Eco soundings

John Vidal
Wednesday January 17, 2001

Green house plans

As first reported here, housing minister Nick Raynsford has promised energy efficiency surveys in the new "seller's packs" that people selling their homes must give to potential buyers. Good news? Not all, according to Friends of the Earth, who fear government back-pedalling. They point out that millions of people buying homes before the packs come into force will get no advice at all. To help these people save energy, FOE has suggested that a bill written by government lawyers is included in the homes bill currently at the committee stage. This appears foolproof as long as Raynsford "doesn't block changes the government wrote themselves and have avidly supported for the last three years", says Martyn Williams of FOE. Would the "greenest government ever" do such a thing? Watch this space.

Yes offensive

Web "lookalikes", where an activist group sets up a spoof website in the style of its object of derision, are common, but seldom has one had more success than GATT.org, a spoof of the World Trade Organisation site. The Yes Men, who run the site in the US, were delighted to be invited to send WTO director general Mike Moore to Salzburg, Austria, to lecture the esteemed Centre for International Legal Studies last October. They duly proposed a fictional substitute, one Herr Dr Andreas Bichlbauer, who arrived at the conference and proceeded to tell delegates how the WTO found Italians "workshy" and how the WTO was proposing that the US reform its voting by allowing people to auction them to corporations. This, of course, caused barely a ripple in the audience. Read the full correspondence at www.theyesmen.org/wto

Biting the hand...

Usually it's Monsanto and Aventis who are under the GM spotlight, but this could now switch to DuPont, who say they have produced the first GM (non-biodegraable) plastic from plants and are intending to produce 50,000 tonnes a year. Meanwhile, Cargill Dow have also turned to making plastic from plants, in this case maize. The company says it acts as a substitute for nylon, polypropylene, polythene, polystyrene and Cellophane. Interestingly, it is non-GM and biodegradable. Even more interesting is the fact that Cargill Dow import most of Britain's GM animal feed.