Today's fact came as a weird coincidence, as I had originally intended, in the absence of anything specific, to plump for 'the human race will destroy itself', staring as I now am into a chasm of confidence in my fellow man and woman to do the right thing, and actually care about the environment (even just a little bit). But I can at least supplement my spittle-flecked rantings with a titbit of relevant information:
It was on 5 March 1984 that scientists first alerted the world to the potential damage that fossil fuels were doing to the environment.
I got this from Teletext's On This Day-type feature - they rather sweetly referred to such a process as 'the greenhouse effect', which is like, so 90s. Like the equally doom-laden 'global warming', it seems to have been phased out in favour of the more ambivalent 'climate change'. Hey, the climate's changing, could get better, could get worse, I suppose? I guess that's half right. We do try and run an eco-friendly ship here at Knowledge Towers, and Claire even attended an environmental forum at Parliament last night (I stayed at home and turned on every single electric appliance I could find), and encountered a patronising, blinkered New Labour harpy of the highest order: Ms Joan Ruddock.
Ms Ruddock is apparently the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and had turned up to discuss environmental issues with members of the public. You may be surprised, therefore, to learn that Reckless Ruddock is in favour of not only the crazy expansion of Heathrow, but also nuclear power, for fuck's sake. She also voted against investigating Iraq and greater transparency of Parliament (why should we know what's happening? After all, we only elected you), and voted for the smoking ban, ID Cards and Trident. Nothing to do with the environment, but you get a picture of what a gibbering plastic socialist dickhead we're dealing with here.
Anyway, when faced with arguments against the Heathrow expansion, she claimed that it was necessary to expand the world's busiest airport further, to allow people from the Caribbean to go and visit their family. So if you're against the pointless expansion of an already massive airport, planned and funded by multinationals, then you're a racist. I could go on but my keyboard's starting to melt through sheer frustration - suffice to say, she demonstrated how little the government are doing about climate change (or as I have coined it, the world slowly cooking itself). But it's not just the politicians - two more things today have led me to the conclusion that we won't take climate change seriously until it's upon us, which will of course be too late.
The first is that American Airlines flew a plane from Chicago to Heathrow with 5 passengers on it (those five people could have all taken a car and driven round via Siberia, and it would have created lower carbon emissions). The second thing is on much a smaller scale, but endemic of the general attitude to recycling - a rubbish bag at Earlsfield station, literally stuffed to the brim with free newspapers. It seems that despite all the warnings, and all the advice that's out there, some people haven't even developed enough consideration to recycle one newspaper. Instead of trying to save the world from roasting, we're basting it in it's own juices. It's over. We've lost. I look forward to seeing an aged Reckless Ruddock sitting atop the House of Commons, fiddling while London sinks.
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