There’s an unusual experiment happening right now in Britain’s energy market. It’s being run by the online community activist network 38 Degrees and consumer group Which, in response to high energy prices. They are inviting people to club together to negotiate cheaper prices by mass bargaining. There’s an open market for energy in Britain. You [...]
Author Archives | Jeremy
Hiut Jeans: Re-activating a town’s skill base
Last year my family rented a house for a week near the small Welsh town of Cardigan. It’s a small town of 4,000 people, on the coast and kind of in the middle of nowhere. In the past it was a significant port, but that was a long time ago. More recently, it had a [...]
Dirty banks: who’s bankrolling climate change
The banking industry has a big part to play in financing the emerging green economy. At the same time, it continues to finance the biggest polluters, the coal industry in particular. On the one hand, the banks’ job is to fund industry, not to change our energy mix. Surely that should be the job of [...]
Write to your MEP about mining transparency
A few weeks ago I wrote about Tearfund’s Unearth the Truth campaign, which calls for transparency in the extractive industries in developing countries. Unless mining companies are forced to disclose how much they pay for mining rights, people have no way to keep the government accountable. Revenues from mining or drilling can vanish, and local [...]
Top ten social documentary cliches
I’ve seen quite a few social documentaries in my time. We show awareness raising films in Transition Towns, and there are some really great, thought-provoking, well crafted documentaries out there. And then there are some very bad ones. Digital video production has made film-making possible (if not advisable, or profitable) for almost anyone. But making [...]
What we learned this week
How do you think the EU is handling its foreign relations? It just got its report card. (Warning – probably an international relations geekery link) I’m familiar with Slow Food, but I hadn’t heard of Slow Finance. David Boyle introduces it here. There are plenty of activists opposing Britain’s high speed rail plans. As far [...]
In Transition 2.0
You’ve all seen In Transition 1.0, the Transition Towns movie, right? I should hope so. You may have noticed the 1.0, and that’s because there was no way the first documentary could claim to have told a definitive story, especially so early in the history of the movement. More iterations of the film were to [...]
What’s your money up to right now?
Do you remember the Paddington Bear story where Paddington goes to get his pound note back from Floyds bank, and they give him somebody else’s pound? He knows, because he marked his specially with a marmalade paw-print. I think it was probably from that story that I first learned as a child that the money [...]
The end of the road for carbon labeling?
This week supermarket chain Tesco announced that they have dropped their plans to introduce carbon footprint labeling across their range. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The project was announced in January 2007, and 15 months later the first 20 products hit the shelves. Crisps, orange juice and light bulbs were among the [...]
Five myths about the financial transaction tax
Yesterday Nicolas Sarkozy announced that France would press ahead unilaterally with a Financial Transaction Tax. Advocates of a Robin Hood Tax were swift to celebrate, myself included. Needless to say, skeptics were equally swift to denounce it as a terrible mistake. There is a shrill paranoia about the financial transaction tax. It is epitomised by [...]
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