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Published: January 24th 2008
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On the way home yesterday another photo opportunity presented itself. Check out the "Chemicals Vehicle". Unfortunately I couldn't get a decent shot of the Hazchem sign , but I like their style - dangerous chemicals in cardboard boxes in an open truck. At least they have a single strand of nylon rope holding one row of boxes down.
"Oh how easy it is to poke fun at these unsophisticated people with their goats on mopeds and kids hanging out of the sunroof," I was thinking, "I am so fucking glad I come from a country with centuries of civilisation, architectural history, democracy since the 19th century, toilets that work and so on".
(Before anyone points it out the UK is technically a Constitutional Monarchy but we pioneered parliamentary democracy) So there I am, smug in my personal air of global superiority, listening to the BBC World Service when some spokeswoman from the European Union is being interviewed about what the EU is doing to reduce carbon emissions.
It transpires that the EU's finest minds (funded by the taxpayer) have got together and decided that the best way to reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions is to set the highest
reduction targets and taxation levels to the countries with the highest GDP. The countries with the lowest will be allowed to increase their emissions so that they can get their GDP up to the level of the rest of us so that we will all be on a "level playing field".
What a stroke of genius.
OK, lets suspend reality for a moment and pretend that man made CO2 is having a significant effect on the overall temperature of the planet outside it's natural cooling and heating cycles that have been going on for the last four and a half billion years and will go on for billions, long after after us puny humans are no more than our constituent atoms in the troposphere.
Let us forget for one minute that the massive subterranean coal seams in China and Australia that have been burning for tens of thousands of years are responsible for more CO2 in the atmosphere than all human activity that has ever been, and probably ever will.
Just pretend for one second that a decent "Krakatoa Easy of Java" style volcano eruption will not pump more crap into the atmosphere than a century of North Americans with petrol at 10 cents a gallon can ever dream of.
Imagine that the boffins and ministers in Brussels honestly think they are doing the best they can for the good of the planet. The best plan they can come up with is to tax Luxembourg. That's right, Luxembourg. Not only the richest country in Europe, but the richest in the world, with a GDP per capita of nearly USD 90,000. Bradford has got a bigger population than Luxembourg. The area of the UAE that is covered in golf courses and man made forests is greater than the total area of Luxembourg. If every Luxembourgian chipped in 20 Euros they could afford to have their entire country covered in a nice Axminster.
Fucking tax Luxembourg? What good would that do?
Amazingly, two seconds after that though went through my head the interviewer asked the spokes-bint if reducing Luxembourg's carbon footprint would have a significant effect. "Well," she said "every little bit helps".
What an inspired piece of thinking. I suppose every little bit technically does help. Worried about sea level rising? This weekend, nip down to Southend and bring a bucket of sea water home and stick it in your shed. Every little bit helps. Worried about the heavy metals in your old mobile phone ending up in land fill? Easy one - just stick it in the cupboard under the sink. Want to reduce global CO2 emissions? I suggest that at six in the evening on the last Friday in every month, everyone holds their breath for 45 seconds. Even if we could only get half of the world doing this, three billion people saving 5 grammes of CO2 equates to a reduction of 180,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. If we did it every 5 days we could boost that figure to a million tonnes. I can't even imagine how many wheelie bins you'd need to contain a million tonnes of CO2.
Someone, who at one point had a quite a significant impact on the planet on a global scale once said
"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it. " If you notice the spin has gone away from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change". Largely because the overall temperature of the planet has not actually gone up in the last seven years. We expect a climate, but get weather.
It's all very well telling us the big lie, but once you start lying, you need to keep telling the same lie, not let Brussels start tinkering with it.
Hitler wanted to take over the world. He didn't start by invading Luxembourg.
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Potter la'
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Don't hold your breath...
Made our 45 sec contribution yesterday, every little bit helps!