Ireland.
The 14th worst ecological footprint per capita in the world.
Fair play though, in fairness.
FIGHT!
Earth lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF (Guardian)
Thanks Stephen
Everything. As It Happens.
Ireland.
The 14th worst ecological footprint per capita in the world.
Fair play though, in fairness.
FIGHT!
Earth lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF (Guardian)
Thanks Stephen
Punching above our weight as usual!
Best little country in the world(*)
(*) May not actually be true
Kill all the cows.
thanks Greens for banning even the discussion of a nuclear power plant.
+1
Well, I’m actually not sure if this is down to the greens but I’m definitely of the opinion that nuclear power is the way forward.
Oh my God! If the Powers That Be thought they’d get away with nuclear power plants in every backyard, they’d bloody do it, and the opposition would oppose it bitterly then when they got in ruefully complete the project with maximum incompetence and corruption.. People are TERRIFIED of nuclear power, and ten times as terrified at the idea of our shower of public officials in charge of it, and blaming the Greens is such a flippin’ cop-out.
(Funny, nobody mentions the Greens from ages, then suddenly I’m defending them on two threads in one day. Weird.)
Some people are terrified of wind turbines and pylons, do you agree with not switching to green energy too and sticking to good old coal and bog burning?
What people are terrified of and what I think should be done are different things entirely, but there are issues of credibility. Fukushima wasn’t a wind turbine plant, for example.
An issue of credibility? I thought it was issue of the Green’s policy and their ignoring of science. They didnt oppose nuclear cos people are afraid of it (if it was they wouldnt be such big supporter of wind turbine)
The fear people have of nuclear is largely down to the fear campaigns run by Green parties and other unenlightend environmental groups (whereas the environmentalists who actually accept science realise the a switch to renewables without nuclear in a support role will lead to an increase in burning coal as it has in Germany)
But good job on highlighting the one nuclear incident caused by utterly exceptional circumstances (I dont recall any tidal waves hitting Ireland lately?) in the last decade out of a current count of 435 functioning nuclear plants…
Although I do support nuclear power, the position of most green parties/campaigners is more to do with the disposal of nuclear waste. I’d be of the opinion that that’s a lesser evil compared to the effects of burning coal, but it’s not altogether cut and dried.
There was a project in (I think) Scandinavia around how to deal with the long term effects of nuclear waste. One of the big issues they addressed (and didn’t really solve) was how to actually mark a site as a nuclear waste site in such a way as to ensure that it won’t just be forgotten about, and then rediscovered (with fatal consequences, obviously) hundreds/thousands of years in the future. What warning sign will definitely never become unrecognisable, and won’t be ignored?
No. An issue of which fears are credible. The Irish Greens are a marginalised group at best, despite their brief heyday. To attribute to them the widespread, deeply ingrained antipathy to nuclear power is to fail to address the actual reasons for that fear. You want global nuclear energy? You’re going to have to deal with plants that can withstand earthquakes, avalanches, sinkholes, tsunamis, civil unrest, social breakdown, revolution, terrorism, corruption, laxity, incompetence, infrastructural degradation and financial meltdown, and it only takes one going kablooey to give us a Chernobyl or a Fukushima, and global nuclear energy requires a lot more than just one. Scapegoating the Greens for anti-nuclear sentiment is lazy and cheap: it’s the one issue for which they have popular support. If they were responsible for it, they could presumably do the same for all the other issues they toil over and they’d be running the whole country by now.
“No. An issue of which fears are credible”
Credible but vastly overrated…so exactly like wind turbines. More longterm and less fatal (unless you count the evidence of interference with flying species) but no less credible
Oh poor Greens, perhaps if they used more commonsense and actually developed some social and financial policies worth a damn they wouldnt be. I know some involved, hell I’d even consider voting for one or two but overwhelmingly their party ignore the bigger issues in favour of green-ish ideology. This is true of the wide spread Greens network of which the Irish party is a part. They parrot for the most part what the wider Green European party says even when those issues dont work in Ireland or their based on pseudoscience….
“You’re going to have to deal with plants that can withstand earthquakes, avalanches, sinkholes, tsunamis, civil unrest, social breakdown, revolution, terrorism”
Ah yes because we have soooo many of these in Ireland….
“corruption, laxity, incompetence, infrastructural degradation and financial meltdown” those we have to some extent but then so do the France/Germany/UK/every other place. Yet you can only point to one incident in the entire history of nuclear power where this was the cause of an incident. A place where every single safeguard was turned off and let run wild. Do you think nuclear design hasnt learned from that incident? No stronger control were put in place? By the way do you know how much radioactive material is pumped out everyday from coal burning plants?
Oh I’m not scapegoating, there are hundreds of other vested interests in try to convince people nuclear isnt safe. But it IS hypocritical of a party who wants to move to a low carbon based economy to support policies that will increase the use of dirty fuel sources (putting all their faith in a grand interconnector and new tech that we’re all still waiting to see any evidence of) and ignore one that could put us into a low carbon setting tomorrow
I don’t entirely disagree, but until a wind turbine causes a Chernobyl, there’s really no comparison. It’s all very well to rail against the opposition to nuclear power, but the fact of the matter is, there’s not ever likely to be nuclear power in Ireland. We may end up importing it from the UK, but that’s it. Don’t imagine I’m overjoyed about this; it’s symptomatic of a widespread irrationality when it comes to power and climate change and environmental issues. If it were just vested interests and special interest groups like the Greens against it there’s be a chance of nudging it along, but mistrust of nuclear power is so bone-deep it’s almost superstition.
I think they are comparable but not necessarily equal. The fear of each I think stems from the same place. Fear of the unknown effects/progress mixed with fear of large companies/enterprise.
I think you might have a point there that is fairly deeply embedded. BBC’s Scientifica Britannica did a great peace on what drives fear of science and nuclear (in particular the atomic bomb was a big part of it)
But just as the fear of someone putting a 100 wind turbines on the closest hill is an understandable fear it should not be acceptable. Those who prey off that fear rather than try to reduce it are not someone rational people should support. Greens did this with nuclear and several other scientific advancements just as many politicians are doing now with turbine/pylon issue. That doesnt mean they should be let off for it and not held accountable (particularly when they talk from the pulpit of reducing carbon).
As for Ireland never having nuclear I think that is very likely true but you would be surprised by how many are actually in favour of nuclear. A few more years of education and as the promotion of scientific education continues in our young people who knows what could change…
please please please dad can i have a nuclear power plant in the backyard? please?
No thanks. We couldnt even manage the port tunnel without sections collapsing and the rest leaking. Wait until we’re adults before we attempt a nuclear plant.
bloody right. thousands of moving parts put together by the cheapest bidder, paid for by the taxpayer who also gets to pay for any environmental damage and all the profit goes elsewhere?
nonononononononononono
what on *earth* are they doing in Trinidad and Tobago??
Large oil and gas reserves, small population (which is presumably why Kuwait and Qatar are there, but not Saudi Arabia).
As I understand it, the chart shows “global hectares demanded per person”, ie, it’s an indication of how much land (globally) is used supporting your lifestyle – what you eat, where your goods come from, the size of your house etc. If it was about emission sources per country, I think our grazing allocation would be way up there.
That’s what I’m getting from it, anyway.
I think the WWF do great work but here they fell into the massive trap many other environmental groups have.
Per capita being the biggest issue here, if you were to take area of these per total area I’d be willing to bet the results would be far far worse for the UK in terms of built land and carbon footprint.
Countries with a large land base but a very sparse population (relatively) will always come off worse here.
Also weird not to include the area of natural habitat in their little measurement which would give a serious boost to countries like Finland/Sweden and even an improvement to us.
The 3rd issue and it is a major one is how they measure this, how much of Ireland’s SAC/SPA is semi-natural grassland which requires grazing pressure to maintain it (in the form of conservation grazing by cattle). Remove grazers from this area and you degrade the rare biodiverse habitat (example: the BurrenLife project). Outside of that Irelands grasslands are a bit different to elsewhere. Grasslands here generally have large strips of linear woodland home to a diverse array of birds and mammals (so much so the EU is now trying to encourage other countries to emulate us and plant hedgerows on their land too!)
I get the point WWF is trying to make and its a good one, but very very hamfisted and over simplified
We all know what a big footprint means…
… and why is Austria under Uruguay?
Well for one, compare the fishing grounds of a landlocked Austria to coastal Uruguay.