designed for, or the commitment that they’ve taken on. They’re dumping sewage and they are actually making life quite miserable for all sorts of people who would like to be able to paddle in streams, or let their dogs go into rivers, or want to swim off a seashore. I was at Langstone Quay today, and there were used cotton buds and used lavatory paper all over the quayside that clearly has been washed over from a high tide from sewage. That is just unacceptable. In some places where sewage is going into watercourses, ecosystems are being destroyed because they can’t cope with the level of pollution. It’s not only human faeces and so on, but also a lot of forever chemicals, and things like oestrogen, which are really messing up life cycles of various creatures.”
Last w/e I visited Wirral to speak at a local Green Party event organised by Green Party councillor Gail Jenkinson, thank you Gail!
The following day I met campaigners opposing the proposed Peak Cluster scheme intending to transport C02 emissions from cement factories to be stored off shore. I spoke to campaigners including Laura Beveridge-Muircroft, chair of campaign group Action Against Carbon Capture Storage AACCS.
Laura says: The proposed Peak Cluster carbon capture and storage project involves approximately 200 km of CO₂ pipeline infrastructure, transporting emissions from cement and lime production facilities to geological storage beneath Morecambe Bay. The National Wealth Fund has committed approximately £28.6 million in public investment towards the project’s development, with total project costs potentially running into billions of pounds. Given the scale of the proposed infrastructure and the availability of alternative industrial decarbonisation technologies, there are legitimate questions concerning value for money and whether less costly or less environmentally damaging solutions have been adequately assessed.
Following my visit I will ask the Government: What independent value-for-money assessment was undertaken before public funding was committed to the Peak Cluster carbon capture and storage project, and what evidence can the Government provide that alternative decarbonisation technologies, including low-carbon cement production, alternative fuels and process innovations, were comprehensively evaluated against the project’s whole-life financial costs, environmental impacts and anticipated carbon reductions?
I congratulate Lord Hunt, on bringing this debate. I also want to apologise to him, because I am always surprised by how passionately he talks about climate change. That is on me. Sorry about that. It is wonderful to listen to.
I have met the new Prime Minister a few times and I have a lovely photograph on my phone of him and me at Glastonbury last year. I sort of thought we could work together, but the more I see what is happening and going through, the more I am beginning to think it will not be possible. It seems as if the slow-moving, stagnant mechanism of government has got its claws into him and he is not thinking very creatively any more. I hope I am wrong. We shall see over the next few weeks and months.
I want to mention three things that are crucial for the future of this Labour Government, which will all help society as well as the environment. We have to accept that climate chaos is the new normal. Thousands of people died this summer in the heat and that is going to keep happening if we are not very careful about adapting to it. People arriving at A&E with heat exhaustion and so on is also going to be the new normal. This Government must not make it worse by going ahead with the Jackdaw gas field and Rosebank oil field. That is folly. What they should be doing is what they have just scrapped—putting solar panels on every supermarket car park and every roof, everywhere they possibly can. That is the sort of thing they ought to be doing to be creative about combating climate change. We need to adapt to hot summers. A tiny measure would be to put shutters on all the windows, as in France. I have lots of ideas and I am quite happy to chat them through.
The second thing is to help save the NHS, not by privatising it but by remembering that prevention is better than cure. If you cut pollution, you cut the number of people going into hospital. You cut the number of children whose lungs are so stunted by pollution that they have lifelong problems with their breathing. Well done to Sadiq Khan here in London, where he has massively cut air pollution. We should have low emission zones across the whole country, as they do in mainland Europe.
Thirdly, one big way to reduce pollution would be to take the water companies into public ownership. The Prime Minister mentioned those words yesterday. I would like to think he means renationalisation, but I do not know any more, because he keeps changing his mind. I have stopped paying the sewage part of my bill. I asked Thames Water how much that part was. I was happy to pay for the water, obviously, but I was not prepared to pay for the sewage it was dumping in the Thames. It told me that it did not work out the bill like that, so at the moment I am not paying my bill. We will see if it takes me to court before it goes bankrupt. We stopped the poll tax with a campaign of non-payment. Civil disobedience is possibly the only way to fight companies such as the water companies which are operating in a way that is a disbenefit to the whole of society. I say to the Government that the Green Party always has loads of very practical ideas and I am very happy to share them.
In the UK, there are 377 marine protected areas, and, of those, only 38 ban the destructive practice of bottom trawling. What makes the Government think that they can do any better in the Sargasso Sea?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington replied to HMG: At risk of stepping on the toes of my noble and good friend Lady Hayman, the Defra Minister, I believe that Defra is either consulting on or has just concluded a consultation on this issue. The Government will be responding very shortly.
On Friday 10th April it was reported in the Guardian that Network Rail had sealed up Swift nests as part of their 7.5 million Chapel Milton twin Victorian viaduct renewal programme. Locals noticed the tiny holes were blocked as swifts were due to return. This at a time when Swift numbers are plummeting, they’re on the UK’s Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern. According to the RSPB, for every ten Swifts in our skies in 1995, there were only about three by 2022. Continue reading “A Swift win”→
I intervened in this debate to say: The sustainable farming incentive is trying to put a sharper focus on water quality and biodiversity, which small family farms are often quite good at. I am concerned that their value is appreciated from a local economy point of view and because they are quite often very sustainable and organic. Does the Minister feel that they are going to be properly valued?
Regulators such as Ofwat have been in bed with the water industry bosses, and the Environment Agency has lost staff and legitimacy. Labour are wedded to private ownership of water and refuse to consider public ownership, even though it would be the most popular legislation they could enact this Parliament.
These amendments take a direct route to stopping pollution by making this personal to the people at the top. If they do not spend the money to invest and reduce pollution, then that is a crime. They are taking the public’s money and failing to improve. Continue reading “Crime and Policing Bill Committee Stage Day 15”→
