www.everythingsgonegreen.co.uk

Remember we said last night that British Gas jacked their prices up by 35%?

Remember their MD saying British Gas was doing “all that they could” to help people out including sending them a couple of energy-efficient lightbulbs?

Well today Centrica, the owners of British Gas, have reportedly made profits of £5million a day.

British Gas claimed that the 35% price rise was to “restore reasonable profitability”.

Look, you greedy bastards, take a hit like the rest of us. Stop robbing people in order to keep the shareholders sweet and deal with a lower profit margin! The sheer greed of these people is utterly contemptible.

Are we mad? No. But Phil Bentley, the MD of British Gas is!

Today British Gas announced a staggering 35% rise in gas prices. It also announced a 9% increase in electricity prices too.

The ITV Evening News interviewed a number of people, who are already struggling to make ends meet, about how they might cope with the huge price rises and then asked Phil Bentley, the MD of British Gas, whether he thought it was right to raise gas prices by 35% when this could put thousands of homes at risk of being subject to “fuel poverty”.

His reaction was that British Gas are doing “everything they can” to help people out including sending out energy efficient lightbulbs. WTF!?

So your average annual gas bill rises by over £210 a year and British Gas think that giving you a couple of energy efficient bulbs will help? What planet do they live on?

Sure, BG are using your extra money to invest in further electricity generation for next year and beyond (I still have a problem with gas companies not specialising in gas) but that’s cold comfort for the people who will freeze to death this winter.

I missed this story a few days ago but somebody on a TV political show mentioned it today:

As he left the G8 summit George W Bush said “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter”, raised a fist in the air and smiled that smug non-compliant grin like only George W Bush can.

Goodbye and good riddance.

I don’t mean to offend my American readership here but for the 5% of the world’s population to cause 25% of the world’s pollution is pretty disgraceful; the sooner the United States gets a proper leader the better. As a Brit I will be so glad to see the back of George Bush for, as they say, when America sneezes Britain catches a cold. So no more pointless wars please (but they do have a point; they’re all about oil!) and no more dodgy sub-prime mortgages.

As for the environment, which was the major topic in the G8 summit, our younger but much bigger cousin hogs resources and does so very little to help the planet. So if America’s next president is an honest, intelligent, socially & environmentally minded and doesn’t treat environmental concerns with such utter contempt then we can pick up where we should have been a decade ago.

George W Bush is smiling and waving goodbye because, whilst being at the helm of the world’s greatest economy for 8 whole years unchallenged, he drove it into the ground, ripped it off and made it incredibly unpopular. But that’s OK because he’ll just go back to his ranch and count the millions he and his cronies have made whilst those who are worse off pick up the pieces.

So who is better suited to make America a greener place? McCain or Obama?

The G8, the group of 8 industrialised nations (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States) have made a decision to go green.

Actually it’s a decision to wholeheartedly go green by… cutting emissions by 50% and not the 100% you might expect.

And despite the rapid rate of deterioration in so many (eco, social, political) systems in the world, the G8 have given themselves a nice and easy 42 years in which to achieve this.

Whilst the leaders now slap eachother on the back for such brilliant “progress”, especially after last year’s decisive move to “seriously consider” pulling their fingers out over the affects of global warming, carbon emissions etc, this is real step forward.

Or is it? Actually our first thought was “pathetic” and funnily enough that’s exactly the WWF said. South Africa’s environment minister also condemned the deal saying this was probably more of a regression than a progression.

When the leading 8 nations of the world can’t get their act together then it’s time for a revolution! Either that or just do it yourself. Oh wait, we already are.

It’s funny how the world goes these days… we had this rapid race for globalisation where barriers were broken down primarily for greed economic reasons; western companies quickly saw that they could reduce costs by employing far-flung foreign workers to do jobs for a fraction of the cost of a westerner. Why pay a Brit/US/Euro web designer/developer a top wage for the skills he or she was told were in huge demand and they’d spent years studying and qualifying for when someone in India would do the same job for a quarter of the cost?

The same goes for call centre staff: Why pay Steve in Basingstoke to work out why your broadband connection isn’t working when you can get “Steve” in Bangalore to read a script over a premium rate line?

Manufacturing doesn’t escape the orbit of globalisation either: British engineering used to be a fine skill touted from the workshop of the world but when market forces and economic factors exerted their influence that workshop relocated to China.

Despite being disrespectful, contemptuous and greedy these thought processes have been rife in the west, aided and abetted by all and sundry. It’s not just the bosses of the companies that have perpetrated these crimes it’s the consumers too. Consumers. Thirsty word that. Because they want everything cheap they’ve helped their own local economies go down the pan. You want a 54 foot widescreen LCD plasma reactor HD TV? Don’t worry that the electronics factory down the road just shut and all your friends lost their jobs - you can impress them inviting them ’round to watch Richard & Judy and all the other daytime pap on your shiny new egovision set.

And that’s why we’re here discussing globalisation; it’s not always good, we’ve always said that and there’s the smoking analogy. If you smoke you’ll damage your health; the least you’ll do is develop some sort of respiratory disease or you may end up with cancer. Whatever the route there are people that have been saying “don’t do it” for years and do people listen? Of course not; they get angry, blow smoke in your face and carry on regardless. Then one day they say “I wish I’d listened to you, you were right.”

Like all addictions, be it oil, cigarettes or cheap gadgets, we love them. We don’t want to stop. We care little for the consequences just as long as we had a good time getting there.

And once we’re there was it worth it? We can’t afford the petrol to go out to get the expensive food so we sit at home and watch the doomy news of the demise we accelerated towards in high definition with stunning dolby 7.1 cinema surround sound. Wow!

It doesn’t take a genius to tell us that globalisation is over; it’s been a discourse amongst us for a while now. Chris Baskind reckons it’s time to stop gloating over the fuel price issue too. True. There are better things to do like roll up our sleeves, got on with boosting local economies, drink the local ale, help out our neighbours, lag the loft, grow our own veg, cycle to work, buy a small second-hand car, switch those lights off, stop polluting, stop consuming.

It might be a good time to stop smoking too.

The MPV, people carrier, or the Minivan as they call it in the States, is the latest victim of the American car companies’ knee-jerk reaction to the oil crisis, according to the beeb.

After GM’s decision to shut 4 SUV/truck plants in the US, Canada and Mexico as we reported back in June, it’s now Chrysler’s turn, shutting one plant in St. Louis and cutting shifts at another, affecting around 2,400 jobs.

GM realised that the gas guzzler was dead so they’re apparently focusing on smaller vehicles, so that’s a great reason to simply shut 4 plants and put nearly 10,000 people out of work. Why couldn’t they retool the plants?

We have a similar criticism of Chrysler for cutting Minivan production; Maybe American people carriers are a bit more thirsty than their European & Japanese counterparts, and maybe there are tons of 7 seater vehicles being driven around the U.S. with just one person in them, but isn’t a people carrier the best mode of transport for large families? Doesn’t it make more sense to take 7 people to the game in one larger vehicle rather than 2 smaller ones?

We don’t have an answer but we do question the blunt decision making of these car companies purely because we’d like to know the though processes behind their decision making; are the car companies simply blunt & aggressive machines? Do they care about their workers? Do they know something that we don’t?

Let’s put it this way: Many people are calling for stabilisation of oil prices, blaming rises on oil price speculators and pushing for increased production from oil companies, hoping to “flood” the market with more oil in order to affect market prices and bring the price down. As we have to keep reminding ourselves, oil is a finite resource and it is going to run out, therefore the price is going to continue to rise. Goldman Sachs’ own expert said oil would reach $200 a barrel (yesterday it was $143!)

If oil DOES come down any time soon then why would Chrysler shut their plants? If oil continues to rise then we know why.

The time of the big car does appear to be over, though some clever thinking would make MPVs affordable in the U.S. How about diesel engines, smaller engines, lighter vehicles? Do people really need all that sound-proofing and luxurious interiors - after all it’s a car not a palace. Understandably Americans have to drive longer distances than us Brits and Europeans, but foregoing the opulence might afford some gas.

The car industry needs more revolution and less knee-jerk reaction.

It’s so annoying to get junk mail don’t you think? It’s usually for all the stuff that you don’t want; another credit card, mortgage, car insurance… Actually that’s as far as I can remember about what sort junk mail we used to get because it’s been quite a long time since we saw that deluge of wasted paper on our doormat - We joined the MPS the Mailing Preference Service. We prefer not to receive mail from random companies hawking their wares and we certainly don’t want junk for the previous residents of this property who have not been here for over 2 years!

MPS online is the place to sign up. They don’t guarantee to stop ALL your junk mail but they reckon it’s good for cutting unwanted mail by as much as 95%. We can certainly vouch for that and we were only prompted to write this because we received a stray piece of junk mail yesterday. And if you’re visiting from stateside, as a number of our visitors are, try the DMA’s MPS in the U.S.

Once you’ve signed up for the Mail Preference Service it can take up to 4 months to see the reduction in evil junk mail but it’s worth it. That’s less junk mail, less paper used, less trees cut down, less crap for the postal service to carry around, less stress for you.

Now that just leaves the matter of all those pizza companies and local Asian restaurants that send their underpaid flunkies into our neighbourhood to try to get us to buy their greasy food…

Tips for avoiding junk mail:

1. Sign up to the Mail Preference Service (UKor US)
2. Sign up to paper free billing from your utility companies or your bank
3. Be careful when you sign up for some services that you check the small print and tick boxes: make sure you do not wish to be sent more crap from “carefully selected partners”
4. If they still persist then fill up their pre-paid envelopes with all your other junk mail and post it back to them