 | | Things are coming along nicely... |
More great news from York. The city council has invested in a bathysphere and is about to embark on an ambitious mission to chart hitherto unknown regions of the St Andreas Trench, with a view to colonising parts of it for future generations of York citizens, in anticipation of the impact of rising sea levels.  | | 1. Bathysphere |
Ok, I lie. In fact this strange turquoise device in the photo is actually not a bathysphere – it is part of the rainwater harvesting system being fitted at the ecoDepot to enable this city to stop cleaning trucks in drinking water. Inside the bubble you can see a grill which will serve as a filter. The next photo shows the tank that will hold the rainwater. It is massive. I thought I had ventured onto a film set for a new film about Jacques Cousteau, as like the ‘bathyphere’, the tank has an ocean going wang about it, resembling the shape of a surfacing submarine.  | | 2. Rain harvest tank |
What Jacques would be doing surfacing in a pool of concrete on the edge of a car park is anyone’s guess but the poor man’s been dead for many years and might be forgiven for losing his bearings. At the bottom of the picture you can see the inlet and outlet pipes, clearly marked to avoid silly mistakes! This tank will store 50 cubic metres of water. Given yesterday’s torrential downpour, I have a feeling it won’t take too long to fill. If all goes to plan this tank will enable the council to save about £25K a year in water bills. I am including a picture that symbolises the dramatic shift that the ecoDepot brings our city. I am calling it The Three Ages of York. [sound of fanfare] In the background is the Minster, heart of our medieval city. In the foreground are a few of the photovolataic cells that are on the roof of the ecoDepot, heart of a modern 21st century city. And sandwiched in the middle are two icons of industrial York, a world that is now a part of our history and, in a sense, marks the transition from the medieval world to the present.  | | The 'Three Ages of York' |
All the challenges we face with regard to Climate Change have their origin at the start of the 19th Century and the birth of industrialisation. Up until the start of the 19th century, average global temperature and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere moved in parallel. Since then CO2 emissions have risen dramatically. The old chimney and incinerator on the site of the old Foss Islands Road depot are symbols of how we have got to where we are. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not an anti-incineration lobbyist. The incinerators found across Europe today are not the same as the beast in the photograph. The average contemporary incinerator produces only half a gramme of dioxins a year, less than you would get from a burnt out car. And in much of Europe, power from waste systems ensures that instead of pouring heat and CO2 into the atmosphere, modern incinerators provide district heating for schools, homes and hospitals. Nonetheless the York incinerator is one we can all be happy to see the back of and I am hopeful that this photo of the Three Ages of York demonstrates that the city is now emerging from the industrial age and becoming a responsible 21st century city. Christian, Energy Champion, City of York Council, 15/09/06 | 
