Signed. I found cinnabar moth caterpillars on ragwort growing out of my garden wall this year. Other ragwort plants at the edge of our (unadopted) road are regularly decapitated by passers by.
Incidentally, @pansyface , I understand common ragwort to be a British native plant...
"The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life." Rabindranath Tagore
We hear a lot about climate emergency but details of what is being done are sadly thin on the ground right now.
I only have limited direct experience but I would guess that what I do know is reasonably typical. Councils and other groups declared the Climate Emergency first, as an enabling act, and only then began seeking advice as to what that means in terms of day to day actions. So the long period of radio silence is because plans and policies are being researched and developed. A few have been published and they are notable for a lack of detail. A few claim to already be 'Net Zero Carbon', but the terms by which they are measuring their impacts are not clear. The ones taking longer are probably the ones taking more time to establish actual action plans rather than making vaguely aspirational announcements.
It's not a simple question to answer, "what does Zero Carbon mean?". Add in biodiversity issues like this one as well as air quality and climate change adaptation alongside budget constraints and the massive distraction that is taking up central government's entire focus, it's not surprising that the detail is taking time.
I can tell you that stuff is going on. Albeit currently behind the scenes
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first”
Thanks for that. I'd assumed that 'emergency' would have meant freeing up budgets and powers for direct and immediate action on projects that were already on the cards or currently mothballed etc. I guess it's just more of the typical 'schedule a meeting to discuss what further meetings are required to decide what emergency actually means'. It's been 5 months of radio silence now so it would just be nice to have an idea of what sort of action will be taken and how quickly.
When we were kids, in South London, my brother and I used to collect woolly bear caterpillars from the back alley and rear them in jam jars. We had caterpillar races on the back steps, fed them and watched them pupate and emerge as beautiful moths.
It is sad to learn that they are one of the species in sharp decline and that they are now rarely seen.
I'd assumed that 'emergency' would have meant freeing up budgets and powers for direct and immediate action on projects that were already on the cards or currently mothballed etc.
Not really. For example, many councils are currently in the process of buying a building of some sort. So far I've not come across one who specified net zero carbon in the procurement brief - most QSs and contractors will have advised them that that would be prohibitively expensive. It generally isn't, but that's not widely known, apparently.
Now they have set a (sometimes random) NZC target of, say, 2030 perhaps. And they ask someone like the company I work with what they have to do to get to that target. We say, well don't buy anything new that isn't NZC is your first rule, because making something NZC later is always more costly than doing it at the outset. At which point panic sets in in the team buying the new school or care home or whatever and there's a long period of them staring at us like so many rabbits in the headlights.
There is almost no climate related question to which a satisfactory answer won't be "plant more trees". But other issues are much more difficult. Offsetting is the big argument a lot of the time.
If you've read the CCC report on zero 2050 - which is generally excellent as a framework - you'll know where it's heading. The difficulty seems to be to get from (perfectly sincere) 'we really want to do this' to 'actually I need to do something different now, today, if we're to stand any chance'.
Which I think is what today's strike activists are trying to say.
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first”
I had a conversation with a Building Inspector recently and asked why a client was having to spend thousands of pounds on a sprinkler system and rain water attenuation when the money could have gone towards a whole raft of energy saving tech for the house. They could have made the house near zero carbon for the same money but are now building to minimum specs for insulation to get some money back. It's like we've gone backwards in the last few years when it comes to housing.
Buildings are one thing though but England is still something like 70% behind on its minimum tree planting targets and marine conservation is still really poor compared to the targets the UK should be achieving.
Lets face it we're not having mass climate strikes today because people are happy with how things are progressing. I suspect Brexit will be blamed though.
I see the petition got a mention in the magazine this month. It's still needing a lot more promotion though to get the numbers up. Maybe 38 Degrees could help?
Thanks for sorting me out regarding different sorts of ragwort, @wild edges. I understand there are various hybrids of different species worldwide, which must make things more difficult...
Being uneasy about conflicting information on ragwort toxicity, I found this site, which makes for interesting reading: http://www.ragwortfacts.com/
"The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life." Rabindranath Tagore
Thanks for sorting me out regarding different sorts of ragwort, @wild edges. I understand there are various hybrids of different species worldwide, which must make things more difficult...
I can recommend Richard Mabey's book 'Weeds. The story of outlaw plants'. As the guy who wrote the foraging handbook 'food for free' you can imagine he has a lot of good things to say about wild plants and their benefits but there's also a lot of interesting stuff about the cultural history of weeds too.
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Incidentally, @pansyface , I understand common ragwort to be a British native plant...
It's not a simple question to answer, "what does Zero Carbon mean?". Add in biodiversity issues like this one as well as air quality and climate change adaptation alongside budget constraints and the massive distraction that is taking up central government's entire focus, it's not surprising that the detail is taking time.
I can tell you that stuff is going on. Albeit currently behind the scenes
Now they have set a (sometimes random) NZC target of, say, 2030 perhaps. And they ask someone like the company I work with what they have to do to get to that target. We say, well don't buy anything new that isn't NZC is your first rule, because making something NZC later is always more costly than doing it at the outset. At which point panic sets in in the team buying the new school or care home or whatever and there's a long period of them staring at us like so many rabbits in the headlights.
There is almost no climate related question to which a satisfactory answer won't be "plant more trees". But other issues are much more difficult. Offsetting is the big argument a lot of the time.
If you've read the CCC report on zero 2050 - which is generally excellent as a framework - you'll know where it's heading. The difficulty seems to be to get from (perfectly sincere) 'we really want to do this' to 'actually I need to do something different now, today, if we're to stand any chance'.
Which I think is what today's strike activists are trying to say.
Being uneasy about conflicting information on ragwort toxicity, I found this site, which makes for interesting reading:
http://www.ragwortfacts.com/