3-2-1: Unstoppable clean energy, diverging from EU water directive, and keeping our drains unblocked
3 Positive Changes
Unstoppable Clean Energy
It takes a lot for the International Energy Agency to put its weight being anything that isn’t fossil fuels, but in its 2023 ‘World Energy Outlook’ report has stated that the growth of solar and the projections that see continued growth make the transition unstoppable with it becoming ‘when’ we move away from fossil fuels rather than ‘if’. There is still so much progress needed, and quickly, for countries around the world to achieve the targets that were set following the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but progress is being made!
In-store Refillables
Supermarkets are slowly beginning to bring in reusable products that customers can fill their own containers with, reducing the amount of packaging waste we need to dispose of. Aldi has now joined that list with a trial in Solihull, offering customers the chance to purchase dry food products using their own containers!
Supporting a Plant Based Treaty
There are a number of UK councils who have already signed up, but now Lambeth Borough council have joined them in pushing for a global treaty that would scale back the most intensive and destructive forms of agriculture. Instead, farms would be more resilient and regenerative, building sustainability in all practices in order to have less of an environmental impact!
2 Steps Backward
Diverging from the EU Water Directive
As the impacts of Brexit and the moves away from European law continue, environmental protections on the streams, rivers, lakes and seas of the UK are next in line for the UK government to move away from. The quality of waterways is as poor now as it has been for a very long time with pollution from farming and the dumping of sewage dropping the quality of water and leading to events
With any break away there is an opportunity to make more stricter regulation around water quality and go further than what would be possible within the EU. However, the lack of action in the past suggests this government won’t be going further than we did in the EU.
Our Struggles with Eastward Weather
Over the last couple of weeks a number of parts of the UK have been battered by extreme weather with flooding causing huge amounts of damage, forcing hundreds of people from their homes, and taking the lives of 7 people.
The Environment Secretary, Therese Coffey, was in front of the Commons’ Environment Committee explaining why certain parts of the country seemed so under prepared in defending against heavy rain when she gave a quite staggering reason. In her own words:
“One of the things that happened particularly with Storm Babet is that we are very good, with the Met Office and the Environment Agency’s flood forecasting [centre], at predicting weather normally because most of our rain tends to come in from the west. We’ve got that pretty much down to a fine art. This was rain coming from the other way and we don’t have quite as much experience on that. Therefore, our accuracy of predicting where such heavy rain would fall was not to the same degree as if it had been.”
What do you think of that?
1 Change We Can All Make
As we come to the end of October, we also come to the end of Unblocktober. The month-long campaign was designed to raise awareness of the importance of treating our sewers, drains, watercourses and seas better than we currently are, reducing the amount of plastic entering our water systems as well as the amount of oil and other blockage-causing liquids.
The only thing that should be going into the toilet to be flushed is toilet paper, all other items should be going in a bin. Oils and other similar liquids can be wiped from tins or our pans (once it has cooled!!) and can also be binned, rather than rinsing and washing in the sink. Is there more you can do at home?
