Geoffrey Lean

The alarm clock is one item that won't be included in a new anti-noise campaign (Photo: Getty)

Stand by for a quiet revolution. Yes, I know that’s a tremendously overworked cliché; in the past couple of days alone it’s been applied to developments as varied as the EU’s energy policy, the status of Qatari women, a new blend of Rioja and an urban windfarm in Hull. But I’m talking about the real thing.

From early in the New Year, some of the world’s biggest brands will be vying with each other to sell muted machines as part of a new campaign to hush the ever-increasing levels of noise in daily life. The campaign was thought up just 10 months ago by a remarkable mother and daughter team over a kitchen table. More here.

Cooking for a better planet: the Wonderbag cuts down on fuel - and pollution

They have gone virtually unnoticed amid all the bombast, bargaining and breaking news of the past two weeks of top-level climate negotiations. But tucked away in an obscure corner of the giant conference site in the middle of Durban are two South African women, surrounded by a pile of brightly coloured bags, who promise to do more to fight poverty, save lives and combat climate change than all the suited bureaucrats, and their political masters, have done in their

These women – one white, one black – have come up with a simple, traditionally-based technique that could dramatically cut the amount of fuel used to cook food, save desperately poor people a sizeable slice of their income, slash pollution, improve health and employ many thousands who… Read More

Protests outside the Durban climate change conference

Talks on a new international climate treaty – such as those going on here in Durban this week – may be proceeding with the pace and sense of direction of an inebriated and mobility-challenged snail, but national measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions are being brought in remarkably widely and fast, or so a new report suggests. And this seems to be happening most in the biggest polluters, both developed and developing, who often are the most obstructive international negotiators.

The report – by the Global Legislators Association (GLOBE International),a worldwide group of parliamentarians of widely differing political persuasions chaired by the erstwhile John Gummer (he now likes to be called Lord Deben) – looked at what has been going on in 17 of… Read More

A farmer tries to sell her meagre crop of sweet potatoes in the Bolivian Andes. (Photo: Alamy)

It was, of course, a complete coincidence. Just hours before the latest round of top-level climate negotiations were due to open, Durban was hit by a torrential downpour. High in a precipitous shanty town that clings to one of the hills above this South African coastal city, Sindi Madlala told me how she had been woken at midnight on Sunday by water rushing into her house: she and her family had to take down part of a wall to allow the torrent to flow out the other side. “We have often had rain, but never like this” she said.

She was lucky. Other shack… Read More

Protesters at the Durban climate change conference (Photo: EPA)

As giant climate summits – like the one now taking place in Durban, South Africa – grind wearily on, the old parlour blamegame of “Hunt the Villain” increasingly takes hold among the thousands of delegates and hangers on that assemble each year.

For years it was easy enough – George W Bush's United States was the shoo-in repetitive winner. After all it had refused even to try to ratify the Kyoto Protocol – the one international treaty requiring countries to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases – and for a while the US even seemed to deny the existence of climate change (though the President later changed his mind).

With Barack Obama's election – and the appointment of leading experts on global warming to senior posts in hi… Read More

The Durban Climate Change summit is next week (Photo: PA)

So it’s doable. Just days before the opening of the next big round of climate change negotiations – in Durban on Monday – a major new report has concluded that cutting emissions to a level that will avoid dangerous global warming is “technologically and economically feasible”.

It identifies savings from using energy more efficiently – and providing more of it from renewable sources and less polluting fossil fuels, like gas – that would be more than enough to set the world on a course to keeping the warming to under the two degree C increase that scientists have identified as the danger threshold.

If that is to be achieved the world will need to be emitting the equivalent of no more than 44 billion tones of carbon dioxide in… Read More

Richard Branson has an evangelical streak

Business can only hope to rescue the world from the escalating economic crisis if it consciously sets out to “do good” instead of merely concentrating on the bottom line. And companies that do so will actually become more profitable.

Utopian? Idealistic? Impractical? The sort of thing you’d expect to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Occupy protesters, or the Prince of Wales? Save your scorn. The person passionately putting these points to me is one of the world’s most successful dealmakers and entrepreneurs — and has just pulled off one of the business coups of the year.

More here.

The Government and its critics agree on the need for increased growth and the building of more houses, but disagree over the steps to be taken (Photo: Alamy)

Green issues – or so the conventional wisdom goes – fall off the public and political agenda when the economy turns down. In fact that is no longer true: environmental concerns have become so entrenched in Britons’ values that they remain remarkably robust in bad times as well as good. Even so, it is rare for one actually to come under an ever brighter spotlight as the economic outlook darkens – as is now happening with the Government’s planning reforms.

Certainly, prospects could hardly be more perilous. This week, as youth unemployment passed the million mark, the Bank of England slashed its growth forecasts for both this year and next. The chance… Read More

On top of the world: Sir David Attenborough at the North Pole for his 'Frozen Planet’ series (Photo: BBC/Jason Roberts)

It’s just one of a host of mind-blowing images in Sir David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet – but it also provides a taste of things to come both in the series and in the white world at large. In the opening minutes of this week’s episode, the camera followed a rushing river of meltwater, carving a curving canyon in an Arctic ice-shelf before plunging off it in just one of a thousand waterfalls.

In itself, of course, this is normal enough: it happens every summer as the sun returns after the long polar night. But, in a sense, the hurrying water carries with it the series’ ultimate message; that the ice is melting not just on a seasonal, but an epochal… Read More

Pipe down: there's nothing new about noise pollution (Photo: Picture Post)

No other pollutant ruins nearly as many lives in Britain and other industrialised countries as noise – and it is the only one known to drive sufferers to murder – yet few receive so little public attention. Green pressure groups, so vocal on so many environmental threats, are almost universally silent about it. Virtually no governments, anywhere in the world, seem to be prepared to give the case for comprehensive action much of a hearing.

Yet two thirds of Europeans – 450 million people – are exposed every day to noise levels that the World Health Organisation (WHO) says are unacceptable. In Britain, more than half a million people appear to move home every year to escape the din. Ten years ago, a survey found that… Read More