Carbon emissions by local authority

So am sat there, minding my own business (as usual) when I stumble across this:

Carbon emissions by local authority


from The Guardian

Data released today slices up the 8.3 million tonne carbon footprint of local authorities' buildings and transport - equivalent to 1.6 per cent of the UK's CO2 emissions in 2008 - in England into local council chunks.

The numbers, collated by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, show a wide disparity in the carbon footprints of the different councils. At one end of the spectrum are large, bustling metropolises with large populations, such as worst offender Birmingham with 177,360 tonnes of emissions for 2008 to 2009; and at the opposite end, the tiny Isles of Scilly, where schoolchildren get to school by boat and the year-round population amounts to just over 2,000.

Another prism to look at the data through would be the wealth of the respective councils. But at the moment I can only get hold of data of assets for regions from the Office of National Statistics. But it would be interesting, if the data became available, to see if richer councils spend more in carbon terms than their poorer relations - in the same way that data suggests richer householders have a bigger footprint than poorer ones.

If this was the case, would this be because they spend more in public services or on their own creature comforts, like the civil servants at DECC last summer who reverted to air conditioning after an attempt to live without it.

There's a few interesting aspects to this, one might be the fact that we are having the money spent on collecting this data at all during a recession. Another might be, if we're being charitable, that we might want to ask if it's reasonable that some places appear to have a bigger footprint than others with a similar demographic.

What interests me about it is this. We're currently going through a huge pub argument in Britain today over cuts in spending. It's getting quite bitter as it happens.

On the one hand there are people like me; I want to see cuts in spending on everything but the most basic services that keep the streets clean, reasonably safe and well lit in the dark. On the other there are those who are of the view that any cuts in public spending are a step backwards, that we need to spend money we don't have on services we don't need on behalf of people who don't care as a way of growing ourselves out of the recession.

And yet it gets ironic, because, in general the people who claim to care most about the negative effects of 'climate change' are the same ones who are arguing not only for retaining public services, but actually growing them.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want councils to cut back the spending in the vain hope that one less teaching assistant is going to hold back the seas; I just despise a large state.

Another thing that makes me chuckle is that these figures are released with a straight face. I suppose in some respects they totalled up their power and fuel consumption bills and so on, but at some point in the exercise there simply has to be a figure tossed in that is simply plucked from thin air.

There are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics, and after statistics there are climate change statistics I suppose.