Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
around the UK, the National Trust can be a very powerful opponent on
onshore renewable energy; it usually only backs micro-wind, offshore
wind and “run of the river” hydropower projects that don't involve dams.
On the other side of the fence, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth
are strongly in favour of wind power, whether on-or offshore. Objections
to wind farms are often localized. It is therefore intrinsically easier for
Greenpeace to take a pro-wind stance, because it is an organization
that has a national membership but no local campaign groups. Friends
of the Earth UK favours wind, despite having some 250 local groups.
The reason, says FoE climate-change coordinator Mike Childs, is that
“our watchword has always been 'think global, act local, so we have first
thought about what is needed globally - more wind power - and then
applied it locally”. He adds that FoE is “not part of the landscape move-
ment”.
A big green success: putting climate
on the statute book
The 2008 Climate Change Act is a far-reaching piece of legislation. It establishes
legally binding targets for the UK to cut greenhouse gases (from the 1990 level)
by 80 percent by 2050 and carbon dioxide by 26 percent by 2020.
It also sets out a road map of how to get to these goals, via five-year carbon
budgets and the establishment of a climate-change committee to advise how
these budgets should be set. This piece of legislation is very much the result of
pressure from environmental NGOs, and of one in particular - Friends of the
Earth.
2005
FoE drafted a climate-change bill, calling for annual cuts in carbon.
In 2005, FoE announced that it had grown impatient with the Labour
government's failure to act on its successive election-manifesto pledges on
climate change, and disappointed by the failure of government departments
such as transport to do anything about their big carbon footprint. It designed
the draft bill to have year-on-year carbon reductions so as to avoid the
“tendency of politicians to hope for some technological breakthrough that
would bail them out”. FoE launched the Big Ask campaign - to request the
government to take adequate climate-change action - and persuaded
Radiohead singer Thom Yorke to head it. “Getting celebrity support opens you
up to other audiences, makes your campaign interesting to the media - and
Radiohead had a reputation as the 'thinking man's band'”, says Mike Childs,
FoE's climate-campaign coordinator. At the same time, the Stop Climate Chaos
coalition was formed to give wider backing to the climate bill. It included
many other organizations such as WWF, Greenpeace, RSPB, Oxfam, CAFOD
and the Women's Institute.
