[News] from [guardian.co.uk]
[Money > Energy bills]
Plan for energy co-ops to cut fuel bills by 20%
Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent
The Guardian, Saturday 12 September 2009 Article history
Gas and electricity bills will be cut by up to 20% under a scheme that will also cut carbon emissions by encouraging an increase in environmentally friendly technology.
Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, will today back the scheme, which is designed to answer climate change sceptics who say tackling global warming will mean higher energy prices.
Under the plan, to be launched in Edinburgh by the Co-operative party at its annual conference today, local residents will join schools, community organisations and businesses to form consumer energy co-ops. These would negotiate with wholesale energy groups to supply gas and electricity at between 10 and 20% less than the normal domestic price.
A modest step towards reducing emissions would occur at this first stage because the co-ops would install smart meters in members' homes.
A bigger step in cutting emissions would occur later when co-ops install environmentally friendly technology, including combined heat and power systems (CHP), heat pumps or biomass boilers. CHP is the process by which heat generated at power stations while creating energy supplies is captured and used to heat the homes of local people.
The co-op plan is closely modelled on a scheme in the coal-producing Belgian province of Limburg, where residents joined forces after fuel prices rose after liberalisation of the Belgian energy market in 2003. In all, 15,000 families each save an average of €250 (£218) a year in the scheme run by the ACW charity.
The Co-operative party is interested in the Limburg scheme because Belgium's energy market is similar to Britain's. The party says a series of pilot schemes in the UK have been successful. One of these involved the Reddish Vale Technology College in Stockport, the Co-operative movement's first trust school.
The consumer co-ops would fund their projects by raising capital from schemes such as the Emissions Reduction Target (Cert), which are designed to help environmentally friendly projects. They would also use their status as mutual societies to raise capital from the community, in the way building societies raised funds in the 1980s to compete with high street banks.
Michael Stephenson, the general secretary of the Co-operative party, said: "There is a false choice that we have to kill: that is you can't be green without it costing. People want to be environmentally sensitive, but they see it as punitive. The virtue of this scheme is that it says you can be environmentally sensitive, but save money. The key to reconciling those two objectives is you take a co-operative approach."
Miliband will say today: "Communities should be able to work together to generate clean energy in their own area. We're bringing in guaranteed feed-in rates so local wind or hydro power gets a cashback. We want communities to be able to work together to show their area can lead the way on climate change."
[Life & style > Food & drink]
Fat Duck's oyster supplier bites back
> John Wright: The water companies must clean up
> Timeline: The key dates in the Fat Duck food poisoning
James Sturcke and Peter Walker
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 September 2009 21.27 BST Article history
The family-run fishery that provided the oysters blamed for an outbreak of food poisoning at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant has blamed poor sewage treatment at a nearby plant for the contamination.
Graham Larkin, the operations manager at Colchester Oyster Fishery, which harvests 1.5 million wild gigas (rock) oysters a year from the river Colne, insisted it had been an isolated incident.
A report by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) into the poisoning of more than 500 diners at the Fat Duck, regularly named as one of the world's best restaurants, said the most likely cause was a norovirus introduced by oysters, although other ingredients such as langoustines could have played a role.
Larkin said: "The HPA inspectors have found traces of norovirus in our oysters, and in other produce at the restaurant which we did not supply. It happened in January and February when winter vomiting disease is quite common."
He claimed the company was a victim because there had been alleged contamination at a sewage treatment plant in Colchester. Anglian Water, which runs the plant, did not respond to calls last night.
Larkin said the fishery was seeking legal advice and also laid blame with the Environment Agency, which he said was supposed to monitor the sewage plant.
Colchester Oyster Fishery was founded by Christopher Kerrison, who still runs the firm on Mersea Island off the Essex coast. The oysters are dredged from the bed of the Colne estuary and brought ashore at the firm's processing plant. The oysters are filtered with clean running water for 48 hours to remove impurities before being packaged and sent to market.
The fishery, which employs 30 people, has supplied the Fat Duck for "many years" and never had a problem with its produce, Larkin said. It also supplies London's Le Gavroche and Gordon Ramsay's restaurant, as well as Billingsgate fish market.
Oysters are recognised as a risky food, most recently by Thursday's HPA report, where investigators found the Fat Duck norovirus outbreak "confirms the well-known risks that raw shellfish pose".
The Environment Agency said the government's shellfish water directive, which lays down water quality standards for oysters, mussels and other molluscs, were extremely strict. The waters around the Colne estuary were regularly tested for impurities and while sewage levels were monitored, the presence of the norovirus cannot be detected.
Recent tests showed that the water quality near the oyster beds was good but results for earlier this year were not immediately available, a spokeswoman said.
As with all rivers, the Colne sometimes had raw sewage pumped into it, she added: "Like all water companies, Anglian are permitted to make discharges a certain number of times, for example during storms, as the alternative is the system backing up into people's bathrooms."
This practice came to public prominence in August 2004 when almost 900,000 cubic metres of waste was discharged into the Thames in London after violent storms, killing thousands of fish.
Larkin – who is allergic to oysters – said the company had monthly tests carried out on water quality.
> John Wright: The water companies must clean up
> Timeline: The key dates in the Fat Duck food poisoning
[Environment > Mining]
White House action puts on hold dozens of mountaintop mining projects
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 September 2009 19.45 BST Article history
The Obama administration took its strongest action to date against highly destructive mining practice today, putting a hold on dozens of mountaintop removal projects in the Appalachian region.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it was ordering a review of 79 permits in West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky to mine for coal by blowing the tops of mountains to assess the impact on water quality.
Mountaintop removal involves dynamiting the tops of mountains - leaving mounds of debris in neighbour rivers and waterways - razing forests and cutting off hundreds of feet of rock to reach narrow seams of coal.
The EPA said it had continuing concerns about toxic debris from the mine sites, and the loss of hundreds of miles of streams, which were choked off by the rubble.
"The administration pledged earlier this year to improve review of mining projects that risked harming water quality. Release of this preliminary list is the first step in a process to assure that the environmental concerns raised by the 79 permit applications are addressed and that permits issued are protective of water quality and affected ecosystems," the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, said in a statement.
The decision was welcomed by some environmental organisations as a key break by the Obama administration with the policies set by George Bush.
Appalachian Voices, a local activist coalition, said in a statement:
"By recommending these permits not be approved, the EPA and the Army Corps has demonstrated their intention to fulfill a promise to provide science-based oversight which will limit the devastating environmental impacts of mountaintop removal mining."
But environmental organisations are still pressing the Obama administration for an outright ban on mountaintop removal, which environmentalists say is the most destructive method of extracting coal.
Bush-era regulations had made it far easier for mining companies to win approval for mountaintop removal and to avoid regulatory control. The EPA, in Bush's eight-year term, did not oppose a single permit for mountaintop removal.
Jackson, in a recent interview, admitted the agency had grown "toothless".
The Obama administration signalled last June that it would take a tougher approach to enforcement. Earlier this week, the agency said it would halt West Virginia's biggest mining project, spread over 2,300 acres, because of concerns over dumping debris.
The agency now has two weeks to issue its final decision on the pending permits. Projects that do meet EPA environmental standards will move ahead.
[Money > Energy bills]
Plan for energy co-ops to cut fuel bills by 20%
Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent
The Guardian, Saturday 12 September 2009 Article history
Gas and electricity bills will be cut by up to 20% under a scheme that will also cut carbon emissions by encouraging an increase in environmentally friendly technology.
Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, will today back the scheme, which is designed to answer climate change sceptics who say tackling global warming will mean higher energy prices.
Under the plan, to be launched in Edinburgh by the Co-operative party at its annual conference today, local residents will join schools, community organisations and businesses to form consumer energy co-ops. These would negotiate with wholesale energy groups to supply gas and electricity at between 10 and 20% less than the normal domestic price.
A modest step towards reducing emissions would occur at this first stage because the co-ops would install smart meters in members' homes.
A bigger step in cutting emissions would occur later when co-ops install environmentally friendly technology, including combined heat and power systems (CHP), heat pumps or biomass boilers. CHP is the process by which heat generated at power stations while creating energy supplies is captured and used to heat the homes of local people.
The co-op plan is closely modelled on a scheme in the coal-producing Belgian province of Limburg, where residents joined forces after fuel prices rose after liberalisation of the Belgian energy market in 2003. In all, 15,000 families each save an average of €250 (£218) a year in the scheme run by the ACW charity.
The Co-operative party is interested in the Limburg scheme because Belgium's energy market is similar to Britain's. The party says a series of pilot schemes in the UK have been successful. One of these involved the Reddish Vale Technology College in Stockport, the Co-operative movement's first trust school.
The consumer co-ops would fund their projects by raising capital from schemes such as the Emissions Reduction Target (Cert), which are designed to help environmentally friendly projects. They would also use their status as mutual societies to raise capital from the community, in the way building societies raised funds in the 1980s to compete with high street banks.
Michael Stephenson, the general secretary of the Co-operative party, said: "There is a false choice that we have to kill: that is you can't be green without it costing. People want to be environmentally sensitive, but they see it as punitive. The virtue of this scheme is that it says you can be environmentally sensitive, but save money. The key to reconciling those two objectives is you take a co-operative approach."
Miliband will say today: "Communities should be able to work together to generate clean energy in their own area. We're bringing in guaranteed feed-in rates so local wind or hydro power gets a cashback. We want communities to be able to work together to show their area can lead the way on climate change."
[Life & style > Food & drink]
Fat Duck's oyster supplier bites back
> John Wright: The water companies must clean up
> Timeline: The key dates in the Fat Duck food poisoning
James Sturcke and Peter Walker
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 September 2009 21.27 BST Article history
The family-run fishery that provided the oysters blamed for an outbreak of food poisoning at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant has blamed poor sewage treatment at a nearby plant for the contamination.
Graham Larkin, the operations manager at Colchester Oyster Fishery, which harvests 1.5 million wild gigas (rock) oysters a year from the river Colne, insisted it had been an isolated incident.
A report by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) into the poisoning of more than 500 diners at the Fat Duck, regularly named as one of the world's best restaurants, said the most likely cause was a norovirus introduced by oysters, although other ingredients such as langoustines could have played a role.
Larkin said: "The HPA inspectors have found traces of norovirus in our oysters, and in other produce at the restaurant which we did not supply. It happened in January and February when winter vomiting disease is quite common."
He claimed the company was a victim because there had been alleged contamination at a sewage treatment plant in Colchester. Anglian Water, which runs the plant, did not respond to calls last night.
Larkin said the fishery was seeking legal advice and also laid blame with the Environment Agency, which he said was supposed to monitor the sewage plant.
Colchester Oyster Fishery was founded by Christopher Kerrison, who still runs the firm on Mersea Island off the Essex coast. The oysters are dredged from the bed of the Colne estuary and brought ashore at the firm's processing plant. The oysters are filtered with clean running water for 48 hours to remove impurities before being packaged and sent to market.
The fishery, which employs 30 people, has supplied the Fat Duck for "many years" and never had a problem with its produce, Larkin said. It also supplies London's Le Gavroche and Gordon Ramsay's restaurant, as well as Billingsgate fish market.
Oysters are recognised as a risky food, most recently by Thursday's HPA report, where investigators found the Fat Duck norovirus outbreak "confirms the well-known risks that raw shellfish pose".
The Environment Agency said the government's shellfish water directive, which lays down water quality standards for oysters, mussels and other molluscs, were extremely strict. The waters around the Colne estuary were regularly tested for impurities and while sewage levels were monitored, the presence of the norovirus cannot be detected.
Recent tests showed that the water quality near the oyster beds was good but results for earlier this year were not immediately available, a spokeswoman said.
As with all rivers, the Colne sometimes had raw sewage pumped into it, she added: "Like all water companies, Anglian are permitted to make discharges a certain number of times, for example during storms, as the alternative is the system backing up into people's bathrooms."
This practice came to public prominence in August 2004 when almost 900,000 cubic metres of waste was discharged into the Thames in London after violent storms, killing thousands of fish.
Larkin – who is allergic to oysters – said the company had monthly tests carried out on water quality.
> John Wright: The water companies must clean up
> Timeline: The key dates in the Fat Duck food poisoning
[Environment > Mining]
White House action puts on hold dozens of mountaintop mining projects
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 September 2009 19.45 BST Article history
The Obama administration took its strongest action to date against highly destructive mining practice today, putting a hold on dozens of mountaintop removal projects in the Appalachian region.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it was ordering a review of 79 permits in West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky to mine for coal by blowing the tops of mountains to assess the impact on water quality.
Mountaintop removal involves dynamiting the tops of mountains - leaving mounds of debris in neighbour rivers and waterways - razing forests and cutting off hundreds of feet of rock to reach narrow seams of coal.
The EPA said it had continuing concerns about toxic debris from the mine sites, and the loss of hundreds of miles of streams, which were choked off by the rubble.
"The administration pledged earlier this year to improve review of mining projects that risked harming water quality. Release of this preliminary list is the first step in a process to assure that the environmental concerns raised by the 79 permit applications are addressed and that permits issued are protective of water quality and affected ecosystems," the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, said in a statement.
The decision was welcomed by some environmental organisations as a key break by the Obama administration with the policies set by George Bush.
Appalachian Voices, a local activist coalition, said in a statement:
"By recommending these permits not be approved, the EPA and the Army Corps has demonstrated their intention to fulfill a promise to provide science-based oversight which will limit the devastating environmental impacts of mountaintop removal mining."
But environmental organisations are still pressing the Obama administration for an outright ban on mountaintop removal, which environmentalists say is the most destructive method of extracting coal.
Bush-era regulations had made it far easier for mining companies to win approval for mountaintop removal and to avoid regulatory control. The EPA, in Bush's eight-year term, did not oppose a single permit for mountaintop removal.
Jackson, in a recent interview, admitted the agency had grown "toothless".
The Obama administration signalled last June that it would take a tougher approach to enforcement. Earlier this week, the agency said it would halt West Virginia's biggest mining project, spread over 2,300 acres, because of concerns over dumping debris.
The agency now has two weeks to issue its final decision on the pending permits. Projects that do meet EPA environmental standards will move ahead.
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