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  BBC 7 Dec 06
Best of the Green Room
Michael Gunter: Wealth seeking among the green concerns
Jeremy Hattingh: Nature's not for taming
Maria Ashot: Climate solutions can be child's play
Steven Walker: After the 'stuff' is gone

Green Room: Over to you! This week we have flung open the doors of the Green Room and asked you to come inside. We receive a great mix of comment on Green Room articles, and emails about environmental issues in general. We selected four of the best, and asked the writers if we could feature their contributions.

MICHAEL GUNTER - Wealth seeking among the green concerns
Michael wrote in response to Dr Mike Hulme's article suggesting that the language of "climate chaos and catastrophe" has become too extreme

Dr Hulme's recent commentary fails to acknowledge one likely powerful driver for the recent climate hype; that corporations have now determined there is a "tipping point" in terms of new business ventures to spawn.

Banks will now lend; governments keen to appease a restless public will provide "corporate welfare" out of the public purse.

So of course, the market is signalling in flashing dollar signs, and the more they scare us the more money they think they can make out of our fear.

Emissions trading, Clean Development Mechanism ventures, geosequestration (burying carbon dioxide underground), uranium mining, nuclear fission reactors, and tree plantations are all just new business opportunities for amoral corporatists everywhere.

There seemed to be quite a few well-organised "new kids on the block" at the "Walk Against Warming" in Melbourne on 4 November, and some I spoke to were advocating geosequestration as our best response.

I would not be the least surprised if these apparent grass-roots advocacy groups were getting funding and other support from mining and energy corporate interests.

Meanwhile some of the most rational and cost-effective fixes for CO2 reductions are being ignored because corporations don't make enough money out of that sort of future.

The Australian energy industry encourages the public to invest significant amounts of personal wealth on costly, low-efficacy emission reduction technologies such as solar electric (photovoltaic) panels.

In contrast, domestic solar water heaters remain a rarity on our rooftops, even though they are five to 10 times more cost-effective in reducing emissions. Solar water heaters compete directly against baseload coal-fired electricity in south-eastern Australia; photovoltaics do not.

Short-term commercial self-interest demands they promote the weakest competitor!

When civilisation collapses prematurely, having been led down the wrong energy-intensive overpopulated path, it will be the last failure of free markets.

Consumer society, consumptive planet.

Michael Gunter is a renewable energy enthusiast who writes about his backyard technology experiments. Some of his initiatives can be found on voltscommisar.net

JEREMY HATTINGH - Nature's not for taming

As a South African, the first thing I noticed on starting to live in the UK five years ago was the startling lack of awareness of the environment among the English.

Not only have you cut down all of your trees; more importantly, the fundamental process of educating children about "sticks and stones", the excess of the nanny state, and an almost unbelievable lack of socio-political knowledge and awareness amongst my peers (25-40 year olds) has led to a situation where peoples' eyes are closed to the fact that we live in our environment, not separated from it.

A throwaway society, an inability to see the biosphere as anything other than a "nice pretty garden", a lack of awareness for the damage that buying habits are causing in the "third world" - these all contribute.

I was born in Stellenbosch in South Africa and grew up 50 metres from the sea. It was a very privileged upbringing; not wealthy, just very lucky.

I owe a lot of my love of nature to my father. He would take me in his arms, tell me about the wind, the sun, the trees, the plants. Dad would take me and my brother off on long walks, much too long for small children, away from the other kids - out into the middle of nowhere.

It was a very clever thing on his part.

It's not sufficient to have yet more committees and write yet more memos.

The fundamental nature of involvement in the world has to be taught, free from the meddling of the nanny state.

Nature is a hard place; I've done enough travelling in Africa to see this. Yet it is this harshness that drives us, that should teach us that nature does not necessarily have to be "tamed" in the dreadful way of western societies.

My three-year-old daughter Mia now gets to say "goodnight" to the "Outside" and "Trees and Planties"; it's the cycle of life. Too bad children aren't being taught it.

Jeremy Hattingh is a visual effects artist on films. He now lives in London

MARIA ASHOT - Climate solutions can be child's play

We talk circles around the climate problem, and no-one wants to implement meaningful changes.

Here's an example of the kind of change that's needed.

In every developed nation in the world, on some 200 days out of every year, families rise early to trundle off their young to school. Millions of gallons of wasted fuel, many thousands of hours of wasted productivity, traffic accidents - not to mention stress and aggravation.

How difficult would it be for developed nations to switch to online education?

Digital classrooms linked by telecom systems; students studying without leaving home, or from a convenient neighbourhood centre - all much simpler than maintaining a modern school facility.

Teachers teaching from their own comfort station, with zero commutes and minimal administrative staffing; no more absurd waste of paper on schoolbooks, beyond the absolute minimum, as students download assignments or access texts on CD.

There is nothing the least bit difficult about such an approach. All it takes is the willingness to implement a rather straightforward new educational infrastructure.

Many parents already telecommute. Many of our young relate well to a screen and are quite addicted to the keyboard; we might even get better performance out of some of them.

Plus, we can enable excellent teachers to reach a virtual classroom of thousands instead of dozens.

As a professional writer currently lending a hand by teaching writing to students, I am too familiar with the problems of the 21st Century classroom.

As a thinking human and a mother, I fret a great deal over the future implications of unchecked climate change.

It is really not all that hard to make significant, meaningful changes; all it takes is a bit of creative thinking.

If we can't get adults to change their habits, perhaps we can start by imposing changes on the more rational, more willing captive audience that is our children.

Many of them get the point about climate threats a great deal more thoroughly than their elders.

Maria Amadei Ashot is a poet and artist who became interested in climate issues during university astronomy classes. Originally from Argentina, she now lives in California and is involved with artlit.org

STEVEN WALKER - After the 'stuff' is gone

The problem isn't carbon, or the state of our water supplies, or giving us a different sort of lightbulb.

It isn't the cars, or cities, or tarmac, or wind farms, or nuclear power, or not enough fish in the sea; these are the symptoms.

The problem is human activity; people. You and me.

In his recent article on the BBC News website, Dr Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, says: "Things are not as bad as they make out in the papers".

I was going to write him a very simple letter: "Don't worry mate, we will keep going until they are."

In March of this year, Tony Blair went to Australia. The TV company put a camera in front of him, and he said: "More economic growth - but in an environmentally-friendly way."

What a load of twaddle!

What do you need more economic growth for? To support more people.

The question is; do we need more people? Could we contemplate a world where we don't have any more people, and thus we do not need more economic growth?

Economics is simply another human technology. We are told we must change our lightbulb technology to save the planet; but what about changing our economics technology too?

Indeed the joke about many of the emissions studies is they enthuse about the "marketing potential of low carbon technologies".

Marketing potential? You mean, more economic growth, so you can have more people, who in turn want more stuff, which in turn means...

Read my lips, folks; we've run out of stuff!

There isn't any more, you've had it all!

The stuff is gone; you've burned it, buried it, dug it up, and wasted it!

In the next 20 to 25 years the "sweet oil" runs out - the stuff that comes out of the ground as conventional crude. So our carbon lifestyle "stops" then; our "zero carbon lifestyle" is still about 75 years away. That is 50 years to get through.

Nobody has any cars, so they can't drive to work; nobody can pay any taxes, so there are no hospitals. There is no oil left, so there is no tar to make roads, so the ambulance couldn't get to you anyway... no, you're screwed.

The sight of New Orleans after Katrina was the shuddering moment for me. Sitting on a Cornish stone wall and predicting the end of the world is one thing. But watching a major western city collapse into lawless chaos in three hours - it makes you think "so that's how it actually happens..."

If we screw this up, then in a couple of million years, some little furry creature which is currently hiding under a rock somewhere will be taking its kids round the museum, pointing out our fossilised bones in the display cabinet and saying: "That's what happens when you screw up, kids."

Steven Walker is a technical author who "draws pictures to explain what I mean", and prefers pictures of flowers to those of himself. He comes from the New Forest in the UK but finds Cornwall is his spiritual home

The Green Room is a series of opinion pieces on environmental issues running weekly on the BBC News website A series of thought-provoking environmental opinion pieces
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