Green but not unripe
This is the first event (of many, no doubt) in Europe that I really would like to go to and will miss because I am in the US. If you can jump on a train to Brussels on March 29, however, I highly recommend attending. It’s a discussion, followed by cocktails, of whether the market-oriented Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is a good example to follow. With the expiry of Kyoto in 2008, it’s a timely topic. RSVP here. (Shame it’s on a weeknight, or I suspect Antoine would have nipped over and blogged the debate, with him being such an environmental policy buff.)
This reminds me that some people, especially those who know me offline, might be confused about why I like to see environmentalists in a tizzy. If you spent any amount of time with me in ‘real life,’ you might actually mistake me for a garden variety greenie. I do things like fill the freezer with bottles of water to make it run more efficiently, put bottles of water in cisterns to make them use less water (and woe betide the person who brushes their teeth in front of me and leaves the tap running while they do so), and consider it a daily challenge to find new uses for things other people would throw away without thought.
“Since when did you become such a hardcore earth mother?” my friend Karri asked me this weekend, after I’d complained about excessive and pointless packaging in women’s cosmetics. Thing is, while I abhor waste - especially waste for the sake of it - what I hate more is the cultural agenda being so heavily influenced by people who disposed with the need for reasoned debate and discussion long ago. The fact that their weapon of choice is governmental power only makes them more worthy of lampooning, denouncing, and discrediting. That we may share recycling habits or energy efficiency techniques does not make them my brethren.
I think it’s important for people like me to speak up and say, “Look, I want good things for this planet as much as you do, but intellectual intolerance and the restriction of personal liberties should have no place in this endeavor.” Otherwise the ones who think these things can and should be accomplished by the force of the state actually look perfectly reasonable, because if all their opponents seem to think that trashing the earth is no big deal…well, who’s going to side with that?
Filed under: Life
Couldn’t agree more. I dislike waste, because it’s stupid. I tend to be kind of skint most of the time, so waste is just something I can’t afford. You shouldn’t need a load of convoluted hypothetical stuff about polar bears in order to be persuaded not to leave two televisions on while you’re out.
There’s a big poster just gone up near my house telling us that keeping your car’s tyres properly pumped up means lower carbon emissions. I can’t work out which is weirder: that the people behind the poster think that “cuts carbon emissions” will be more effective than “saves you loads of money”, or that they might well be right.
When I can afford it, I’m getting solar panels and a windmill on top of the house. B&Q do a windmill for a grand now, including fitting. You can even have it wired up to sell electricity back to the grid if you ever have any excess. Why should anyone need to believe the crap about global warming for that to ge a good idea?