
Burbage
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Jeremy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Even with the bribes, it's incredible he got away > with it for as long as he did. For what it's worth, the TV Licencing folk still claim to have Detector Vans roaming the streets and homeopathy remains oddly legal.
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owlwise Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I doubt they were eally from ADT. Just probably > casing people's properties in order to come back > another time and burgle them. I'd never let them > into my home. Usually they're not. They're usually from some rent-a-knocker agency, often itself outsourced by some higher sub-contractor, given (or sold) a badge and only paid commission. That way the firms get all the benefits of shafty doorstepping (cf. any utility outfit you can think of) without having to pay employees or answer to the OFT. It's not just alarms, either, and some of the most exploitative arms-length scammery is done in the name of some of our wealthiest charities. As it's not difficult to nick, or even make, a badge, there's a parallel market in entirely bogus knockery and it's impossible to tell the difference until it turns out that you've not only been overcharged for something you didn't need, but that you never got it, either. With the economy as it is, and with the usual suspects tied up in playing the Green Deal fraud, commissions have been driven down sharply, which means the folk who have to do this stuff (and their children, if they're sufficiently enterprising) are now playing some very desperate games. You can't help but feel a little sympathy, but you already pay for a supposedly universal safety-net and it won't hurt to give them a bit of a shove towards it. As a rule of thumb, any situation that requires you to trust someone or believe something is a scam, and it should go without saying that you should never volunteer information on any grounds, open the door to anyone without an appointment pre-arranged in writing or fail to record any conversation, in person or on the telephone, with anyone claiming to represent anything. You can, as Loz suggests, report it to the police, but only if you've a good reason to believe they already know where you live.
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uncleglen Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > You can bet your life 'they' are being paid for > out of the council tax. Typical. Not this again. It has been repeatedly proven that paying good money into the Arts, even the futile and derivative nonsense in question, is cheaper than any other relevant form of provision. Even in a democracy we have a collective responsibility to those less advantaged that ourselves, whether we like it or not. There are, of course, limits. Having added my tuppence-worth of enlightenment, I'll leave it to someone else to enlighten the good Councillor on the doubtful merits of string as a means of arboricide.
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minder Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Title of this thread is very misleading. Not any more, by the look of it.
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Will the trees in Barry road ever come in to leaf?
Burbage replied to treehugger's topic in General ED Issues / Gossip
rch Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I'm not a big fan of severe pollarding, but I'm > just a councillor. The good news is that we've had > a bit of a change in tree officers so maybe a > different management strategy will prevail...? I strongly doubt it, unless the tree budget's heading sharply northwards. The only alternative that would match pollarding in terms of cost-effectiveness would be to chop them all down and I doubt Southwark would appoint a tree officer with that agenda. As I'm sure you know, Southwark's Tree Management Strategy for 2013 explains the rationale for pollarding (which is what gets the complaints) quite neatly. In essence trees are only pollarded if they've already pollards (and therefore would need pollarding regularly in any case) and/or if pollarding is required for 'insurance mitigation purposes'. Otherwise, they're left alone except for the health, safety and 'basal growth' stuff. As I'm also sure you know, the business of trees was investigated by the green folk at the GLA in the halcyon days of Blairist largesse in a balanced, short and thoughtful report entitled 'Chainsaw Massacre', which, despite some charmingly hysterical and largely evidence-free prose, found nothing against pollarding except that some residents, presumably those with sheltered lives, thought it looked ugly. It also found that subsidence claims accounted for around 5% of tree removals, and were amply made up for by new plantings. The slightly feeble upshot of this futile blether was a set of bland recommendations including one that the LTAO produce a 'best practice framework' for pollarding, if they hadn't got one already. If it helps, there are trees in the area that have been pollards since at least the 1950s (it's clear in some of the old photographs), and on Lordship Lane pollarding has been done in sections over the last handful of years, so you can see the effects quite easily just by walking around (if it's easier for your correspondents, they do much the same at the square in St Tropez). Pollarding is a practice that's older than medievalism, doesn't noticeably affect the longevity of the trees, and seems to keep them relatively healthy - pollarded planes don't seem to get Messaria, for example. In towns, it proactively mitigates health-n-safety and subsidence issues (including those that require expensive pavement repairs, given we're on clay), and though it considerably reduces the shading effect for a year or two after, also reduces the amount of leaves that need clearing and thus the number of grouchy letters the Southwark News has to print. It also reduces all the other problems due to overgrowth, such as blocking daylight to houses, interfering with street lights, tangling overhead telephone cables, disrupting satellite dish reception and taking the roofs off buses, all of which can be just as irritating as any aesthetic surprise. -
El Pibe Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > all those years of chips and curry sauce from the > chip van outside of the pub, I didn't realise I > was actually being a pretentious arse; always glad > to be set straight by the better informed among > us. Not pretentious? Chips and curry sauce? You don't know you're born, mate. When I were a lad, the only street food was pavement pizza, and that was a treat. Most nights we'd have nowt but dog-ends and go to bed dreaming of roadkill.
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It's no less desperate and sad, and arguably a little safer, than popping out on the pull. Moreover, it's no longer a geekish enclave of the friendless, but a mainstream phenomenon which has, more or less, lost what stigma it had. There are two drawbacks to it. First, the algorithms are better, but still not omniscient, so there's always the chance of your details being suggested to your spouse, boss, aunt or uncle, which may lead to awkwardness. And it won't be long before face-recognition software becomes widespread enough to justify a certain nervousness, especially if, like everyone else, you've lied through your teeth about your height, weight, career and love of the Great Outdoors. If you don't let those bother you, then there's very little not to get into, unless you're baffled by the concept of dating as such. You pick a few suggestions, exchange a few messages in an attempt to work out what's wrong with them and, if they seem moderately sane and aren't a relative, you meet them somewhere neutral (not a cinema - you need to be able to talk and, more importantly, watch their hands) to refine or amend your conclusions. Admittedly, there's a wide range of different agendas out there, though. Some just want someone to talk at for a few hours a week, some are after a few minutes in a cheap hotel, some are after a long-term relationship (or, at least, long enough to snaffle a house and half an income), some just want the sort of confidence-boost that they're no longer getting at home and others are in the habit of dining out on forgotten wallets. But that is the same for any form of courtship. It won't suit everyone, all the same. For some it will involve too much time, money and effort for the questionable benefit to be justifiable. Objectively, given cats are cheaper, more reasonable and much better company than most people, the only real reason we have to court anyone at all is that we're incapable of resisting the reptilian urges of our selfish genes, and this particular urge is only curtailed, rather than proscribed, by law. Happily, if you're able to resist, there's nothing to stop you investing in tweed and ignoring the whole dating thing altogether.
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Huguenot Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I'm going to use 'she' for brevity. 'he' would have been briefer. Unless this isn't hypothetical. > At what point does she become a rich bitch, sucking the nation dry? A million and a half in disposable assets (savings and what was lent against the house, which won't have been the full value) does not make you very average. An average household net wealth is something under ?250k. That puts her well within the top 10% which, I believe, is where the relevant category boundary lies. Exactly when that happened is unclear, but it's certainly what gave her, and the 99 less successful mugs, the chance to have a crack at entrepreneurship. Without more details, it's impossible to tell, but my guess is it'll be down to luck and hidden subsidies. Anyone with modest savings five years ago would have less than modest savings now unless they'd been spectacularly fortunate. Likewise with the App itself - there is no particularly good reason why any of the millions of Apps out there sell any better than any other. So, in that sense, her bold risk was no different than the stupid gamble that the other 99 made. And anyone who bought a property in the early to mid-nineties will have done well too, thanks to the various ways in which successive governments have artificially inflated the price of housing (and thus the credit that can be obtained on them). All of which fortune is now being paid by those unlucky enough to have been born a little later. It's not just the money she relied on. She also relied on the laws that would protect her from creditors if things went badly wrong. Those laws may be the same for everyone, but they disproportionately protect those in a position to attract creditors in the first place. It is, of course, not necessarily her fault that she's been fortunate, but it would be wrong to suspect it signified any qualities other than just happening to be lucky. That doesn't make her necessarily evil, but a lot will depend on what she does now. If she decides to keep employing those people and invest in the business, taking her 1% chance again and risking losing the lot, that would be fine. But I suspect she won't. I suspect she'll, in one way or another, take the money and run. And that's what's wrong. We see plenty of companies, and individuals, sitting on piles of cash that could be transforming the economy but which are choosing, instead, to hand out token amounts to good causes in the aims of PR or gongs, or to salve their consciences by, thanks to Gift Aid, directing the largesse of government to their chosen grateful causes. In short, they have no confidence in their own ability to repeat the trick, don't want to risk their boom-time-minted, but want to reap the rewards as if they had. That's fair enough, but it's oddly counter to the spirit of capitalism.
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Any traffic lights experts out there?
Burbage replied to James Barber's topic in General ED Issues / Gossip
Not an expert, but I've read a bit and I'll have a look if you like. This page is a repository of all the DfT rules and regulations on puffin crossings, which TfL should be abiding by. The Good Practice Guide from 2006 (the fifty one down) is probably your best bet in terms of clarity (p.24 gives the timings). The rules are, however, complicated, especially where there's 'pedestrian detection' involved, and there's a lot of allowable variability. The take-home message is that the green signal for pedestrians (the "invitation to cross"), can be as short as 4 seconds, and the traffic should remain stopped for at least a second after that. This latter time is variable, and if the detector reckons there are pedestrians on the crossing, it will allow up to 12 seconds in total, after which the traffic will start again regardless. -
Lowlander Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > You could be right Hugunot Indeed, he/she/whatever is entirely correct. Though I wouldn't be quite so cynical. Although you will end up with a dodgy loan and some 'consultants' in your life, it can be worthwhile, especially if you're going to rent it out, in which case it'll be the tenants who pay the loan off (as it's them that see the benefit - unless, that is, you go for a cashback deal before renting it out, but only a grasping cynic would think of that dodge). Originally, I think, the Green Deal was just focused on insulation, rather than other forms of home-improvements, but that seems to have changed, possibly because cavity wall insulation isn't a visible reason for putting the rent up (no matter if tenants would be already paying for it all), so you may be able to get it all done. You do, however, have to get an 'assessor' round, who will almost certainly not be trying to drum up work for their employer, and therefore won't necessarily focus on adding wildly expensive, and hard-to-repay, elements to your loan, so you might want to do your own sums. Unless tenants will be paying, naturally. It's still not entirely clear what the loans will be secured against or who will be underwriting them, which may mean everything's been thought through clearly. It looks like the energy companies will be on the hook for defaulters, but that might depend on the exact terms of the contract. As I understand it, the deal-seeker (who may be the owner, landlord or tenant) gets a contract with the Green Deal Provider, who gets paid by the energy company (or one of them, depending if the dual-fuel trap's been avoided) who has a contract with the bill-payer (who may or may not be the owner, landlord or tenant) and nothing can possibly go wrong, apart from the minor inconvenience of a disconnection if a bill doesn't get paid. But I'd check the terms of any agreement very carefully before signing it.
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Lowlander Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Anyway this thread is about the morals of > celebrating death. That's a wider and somewhat theological subject. And a little late, given the national Death-celebrating holiday happened last week. It's also a debate that won't be resolving itself soon. Not least because Death, as well as being the inevitable aim of all of us, is a useful phenomenon in its own right. The fear of a compliance-dependent 'afterlife' has probably served its term, but Death as a tool for removing dissatisfaction remains popular in many parts of the world, not least Switzerland. Celebrating Thatcher's death in particular won't be any skin off her nose, so it won't matter. It might upset the family, but they're supposed to be upset already. On the other hand, we won't be have to pay for her protection any more, or fund her public duties (an extra ?100k a year in Thatcher's case). And, of course, the funeral trade's been pushing prices well above inflation for a while now, so the sooner the better, at least for those who are paying for it. Even if the celebrations are motivated by hate (which should only be a concern if you imagine hate has any influence over the dead) they may bring people together in collective joy, which can hardly be a bad thing and, it should hardly need pointing out, will go a lot further than any of the coalition's attempts to engineer happiness.
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maxxi Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Caught a LB bound train at 12-ish today and could > have sworn I heard a woodpecker in the trees > between the platform and those houses around > Dulwich Hamlet Fc - this post makes me think it > really might have been...? It'll have been a woodpecker, but probably one of the spotted woodpeckers (most likely lesser spotted), as they do more drumming. We've also, apparently, got greater spotted woodpeckers round here too, which do the same thing. And treecreepers, which are a sort of woodpecker that creep up trees, that don't. The green ones make a noise like a mad horse, most like the noise that the little grebes make on the lake, except that the little grebes call falls in pitch as it goes on, and they live on the lake, which woodpeckers don't. If all goes well, and the drumming works out, in a few weeks time we should start hearing the woodpecker chicks squeaking from inside holes in trees. Parrots do that too, but there's usually one of the adult parrots nearby, in which case it's not a woodpecker. I think that the parrot gets fed too, when the other adult returns, but I'm not sure. They do a bit of nose-rubbing before one of them vomits down the other's neck, so that might be more in the way of courtship. Not that there's any obvious distinction between courtship and being fed, except in the case of humans, and even then the two seem to be easily confused.
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Jeremy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > To be honest it's been on the cards for years, and > there's nothing you can say about her which hasn't > been said a million times before. If it's any comfort, it's on the cards for all of us. In that light, I think you're right, and it would be much better if we left the dead to whatever hereafter they weren't expecting, and instead concentrated our efforts on hating the folk that are currently buggering up tomorrow's future. That said, retrospective rage isn't entirely a bad thing. If this frothfest reminds us that we don't want to be wondering why Blair's still at liberty when it's his turn to be measured for a box, it will have done some good.
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maxxi Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > .... that might not be a > bad idea - it may just eliminate the > popping-in-quickly-for-a-book-defeating process > currenty operating where members of staff wander > around, and through, the empty desk area looking > too preoccupied to serve you and only stopping to > answer long and detailed phone queries while you > stand and wait, and wait, and wait..... I'm happy to agree with that. At first I thought it was something to do with shift patterns, or I'd just pitched up on training day each time. But it's not either. It's just spooky. And bloody annoying. I don't necessarily want to go all Daily Mail, but if someone's being paid to do a job, it would be nice for them to at least look as if they're pretending to do it. I'd mind a little less if they were any good at it, but both books and library cards seem to baffle them (I'm either dead, or the book I'm trying to return is already on a shelf in Stoke Newington), and they've never been able to answer a simple question without holding a conference first. It may not be their fault, of course. Maybe the refurbishment is taking longer because they've found a ley-line that needs muffling or there really was something in the water. But, even making that allowance, I can't say I'd miss any of them for very long. A machine might be just as soulless and dismissive, but at least you can guess what it will do, and that it won't take an afternoon to do it.
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StraferJack Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Wouldn't you just go to a petition website and cut > and paste 99% of them? I'm not so sure. Although there's a depressing amount of duplication and iffy spelling, the e-petitions give a useful insight into the predilections of the angry, miserable and disappointed which, if we're honest, is most of us. But, as well as more-or-less accurately reflecting our own fears back at us, the e-petitions aren't and entirely ceaseless stream of fretfulness. There are glimmers of irrational hope, too. Which, though clearly barking, is the only thing that keeps most of us away from Beachy Head. And, to give credit where it's due, some of them have been debated in Parliament. Of course, triggering a few debates isn't much of an achievement, when Westminster's awash with think-tanks and lobbyists, and the dodgily invisible hands of their paymasters, capable not only of instigating debates, but of bypassing them altogether. But the petitions are a start and, although their achievements have been less than modest, that's a great improvement on the days when petitions 'meant something' and triggered no debates at all.
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Air pollution harming schoolchildren
Burbage replied to Inthepink's topic in General ED Issues / Gossip
AbDabs Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It would be a great idea if everyone walked their > children to school rather than driving (and > leaving their engines running while they drop off > and collect) but I can't see that going down very > well with a lot of the parents. No. But the smoking ban didn't go down very well with a lot of smokers. Exactly the same principle, though. But, really, banning motor traffic 'near schools' would effectively mean banning motor traffic entirely. I can see the benefits of that, not least for the handcart industry. However, because we live in a democracy, we have no choice but to tolerate the antics of the thoughtless and lazy, so it's really a non-starter. Which is why our efforts are currently spent setting incrementally stricter limits on the emissions of vehicles in the hope that nobody will notice enough to complain. A more robust alternative, which I may have suggested before, would be to pro-actively protect children by removing them from the sources of harm. With our current population and its projected rate of growth, it would be possible for the forseeable future to accommodate, educate and maintain all children up to the age of eighteen on the Isle of Wight. Such a strategy would neatly solve the problems of busy roads, childcare costs, the postcode lottery of schooling, the school run, inequalities of opportunity and, most importantly, abolish much of the need for spare bedrooms. As yet, sadly, no government has seen fit to shine its face upon the idea. But hope, as they say, springs eternal. -
Got em! For all the good it's done me. "The competition is now closed" it says, so that's another afternoon wasted. There are only two, I think, that require any previous knowledge/guessing - the rest are more-or-less straightforward word games - and they can all be done without any research, though access to an up-to-date tube map would be helpful. In case you're wondering, none of the answers are repeated.
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Dulwich Medical Centre - Any good?
Burbage replied to Juliette&Rich's topic in General ED Issues / Gossip
Freddy1929 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > What has happened > to some of our GP practices? The practices are just doing what suits their business purposes best. And that's fair enough. They don't make the rules or decide what they get paid for what. They're just the gatekeepers, and their only responsibility is to balance the books in such a way as best pleases them, within the limits of their contracts. So if a patient turns up with something that might have to be referred to A&E anyway, wasn't scheduled in advance and would play havoc with the appointments-book*, they won't even see a doctor, let alone a nurse. Instead, reception will send them to A&E (or the walk-in centre, if it's run by the same company). A&E might charge the practice (around ?75, I think), but that's just a pocket-change (A&E don't have profit-margins to consider) and easily outweighed by the freedom it gives the practices to both stuff their books with more patients than they can cope with, and restrict the hours of the practice nurse. Of all the reforms currently on the table, none will really address this, save, perhaps, the idea of turning A&E departments into canteens for paramedics who'll be free to kerb-crawl for minor injuries and non-specific poorliness. The more truculent defenders of the NHS (and, of course, the Business Units) will point out that pharmacists have now been brought into the fold, and can do almost as good a job as a doctor, provided it involves just selling you stuff. (I'd be delighted if anyone has received useful counsel from a pharmacist, but the last time I bothered asking, they looked at my bleeding fingers in abject bafflement and tried to sell me a sling). The quacks certainly don't want more reform (save the bit about CCGs, which will give them the power to put downward pressure on A&E's prices), and thanks to the hard work of their unions and 'colleges', the public don't much fancy reform, either. Whether that's going to work out helpful is a matter for the optimists among us. For my money, the polyclinic idea looked a good one. The plan was to have a bunch of, effectively, walk-in centres with a mix of skills appropriate to the area, run by the NHS trust, treating everything from acne to zits. Admittedly, they wouldn't have necessarily been able to provide the valuable rapport that some GP practices allegedly offer, but with GPs ditching of out-of-hours, home visits, acute care and, apparently, the telephone, that's debatable. But, of course, it was debated, and the upshot was that the quacks didn't like it. * Is it just me getting old, or is there a rise in 'administrative' appointments? I've had to arrange a number of visits over the last year or so to my GP, just to chase up referrals and tests and results and stuff, for an as-yet undiagnosed complaint, and I'm wondering if the proportion of appointments devoted to checking the post is rising generally and, if so, why? -
Very Old Pic (Apparently it's an East Dulwich house)
Burbage replied to jimbo1964's topic in General ED Issues / Gossip
silverfox Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Does the reflection in the middle window show the > gable end of a house at 90 degrees? It looks like > a Dutch Gable at a guess. Tintagel Rd looking up > Lordship Lane? No. It's clearly a Zeppelin, possibly on the way to Streatham, which would put the date a little later (1915/6?). There again, it might be not be unrelated to the stain running from the top of the picture. Sadly, colour photography having not been invented at the time, it's impossible to tell just by looking, but my money's on Bovril. -
rahrahrah Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > My objection is that there is no evidence that it > will reduce average speeds, There never is, to be fair, until afterwards. Unlike 20mph zones, 20mph limits (the difference is spelt out in Setting Local Speed Limits: Department for Transport Circular 01/2013) aren't nearly so common, and there's not a lot of data. But if the incessant whinges we have put up with from the car-bound are any guide, 20mph is a giddy aspiration that's unlikely to be broken at the moment, so the aim won't be so much to reduce average speeds as to make the adjacent zones contiguous, with an eye to abolishing any 'edge effects' at the current zones and, more importantly, felling all the lovely signs that would have become redundant. As for enforcement, the same DfT document doesn't fail to mention average speed cameras and, despite the popular conception that they're more of a cash-cow for dodgy solicitors than an enforcement regime, I'd imagine they be a lot more effective, and possibly less chippy, than any alternatives. Though it seems that trees and lamp-posts have been playing a significant enforcement role this year, so maybe they'll just leave the role to them.
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Incinerator - emissions reaching East Dulwich
Burbage replied to EvaC's topic in General ED Issues / Gossip
EvaC Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The nitrogen oxides aren't great for anyone's > health. True enough. And, having looked at some actual numbers in the meantime, particularly with an eye to the future, I'm not sure they aren't worth worrying about. SELCHP handles around 420,000 tonnes of waste each year. According to Greenpeace (in the interests of balance), incineration generates up to 5000 cubic meters of gases (mostly air) per tonne. So that's 2.1bn cubic meters of gases. The European Limit (which SELCHP doesn't break, apparently) is 200mg of oxides of nitrogen per cubic meter of gas, which amounts to 420,000 kg of nitrogen oxides over a year. A car emits around 80mg per km driven (assuming all cars meets the Euro 6 standards for new vehicles that will come into force in 2015). If we assume Londoners drive around 5000 miles a year in their cars (less than the national average, and a bit below where car club membership makes sense), that's 8000km or 640g of nitrogen oxides (NOx) per car. An incinerator, therefore, kicks out as much as 660,000 clean new cars, and it would take just 3.7 incinerators to match the total NOx emissions from London's 2.5m cars. That's faintly shocking. There are lots of things wrong with my sums. For a start, the emissions standards for cars are currently much higher, not all cars on the roads are very new and some of them might clamber out of the gutter for more than a weekly crawl round the South Circular. It's also likely that Greenpeace's 5000 tonnes of gas per tonne of waste is a neat exaggeration aimed at the lazy headline, given that Greenpeace, bless their cotton socks, are sometimes less inclined to thought than tub-thumping. But that's not the point. The point is that we're currently doing a lot of work, and spending a lot of money, on reducing NOx emissions from cars and other sources, and it seems very silly to let incinerators put them all back again. In short, although the reductions in car emissions over the next couple of decades will be equivalent to 33 more incinerators, we're not reducing car emissions just so we can build incinerators. We're reducing emissions because they're bad for people, children (where different) and, in all probability, kittens. Admittedly, an incinerator is not a car but an energy generator, and if we compare emissions from incinerators with those from coal-fired power plants, they look very much better. And cars are far from the only sources of NOx pollution - the Baltic Wharf monitoring (as per this air quality report) showed no clear difference in NOx levels whether the incinerator was operating or not. Possibly because incinerators have chimneys, meaning all the nice pollution won't get inhaled by us, but by unfortunates in the provinces or, even better, France (though, again, that's more along the lines of cheating than progress). Whichever way I look at it, I'm still faintly shocked, and given that it's taken a largely sober Saturday evening, when I'd rather have been shaking whatever it's called in a cosy discotheque, to dissect a bunch of numbers that really shouldn't need dissecting, I'm inclined to wonder if someone hasn't gone to some trouble to make it difficult. There may be other issues with other pollutants, too and, although the Health Impact Assessment of 2005 for SELCHP didn't seem to find anything worrying, that, again, was only against current guidelines. Sadly, it's difficult to get much sense out of issues like this. Apart from the obvious attempts at politicking, commercial puffery and the tendentious invention of correlations (bless their cotton socks, again), which really don't help, it's difficult to see what's best. Incinerator emissions at present aren't really noticeable amidst all the rest of the pollution. But in the world we're building, with cleaner cars, they'll become a greater proportion of the whole. On the one hand, air quality in London will improve overall, and we'll get power from our rubbish. On the other hand, air quality (not necessarily in London, given the chimneys) won't improve as quick as it might. It's tricky, but I'm not sure we'd be wise to leave the decision entirely to a bunfight between commercial interests, tub-thumping campaigners and (not that they don't mean well) politicians. Though I confidently expect that's exactly what we'll do. -
Incinerator - emissions reaching East Dulwich
Burbage replied to EvaC's topic in General ED Issues / Gossip
We already receive emissions from SELCHP, and this looks similar. Provided it's run properly (and there are laws about that) the worst that'll come out is nitrogen oxides. That might sound scary, but they'll be a very small addition to the same sort of pollution we already enjoy from motor traffic. -
TJ Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Not quite universal, but in shopping areas, why > not have something more engaging, then we can be > left in peace elsewhere to manage our own lives > without the need for borough wide 20mph nonsense. Right. So, you're proposing we start a preliminary fact-find aimed at designing a process for appointing a committee to assess the feasibility of working towards a carefully-considered and widely-consulted definition of a 'shopping area'? Fair enough, but you would also need to assess the likely flood of objections from people wanting to know why it should be safer to walk about outside a newsagent than outside a school, hospital, park, clinic, nature reserve, dentist, retirement home etc. And that's not including the amusing side-debate of what counts as a residential area, and thus suitable for a zone, or why it shouldn't if it is. It's like the urban/suburban debate, but with a lower chance of resolution. The point about managing lives is a good one, though. After all, fear of traffic is at least partly responsible for the school run, congestion and low rates of cycling and walking*. Crossing roads, even ones with signalised crossings, is intimidating enough with just a touch of lumbago, for those with serious mobility, balance or vision problems it can render them virtually housebound. And that's no way to manage a life. So it really comes down to whose life you think is more important. *Officially, fewer trips are made by foot in London (31%) than by car (39%), and although there's likely to be some undercounting, that's much lower than the average in France, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands, all of which, presumably coincidentally, have fewer pedestrian fatalities per capita than the UK.
East Dulwich Forum
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