Joe McCarthy and Valerie Jennings, regular contributors to the discussion on municipal waste management on this blog, write in the Irish Times. It’s a classic protest, with complaints about the status quo but no serious consideration of the alternatives.
Yesterday’s Sindo had a sensationalist piece on electricity prices. It misrepresents the PSO levy as an ad valorem levy on electricity (it is a connection charge). It confuses a 3% increase in the transmission tariff with a 3% increase in the price of electricity — the former is a small part of the latter. And it omitted that the distribution tariff will fall by 6.5%. See the CER newsletter of August.
Frank Convery dreams of a Silicon Valley of Emerald Green over at Comhar. To get to Silicon Valley, you need to pass through that other valley, where bad ideas face a certain death.
Rigour and scrutiny, however, are not part of Convery’s vision. He claims that Palo Alto “will be submerged if sea levels rise significantly” — ignoring that Palo Alto is 9 metres above sea level (projected sea level rise by 2100 is less than one-tenth of that); that people there know how to build dikes and can pay for it too; and that Palo Alto is special because of its people rather than because of its physical characteristics.
I left a comment to that effect on his blog, but discussion is not appreciated in sustainablalaland.
UPDATE: Comments are up now at Comhar.
UPDATE: Frank Convery responds. I close the discussion here.
Olivia Kelly reports that the national cycle path network has been unveiled. As is all too common, there is no trace of this with the Department of Transport or the National Roads Authority. There is a powerpoint from January 2010, though, which is consistent with Kelly’s description.
I’m all for cycling. I cycle to work. I wish more people would cycle, so that there are fewer cars on the road (they’re a menace, not just to women). A proper cycling policy is one of the few ways in which carbon dioxide emissions can be cut fast.
The national cycling network disappoints. Its primary aim is to connect Ireland’s main towns. People do not commute by bike from town to town. The distance is too large. Bike commuters travel from the near suburbs to the city centre (and back).
The cycle paths are for recreation so. It is instructive to compare the NRA’s proposed network to the one proposed by Failte (page 19). The Failte one takes the cyclist through a scenic landscape from one place of interest to the next. The NRA one takes the cyclist on the shortest route from population centre to population centre.
Bikes are not cars. You use them in a different way for a different purpose.