Sunshade World? No! No! No!

Now and again people send me press releases they think I'll find interesting, but this one made me want to run upstairs and hide under the bed. Actually, to start with I thought this report, from a respected university not a million miles from my door, must be an April Fool that had got lost somewhere in the www. It began:

Sunshade World - a global warming solution?

I read on, and it became clear that this was no joke. Instead, a team of scientists had just devoted hatfuls of time and energy to creating computer models designed to help us understand what the world would be like if a giant sunshade were placed between us and the sun. Apparently such a scheme could be put in place in 25 years or so for so many trillions of pounds, so obviously we need to know what it will be like.

The good news is that, compared to the 'sky falling in' doom-monger's scenarios of runaway climate change, life under the sunshade would be quite pleasant. A bit less ice at the poles than at present. Rather drier in the topics. Possible catastrophic effects on plankton with potential global repercussions.

As I read and digested this, I tried to imagine these scientists going about their work, chatting over coffee and comparing notes, then I thought about all the other scientists all over the world who spend their time modelling futures and extrapolating data, which then gets turned into fabulous stories by the media and so makes its way into our tiny brains, where we try and come to terms with it.

And no doubt somebody, somewhere, is busy monitoring all these scientists, studying their carbon footprints and coming up with ingenious ways to make their future-mongering more efficient. And these people also issue reports telling the world how vitally important their work has been in cutting the climate impact of the climate impact studiers. And after a while someone says, you know, this Sunshade World really sounds pretty good, and then we're all in trouble.

You know what they say: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

A Few Words from Mr Angry (or is that Ms?)

It's always nice to get a little feedback, and this morning a message arrived from someone bravely identifying themselves as Anonymous. Describing me as a **** idiot, my correspondent went on to explain that I knew nothing about anything and, in particular, that by mentioning the possibility of oil becoming more expensive I was effectively acting as a mouthpiece for the great liberal global warming conspiracy.

To back up their argument that I am a **** idiot (which I no doubt am, at least some of the time), Mr or Ms Angry pulled out an old chestnut called the abiogenic theory of petroleum formation. This theory, which was put forward in the nineteenth century and has since been rejected by everyone except a couple of rogue Russians and an astrophysicist, suggests that oil and gas are not fossil fuels, but that they derive from magma squeezed up through cracks in the earth's crust and transformed by complex chemical processes into oily hydrocarbons.

In other words, in the view of Anonymous, supplies of oil and gas are continually being replaced from below, and will never run out. There is no evidence for this whatsoever, but that doesn't matter with this sort of bogus science. Which would be funny except that people who know even less about the subject than I do tend to grasp at theories like this and cling on to them, and we don't need people's heads to be full of muddled ideas. We need people to be well-informed, and to think carefully about subjects like wind energy, nuclear power and so on.

The earth is rich with many forms of energy. Let's think about this in more interesting ways, not just make stuff up.

Are You Greenish?

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't think all that many people would describe themselves as Green. I think the quiet majority of people are wary of Green politics and not very keen on carbon-crunching. They're not really convinced by the fire-and-brimstone sermons of Monbiot and co.

But many of us have Green tendencies. We love nature documentaries and walks in the country. We grow things. With a bit of encouragement we easily become fiendish recyclers. We'll turn the temperature setting down on the washing machine, so long as we know the clothes will still come out clean.

In other words, we're Greenish. Unfortunately professional Greens sometimes give the impression that anyone who hasn't sent their car to the crusher and vowed never to eat a carrot that has travelled more than 200 metres is a carbon criminal responsible for the imminent destruction of the world. Which is hardly encouraging.

Instead, let's give ourselves a pat on the back for saving those cans or for trying to bike to work, or even for noticing the first swift of summer.

What Happens When Oil Isn't Cheap Anymore?

Yesterday I woke up. Well, I suppose I wake up most days, but this was different. This was like an alarm clock going off and waking me up EVEN THOUGH I WAS AWAKE ALREADY. Hmmm. Tricky concept. Anyway, what woke me up was a man called Rob Hopkins, a tall, mild-mannered sort of chap with sticky-out ears and a nice sense of humour. He was talking about something called Peak Oil - no, not oil pumped out of mountains, but something altogether different:

The moment at which the oil waiting quietly in the ground for us to pump out is less than the amount we've already sucked out and burned up.

My grandfather worked for an oil company and I always thought of oil as something that was THERE. When one lot was sucked up, you just went and found more. There had to be more, because in our Groanish world we can't imagine less. Things aren't supposed to run out or close or end in our world, so the oil had to keep flowing.

More recently I began to realise that oil would one day run out, but I imagined that we'd have found some other wonderful source of energy by then. Nuclear fusion or cosmic rays - I don't know. Until yesterday I didn't understand that oil is special. Oil is like having a whole room full of cash you can just pull out and spend. Oil is like pickled sunshine. It's like the richest chocolate brownie you can imagine, only instead of butter and sugar and chocolate it's full of energy.

Over the past 150 years this chocolate-brownie-sunshine energy has made the modern world what it is. Cheap oil is the difference between a modern Western city and a poor city in the developing world. Look around you. How many things that you see were either made or brought to you using oil?

But once oil starts to become scarce, it will be expensive, and expensive oil is an altogether different creature. Expensive oil is a luxury. Expensive oil means no more cheap plastic, or cheap computers or TVs or clothes. Expensive oil means that only rich people will be able to drive or fly. It means having to live WHERE YOU ARE and eat food that is grown nearby.

In fact expensive oil could make life a whole lot better. It will stop people rushing around, trying to be in seventy-two different places at once. It will stop people getting fat. It will force people to spend their time living instead of shopping or watching TV. Provided people are positive and make good decisions, expensive oil will make our lives healthier, Greener and less stressful.

What happens when oil isn't cheap anymore? That's up to us.

Coconut Jet Fuel and the Icarus Moment

The idea of a plane powered by coconuts sounds quite funny, but when I read about this in the papers the other day it didn't make me laugh. Instead it made me think of Icarus, the unfortunate flying boy. He tried to fly too high and melted his wings, confirming the view that people ought to stay put on terra firma and not act like gods. The Greeks had a word for this sort of behaviour: Hubris. In their myths people who put on airs and graces were guilty of hubris and generally came to a sticky end. Prometheus is another example.

Cut to 2008 and people are concerned about the environmental impact of cars and planes. We want to go wherever we want quickly, but oil is getting more expensive and our journeys are releasing ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. I don't claim to be an expert Carbon-cruncher, but wiser heads have pointed out that carbon released high in the atmosphere causes more trouble than the same amount released at ground level. Yes, we're back with Icarus...

Airlines are attracting more and more customers but they're not enjoying the bad publicity. So a certain British businessman, who owns an airline, hit on the idea of putting biofuel in the gas tanks of a 747. Of the jet's four tanks, three contained ordinary jet fuel, while the last had a mixture of 80% jet fuel and 20% fuel made from coconut and babassu palm oil. Apparently 150,000 coconuts were used, along with an unspecified amount of palm oil. I'm no mathematician, but that sounds like an awful lot of coconuts to provide a small percentage of one airplane's fuel.

The entrepreneur in question described the flight as 'historic', and perhaps it is. Perhaps this was the moment when the human race finally took leave of its senses. The Icarus moment.

Biofuels are made from living plants, which absorb carbon as they grow. The idea is that, on balance, a car or jet running on biofuel emits less carbon than one using ordinary fuel. Groans point to this and say, Here is the future of transport! And that future is bright leafy Green!

What they never mention is that all these plants - oil palms, rape, wheat - have to grow somewhere. Land which might have been used to grow food or left alone for wildlife has to be cleared and planted with biofuel crops. These are not cosy little farms but vast plantations run by big companies that want to make as much money as they can - what they do is called Green because people have this obsession with carbon, but isn't even remotely Green. It's hugely destructive. Oil palms grow in the tropics, which means rainforest is being cut down and burned to make way for them. The oran utang is losing its home so that people in Europe can put biofuels in their petrol tanks and feel all virtuous and Green.

And now people want to power jets with coconuts! This isn't Green, this is Gruesome, Grisly Groanishness of the first order. It's unbelievably stupid. By contrast, Icarus was just a kid who forgot where he was.

Green Freedom

How to Turn Your Parents Green is going places. Copies should be appearing in Greenish shops near you, and could well be heading across the Atlantic soon. More importantly, we were attacked by one of those blogs that aims to protect the good citizens of the world from a Government-backed Green Conspiracy. We're obviously doing something right!

But this kind of reaction is a good reminder that the Green world is still small and quite self-contained. Most people have some idea of what global warming is, and many people love nature and want to help birds and animals. But those same people tend to react badly if you make practical suggestions that don't fit with the Groanish philosophy of MORE CHEAPER and MAKE LIFE EASY.

It's the principle of the guy stuck in rush hour gridlock, complaining about the traffic. He hates the traffic, but he'll defend his right to sit in it because it's what he does and what he knows. Changing the way he travels might involve changing his whole life, and who wants to do that?

Greens have a habit of knowing better than everyone else what's good for them, and nobody likes a know-all. Especially a know-all who is also a party-pooper. It's always amazed me that a movement which is all about promoting happiness should have such a reputation for being worthy and not much fun. It always seems to be about having less and doing without. There's a sort of Puritan ethic that most people don't like at all.

To turn parents and others Green I think we need to stop making people depressed with Carbon Footprints and all that, and start making them feel that Green is a better alternative, for them, personally. Not just for future generations or people in far-off lands or creatures that live in ponds, but for them and their families.

As you read this, brilliant Green minds are at work, trying to work out how to do this. But for now, perhaps we could spend less time telling people how to live and more time demonstrating - like someone showing off a new hoover - the pleasures of a Greenish life.

Look out! It's the Carbon Weevils!

One of the aims of How to Turn Your Parents Green (how I wish I'd given it a shorter title!) is to inject a bit of humour into the global-warming-mass-extinction-oh-no-we're-all-going-to-melt thing. And I'm happy to say we're part of a growing trend. Yes, there are still plenty of tedious books and websites where people drone on about lightbulbs and recycling without so much as a smile, but some great comic minds are at work dreaming up wonderful new ideas.

My favourite is the Carbon Weevils, a short film made by madcap theatre troupe Forkbeard Fantasy. It's shown as part of their hilarious show Invisible Bonfires, which is about global warming, but you can also see the film by itself on Youtube or You Tube or whatever it's called - you probably know better than me.

The link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEuUDmwZ8a0

At least it should be. Sorry if it's someone doing a silly dance instead.

Viva Greenpeace!

It's hard to be positive when you come across stories like Goodbye Froggie. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read them. You just have to read them, think a bit and then do something. No one's expecting you to go charging around the Southern Ocean like the rainbow warriors of Greenpeace are doing right now. There is, as they say, more than one way to save a whale. Or a frog, come to think of it. This is what 'How to Turn Your Parents Green' is all about: direct action you can do at home.

Take the poor frog. In this green, wet country of ours there used to be lots of frogs, toads and newts. Witches didn't have to look far when they needed a bit of amphibian for a spell, they just looked in the nearest patch of weeds. There were ponds and streams everywhere, full of green, slippery creatures.

The modern witch has to look much harder, because there are less amphibians, and there are less amphibians because there are fewer places for them to live. Our growing towns and cities cover land with tarmac and bricks and concrete. We use strimmers and weedkillers to get rid of vegetation. Even in the countryside you have to look quite hard for a pond because people have filled them in.

So what can you do? Here's a clue: in our tiny city garden we have anything between five and ten frogs. They live in the flowerbeds around the world's smallest pond, feasting on the thousands of slugs that live in the garden. They're protected from local cats by the thick, messy foliage that we never cut back. We don't use any poisons. In fact a lot of the time we don't do much. It's a bit of a jungle, but paradise if you're a snail, a slug or an urban frog.

The gardening chapter of 'How to Turn Your Parents Green' has lots of tips for the greener gardener, so why not check it out?

Goodbye Froggie

The other day I was lucky enough to interview the producer of the new BBC nature series Life in Cold Blood, which is all about Reptiles and Amphibians. He told me a story which is featured in the series, about the Panamanian Golden Frog. It's one amazing creature, this frog, bright yellow with a black stripe. The male of the species will sit on the riverbank and, when it spies another frog, wave at it. To other male frogs, this is a bit like a shake of the fist - look at my muscles! To a female it's, well, much the same, only with a different aim...

A couple of years ago the producer contacted scientists in the region to talk about this frog and they told him, you'd better get here quick because we don't know how long this frog is going to be around. Apparently there's a nasty fungus which is spreading along river systems all over the world, and it is killing amphibians at such a rate that people are comparing the situation to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Anyway, the producer rushed over to Panama and filmed the Panamanian Golden Frog, which he described as a truly amazing creature. Scientists went along too, and did experiments to see whether the frog would wave at its own reflection or at a frog on a TV screen. And then, some time later, the fungus reached the homeland of the Panamanian Golden Frog and local scientists scooped up the last remaining population and took them into captivity.

The frog has waved its last in the wild, but it is about to become a TV star.

As a producer of nature programmes I suppose you get used to extinction, but I found this story disturbing. What you're wondering though is, are we to blame? The answer is, quite possibly. The killer fungus seems to have travelled from Africa along with the South African Clawed Frog, which is used by people all over the world. You see the South African Clawed Frog is very useful to us humans, because if you inject one with the urine of a pregnant woman it will produce eggs. Yes, this particular frog is a living pregnancy testing kit.

What does this tell us? With their thin skins, amphibians are incredibly sensitive animals. A frog may help us detect a pregnancy, but perhaps the rapid decline in species across the world should give us another kind of warning.

What does Green mean?

It's a tricky one, isn't it? We're always telling each other we should be Greener, but does anyone really know what this means? I have an idea in my head, but I doubt it's the same as yours. For instance, my Green vision isn't limited to worrying about Carbon. I'm not sure that all our attention should be focused so narrowly on this one element, because it allows accountants and technical people and marketing whizzkids to dictate how we think about changing the world for the better.

If you're obsessed with Carbon you can't think rationally about nuclear power or dams across the Severn. Of course this suits big corporations just fine, because a thinking public is not good for business. After all, if you think in broad terms about being Green you soon realise that the most important Green qualities are THRIFT (ie not wasting stuff), MODERATION (ie not consuming too much), SELF-RELIANCE (ie doing things for yourself) and CRAFT (ie making and doing things rather than passively consuming them). If you have these qualities you will have a small Carbon footprint. You will have lower Carbon emissions than other people. You won't need to waste any of your precious time thinking about this incredibly tedious subject.

But can you think of a business that wants its customers to be thrifty, moderate, self-reliant and crafty? What about the government? Our leaders want us to be healthy and reasonably content, but they also want us to consume. They want us to buy a lot of everything. For the economy to keep booming we have to buy more this year than we did last, and if we're Green we won't.

Carbon is a good get-out for government and business. Think about it. If you're a business person you want people to keep buying stuff, but there's only so much a person can buy. So you keep creating new products and new markets, and this is what's happening with Carbon. Instead of buying less, people are buying more, only they're buying stuff that seems to be Green because it involves less Carbon floating about the place. Biofuel is a classic example of this, as discussed in How To Turn Your Parents Green:

Don’t be Fooled by BioFuel
Car owners, manufacturers and petrol companies are always looking for ways to seem Green, and biofuels are the New Big Thing. Instead of powering cars with the energy from long-dead plants (ie oil), biofuels are made from plants grown for the purpose – crops like wheat, oilseed rape and oil palms. The idea is that the growing plants consume as much CO2 as the car engines will emit, but does this make biofuels Green? Not in the slightest. So how can you be a Green driver? By riding a bike instead

Don't get me wrong. I'm nervous about Global Warming and I know that we need to change our ways. But when you're thinking Green, have some imagination. Have some vision. Conjure a great life. The future needs hard-working, thoughtful, creative people, not a bunch of Carbon-crunchers.