Month: December 2015

Gallery

Self-portraits in a wild mirror

The  first photos was taken on the 26th December 2013. Today, by chance I walked in the same park, which is about 2 hours away from where I live. And I noticed the same mirror. So the second picture was taken today, 26th December 2015. Both are self-portraits in a mirror living in the wild – next to a house boat, next to a canal, near Hackney Marsh.

Piri in the mirror at he boat 26.12.2013Piri in the mirror at the boat 26.12.2015

 

How Green is Blue this week? (The pollution-race of the Tories)

The British Conservative party, in other word the ‘Tories’ like to picture themselves as blue, perhaps in contrast to the red colour often associated with the Left. So how green is blue nowadays? I have to admit that I did not follow the Paris show, as I thought the actions will speak for themselves. And they did. A few days after the Paris show was finished and the participants congratulated to themselves, the British Tory government announced a few very significant changes, which will intensify their commitment to destroy the earth with much faster speed then ever before.                            

(1) The government is scraping support for large-scale solar energy projects. The solar energy project only required a £3 yearly contribution in every household’s bill. This project was clearly a threat to the the government, because it was nearly becoming self-sufficient and soon it could have become the cheapest low-carbon energy source. So the government mutt have panicked and to stop the solar energy project to succeed they suddenly pulled this support, claiming to prioritise the lowering of customer bills (ridiculous claim as £3/year per household is a very reasonable contribution for a better future. To have an idea of the worth of £3: if you want to buy a coffee  you could easily pay £2.50)

(2) The Government has just granted NINETY-THREE (yes, 93) fracking licenses in England and Wales. Luckily they could not touch Scotland, as the Scots were clever enough to ban fracking (of course they English did not want them to become independent – just see what a good example they would create?) So where are they going to be digging for the modern gold: oil and gas? The licences include many places which are described as “national parks and areas of outstanding beauty”. In case you would like to know which firms will do the dirty work: licences were granted for Ineos, a Swiss chemicals giant which owns the Grangemouth Refinery in Scotland (could they kick them out?) and Cuadrilla, a fracking company backed by British-Gas owner, Centrica.

I could not express my horror better than Adian Harrioson, whose letter was published yesterday in ‘The Independent’: “a number of studies, including one from Cornell University, have shown that the countless drilling of new wells demanded by the process results in the release of such large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas far more immediately dangerous than CO2, that over 20 years it is considerably more damaging to the climate than coal.The cynicism and idiocy of a government which, just a week after signing up to a green agenda in Paris, turns its back on renewables and then plumps for this filthy, landscape-destroying, economically disastrous option which at best might last a decade, is breathtaking.”