Notes on our (totally uncorrupt) mini UN debate

So the time has come to discuss our geography debate which we held last week and I think in overall fairness we did very well even though some of the funding was clearly bias! I had to discuss the sustainability of South Korea and I found out that country to my own beliefs they are a very sustainable nation even though they are a rapidly developing nation. They have many policies in place which mean that they are becoming very sustainable will the country undergoes massive changes to their structure and the form of their economy. There a shining beacon to the world and many countries should make not of their example as they are doing very for themselves. They are set to become one of the world’s leading designers and producers of hydrogen fuel cells which will have to become the fuel in the future no matter what America has to say. They are designing many ways in which to make the world greener but they desperately need capital as many of the so called ‘developed nations’ are ignoring them as they don’t want to admit to their own mistakes which they have may and own up to the fact that this small countries ideas are the way forward. The debate itself was very well structured but I wish there were more structured comments like the ones a certain Andrew White made but nobody understood! The countries involved where from a vast plethora of places and I think some where poorly chosen as there was little information on what their policies on sustainable development was if they even had any. This made it difficult to create decent arguments as many people had little to compose their arguments with and was hampered by some people’s difficulty to talk in front of a large amount of people which held a lot of the debating back which was very annoying. The ideas presented were of very good standard however and the creative use of facts to expand some of the more unfortunately thin ideas by some groups was a very good decision. I do however totally disagree with the distribution of the funding to the countries as some of them were totally undeserving of the money. The main culprit of this was the United States of America which received 4 billion dollars of funding and even though they could only get it if they raised and equivalent amount I believe 4 million would have been too much. This is country dead set against sustainable development and many of their leading figures proudly display this fact when they talk to the globe. They have never wanted to try and help the world and would rather see it tipped into oblivion than raise themselves to do anything about their situation. This is my conclusion to this debate I am sorry for the rant but in blog you have to speak your feelings and this is my feelings.

Lets recycle!

So third blog and it just keeps getting easier and easier (no not really!) this blog will be on waste recycling in Northamptonshire and will focus the seven districts that make up Northamptonshire. These are South Northamptonshire council, Northampton itself, Daventry district council in the West, Kettering Borough council (also in the west), Corby borough council (in the North), East Northamptonshire council and the Borough council of Wellingborough (in the South-East). These Seven make up the political makeup of Northamptonshire but each one is very different in its characteristics as there are some that are rural and there are some that are very urban. These differences will make a difference in the manner that they collect and recycle their waste as different areas will have different ways of carrying out their waste recycling policies. The East Northamptonshire council has the lowest waste collection of the lot of them (26.8% compared to 39.2 average over the whole area of Northamptonshire). This could be due to the very rural nature of the area which borders East Cambridgeshire which is a very rural and agricultural area which may explain why there is not as much recycling. Many of these areas like the little villages are very hard to accesses from the major population centres and this means that there is little waste collection and so their percentages are lower. There is also the issue of the council actually wanting to recycle the waste as there is a charge for picking up recyclables which is in place nowhere else in the country and is a very rare thing to do in the whole of the country and is detrimental to the whole system of recycling. There are could also be other things such as people just couldn’t be bothered to recycle but we can’t tell that from the charts given and people would be unlikely to admit to it anyway so it is nearly an impossible thing to try and survey. So it seems after all this then that this business of recycling is a case of it takes two to tango as it is one thing to have a lot of people wanting to recycle but you need a reciprocal council to take up the scheme and actually want to do help the people in their district to recycle. This works in opposite as well because if you have a council that actively wants to recycle but doesn’t have the popular support they have to do a lot to make people want to recycle and this is the crux of the matter. This is an issue that will always be as difficult one as there will be many problems to overcome. There will always be people who don’t want to recycle and there will always be people over do a lot of recycling and believe that their respective council are not doing enough to help them ‘save the planet’. Trying to find a balance will always been a very difficult and thorny issue and it one that all councils will face but the outcome will be the decision of a lot of different people.

Don't panic!!!

Well here we go my second blog sorry for the delay but I don't come up with ideas on tap! This blog will follow the prompts this time and I will be talking about the image of global climate change and issues of the environment through different medias as I find the different slants on stories very interesting. There are many different newspapers in circulation in Britain today and they all have different slants on what is going on in the world and they often disagree on issues that are nearly exactly the same. This is due to the political ideas or parties that they follow and this is called media discourse (thanks Faith) which means that they may report the same article but in very different ways from each other. These traits can be seen across all papers in the United Kingdom and they each attract different groups of people who these papers are designed to approach and appeal to. This however is a major problem because they often different wildly on issues such as climate change where some there needs to be some co-operation as these issues could be sorted out a lot quicker if there was some sort of co-operation on the issues of climate change. This is a major issue and could be dealt with more effectively if there was some sense of co-operation between the different newspapers. In the UK there are many different papers but the leading one is the Sun (one of the most widely read papers in the English language) and no matter what people say about it this is an important paper as it shows the right-wing working class and as this is a very large and vocal group the Sun is an interesting paper to read if you what to get under the skin of a lot of people in this country. The Suns articles are often scare-mongering to appeal to a larger audience and this ok if you want to speak to the general public but if we are to analyse it there is greater difficulties as you have to look very deep down to find any grains or nuggets of hard fact but this can be a very fun process! There others major right wing paper is the Daily Mail but they are much more subdued and there articles are much more straight forward and there articles are often much less scare mongering. To swing in the totally opposite direction there are papers such as the Guardian which is a very left-wing paper and it is nearly as scaremongering as the Sun and in some aspects is even more so as they are more technically in their language due to who their readers are. There is also the Independent which is left leaning but is more gossipy than the Guardian and its appeal is to a slightly different audience. The last major British paper is the Times which is a very old and established paper which is supposed to be right-wing but has become much more central lover the last decade but it uses very complex language as it readers are the very affluent and they are the type that want straight forward news.
Here are a few examples of climate change from different newspapers
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/special_events/green_week/article1547947.ece
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1080945/Climate-change-causes-rare-swans-stay-warm-Siberia-instead-returning-UK.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/05/climatechange-carboncapturestorage
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-change-at-the-poles-is-manmade-980256.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4957408.ece