Finally, food miles under attack

Front page of the Sunday Telegraph and a large feature inside it raises the point that has been made all along on this blog and elsewhere, that food miles are an inaccurate measure of the environment impact of food production and distribution - but one that the inefficient European farming sector (propped up as it is by tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers' funds) milks. I shouldn't put all European farms on the same level, it is fairly clear those in the east are more efficient, since they get a fraction of the subsidies of French farms.

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The point is made that:

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British lamb takes, on average, 2849kg of C02 for every tonne raised

New Zealand lamb takes, on average, 688kg of C02 for every tonne raised including shipping it to the UK

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British apples are "greener" in autumn and winter, but not in spring and summer when importing them from New Zealand is better than keeping stock in storage.

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A similar story applies to lettuces, tomatoes and strawberries, as the growing season for such veges and fruit is short in Britain, requiring heated greenhouses. It is better to import them from Spain.

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Even importing beans by air from Kenya or Uganda is more environmentally friendly than growing locally.

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However, onions can be grown in the UK for 14kg less C02 per tonne than importing from NZ.

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Still, it's a start in breaking down this nonsense about food miles. Some of the details are listed here. The Guardian reports the same point, with no figures or mention of NZ.

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The solution is cold turkey on the CAP step by step:

1. Eliminate all export subsidies by the EU (stop distorting foreign markets by your protected grub);

2. Eliminate all non-tariff barriers to agricultural imports in the EU (quotas and specific bans);

3. Put a ceiling of 100% on all agricultural tariffs ratcheting down to 75%, 50% and 25% each year, do the same to subsidies capping them in nominal terms and reducing them annually to zero.

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Meanwhile Sarkozy threatens to veto WTO talks over agriculture - see he isn't Thatcher after all.

Clark and Tizard on power

It's outrageous Clark has waded in on this, judging the contractor so quickly, instantly believing one version of events - but then she is Prime Minister and should be expected to have opinions on everything her subjects do.

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However I did laugh with this comment:

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"Labour MP Judith Tizard said when she was on the Auckland Electric Power Board from 1977-1983, it had a no-disconnections policy in cases when people genuinely could not afford to pay the bill."

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So you might ask why Auckland had a blackout due to underinvestment in its network some years ago?

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Desperately blaming the Nats for this - because of commercialisation of electricity, something that started under Labour, in fact Clark was in Cabinet at the time. Never mind it has nothing to do with that, never mind that it was a state owned enterprise that took over a locally owned company.

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Name one thing Judith Tizard has done for Auckland, and cutting ribbons on road projects that had nothing to do with her doesn't count.

Anti-globalisation protesters are communists

The usual travelling roadshow of naive young dreamers and old-fashioned hate filled socialists are causing trouble in Rostock, Germany, protesting the G8 summit. It should be noted Rostock is in the former GDR, which had the Stalinist regime of Erich Honecker until 1989. The flying of the hammer and sickle flags there, when millions were watched and thousands imprisoned, tortured and murdered for questioning the GDR regime is disgusting.

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The rather inane BBC is talking about far left groups as if they are benign compared to far right groups. The communists protesting at the G8 are no better than neo-nazis, both back the oppressive use of state violence to tell people what to do and what not to do.

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There are reasons to protest at the G8. You could protest:

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1. Russia's continued slide towards authoritarianism.

2. The impoverishment of primary producers throughout the world due to heavy protectionism for agriculture by Japan, the EU and the USA, and the negative environmental impacts of that protectionism.

3. The unwillingness of the G8 to get the Doha round to make much progress in liberalising world trade (a major step towards lifting standards of living).

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The protestors are intellectually vapid. Poverty in African is largely due to governments in Africa being corrupt kleptocracies in many cases, more than happy to use aid to pay for their families to go on shopping trips in Knightsbridge, London. These countries do little to protect property rights (necessary for people to protect what they produce and own, and without that poverty exists) or have independent judiciaries and police. It also isn't helped by the lack of free trade in primary products, as the EU and USA subsidise exports of agriculture undermining the export competitiveness of many other countries, and block or highly tax imports from those countries.

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The protestors current pinup boy Hugo Chavez is now into shutting down broadcasters that disagree with him - the lack of interest in this by many on the left speaks volumes.

Urophilia or watersports

David Farrar has posted wisely on this, and I add just a few points:

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1. The acts depicted in the DVDs imported by the man concerned are legal, in real life. Anyone could undertake them in the comfort of their home and there is no crime committed. What the law does is criminalise the photographing, filming or even writing about it, and also criminalises those viewing any of the above. Yes urophilia erotic stories are a crime in New Zealand, though you'll find ample at Alt Sex Stories website, because, you see, such stories are legal in the United States (you know that bastion of Christian conservatism - the Constitution guarantees it as free speech).

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If you want to ban viewing acts that are legal in real life, then perhaps you should lobby to ban anyone peeing on any one else for sexual purposes, and that opens up a whole range of potential bans. Ones that religious conservatives, whether christian, muslim or others, would no doubt enjoy, but which would be a fascist imposition upon the private lives of consenting adults. Adults own their bodies, the state does not. I've known more than one woman who has said she likes watersports.

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2. Even regardless of legal status, urophilia (assuming it is consensual) is a victimless crime. Just because it is not something you would do, is not something that others should be stopped or criminalised from doing, let alone criminalised for reading about it or watching others do it. No doubt threesomes offend plenty of people, as does men dressing as women, women dressing as schoolgirls for sexual titillation of men, masturbating with stuffed toys, or indeed relatively common sex acts like fellatio and cunnilingus (if you need a link to find what they are then you shouldn't be searching).

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I remember when Libertarianz raised this very point when the Film Videos and Publications Classification Bill was in Parliament, pointing out how absurd it was that these acts are legal but depictions of them are illegal, and that pornography of urophilia is very widely available online because it is legal in the USA and many continental European countries.

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The response to this was that David Cunliffe simply went into a tyrade of "why should we do what the USA does" in an insulting rant, instead of debating the point. In other words, he lived up to the silent T in his surname. The point is, of course, that no MP wants to be known as a defender of free speech, for people who want to watch videos of those peeing. In fact the penalties were raised for producing or viewing urophilia, because it is in the same category as child pornography - being objectionable - which is absurd!

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However, the businessman in question is now getting his life ruined because Labour and National MPs prefer to side with the likes of Brian Tamaki. Even the Greens have said nothing and they like to claim they are "liberal" - my arse!

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Censorship law should simply be a reflection of criminal law, in that those who record real crimes with or as the offender are accessories to the crime, and the recording is evidence. Urophilia is not a crime, and any depictions of it should be nobody else's business. Otherwise you believe in patrolling people's bedrooms!

Tfl incompetence

On Sunday my girlfriend and I were driving to Norfolk, with a rental car (and don't give me "take the train" finger pointing, as the car was full with possessions as she is moving there for five days a week for work reasons), and to undertake this journey should be straightforward. We live not too far from the A406 North Circular road (around 40% of a circular route) which is 3 lanes in each direction over much of its length.

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It was a wet day and a busy one, with a considerable amount of holiday traffic - including some tube replacement buses - and so you might wonder why Tfl authorised its contractors to close to one lane each way the underpass (under a railway line) between New Southgate and Colney Hatch lane. Why were the second lanes closed (the road already narrows from 3 to 2 lanes each way because this is the beginning of an awful gap in the A406)?

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Very simple. Contractors were scraping unauthorised posters from the walls of the road underpass.

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Were they doing this on a roadway? No, in fact there are very wide footpaths where the workers were working. Traffic passed beside them quite safely (as pedestrians can walk through this underpass).

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Were they doing work in the road median? No! The only reason the central lanes were closed was to create a space for the contractors' vehicles to be parked!! Parked!!

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The resulting tailback added 20-25 minutes to a journey of about a mile eastbound, it was easily a 2 mile tailback westbound.

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So for some inexplicable reason, TfL authorised the contractors to close lanes in the middle of the day so that some cleaning activity could be carried out. Now, let's just assume for the sake of argument that it wasn't just to park the trucks somewhere (there is an adjacent service station and vehicles could have been parked less than 100m further away on the road without closing both lanes), and there is work in the middle of the road...

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Why isn't this work carried out at night? Dare I say, in Australia and New Zealand such work on a major arterial route which halves the capacity of the route would be carried out in the wee small hours. Yes you pay people more, but this is nothing compared to the cost in lost time, fuel and the safety risk of traffic slowing from 50mph to a stop-start crawl - something that clearly doesn't seem to matter to Tfl. Heaven help you if you catch the Northern line replacement buses that were stuck in the jam in the other direction.

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I can put it down to either:

- Sheer incompetence either driven by failure to appraise whether it is cheaper for London to pay to do this work at night or to do it on the cheap, and create huge traffic jams;

- An obsession with public transport and little interest in highway management, and little interest in minimising congestion through better traffic management.

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Tfl should be split in two - one body dedicated to managing public transport franchises and another dedicated to managing London's highway network. The latter should have a hypothecated stream of funding prioritised to road maintenance, with specific output goals of minimising incident or planned congestion, and maximising the efficient and safe operation of the network. To do this means a major political change in the Mayoralty and the Greater London Assembly. London has one of the worst urban highway networks in the Western world, the north circular (A406) is incomplete and erratic, the south circular (A205) is a circular by signpost only, it is about time that London's road network was properly managed and funded. London's road users already pay enough to use it!