Isonomia

by Peter Jones

The Budget last week offered little to excite the environmentally minded, as George Osborne produced no new green measures from his battered red box. One of the main talking points in the waste sector has been the absence of any clarification of what will happen to landfill tax after it reaches £80 in 2014/15. The Green Alliance advocates further increases, but the Environmental Services Association and various local authority representatives are looking for the escalator to stop. At the same time, the planned fuel escalator increase for September 2013 was cancelled.

Read more on A tale of two escalators…

by Steve Watson

The actor Richard Briers, who passed away last month, will continue to walk the boards in the theatre of collective memory in one role more than any other.  From 1975 to 1978, over four series of the BBC sitcom The Good Life, Briers played Tom Good, affable advocate of self-sufficiency. The very phrase is still apt to conjure up images of Briers and co-star Felicity Kendal in the role of his wife Barbara, clad in bulky home-knit jumpers, tending to their vegetable patches and incongruous animals in their suburban garden. But the show ended thirty five years ago, and the passing of the actor whose creation so symbolised a green alternative has led me to ask what ‘the good life’ meant back then and whether there are contemporary Goods still searching for it in modern terms.

Read more on The meaning of the good life…

By Ann Ballinger

At the core of my work for Eunomia is a belief in evidence-based decision making. Sometimes the evidence is stronger than others, and there is an element of art in selecting the assumptions that go into even the most rigorous lifecycle analysis or a cost benefit analysis. Taking a dispassionate approach to the evidence remains my aim – but there is no doubt that this has become increasingly difficult in the environmental sector as a whole, leading in extreme cases to some questioning the role of science in society.

Read more on Science and the environment: bridging the credibility gap…

by Adam Baddeley

Last week’s announcement by Defra that it was withdrawing around a combined £200 million of PFI funding from three waste projects (Merseyside, Bradford / Calderdale, City of York / North Yorkshire) was met with some anger and derision across the waste industry. No surprises that the loudest voices were those who have invested significant amounts in these projects, not least the successful bidders (or ‘nearly successful’ in the case of Merseyside) in each related procurement.

Read more on How much is too much?…

by Mike Brown

Sometimes it takes a really clear expression of the fundamentals of a point of view to help you see what’s wrong with it. A couple of weekends ago, BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions came to the Gloucester Guildhall. One of the hot local topics is the county council’s incinerator plan, and a number of its opponents were in the audience, and a question was raised about whether it was “a blot on the landscape or a necessary step to securing an ecologically sustainable environment”.

Read more on Incinerators in the dragons’ den…