Green Alliance’s very own roving diarist of the party conference season, Alastair Harper, is back again this year with his first posting from the Liberal Democrats’ conference in Glasgow. It first appeared on BusinessGreen.

This is the year the parties position themselves for the electorate. What do they want people to vote for? The Liberal Democrats should have arrived in a drenched Glasgow ready to say it is for a strong environment. While the other parties spent their beach holidays reading books by or about their parliamentary colleagues, they were reading about the environment, with a survey showing they favoured the excellent Burning Question and Tony Juniper’s What has nature ever done for us?

 The following report was published two days ago on Oil Price.com and is one of the most detailed accounts I’ve read so far about the chemical weapons attacks in Damascus on August 21st. Oil Price.com is not a political website with an ideological position to sell. Compare this to the fuzzy storydevoid of any real evidence upon which Obama has been relying to convince us that military action is necessary.

Syrian Chemical Attack: More Evidence Only Leads to More Questions

By Yossef Bodansky | Tue, 10 September 2013 21:27 |

Accumulating new evidence regarding the August 21, 2013, chemical attack in Ghouta, eastern Damascus, raises most basic questions.

The recent findings point increasingly toward the conclusion that it was indeed a self-inflicted attack by the Syrian opposition in order to provoke a US and Western military intervention against the Ba’athist Government of Pres. Bashar al-Assad. Ultimately, it will take the…

Manchester chef Jules Bagnoli reports from an inspiring gathering of foodies in Denmark.

When Nobel award winning Professor Jason Box bounced onto MAD3‘s woodland stage, freshly mown by the teeth of the previous speaker, forager Roland Rittman, the mainly chef crowd confidently had no idea what to expect next. Eyes narrowed at slide after slide of stark scarred ice images, melt rate graphs and magnified water molecules charted up to a 21 metre sea level rise in coming centuries – and the effect on a food industry in turn up to 40% responsible for climate change was not lost.

For those who hadn’t yet found their dark foam cushions and were already shifting on the circus plank seats, comfort shrank further at the sight of 80 square kilometres of the Jakobshavn glacier crumbling on screen. Where the world’s fastest glacier is going – seaward, and at 180 foot…

MYTH 1 – “Renewables cannot heat our homes – we therefore need gas.”

Many people believe that renewables can only contribute to any significant extent towards electricity our energy needs. The Germans prove otherwise. In 2012 Germany got 11% of its heating needs from renewables and this is rising rapidly:

MYTH 2 – “Our energy needs can only be met with big infrastructure projects – which is why we are beholden to the big energy companies to provide this for us.”

Much of the heat energy above, was produced by the rapidly growing energy co-operative sector:

The good news, although this is absolutely nothing to do with our fossil fuel obsessed/deranged Government, is that there is support for similar schemes in this country – from places like the Co-operative. Their COMMUNITY ENERGY vision recognises:
“In the UK, people are currently passive consumers when it comes to energy, at the mercy…

Last year, ten thousand six hundred sick and disabled people died within weeks of losing their benefits, after Atos assessed them as ‘fit to work’.  Thierry Breton, boss of IT firm Atos, has just been awarded a £280k pay rise, bringing his total remuneration to £2.3m a year. While disabled people were hounded to death for a maximum of £131.50 Disability Living Allowance a week, the head of the business chasing them earned £44,000 a week.  This is not austerity, it is travesty.

The Bogus Case for Mr Atos

Atos didn’t just enter with the Coalition.  They have been the sole provider of medical assessments for the DWP since 1998.  While Atos is the bulldog, it is the ministers of the DWP who hold the leash – and this government have given a firm order to attack.

The government has mandated that every single person claiming…

This post first appeared on the New Statesman blog.

Among the many extravagant claims made by supporters of fracking, perhaps the most absurd is that it will lead to a renaissance in British manufacturing. George Osborne picked up this theme last week when he argued that cheap energy was leading manufacturers to return to the US and he wanted to see this happen in Britain.

Who do you believe about the Work Capability Assessment?

Not the government, obviously.

You may have missed this – because it hasn’t been reported widely in the mass media – but a quiet row has been running for several months, concerning the collection and use of medical evidence to support applications for Employment and Support Allowance, the benefit people taking the WCA have applied to receive.

The government – whose spokesman appears to be Employment Minister Mark Hoban rather than Esther McVey, the Minister who is actually responsible for Disabled People – insists that decisions are made after consideration of all medical evidence supplied by claimants, and that they can provide further evidence during the reconsideration process or appeals.

But there is a mountain of evidence that this is a load of bunkum.

Back in 2010, an ex-military claimant, ‘Mrs S’ wrote a damning report on the service at…

Israel shows signs of desperation to safeguard its self-proclaimed image as the only democracy in the Middle East

Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and national student union to create covert units at universities to engage in diplomacy via social media; unit heads to receive full scholarships.

About a week ago, the outgoing deputy-director general of the Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Ministry, Daniel Seaman, sent a…