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).

Neatly following on from a discussion I was having last night – how much do we really have to worry about the impact of climate change in Britain within the immediate future? – a preview of a report out this week on rising sea levels, higher waves and stronger storms.

The most obvious impact will be from rising sea levels. A report from the Hadley Centre, the Met Office’s climate research facility, warns that sea levels could rise by up to 2ft 6in around southern England by 2080.
Even Scotland, where rising sea levels are mitigated by the fact that the country is rising slightly from the earth’s crust, will experience an increase of up to 2ft, says the report.
Climate change causes sea levels to rise partly through melting ice sheets but also because, as water gets warmer, it expands slightly. A 1C temperature rise could raise global sea levels by many feet.
The report warns that such rises will be accompanied by an increase in the frequency and strength of big storms. As the atmosphere warms, more heat is generated to power weather systems.
“There has already been a greater incidence of severe winds,” says a report from the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton University. “Wave heights are increasing by about 2% a year around western and northern UK waters.”

I think of one of my favourite seaside spots – Broadstairs. There’s a wonderful Georgian house right on the beach tucked underneath its cliffs, with the small claim to fame that it is supposed to have been where the news of the first victory at Waterloo was delivered. I really don’t like its chances….

Not a story to be exactly taken at face value, but interesting that there seem to be efforts to recycle Tetra Paks in Thailand. (The cardboard/plastic composites in which much milk, fruit juice etc are now delivered.)

Pity that there is only one such recycling plant in the UK, in Scotland, and to the best of my knowledge there is no recycling of these at all in London, despite the vast quantities that must go into landfill from here.