I’ve just been pointed to a potentially very useful resource on energy issues from a broadly Green perspective, Energy Bulletin – well worth adding to the “to read” list, and I’m not saying that because one of my Guardian blog pieces just appeared on it.

The teachers took us to the hall, saying they were under instructions not to tell us what we were going there for. Once there, we weren’t allowed to leave – teachers were posted at the doors.” The lecturer was Barbara McGuigan, an American evangelist and founder of the Catholic charity Voice of Virtue International. “She told us that if we had an abortion we’d go to hell for ever, and she showed pictures of foetuses aborted after 12 and 20 weeks. Some of the girls were in tears, but no one was allowed to leave,” says Michael.
McGuigan also told them that homosexuality was a “disorder”, that a person who was homosexual must adopt a life of chastity, and that no unmarried couple could have a successful relationship.

This is at a Kent, Catholic (of course) school. One recently taken over in the merger of three, successful institutions to form this one, unsuccessful one. (Story in the Education Guardian.)

And the treatment of the pupils sounds very like false imprisonment to me – as does attempts to force pupils over the age of 16 to attend Mass.

Still, the positive side is that at least we can be sure most of the pupils will be put off religion, hopefully for life.

A third conference piece on Comment is Free – about a positive vision of a world in which life has been improved, not cut back, by the slashing of carbon outputs. I am being hammered rather in the comments – I wouldn’t claim it as my finest piece of writing ever, but I don’t think it is as bad as commentators are claiming, but go and see for yourself… and see why lots of bloggers don’t last on CiF!

You won’t get from me a blow-by-blow account of the conference (although I’m hoping another blog piece will get up on the Guardian (if not you’ll read it here) – I had too much else to do, in part for reasons that might be announced here in a couple of weeks. But if you’d like to read a full account, warts-and-all, Jim over on The Daily Maybe (although he’s a day or so behind) is providing just that.

It was great to meet him at the conference (the only other “full-on” blogger I met at the conference, although the new female principal (-al Jim, -al!) speaker, Sian Berry, has been blogging it for the New Statesman and one of the candidates for male principal speaker, Derek Wall, also blogs.

There’s a piece in the Independent sort-of profiling Sian. Pretty much what you expect from the MSM…

Elsewhere, Peter Tatchell explains why he’s a Green and a really quite decent Newsnight debate on What is the point of the Green Party?

It takes six pints of water to produce one cotton bud.
(That’s from the Environmental Justice Foundation.)