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I posted to youtube.com
Clifftop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOdmmkDK3Z8&feature=youtube_gdata
July 15 2011, 10:18am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Seasonal water metering is seen as a con by consumers, study finds
Public anger grows over proposed seasonal water tariffs, as utility companies look for ways to save the UK’s supply
This article titled “Seasonal water metering is seen as a con by consumers, study finds” was written by Jamie Doward and Mario Ledwith, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.06 UTC The race to provide Britain with a sustainable water supply is already generating the first of what is likely to be a long list of controversies. As the UK basks in temperatures that put Athens in the shade and with rivers already running low, utility companies are under increasing pressure to preserve water. But the most comprehensive study of its kind suggests the leading option for ensuring the UK enjoys a sustainable water supply – metering – is hitting the poorest hardest and is viewed with suspicion by consumers who believe it is a ruse by utility companies to increase their profits. The study by Wessex Water, which supplies water to more than one million households in the west country, found the introduction of meters reduced customer demand by 17%, higher than previous estimates. The reduction was even greater if the meters were tied to a tariff system that saw the price of water rise in the summer, an increasingly popular option being considered by the utility companies, but one which has caused widespread anger among consumers. The Wessex study, the largest since metering was introduced 20 years ago, found 15% of customers saw their annual bills rise by more than £100 after flat-rate metered systems were installed. A quarter of the poorest customers saw their bills increase by more than £50. Phil Wickens, tariffs manager at Wessex Water, acknowledged his company had one of the highest water rates in the UK, but said that it was vital the industry introduced a new charging system if the UK was to have a sustainable supply. “We want a charging system that gives us the ability to meet future challenges in the long term,” Wickens said. “Climate change and population growth are going to place pressure on the need for increased investment. In order for us to secure that investment we really need all of our customers to be willing and able to pay their bills. There is a commercial incentive for raising these issues now.” Household water bills have increased by more than 50% in real terms since 1989, partly due to investment costs. But the financial burden on customers is becoming a key issue, with an increasing number refusing to pay their bills. Wessex estimates its underlying bad debt has doubled over the past decade, with the figure expected to rise further given economic conditions. It is estimated that the average customer now pays an extra £12 a year to cover unpaid water bills. Experts suggest establishing a fair charging system is vital if more schemes, such as the new £270m Thames Water desalination plant that filters salt from water in the Thames estuary, are to get the go-ahead. A failure to address water sustainability could have serious repercussions for the UK. The current spell of hot weather has already triggered warnings that farmers in some regions will have to limit their use of water. Several rivers in England and Wales are reportedly at “exceptionally low” levels, raising fears there will be a need for hosepipe bans. The Environment Agency said two months of unusually dry weather has left 11 rivers at extremely low levels of the kind seen only once every 20 years. The government is currently consulting on water sustainability, and environment minister Caroline Spelman is reportedly in favour of metering as a key part of its response. All new homes built since 1989 have had to be fitted with water meters, and an increasing number of people opt for them. Just under half of all UK customers now have a water meter, and it is predicted that all households will have one fitted in the future. But the shift to metering has prompted concern among charities. The Fairness on Tap (FoT) coalition – made up of 12 leading environmental organisations, including the WWF and the National Trust – is calling for a national switch to water metering. The coalition claims the current system of water charging is outdated, unfair and encourages wastage, with many households paying a flat “all you can use” charge, giving them no incentive to be water-efficient. However, the previous charging system, with water bills linked to the rateable values of homes, protected the poorest in society from excessively high bills. “The industry has been moving from a system based on rateable values that were set as part of local authority charging back in the late 80s,” Wickens said. “Lower income customers were paying less than higher income customers, but as we are gradually moving towards metered charging that social protection is winding out.” Creating a fairer charging system has seen some water companies experiment with higher charges in the summer. The option, being tested in more than 1,000 homes by Wessex, has resulted in a “step change” in consumer behaviour, says the company. Wickens said: “Higher income customers with bigger gardens end up paying a fairer chunk than lower income customers.” The new form of charging is likely to trigger animosity among households in the “squeezed middle”, who may fear they will be hit disproportionately. However, the Wessex study found almost all customers opposed to seasonal tariffs. “Customers are cynical about companies changing the way they are charged; they assume it’s about making money, like travel companies charging more on holidays, but in our case it isn’t,” Wickens said. “Even if we had a dry summer and generated more income, the regulator takes that money off us.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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April 26 2011, 11:01am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Angela Hartnett’s roasted pollack with crushed new potatoes and chorizo recipe
This is a wonderful recipe combination of spicy chorizo sausage and meaty sustainable fish. The vinaigrette could be made with apple cider vinegar.
This article titled “Angela Hartnett’s roasted pollack with crushed new potatoes and chorizo recipe” was written by Angela Hartnett, for The Guardian on Wednesday 20th April 2011 16.30 UTC Pollack is a member of the cod family – a greeny-brown carnivore that can grow up to a metre long. It is common off the coast of Britain and Ireland, especially around wrecks, where it is popular with amateur anglers. It has traditionally been less of a hit with cooks, but with the push to eat more sustainable fish, pollack has emerged as a viable alternative to cod and haddock. Most supermarkets stock it, though you may find it labelled, French-style, as colin. Not only is it cheaper than cod; as far as I’m concerned it’s just as tasty. Like all flaky fish, pollack can break up during cooking; a quick solution is to salt it beforehand. Just cover the fish with rock salt and leave it to firm up for 30 minutes, before giving it a quick rinse and patting it dry. If you do this, remember not to salt the fish again before cooking. I love this combination of spicy sausage and meaty fish, but you can leave out the chorizo and finish the dish with extra vinaigrette. Ingredients (Serves 4) 4 100g portions of pollack fillet 12 large new potatoes, washed, with skin on 1tbsp diced black olives ½tbsp chopped basil 50ml vinaigrette 100g chorizo, chopped into lozenges 3tbsp olive oil Rock salt Method Fill a pan with cold water, a little rock salt and the potatoes, and bring to the boil. Cook for about 15 minutes, until just done. Drain the potatoes well, crush with a fork, and mix while still warm with the vinaigrette and olives. This ensures that they take on the full flavour of the vinaigrette. Set aside. Season the pollack with salt (unless you have previously salted it to firm up the flesh). Heat the oil in a non-stick pan (medium heat) and add the pollack, skin side down. Give the pan a quick shake to prevent the fish from sticking. To cook it should take about two minutes each side, depending on the thickness of the fillets. The fish is ready when you can easily push the handle of a spoon through it. Remove the fillets from the pan and place them somewhere warm. Add the chorizo to the now-empty pan and lightly sauté until it starts to release its oil. To serve, dress the potatoes with the chopped basil. Place the fish on top and finish with the chorizo lozenges and the oil from the pan. Any extra potato can be served on the side.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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Related posts:Nain’s bara brith recipe The ultimate Cornish pasty recipe Angela Merkel orders safety checks on Germany’s nuclear power stations
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April 22 2011, 10:23am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Radioactive water from Japan’s Fukushima plant is leaking into sea
Tepco officials say that a 20cm crack found in a containment pit under reactor two may be source of radioactive water from Japan‘s Fukushima plant leaking into the sea.
This article titled “Radioactive water from Japan’s Fukushima plant is leaking into sea” was written by David Batty and agencies, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 2nd April 2011 12.14 UTC Radioactive water from Japan’s quake-striken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is leaking into the sea, its operator said. The 20cm (8in) crack in a containment pit under reactor two may be the source of recent radiation in coastal waters, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) officials said. Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said Tepco was planning to pour concrete into the pit to seal the crack, which may have been leaking since the magnitude 9.0 earthquake three weeks ago. “This could be one of the sources of seawater contamination,” Nishiyama said. “There could be other similar cracks in the area, and we must find them as quickly as possible.” Readings released on Saturday showed radiation in seawater had spread to 25 miles (40km) south of the plant. The concentration of iodine there was twice the legal limit, but officials stressed it was still well below levels that are dangerous to human health. The announcement of the radioactive leak came as Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan surveyed the damage in the town of Rikuzentakata, which was gutted by the devastating tsunami that hit the country following the quake. The prime minister bowed his head for a minute of silence in front of the town hall, one of the few buildings still standing, which has all its windows blown out and debris piled up in front of it. “The government fully supports you until the end,” Kan later told 250 people at an elementary school that is serving as an evacuation centre. He met with the town’s mayor, Megumi Shimanuki, whose 38-year-old wife was swept away in the wave and is still missing. Shimanuki, whose family is living in a similar shelter 100 miles (160km) away in Natori, said Kan did not spend enough time with people on the ground. “The government has been too focused on the Fukushima power plant rather than the tsunami victims,” said Shimanuki, 35. “Both deserve attention.” One member of the power plant crew described difficult conditions inside the complex in an interview in the Mainichi newspaper. He said the plant has run out of the nylon protective booties that workers put over their shoes. “We only put something like plastic garbage bags you can buy at a convenience store and sealed them with masking tape,” said the anonymous worker. He added that the grounds of the power plant were littered with dead fish churned up by the tsunami. Japanese media reported that nuclear workers had been offered up to 400,000 yen (£3,000) a day to work inside the crippled reactors. Before the crisis some contract workers were reportedly being paid as little as 10,000 to 20,000 yen (£75 to £150) a day. Three weeks after the tsunami more than 165,000 people are living in shelters, while 260,000 households still do not have running water and 170,000 do not have electricity.
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April 2 2011, 2:40pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Essex reptiles settle into new Wiltshire home
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/21/essex-reptiles-settle-into-new-wiltshire-home
24,000 adders, common lizards and other species moved from oil refinery site to reserves to make way for London Gateway container port.
This article titled “Essex reptiles settle into new Wiltshire home” was written by Steven Morris, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 21st March 2011 14.23 UTC They had lived peacefully in their tens of thousands on an old refinery site in Essex. Now after what is thought to be the UK’s biggest artificial movement of animals, 24,000 adders, grass snakes, common lizards and slow worms are settling well into new homes 140 miles away. The reptiles were transported from the east of England to reserves in Wiltshire to make way for the £1.5bn London Gateway container port and logistics park. Since 1998 the creatures have been captured by hand and moved in vans – early in the morning so they did not dry out – around the M25 and down the M4 before being released into their new homes. The reserves in Wiltshire have now been declared full and this year the relatively few remaining reptiles at the Essex site will be rehoused closer to another reserve closer to home. Marcus Pearson, environmental manager for DP World, said the move seemed to have been successful. Reptiles that had been moved and then recaptured to check their wellbeing seemed healthy and doing well in their new home. Construction is under way at London Gateway, 25 miles to the east of central London. Once complete the development will allow the world’s biggest container ships to berth close to the capital. But one of the challenges the developers faced was rehousing the animals that had moved on to the site after an oil refinery ceased operating in 1999. Homes were found nearby for the carefully protected great crested newts. But no new local habitat could be found for the reptiles so the decision was taken to move them to reserves managed by the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. DP World also bought a chunk of land to link areas owned by the trust. It has moved 290 adders, 400 grass snakes, 17,000 common lizards and 6,000 slow worms. Pearson said finding a new home was tricky because they could not be moved to places where they were already large populations of a particular creature. The Wiltshire reserves are now judged to be full and the remaining reptiles found on the Gateway site this year will be moved to the RSPB reserve, West Canvey Marsh.
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March 21 2011, 4:45pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Japan’s horror reveals how thin is the edge we live on
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/18/japans-horror-reveals-how-thin-is-the-edge-we-live-on
Climate change may not be responsible for the tsunami, but it is shrinking our margin of safety. It is time to shrink back ourselves
This article titled “Japan’s horror reveals how thin is the edge we live on” was written by Bill McKibben, for The Guardian on Friday 18th March 2011 21.00 UTC It’s scary to watch the video from Japan, and not just because of the frightening explosions at the Fukushima plant or the unstoppable surge of tsunami-wash through the streets. It’s almost as unnerving to see the aftermath – the square miles of rubble, with boats piled on cars; the completely bare supermarket shelves. Because the one thing we’ve never really imagined is going to the supermarket and finding it empty. What the events reveal is the thinness of the margin on which modernity lives. There’s not a country in the world more modern and civilised than Japan; its building codes and engineering prowess kept its great buildings from collapsing when the much milder quake in Haiti last year flattened everything. But clearly it’s not enough. That thin edge on which we live, and which at most moments we barely notice, provided nowhere near enough buffer against the power of the natural world. We’re steadily narrowing the margin. Global warming didn’t cause the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Miyagi coast, but global warming daily is shrinking the leeway on which civilisation everywhere depends. Consider: sea levels have begun to rise. We’re seeing record temperatures that depress harvests – the amount of grain per capita on the planet has been falling for years. Because warm air holds more water vapour than cold, the chance of severe flooding keeps going up and in the last year countries from Pakistan to Australia have recently ended up on the wrong side of those odds. Those changes steadily eat away at that safety margin. With less food stored in our warehouses, each harvest becomes critical. With each massive flood, we have to spend more money rebuilding what was there before: there are still as many as 4 million homeless from Pakistan’s floods, which means “development” has given way to “getting a tarp over your head”. Even rich countries face this trouble: Australia cut much of its budget for renewable energy to help pay the recovery bill for soggy Queensland. Warmer temperatures are helping dengue fever spread; treating one case can use up the annual health budget for a dozen people in some Asian nation, meaning that much less for immunisations or nutrition. Just the increasing cost of insurance can be a big drag on economies: a study by Harvard and Swiss Re found that even in rich nations such as the US, larger and more frequent storms could “overwhelm adaptive capacities”, rendering “large areas and sectors uninsurable”. The bottom line was that, “in effect, parts of developed countries would experience developing nation conditions for prolonged periods”. There have always been natural disasters, and there always will be. For 10,000 years the planet has been by and large benign; you could tell where the safe margin for civilisation was because that’s, by definition, where civilisation was built. But if the sea level rises a metre, that margin shrinks considerably: on a beach that slopes in at 1 degree, the sea is now nearly 90 metres nearer. And it’s not just a literal shrinkage – the insecurity that comes with smaller food stocks or more frequent floods also takes a psychological toll: the world seems more cramped because it is more cramped. We can try to deal with this in two ways. One is to attempt to widen it with more technology. If the Earth’s temperature is rising, maybe we could “geoengineer” the planet, tossing sulphur into the atmosphere in an effort to block incoming sunlight. It’s theoretically possible. But researchers warn it could do more harm than good, and maybe this isn’t the week to trust the grandest promises of engineers, not when they’ve all but lost control of the highest technology we’ve ever built, there on the bluff at Fukushima. The other possibility is to try to build down a little: to focus on resilience, on safety. And to do that – here’s the controversial part – instead of focusing on growth. We might decide that the human enterprise (at least in the west) has got big enough, that our appetites need not to grow, but to shrink a little, in order to provide us more margin. What would that mean? Buses and bikes and trains, not SUVs. Local food, with more people on the farm so that muscles replace some of the oil. Having learned that banks are “too big to fail”, we might guess that our food and energy systems fall into that same category. Imagine, for instance, a nation that got most of its power from rooftop solar panels knitted together in a vast distributed grid. It would take investment to get there – we’d have to divert money from other tasks, slowing some kinds of growth, because solar power is currently more expensive than coal power. We might not have constant access to unlimited power at every second of every day. In the end, though, you’d have not only less carbon in the atmosphere, but also a country far less failure-prone. The solar panels on my roof could break tonight – and I’d have a problem if they did – but it wouldn’t ramify into rolling blackouts across the continent (and no one would need to stand in my driveway with a Geiger counter). Such changes wouldn’t make the world safe: climatologists promise us we’ve already put enough carbon out there to raise our planet’s temperature two degrees in the decades to come, which will make for a miserably difficult century. But they also promise that if we don’t stop burning coal and oil, that number will double, and miserable will become impossible. With Japan’s horror still unfolding, there’s nothing to do for the moment except watch, pray, and try to find some small ways to help people caught up in forces beyond their control. But the lesson we should learn, perhaps, is that it’s time to back off a little. Suddenly squat and plain words – “durable”, “stable”, “robust” – sound sweeter to the ear.
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March 18 2011, 5:29pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Southend on Sea
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/4061809441/
Andyrob posted a video:
Southend on Sea
October 31 2009, 7:06pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Southend on Sea
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/4062526460/
Andyrob posted a video:
Southend on Sea
October 31 2009, 6:54pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Southend on Sea
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/4061766579/
Andyrob
Southend on Sea
October 31 2009, 6:48pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Geese flying over Southend on Sea
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/4061764725/
Andyrob
Southend on Sea
October 31 2009, 6:47pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Southend on Sea
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/4062508076/
Andyrob
Southend on Sea
October 31 2009, 6:46pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Southend on Sea
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/4062505952/
Andyrob
Southend on Sea
October 31 2009, 6:45pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Southend on Sea
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/4061757949/
Andyrob
Southend on Sea
October 31 2009, 6:44pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Southend on Sea
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/4061755465/
Andyrob
Southend on Sea
October 31 2009, 6:43pm | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Sea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g9BmGAKw5E
March 18 2008, 10:07am | Comments »
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