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The Lothian Cycle Campaign |
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The Lothian Cycle Campaign |
See also diary page. Other cycling events may be found on the Internet at http://www.scottishcycling.co.uk/events.
Feb 28 Shaping Edinburgh - FOE evening meeting on Lothian Structure Plan, which is now out for consultation [see article in Spokes 81 for more on the Structure Plan]. Speakers John Inman from Council Planning Dept and John Russell, planning lecturer (also Spokes member). 7.30, Friends Meeting House, 7 Victoria Terrace. More info - Richard 552.4833.
Mar 2 East Lothian - Planning for Sustainable Future Council presentations/discussion at Town House, Haddington. Morning. Details: jhill@eastlothian.gov.uk 01620.827286. Book now.
Mar 23 2nd-hand Bike Sale by Royal High parent teacher assn. Details: Dave Dickson info@scotquest.org.uk. Phone unknown.
Mar 14 SPOKES PUBLIC MEETING - see Spokes 81.
Apr 6 Rally for a Sustainable Britain SERA conference (Labour Environment Group), London. Top speakers. Workshops - Transport, Energy, Planning, etc. Gerry Lawson of Spokes Midlothian leads Planning workshop. Details: seraoffice@aol.com.
June 16 Glasgow Cyclefest draft events programme now at www.scottishcycling.co.uk/events/gcf/gcf2002/programme.html.
We are keen to get local members who could organise a stall in their local area, for example at a local festival. We would help by providing materials and informing you of other local members so that you could draw up a group of helpers from the area. Hopefully we would also be able to send along one person for most or all of the time, but the hope is that the organisation would be by members from the local area. This might also be an opportunity to get together with other local members to discuss cycleroute issues that need raised with the council.
Note: the details in the first two items below are rather complex, so if you have corrections, let us know!
If you have comments on the above - and especially if you have written to the Council or RIE on these issues, with or without a satisfactory reply/action - then please send in your ideas and experiences to...
Elaine Gordon, Oscar Faber, 279 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 4JL. elaine.morgan@oscarfaber.com. Please copy your letter to Spokes.
Incidentally, we have just received from the council a list of the measures to be taken specifically for cyclists at the RIE. All are meant to be in place by Jan 2002 except the last.
This challenging article from the Guardian [9.11.2000] was written by environmental specialist George Monbiot at the time of the late 2000 'fuel crisis' when 'truckers', motoring organisations and much of the media were demanding cheaper fuel prices.
It is reprinted by his kind permission. G.Monbiot@zetnet.co.uk.
If you want to know whether fuel in Britain is too expensive or too cheap, just look at how it's used. One superstore chain lands its fish at Aberdeen and trucks it down to Cornwall to be smoked. Another buys vegetables in Worcestershire, then drives them first to Hereford, then Dyfed, then Manchester before trucking them back to Worcestershire to be sold. Onions are shipped in from Argentina, potatoes from, Australia. Every day aeroplanes, whose fuel, being wholly untaxed, costs only 17 pence a litre, bring lettuces from Kenya and Zimbabwe.
Truckers in Britain are in trouble not because diesel prices are too high, but because their own trade associations, being partly controlled by the superstores, have demanded that the government allow ever heavier lorries on to the roads. This means that fewer vehicles are needed to shift the same amount of goods (though they have to travel further), with the result that the sector is now suffering from over-capacity. Their customers are, therefore, able to nail the truckers to the floor.
It is a source of enduring mystery to me that farmers, like lorry drivers, are calling for cheaper, rather than more expensive, fuel. Cheap fuel has destroyed British farming. It has allowed produce from the other side of the world to out-compete our own.
Within Britain, it enables superstores to centralise their distribution networks, playing farmers off against each other until they find the lowest national prices for the products they want to buy. The concessions Gordon Brown made yesterday [November 2000 budget] will harm the very people who demanded them.
By a marvellous stroke of irony, the deadline for government action the truckers and farmers have set [Monday November 13] is also the day on which the global climate talks open in the Hague. Their purpose is to encourage countries to ratify the Kyoto protocol on reducing carbon emissions. Governments will be able to meet their targets only if they keep fuel prices high.
Prospects for the climate treaty look, if George Bush has indeed won the US presidency, less than promising. Mr Bush, who was suckled on oil, will block its implementation by any means possible.
Even if it were to be enforced, however, the cuts it demands are just a fraction of those required to prevent the proliferation of such freak weather events as those we have suffered over the past two weeks. If governments are to make any appreciable difference to their impact on the world's weather, in other words, they will have to go it alone.
But what on earth could we do? It's simple. All that needs to be done to bring our contribution to climate change to an end is for the government to announce that in five years' time the burning of fossil fuel in the United Kingdom will be illegal.
This is the point at which all those kind souls who write every week to express their tender concern for my sanity conclude that I have finally taken leave of my senses. The entire economy is built on combustion of fossil fuels. To ban them would surely bring the country to its knees. I suggest it would do precisely the opposite.
The task is certainly more achievable than it might at first appear. In 1941, the entire US economy was turned around in a matter of months, as civil manufacture was switched to military production. As Jack Doyle's new book The Autocrats documents, General Motors designed, tested, and started mass producing an amphibious truck in 90 days from a standing start. Ford was soon turning out a precision bomber every 63 minutes. This transformation was attended, of course, by a massive boost in economic activity and employment And all this was 60 years ago, before the age of 'flexibility' and 'just-in-time production'.
Northern Europe, according to a new report commissioned by Greenpeace, could meet three times its total energy needs simply by exploiting offshore wind. Every terrace house could produce more energy than it consumes by covering its roof with solar panels. And many of us could cut our consumption in half by replacing our clapped-out fridges and rattling windows, and insulating our lofts.
As the most accessible reserves are depleted, the price of oil will continue to rise. The countries which control it will be able to hold their clients to ransom. Were Britain to announce a ban on fossil fuels today, then in five years' time ours would. be the advanced economy, while America, governed by oil, would still be locked in the fossil era. As an oil sheikh once remarked, the stone age did not come to an end through a shortage of stone! Why should we wait for the oil to run out before abandoning the fossil age?
Stop Press: In Spokes 81 we mention hints of a 'green streak' in Jack McConnell. It appears there is some truth in this! - he has just made a major speech on the environment, which has gained considerable praise from Scottish Environmental organisations, and was the first ever speech on the environment from a Scottish First Minister.
The section on transport, however, was one of the weakest parts of the speech. For example "we must tackle the forecast growth in road traffic" and "reduce the need to travel". But! - "we will not stop building roads", and "our transport policy will focus on tackling congestion in metropolitan areas" - this, of course, is where traffic growth is lowest!!
He promised that spending proposals of all government departments [i.e. including transport] and of all government-funded agencies must...
[The full speech is available
at www.scotland.gov.uk. Go to
the News section, then 18 Feb, then follow the link to the full text].
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