What We Have Done at Green World Trust See the replies from the leader of the Labour party and the Treasury to Dragonfly Trust's Proposal for an eco-tax on petroleum and plastics GWT has examined the science behind "Global Warming" (where our CO2 emissions are blamed) and have concluded overwhelmingly the problem is not the weather but the science and the politics.

Green World Trust (was Dragonfly Trust, and before that was Magdalene House Trust) has been in existence for about twelve years, the first five years of which were spent in Glastonbury, working with casualties of modern life.

We achieved a lot of success in rescuing drug and alcohol abuse victims, counselling those in crisis and "spiritual emergency", housing the homeless and restoring self-confidence and self-respect in people who had suffered emotional or physical trauma.

We also rescued another charity that was on the verge of collapse and brought it back to being a fully functioning, viable operation. For this we established a charity shop and ran it ourselves, together with volunteers from among the people we were helping (this was a part of the rehabilitation programme).

During that time we initiated the principle of requiring housing developers to build “social need housing” in direct proportion to the total number of houses built on any one project. This was taken up by the minister for housing at that time and is now standard practice in several areas.

Becoming aware of the pressing nature of various global issues, we decided to extend our activities into investigating the nature of these, and approaches to finding solutions. This led to the formation of Green World Trust as a little think-tank.

We came to realize how precious our support of each other was, and how that support reached into whatever we needed to attend to, whether big or small, enabling us to become an effective springboard to "Think Global Act Local".  We want to encourage others to do the same as us! We are aware of the importance of small, local groups everywhere. 

Exploring “Think Global and Act Local” in more detail, we looked at the concept of “Planetary Citizenship” and an original idea which we refer to as the “Twig Rating” - a way of rating all products for their cradle-to-grave environmental impact at the point of sale, thus making manufacturers responsible for future waste generated from their products. We are interested generally in waste disposal issues.

We had planned to start a local Transition Towns group. We examined the issues of Global Warming and Peak Oil, towards which Transition Towns has arisen as a creative grassroots response. We then became suspicious about the message of Anthropogenic Global Warming, and discovered that whereas there was simply no problem in the climate itself (or rather, cooling in the years ahead, not warming, might be a problem), there was a grave problem in Climate Science itself, and its politicization that has reached epidemic proportions.

We decided to concentrate on issues around tidal energy from the Severn Estuary, which is local, at the cutting-edge of technological innovation, very topical, and not dependent on bad climate science. To date we have looked at the proposals for a Barrage (which has so many attendant problems it seems like a non-starter), a "reef" to harvest both incoming and outgoing tides on a small differential head of water, and small turbines able to operate in very slow flows.

updated 14 November 2009

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