Green Options

The optimistic are calling it Gordbama, in the same vein as Brangelina: a relationship not between two of the world’s most beautiful people but between two heavyweight intellectuals … but can it save the planet?

UK Officials Plan To Grow Genetically-Modified Crops In Top Secret Military Locations In Order To Thwart Angry Anti-GM Extremists.

Delivering quite a blow to both Gordon Brown and Britain, BP has dumped its plans to build out wind farms and other renewable projects in Britain for projects in the United States.

Great Britain’s Eco-towns initiative is a result of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s previous commitment to build five (subsequently changed to ten) zero-carbon eco-towns should he become Prime Minister. These towns of up to 15 000 homes are meant to be built on unused brownfield land such as former industrial sites.

The initiative is meant to respond to the UK’s housing shortage, as well as help partially fulfill climate change commitments. It is also meant to be an opportunity for housing developers to change the way they do business, and work with the proposed site’s local communities.

The government’s vision of the eco-towns was that the eco-town should be a:

Large-scale free-standing new settlements that are exemplars of sustainable building and living, with the opportunity to design low and zero-carbon technology from the beginning.

The Government wants to ensure that the delivery of eco-towns makes as much use of the existing infrastructure as possible.

It is encouraged that some, or even many, of the initial bids have proposals for developers to invest towards rail provisions The Government said that it saw eco-towns providing a major contribution to the housing supply and increasing affordability, including up to 50 per cent of affordable housing.

However, some opponents to this initiative claim that the eco-town approach may be illegal.

So the Labour Party conference is over for another year and Gordon Brown has survived the attempts to remove him from office. How he managed this is a matter of exceptional luck, not political skill.

As the knives slide back into their sheaths wise old heads know this feat of double handed trickery cannot be repeated again. It’s only a matter of time, the mutterers continue to mutter.

However one rumour needs to be squashed right away: the one that this unrest is all about personality, not policy. Conference showed quite clearly that there are policy differences between Brown and his party, and their colour is Green.

With a rapidly dwindling popularity rating, and under severe pressure from voters as UK petrol (gasoline) prices exceed $8 per gallon, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s labour government has recently canceled a proposed increase in fuel taxes.

Gordon Brown has recently announced plans that made even Greenpeace perform a ripple of applause.

£100bn investment (200bn USD) in renewable energy has been proposed meaning that thousands of wind turbines will be built.

The prime minister has described these plans as his “green revolution” and suggested it is to be the country’s largest energy initiative since nuclear power.

What stared as a murmur of discontent is turning into an increasingly vocal chorus of protest as the British public begin to feel the pain of rising inflation, with already high fuel prices predicted to rise by as much as another 40% by the end of the year.

With a tank of fuel for the average family car costing close to $150, high fuel prices have effectively acted as one very large carbon tax - and effective they have been. Britons have reduced fuel consumption by 20% during the past year, driving less, and driving more slowly at the same time. Sales of fuel efficient vehicles are at an all time high.

But unfortunately this is not politically sustainable. The aforementioned protest is hurting the government’s popularity badly as disposable incomes are eroded by fuel bills. Having previously made broad promises to reduce Britain’s CO2 output by up to 80% by 2050 in a bid to profess world leadership on Climate Change, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been carefully avoiding any kind of statement on environmental targets during previous months. Meanwhile Britain is set to miss most of it’s legally binding and far less ambitious climate change objectives anyway.

In what can only be described as a bizarre twist of fate – and you couldn’t make this up – Gordon Brown has resigned as prime minister of Great Britain.

Events unfolded when an unusually powerful gust of wind swept along the Thames, picking up debris and in so doing, blew a hole in the face of Big Ben.

The ensuing gale caused the iconic bell to monstrously chime in the wind – a knell that shuddered and brought the capital to a standstill - the normally ignorant Londoners actually pausing from earning obscene amounts of money and contemplating their existence.

But it was a wake-up call for more than Joe Public. Realising the enormity of events, our prime minister called an emergency press conference.

The normally stoic Scot, tears visibly welling, announced he was leaving office, citing the weather as, and I quote “the wind of change.”

Spacemen 3 released a song back in 1989. Revolution. It fairly rocked the underground. It didn’t do much damage elsewhere, though the lyrics:

And I’m tired
I’m so tired
Of a lot of people
In a lot of high places

suddenly seem to resonate within me again.