Nostalgia

I’m going to try not to sound patronising now, but it’s not going to be easy for me.

I went to the Climate Camp set up on Bishopsgate after work on Wednesday as part of the G20 protests. I really wanted to go to feel part of the event but they weren’t about to let me into the G20 summit meetings which I would have preferred to attend, so the protests seemed like a good second choice.

It was amazing to see a mini festival site set up in the shadow of the Nat West tower in the heart of the city. The range of protests was staggering, mostly green, and anti-capitalist. “Nature doesn’t do bailouts”, “Bankers are Wankers”… but I even saw a guy with a Free Palastine poster.

I was thinking a few nice banners on the Bank Of England saying “Closing Down Sale”, “30% off all UK currency”, “Bullion reserves reduced to clear” would have been quite an effective protest slogan. Revolution through sarcasm, that’s my philosophy.

So what was the protest about? All the world leaders came together in one place to try to figure out the mess that’s been made of the economy and environment. I was just happy to celebrate that they are talking.

But aside from that it was a trip down memory lane to the days when I was an angry teenager, listening to the Levellers with my hair wraps and the smell of patchouli oil emanating from my slogan covered t-shirts.

So I’ve hit my 30’s and become a tedious reactionary, but I can still dance it up at a cycle powered sound systems and get one over on moronic riot police. They boxed everyone in for 4 hours, but I managed to blag my way out with an old press pass despite being quite drunk.

Meanwhile back at Excel, it looks like the old world order over, as China and the other BRICs have effectively bought the rest of the world up at a knockdown price. Let’s hope they don’t copy the model of industrialisation and foreign intervention that the US and Europe used over the next 50 years or we’re really screwed.

Lord Stern at the DFID Conference.

I was lucky enough to be at this talk.

"....The management of climate change requires the reduction of emissions of GHGs. The G8 nations at recent summits have endorsed the goal of reducing global emissions by at least 50% by 2050 (which should be relative to 1990). Such cuts are broadly in line with a path could hold greenhouse gas levels below 500ppm CO2e and then start to reduce them. According to the Hadley Centre climate model, this would reduce the probability of a 5ºC increase in global temperature from around 50% to 3% or less. Such insurance could be bought for a worldwide cost of 1 or 2% of GDP over the coming decades and may well be lower than that if technical progress continues with its current acceleration. That action is very sound economics as well as a moral imperative.

We know from the long-term target where countries will need to be in 2050 and we can infer current actions from this. The target 50% reduction means halving global emissions from 40 gigatonnes a year to 20, or around 2 tonnes per capita, given that there are likely to be around 9 billion people in 2050.

For the global target to be achieved, few countries can be much above the annual emissions level of 2 tonnes per capita, since there are likely to be few that are far below. This provides a benchmark against which countries can assess how the sectoral pattern of their emissions may need to change for them to reach this level cost-effectively.

These simple headline numbers mean that, even if developed countries reduced their emissions to zero, the forecast 8 billion people living in developing countries in 2050 would still be able to emit only 2.5 tonnes per capita. With the majority (by population) of countries not covered in Annex 1 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, broadly the non-Annex 1 are the developing countries, already above this level, it is clear that emissions in these countries will have to fall in the long term. Aggregate emissions by developing countries will probably need to peak in the next 20 years if the global 2050 targets are to be achieved. Emissions in rich countries must decline, and decline strongly, from now and be at least 80% lower in 2050 than 1990 if they are to get their emissions in the region of 2 tonnes per capita by then. ..."

Lord Stern at the DFID conference, March 09.

That's the best bit, but here's the full transcript and the video.

Rust

It drives me up the wall. Every trip I have done in the past has been driven by rust in some way shape or form. The first ever car expedition I did across the Sahara, I realised the car was about to fall in half because of the rust. I had to sell it there and then in Nouakchott, Mauritania, a terrible position to because the customs rules meant I was completely set up by the buyer and over the next 24 hours I’d had a gun waved in my face, been smuggled through 10 police checkpoints in the back of a car, illegally fled Mauritania in a pirogue, and spent the night in a Senegalese prison before having all my profits taken off me by a mafia of crooks in the town of Rosso, leaving me with just enough for my flight home.

On the trip to Cape Town I did with Esther we finally had enough of the bodywork rust in our Landcruser after reaching the other side of the Sahara, and spent 7 weeks having the body work re-welded. It was really fascinating to watch the team of Ghanaian welders at work, using recycled galvanised plate from reclaimed air-conditioning ducts to fashion body panels, and the springs from old car seats as welding rods. Fascinating sure, but after 7 weeks it was also a frustrating pause in the journey.

I’m annoyed with myself for not looking closer at the bus when I got it. I don’t think it would have mattered, I was always going to buy it, and I don’t think I could have done much better on the price. I got it for less than its scrap value. It’s a G-reg, from 1990. If I’d found something 5 years younger it would have been galvanised at the factory. Instead it’s “Rotten” as M, an old travel companion and welder friend of mine declared. He doesn’t use the term lightly.

I’ve stripped it back so all the rust is visible and it makes for a pretty big hole. M’s going to need a few sheets of metal to rebuild it. The shocking thing is that this bus had an MOT, and PSV test certificate, even though the bodywork is structurally unsound, and from the extent is fair to guess it has been for a few years. This bus was taking little kids around Preston before I bought it.
I really want to get it all sorted before I set off and at the moment have the time and resources (though not really the cash) to get it done. More than anything, I don’t want to spend all my time on this trip repairing the bus.