A rant about Chelsea tractors and other things
You don’t need to be an environmentalist to recoil at daft consumers buying bottled water. The price of bottled water is often higher than petrol.
Increasingly, bottled water is simply tap water. Shipping water from Switzerland to California is just plain stupid, regardless of whether you like the taste, or mistakenly believe that it’s safer.
Seriously, if you are drinking bottled water because you’re afraid of terrorists tampering with the water supply, we’ve got to re-evaluate just how effective terrorism really is. (Is terrorism the new marketing?)
And of course, you don’t need to be an environmentalist to curse the intellectually challenged consumers pouring money into SUVs. Are they bad for the environment? Sure. But that’s not
the biggest problem. As they are trucks, lower safety standards are applied, which means they can be produced with rigid, single piece chassis that are much cheaper to make than the sophisticated chassis of cars. SUVs are essentially really cheap vehicles with pimped out interiors. They are less safe for their occupants than cars, and they are less safe for everybody else on the road than cars.
“Gee honey, now that we have kids, we better upgrade to an SUV. We don’t want our kids crushed under an SUV.”
There’s an arms war of gas guzzlers, propelled by people who think the narrow streets of London, or any of our historic cities are appropriate places to drive a fat-assed truck. Obviously, the car makers love them: skirting safety standards means the profit margin is immense, as
consumers are fooled into thinking of SUVs as status symbols signifying a higher than normal degree of disposable income, rather than a symbol of financial naiveté and a low IQ.
The only crazy behaviour that seems specifically British is the increasing dependence on air
conditioning, you know, for those times when the mercury climbs up above 22 degrees. But I can’t get into that. Once you’ve seen your partner weakly crawling across the Sahara desert of a hardwood floor in a desperate bid to make it to the dog’s water dish before expiring in the blistering 28 degree heat, you can only come to the conclusion that being unable to adapt to a pleasant summer day may very well be a genetic condition. People in other countries routinely adapt to temperatures from -50 to +50. Why can’t the British adapt to variations of plus or minus 10 degrees? (Perhaps the same genetic disorder affects the sales of patio heaters?)
4 tonnes of CO2 a year is comparable with an average (about 40mpg) car covering 12,000 miles a year.
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But its nothing compared with cattle.
A cow lets off between 100 to 200 litres of methane a day – that’s about 1,000 litres (a cubic metre) a week. And since 1 cubic metre of methane contains 0.49kg of carbon, that’s about 25kg a year.
But there are about 2 million head of cattle in the UK, so between them that’s 50,000 tonnes of carbon every year.And methane a much greater global-warming effect than CO2 – about 20-25 times worse over 100 years, and 60-70 times worse over 20 years.
So never mind the patio heaters – we’ve got to stop the cows farting before it’s too late.
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From the comments section on El Reg 03.08.07. El Brad and Nick Dixon
