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Showing posts from February, 2012

Another Landslide

Another  landslide closes the A83 Rest and Be Thankful with the road expected to remain closed until at least Friday.  This time debris has not landed on the road but the remote monitoring system triggered an emergency closure. This landslip occurred after nearby Tyndrum recorded 54mm (2") of rain in 24 hours. Also announced today is a project to remove a bottleneck on the A82, which is the main route from Glasgow to the west highlands and the diversionary route when the A83 is closed. Related post: Rest and be Thankful, but not about Climate Change

How Green are Green Fingers?

Gardening turns out to be very eco un-friendly ... The Independent According to an article in this morning's Independent, gardening is not very environmentally friendly but I think that it depends on your approach.  This is my approach to minimising the negative effects of gardening: Compost I keep a compost heap for garden waste and vegetable trimmings which reduces the amount of waste being carted to a landfill site and produces a compost suitable for use as a soil improver.  Personally, I find it too coarse for use as a potting compost so I use a commercial peat-free compost for potting and other general purpose uses. I have successfully grown  potatoes in bags with a mixture of the peat-free compost and earth.  

Wind Energy Costs

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Following the recent attack on wind farms by MPS, I wanted to look at the cost of wind energy in fairly broad terms.  The latest attack on wind farm development is by a list of over 100 hundred Members of Parliament from across the political spectrum (I counted 2 Labour, 2 Lib-dems, one DUP, with the remainder being conservative) who wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister calling for a ban on any subsidies and tightening planning controls to make it easier for people to block developments. This coming from a government that wants to reform planning to include "presumption in favour of sustainable development".  They appear to rate wind farms as unsustainable while new housing on greenbelt is perfectly sustainable; we have so much green space that we can build on it now without limiting future generations ability to build on it too!