Winter 1999 Newsletter

HAPPY GREEN NEW YEAR TO ALL

MEMBERS AND READERS!!

NO TO FRANKENSFOOD !

Public do not want Genetically Engineered Food

Blackwater Valley FoE were out in Camberley town centre on 31st October to tell the public about a real Halloween nightmare that could come their way :

Frankensfood - otherwise known as genetically modified (GM) food.

One of our members dressed up as Frankenstein (together with hands made out of carrots!), to publicise what may turn out to be a real-life nightmare if it is not stopped.

Despite the weather, a lot of interest was shown by concerned people about the genetic modification of foodstuffs. Most were very surprised that the supermarkets in this country are currently selling GM ingredients in food items on the shelves.

BVFoE are leading the call for local supermarkets to take GM food off the shelves. This follows a recent survey performed for national Friends of the Earth that reveals that most shoppers want supermarkets to stop selling GM food. Conducted by NOP, the survey of over 2000 shoppers reveals that a significant majority (58 %) want supermarkets to go GM free. Only a quarter (27 %), think that shops should carry on selling products containing GM ingredients.

Penny Holmes, Food & Biotechnology campaigner, said :

"The message is coming across loud and clear: the public do not want genetically modified food or crops in this country. Our local supermarkets claim to listen to their customers, well their customers have now spoken. It is not enough to simply label products containing GM ingredients. They should banish these Frankenstein foods from their shelves as soon as possible"

Despite a £10 million campaign by giant US company, Monsanto, to convince us differently, the survey also showed that 77% of people don’t want GM crops planted in the UK countryside. Despite this groundswell of opinion, the Environment Minister (Michael Meacher) has now given the commercial go-ahead for "managed development" of herbicide resistant crops while at the same time misleading people into believing that he had called a ‘moratorium’ which in reality is limited to insect-resistant crops, which will not be commercially available within the next few years anyway!

The Blackwater Valley will soon be surrounded by incinerators if the county councils of Surrey and Hampshire have their way.

Hampshire intends to build three large burners as part of their Waste Plan, while Surrey, whose plans are less advanced, are also lining up the requirement for two large burners, but are holding back to let Hampshire test out public opinion first.

But, if the meeting that our group recently attended is anything to go by, the public are now starting to see through the biased rhetoric that Hants County Council and Hants Waste have been spouting for the last three years on why incineration is necessary - and standing up to say NO! to the burners.

The meeting in question was at Chineham just outside Basingstoke, where Hampshire Waste has applied for planning permission to build an incinerator that will burn 90,000 tonnes of domestic refuse per year. BVFoE is supporting the Basingstoke Burner Action Campaign, as although Basingstoke is not strictly in our area, we are the nearest local FoE group, and our council areas of Rushmoor and Hart, along with Basingstoke will be fuelling the burner with our refuse.

The meeting was held by Chineham Parish Council who invited representatives from opposing sides to put their views on the issue to over 100 people who had turned up. After these presentations were over the public were then invited to ask questions and air their views - which they did - in large and loud numbers!

At the end of the meeting the council could not be in any confusion over how the majority of the people felt about the incinerator coming to Basingstoke. Most people were very angry that Chineham was again being asked to play host to an incinerator (the old one being closed last year). They were distrustful of HCC’s "hidden agenda" with the council’s obsession over building three multi-million pound incinerators that employ few local people instead of many local labour intensive recycling plants. And also, despite the re-assurances of the Environment Agency, no-one believes that there are no increased health risks in living within 20km range of a burner’s emissions to the air. Keep watching this space !

Airports & Air Travel:

A Conference on the Local and Global Problems

Around 50 delegates from FoE local groups, Aviation Environment Federation (AEF) and other groups interested in flying issues met in Birmingham on the 28th October. The opportunity was to find out the concerns of others and it was enlightening to find out how many issues were held in common:

These themes, repeated by several speakers at the conference, are familiar to all those people affected by flying from Farnborough Airfield.

At the same time it was obvious that the conference brought together people working on campaigns which might be substantially different in nature: One campaigner was affected by a local airfield used by parachute jumpers. The long duration and volumes of detail involved in the Terminal Five Public Inquiry was an experience some present had undergone but beyond that of most delegates.

Indeed it was made clear that it as per the title of the conference we are dealing with what is both a local and a global problem. Dr Mark Barrett giving a keynote speech on its global impacts explained how air travel would grow rapidly with the resultant disastrous impact on our environment. Strategies such as increasing fuel efficiency were insufficient to control the scale of the problem. What was needed was to limit to the expansion in air travel. Tim Johnson, Director of the AEF, produced a graph showing the rapid increase in number of flights from the UK’s airports. It was clear that all the airports will see many more aircraft movements in future. Wishing that the aircraft would fly from an other airfield is not a solution.

It was emphasised that action at government level was needed and a proposed Aviation White Paper offered hope. There was discussion of how delegates could contribute. Issues that needed tackling included the inadequacy of the planning system (as witnessed at the Farnborough Airfield public inquiry) when dealing with strategic issues.

The Right Price For Air Travel Campaign is a Europe wide campaign emphasising that international agreement is needed because of the transnational nature of aviation. Ilse Chang of FoE Netherlands reported on progress made including a recent Europe wide day of action.

The conference ended with a promise that an umbrella type organisation would be set up to facilitate communication between groups and individuals working on this local campaigns.

Overall, I learnt a lot from attending the conference and felt that it was a valuable first step towards tackling the growing environment problems caused by air travel.

That was the message the group successfully got across to the public in the centre of Camberley during a Saturday in September!

The Energy Liberalisation allows domestic consumers to choose what company they want to buy their energy from. For buying gas we have been able to choose our company for over a year, but the choice for electricity is only just coming in. It is being phased in nationally over the next year, and for the Blackwater Valley area this will mean that we can select our electricity company as from April 1999. From that month we can choose to buy our electricity from up to 15 new companies other than Southern Electric if we so wish.

This gives us the ideal chance to push the "greener" companies from which the public should buy, and as a result encourage the "greyer" companies to rethink their strategy if they realise that they are starting to lose customers.

National FoE have produced a Green Energy League Table (see below) which places the 16 companies in order of their green credentials. This was judged on a number of criteria :

A small company from Stroud, Gloucestershire, called the Renewable Energy Company (RECo) heads the list scoring 9 out of a possible 12 marks. RECo are encouraging the use of green energy by selling Ecotricity. This is an electricity derived from green renewable sources such as : anaerobic digestion; biomass; hydro; landfill gas; solar energy; and wind energy. They claim that they will be able to sell it to the domestic consumer at no extra cost than the price Southern Electric are currently selling at.

With the profits they get from additional customers they will be able to invest in more renewables.

Southern Electric figure only 9th out of 16 in the league table scoring a measly 4 out of 12. This is because of their poor support for renewable energy and poor environmental reporting. On the plus side however they do have a good energy efficiency programme and since the table was published they have now joined forces with Scottish Hydro who stand 6th in the table. Hopefully this partnership will "green" them both.

To encourage Southern Electric we asked members of the public in Camberley to sign the Climate Challenge cards which would be forwarded onto Southern Electric. These signed cards were telling the company that as customers they would be looking for a good environmental supplier for their electricity when they were allowed to choose in April. If Southern don’t "green" up by then, the customer will buy from a more suitable source.

We got a good response during the day, with over 100 cards signed, and interest in the giant league table that we had on display. For every card that was signed, the ‘mercury’ on the giant thermometer was dropped by one degree (starting at 100 degrees at the beginning of the day). This was a symbolic portrayal of the effect that buying green energy could have. By continuing to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity, the carbon dioxide emitted will very probably cause severe global warming in the next century. This will inevitably lead to climate extremes such as more violent storms, like Hurricane Mitch that recently hit Central America, becoming commonplace, and the whole world undergoing climate change so that drought and floods become much more regular events in certain parts of the world.

Judging from the poor performance of our politicians at the recent international climate conference in Buenes Aires who are content "to fiddle while Rome burns", it really is up to the people to stand up and be counted by making our own contribution in reducing CO₂ emissions. We have to counter the fossil fuel lobby who were so vociferous at the conference by hitting their profits. Start now by plugging into Green Energy from April!!!

Here is the league table of electricity suppliers which summarises FoE’s research findings as of August 1998. It consists of 14 Regional Electricity Companies; Centrica (otherwise known to us as British Gas); and one independent company, the Renewable Energy Company (RECo). As you can see RECo score the highest and are therefore the company we would recommend that you switch to in April next year. They claim that they will be able to supply electricity, a significant amount generated using renewable energy, at no extra cost to the amount we are currently paying Southern Electric. This is a considerable achievement when renewable power generation is getting nowhere near the hidden subsidies that conventional generation (fossil-fuel and nuclear) is getting. If the true environmental costs of conventional generation were taken into consideration, as they should be, then green energy would be considerably cheaper. Also, the more people that choose to use green energy the cheaper it is going to get.

Note that our current supplier, Southern, (which we are compelled to buy electricity off until April) are only rated 9 out of 16. Even worse are Centrica, otherwise known as British Gas. They are currently hawking their electricity very hard, in the press, out in the streets, and in Sainsbury’s (extra 1,000 Reward points if you sign up!). Their environmental record is very poor however (as we know from the gas sales they have been pushing on us for the last umpteen years).

Eastern Electricity (who have recently been pushing their gas in this area) are the best of the Regional Electricity Companies. This is because they have a Green Tariff to which you can choose to contribute an additional 10% of your electricity bill. This is then matched by Eastern and put into a fund which, under the guidance of trustees, is invested in renewables (Dr Patrick Green of national FoE is one of the trustees).

Finally, you can get on Renewable Energy Company’s mailing list in advance of April by contacting them at:

Stroud House, Russell Street, Stroud, Gloucs, GL5 3AN. Tel : 01453 756111 Fax: 01453 756222

ECOVER™ cleaning products, previously only readily available from ‘health’ shops, are now available at Asda and some branches of Sainsbury.

These cleaners contain highly effective plant based ingredients which biodegrade quickly with a minimum impact on the environment. The range includes toilet cleaner, multi-surface cleaner (great for ovens and kitchen floors!) washing powder, bleach powder and fabric conditioner. The U.N. elected ECOVER™ to the Global 500 Roll of Honour for outstanding environmental achievement, and the company is against animal testing.

These products do the job well with none of the side effects that chemical cleaners can sometimes cause. Having used them for some time, I can highly recommend them!