to Cllr Peter Dobb

Dear Peter

ELECTED CLLRS TRUMP OFFICERS; TRAINS TRUMP TRAMS ON TRAIN LINES!

There was no officer presentation at our last meeting.  That was excellent, made for a pleasant change and, with the FoE contingent, meant it was absolutely right to be more informal with the public making helpful comments about the importance of all of us having carbon literacy, climate/nature crisis training, etc.

I would like to suggest Peter, that you and your colleagues maintain the importance of council members, properly and fairly elected, having the upper hand over the professional officers.  In other words, rather than the officers telling the councillors what is best and it must continue, you councillors must exercise the upper hand and, through votes after a full discussion, must tell the officers what they are to do.  And, with a majority vote, insist on it.  The Cabinet can then consider and endorse the decision.

Now, the committee is called a select committee, echoing the House of Commons select committees.  Therefore, we really must have, I think, meetings with occasional top decision makers.  In many years, I have only seen, fleetingly, our Chief Executive once, soon after he was appointed.  I would like him to attend next time to answer my questions over the Dudley Tram.  There is no other way to get him to speak to me or, to obtain the courtesy of a reply to my emails.  Would you invite him, please Peter?

Again, I would like to suggest that members of the committee should be invited to speak about their expertise.  The two observers should be allowed to talk about their climate knowledge, too.  Rob Clinton knows about the UN Sustainable Development Goals and related topics from his time as a University of Brum lecturer.  Damian Corfield knows about the more efficient use of HGV diesel fuel to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  Their expertise is so valuable and must be heard.

Cat Eccles knows about the risky and, indeed, totally unnecessary use of glyphosate when Wilko is selling a harmless, cheaper and equally effective alternative.  As I said to the committee, I saw a resident of Mount Street, Halesowen using it on roadside weeds a few weeks ago.  A full discussion and then vote amongst you members should decide the matter of glyphosate use.

Megan Wakefield did the climate change presentation at her quite brilliant, mix and match, Sunday talks in Mary Stevens Park last summer.  I would like her to do another presentation to the committee.  Other members of the public who were present have climate knowledge, too.  They need to be involved, I think, as part of carbon literacy training for us all.

Chris Barnett and Andrew Tromans also have subjects of concern they want to talk about.  Your committee member, Cathy Bayton is a senior member of the WMCA, Chair of their Overview and Scrutiny Committee who, I think, must also report back to this committee on what the CA is up to and how it can help Dudley.

There are other members of the council on your committee and members of the public who have a vital contribution to make.  Give them priority over officers, please but make sure officers attend, to be able to respond.

Have a full discussion and votes on these vital climate matters, perhaps:

1. Dangerous glyphosate or effective white vinegar, washing up liquid, salt in Wilko's red bottle?
2. Full scale mowing or margins mown to maintain sight lines?
3. More wild flowers or tarmac, concrete, brick on roundabouts?
4. More trams or commuter trains for Dudley's railway "of national strategic significance"?
5. Resurrect the Black Country Urban Forest at Merry Hill to capture carbon?
6. Housing on 100% at High Plateau or the present intention?
7. Daniels Land designated for housing or nature?
8. Council House upgrade to minimise greenhouse gas emissions and resource shortages to come?
9. Urgent retrofitting for the most badly housed or, laid back retrofitting?
10. Major Mudway forever or, cycle-walkway at long last?

MORE DETAILS on my top  issues for attention by officers are: 

1. The public open space on the Dudley No 1 Canal embankment to be formally designated.  It is still due to have a 400 metre, concrete and steel tramway viaduct for the Dudley Tram project.  Right here! :-
   
     6 glorious white trees.jpg
2. The massive 23,000 sq m of housing land at Merry Hill, called High Plateau, that is partly taken by the tram.  See the official plan
   
     WBHE plan for Merry Hill.jpeg
   Nothing has been done about it for decades yet, we are in the midst of a housing crisis.
3. The Black Country Urban Forest that was started, I believe, in the 1990s but was soon heard of no more.  I am suggesting it be resurrected for the other two grassy areas at Merry Hill, as an obvious positive measure since Dudley Council declared a climate emergency in 2020, I believe.
4. The possible SSSI is Daniels Land at Merry Hill.  It is untouched by we humans for decades, fenced off on all four sides, right next to the important Dudley No 1 Canal and, hence a paradise for nature.  The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, we keep on being told.  The pond and wetland area might have great crested newts that give Pensnett Nature Reserve its Triple SI status a mile north of Daniels Land.  I am trying to get a qualified person to do the ecological survey that is the first and, rather essential, first step.  No one is interested and I'm getting nowhere.  Not even the Brum and Black Country Wildlife Trust will help.
5. The UK's only urban-rural-urban cycle-walk Mudway and, it is OURS, around the W side of the W Midlands.  Neglected and forgotten for decades but, a vital business, leisure, commuter and leisure route that MUST get upgraded for fossil fuel free use to slow the runaway greenhouse effect that must now be with us.

Best wishes

Extracts from Porritt's blog

DEFINITION OF CCS: 

capturing the emissions from the combustion of these fossil fuels BEFORE they're released into the atmosphere, and then compressing, liquefying and storing that CO2 in old oil and gas reservoirs.

Its noisiest champions are the big oil and gas companies, with governments providing billions of dollars of R&D investment over the last 20 years.

PREDATORY DELAY: diverting policy-makers’ attention away from urgent, cost-effective and proven decarbonisation strategies by promoting all sorts of long-term, costly and speculative technologies – which just happen to ensure a continuing role for fossil fuels.

n short, this is a clunky, ineffective and costly technology. All those tons of CO2 were already captured and stored underground – in coal, oil and gas deposits – and that’s where it should’ve stayed. It’s also increasingly unnecessary when it comes to abating emissions from power plants. A combination of renewable electricity, efficiency, storage and smart grids will deliver a far greater decarbonisation benefit for the same amount of money.

So what’s going on? CCS is clearly not ‘a climate solution’. But it IS a very significant way of helping today’s oil and gas companies in that it permits them to go on extracting, refining and profiting from hydrocarbon resources that would never see the light of day if we were treating accelerating climate change as a true Emergency.

His new book, ‘They Knew’, is out today. It’s an updated version of that Expert Report – and an utterly devastating indictment of the role of different US Administrations (from Carter to Trump) in aggressively promoting the interests of the fossil fuel industries even as they acknowledged the validity of the science behind accelerating climate change. Decades of deceit, double-dealing and craven subservience to Big Oil.

The Wild Wicked White West ....

 ... is up to its normal behaviour of murder, killing and assassination of people in Arab/Muslim/Middle East.  Under Trump, yesterday's assassination of Iran's nuclear weapons chief follows the Israel/USA dispatch of Iran's top military man in Iraq, at least shows that their killings of us lot has slowed to single figures of people of colour (ie, every colour other than Caucasian whites).  I suppose this must be regarded as an advance instead of many hundreds of thousands of my fellow humans in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank ... since Israel's assassination of its very own Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. Is this kind of hatred by Jews for their own, the ultimate antisemitism?

Such is Israel's, along with US/UK, love of murder/killing/war that they even kill their own Prime Ministers and former Generals who negotiate peace to end decades of warfare between the Muslims and the Jews/Christians.  Extraordinary immorality and hypocrisy and illegality!

Centuries of European/New World warfare by the Christian nations and between themselves has continued in this new millennia.  Despite the Judeo-Christian Scriptures telling them, "Thou shalt NOT kill".  This has now been watered down to "Do no murder" and, if the state tells us to murder the evil empire of Communists and Jihadists that is highly moral, legal and absolutely fine and dandy.

Hence, in this century, we see the revenge of the Jihadists with terrorism brought to the streets of England with slaughter even of children and teenagers at the Manchester Arena.  But the white, supposedly so upright Judeo-Christian nations started it.

4 delicious nouns naming Trumpian benchmarks

What followed might have swept away all previous Trumpian benchmarks for incoherence, self-aggrandizement, prevarication and rancor in a presidency that has seemed before to veer loosely along the rails of reason but may never have come quite so close to spectacularly jumping the tracks.

Over an ensuing half-hour rant, Trump trucked in antisemitic tropes, insulted the Danish prime minister, insisted he wasn’t racist, bragged about the performance of his former Apprentice reality show, denied starting a trade war with China, praised Vladimir Putin and told reporters that he, Trump, was the “Chosen One” – all within hours of referring to himself as the “King of Israel” and tweeting in all caps: “WHERE IS THE FEDERAL RESERVE?”

Leaving aside those who were left merely gape-jawed, the performance inspired reactions from new expressions of doubt about Trump’s fitness for office to evocations of “the last president I know of who compared himself to the Messiah”.

(That turns out, according to Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes, to be Andrew Johnson (1865-9), whose articles of impeachment cited his “intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues”.)

After the news conference, the hashtag #25thAmendmentNow was the top trending item on US Twitter, referring to a constitutional proviso by which cabinet members and the vice-president can band together to remove a president deemed unfit.

Guardian 22 Aug 2019

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Measure twice, cut once. Very provocative to distance NI from ROI. 3 years with the wind behind you but ...

No deal withdrawal from the EU means we do a Trump and break an international peace agreement

Withdrawal is a throwback to the 1940s and the heyday of our mighty British Empire that had just been so victorious, yet again, in 1945.  As Prime Minister Attlee observed, in explaining his feelings about Western Europe coming together: "The so called Common Market of six nations.  Know them all well.  Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four or 'em from attacks by the other two."  Germany and Italy attacking France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Netherlands.  It revealed Attlee's incomprehension that perhaps the six were coming together to create a new future of friendship, co-operation and economic progress to such an extent, that war would never again be possible.  We were invited to take part but Andrew Marr in his 'A History of Modern Britain' tells of one minister, Herbert Morrison who had to make a quick decision over whether to attend a meeting on future European collaboration.  "He thought for a moment and shook his head.  'It's no good.  We can't do it.  The Durham miners won't wear it.'  For many Tories, watching from the sidelines, this was a disastrous mistake."  Marr p 129 and on p 26:
"Herbert Morrison, for his part, declared that the new socialist government of Britain was, 'friends of the jolly old Empire; we are going to stick to it'."

In recent decades, it was always a small number of Conservative MPs (about 80, I've heard) who, for ideological, doctrinaire and sovereignty reasons, were convinced that UK in the EU was fundamentally wrong.  Rather like some who are similarly convinced that every word in the Bible is literally true and inspired by God.  The fundamentalists.  The MPs in the ERG are convinced that sharing sovereignty with other countries is immoral, foolish and deeply wrong.  Yet, countries of the UK share their sovereignty with the UK Houses of Parliament.  Regions in those four countries share sovereignty with their national Parliament or Assembly.  District and borough councils share sovereignty with their Parliament or Assembly or Metro Mayor.

The EU is about nations coming together and working in co-operation with one another where that is sensible and practical, to benefit all.  But, for my wife the EU is wrong for Christian reasons.  She cites the story of the Tower of Babel where the people reached up to heaven to make a name for themselves.  They thought they knew better than God.  He was being challenged by their presumption.  He put a stop to this co-operative effort, the peoples were scattered and had their own languages.  The tower was never finished.

I remember, when at teacher training college from 1968 to 1971, there was one evangelical Christian who was strongly against the UK entering the EEC.  If I remember correctly, it was something to do with the number of countries in the EEC if Britain was to join and a quote from the book of Revelation in the Bible.  I remember his name more clearly - Fouzi Ayoub.

Many people, like me, made decisions on what to do about the 2016 referendum for the most weird and wonderful reasons.  One friend told me that he really had no idea how to vote for the best.   For many people, it was shear pot luck how they decided!  Three years on and we are all much better informed.

I abstained in the withdrawal referendum in 2016 because of the inability to get to see my MEPs or to even get a sensible response from them over the destruction of our railway network for buildings and trams.  Clearly, the EU was as keen on trams taking priority over reinstating the trains as our own politicians and transport planners.  Hence, I voted but put an 'X' next to where I had written in 'Abstain'.  Come to think of it, I may not have turned up at all to abstain.

Since the referendum, some are more aware and better informed over the implications of Brexit.  I realise that withdrawal is very disruptive throughout Europe and is endangering the Good Friday peace agreement.  Anything that distances N Ireland from the ROI is a red rag to a bull to those militant Republican dissidents who are already not hesitating to return to violence - more in 2019 than any previous year this century.

The move to devolution for Scotland and Wales was done slowly over a number of years.  With the even more important decision over our future in the EU, it was rushed with only one referendum and, even then, only a simple majority of 50% plus 1 required for such a monumental matter to be decided!

Probably, Jo Cox would still be alive today if Cameron had not called the referendum.  It was a massive mistake by him.  He could have decided on a 60% majority being needed for withdrawal.  Or, he could have said it was advisory only.  Or, that the final decision was up to a free vote for the MPs as to what we should do.

The debate over our future in Europe did not begin until after the June 2016 referendum.  Very few were fully informed before we all had to make a decision.  Many of us did not know whether it was best to go 'Yes' or 'No'.  Mine was a protest abstention believing, as one reason, that it should never have been called. What Ian Hislop said that Margaret Thatcher advised was right.  Apparently, she said it was too complicated an issue to put to the people in a referendum.  So don't do it.

Above all, billions are spent on getting out of Europe that means yet more greenhouse gases, fewer finite resources, more strain on the planet's life support systems and, at the very time when closeness and collaboration is essential to deal with extinction episode no 6 that we are in the midst of.

Three years have gone by, with the Prime Minister, her ministers and Whitehall trying to get a deal acceptable to a simple majority of MPs of remainers and leavers.  There have been three years and three big defeats for the 52% who wanted out.  That should be enough to make it obvious that a Brexit deal of any kind - hard, soft or anything in between is unachievable.  The final desperate throw of the dice for a disorderly crashing out is totally irresponsible and was never voted on anyway.

After 3 years of trying and being very trying, a 'true' or 'fundamentalist' or 'literal' Brexit is undeliverable.  Revoke Article 50.

SUMMARY
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  Measure twice, cut once.  In 2016, many did not have a clue how to vote or not vote.
The whole thing was rushed with only one vote to decide such a monumental matter.
Very provocative for the violent thugs and criminals in distancing NI from ROI.
3 years with the wind behind you but still nothing achieved because the leavers want a range of different things from leaving.
The herd instinct now demands a thoughtless, impatient, desperate 'Get out at all costs' Brexit.  'Stop the world I want to get off', meaningless mentality!
The rather better informed MPs should be allowed to trump the people on something as life changing as EU membership.