SolarPlexus

A letter in The Engineer recently…

“What is the point in the UK making any type of advances with regard to carbon dioxide emissions when the likes of China, India and Russia are increasing theirs?”
Jim Bridgman

We do tend to see this argument crop up a lot don’t we? Often drawing comparisons between nations, but also between activities. For example, “why pick on reducing vehicle emissions when global heavy industrial emissions are so huge?” etc. etc.

To me the answer is as simple: My garden may be smaller than the chap next door, but I don’t crap in it just because he does. There’d be two of us with faecal landscaping if I did that, not just one.

I’ve just visited my local Dollond & Aitchinson for an eyetest. I’d cycled there so was a bit warm but upon entering the shop the warm fog that met me wasn’t explained by my exertion.

Initially I thought the silly woofters had got the heating on. Yes, we’re having a crap July but it’s not cold. When I was asked to be seat myself in the middle of the shop I spied the culprit: a portable air-conditioner with it’s vent-trunk just lying across the floor!

I quipped that it was stuffy in the shop, but nice and cool in the square meter in front of the aircon. I was met with a puzzled stare - until I elaborated that they were chucking warm air back into the shop. At this point I decided not to explain that by using an electrical device to shift cool air from warm air they were making the air warmer because of the energy expended by the unit itself - that was an gcse physics lesson too far.

Their solution? Open the front door.
“…but it’s a noisy road out there!”, complained the receptionist as this was done.

Oh, for the love of Pete. We can get as many cars as we like off the roads, but if we don’t legislate against global aircon misuse (or just use?) then we may as well fart against thunder. I’m not dead against these devices - but I wish they’d be used sparingly and at minimum levels. What’s the point in getting the compartment temperature lower than you’d find comfortable in winter?!

The reverse should be applied to patio heaters…

“Today, we (the EU) are around three percentage points below 1990 levels, whereas the US emissions have risen by more than 30 per cent since 1990. And according to the US Department of Energy, US emissions are expected to rise further.”
Source: extract from a speech by John Bruton, EU Ambassador to the US, talking about CO2 emissions.

How can the Bush administration continue to hold the argument that to limit US emissions would damage the economy and cost jobs? Some hold the view that the human contribution to global warming has yet to be proved as significant. Regardless of significance, no-one can deny that our activity does have an effect.

Let’s be clear about this: global warming will damage the US (and world) economy all by itself. Adverse effects include damage caused by increasingly extreme weather; stress on water resources; public health; desertification and population migration, to name only a few.

I find it alarming that the world’s remaining superpower, the nation that has tasked itself the role of global policeman, continues to cock a snook at the rest of us. How can the so-called “developed world” take the moral high-ground when asking emerging industrial nations to clean up their act?

And before anyone claims that the EU’s emissions are not particularly small taken in isolation, I am all too aware of that. We can all do more to reduce resource squandering. Can any of us claim, hand-on-heart, that they’ve never made an unnecessary car journey?

Climate change awareness has to be our new religion.