Once upon a time, judges were the people who were old-fuddy duddies, holding society back, saying “would you want your wives and servants to read this?”

Now, however, everywhere you turn they seem to be champions of what the Green Party slogan labels as “real progress” – defending human rights, and in a dramatic case in Australia, the planet’s rights.

Nicola Pain handed down her decision on the Anvil Hill coalmine on Monday … found the NSW Government failed to consider the impact that burning coal from the project would have on global warming….
Two …principles were ignored by planning authorities when they accepted an environmental assessment of the Anvil Hill mine – an omission used by Justice Pain to declare that approval flawed.
They were the precautionary principle – that serious environmental threats should be mitigated even in the absence of full scientific certainty – and the intergenerational equity principle, which says the present generation should maintain or improve the environment for future users.

At the risk of sounding like one of those ladies in vaguely lab-style coats on television waving an impossibly white T-shirt around while raving about a particular brand of washing powder, I just have to say how spectacularly good Ecover (ecologically friendly) Lime-scale Remover is. (I won’t however point you to their website, because it is impossibly Flash-filled.)

I bought it thinking “this will never work but at least I’ll have tried to do the right thing”, but the first time I sprayed it over my difficult large bathroom sink, it came up just like new… whoops, I do sound like the lab coat. But anyway, ’tis true.

This seems a practical point to note the arrival of a new market trading, Unpacked, selling Ecover products, and things like grains and cereals, in bulk, “bring your own container”. Excellent idea, now in Spitalfields and Portobello, and rumour suggests soon to arrive in Marylebone.

Just like grandma used to do…

There’s an early day motion calling for the VAT on compact fluorescent light bulbs (the energy-efficient ones) to the 5% level at which condoms are taxed (an interesting but apt parallel). Definitely a good one to lobby your MP on.

There’s also a petition, on which I haven’t quite made my mind up, to heavily tax the hideously inefficient (but cheap to buy) incandescent bulbs. Of course that makes environmental sense, but there could be some people left in the dark by inability to afford the efficient ones at some particularly point in time (even though they would of course save them money in the long run).