i also think that the amount of plastic is unnecessary. I can remember the days when my Mum used to go to the Greengrocer and just opened her wicker bag and had the potatoes poured in. Also any other fruit/ Veg was loose and put in her bag. Then she would go to the fishmongers and buy some fish which was wrapped in paper. The advent of big supermarkets and their use of plastics has been a huge problem.
Been trying with limited success to avoid plastic for many many years. Bottled water is such a huge con, like the wag who started selling fresh Highland air in a can. Douchatelet's decision to stop supplying bottled water to the U-18's would have carried more weight if he'd also fitted water taps at The Valley, where you could get a drink of tap water, instead of paying £2+ for a bottle of similar quality H2O. In countries where you can't drink the tap water there are plastic bottle mountains..plastic has been found in the deepest parts of the ocean. Although there are plenty of individuals trying to help the environment, global trends are towards environmental destruction.
In a nutshell, we want the benefits of burning fossil fuel without the side effects, In other words: Nobody wants to die but everyone wants to go to heaven.
Extinction Rebellion want to take away your right to decide how to live your life. They have no respect for the rights of other people, because their demonstrations are deliberately disruptive. They want to cause maximum trouble to other folk who have not harmed them in any way. And then they say how sorry they are, but their purpose matters more than what other people want. If they get their way common folk like you and me will no longer be able to choose how we travel, what we eat, how warm our homes can be in the winter, and what our children learn at school. They want to control every aspect of our lives, but never be accountable because however draconian their restrictions are, they can hide behind the all-encompassing mantra that it as saving the environment, so is for our own good. And what will they do when their 'peaceful' protests don't get them what they want? We already know they have no respect for the law. What else have they no respect for?
Global warming is going to cause untold suffering and kill millions of people. Indeed it is already doing so. Hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis and flooding will displace whole populations. People will lose everything and the number of refugees will run into hundreds of millions. Vulnerable wildlife like Polar bears will be wiped out. There will be no ice at the North Pole in 30 or 40 years. All the ocean currents will change and that will lead to mass extinctions in the sea. Probably many of the whale species will follow the polar bears. Nothing can stop any of this happening. That's what Extinction Rebellion don't want to face up to. They believe that the process can be reversed if we all just do what they say. They believe the genie can be put back in the bottle. Even if every human being in the world dropped dead tomorrow, the temperature would carry on rising. The rain forests are already gone. They won't grow back again, ever. The smaller the polar ice cap gets, the more the sea around it warms up. It's a positive feedback circuit. Nature unbound. A mass return to pre-industrial life on the land would have virtually no effect whatsoever. Burning wood produces more carbon and toxic chemicals than burning coal. Without fires, people will freeze to death. Extinction Rebellion have a fantasy that they can make major governments declare a climate emergency and then order people not to fly, drive cars, use plastics or detergents or soap etc. and people will just do as they are told and learn to enjoy living in poverty and squalor. Then the ER saviours can go back to reading the Guardian and enjoying their middle-class lives in the leafy suburbs, knowing that the Polar bears have been saved and it will snow at Christmas time again. Our children will have to do what the children of every generation have always had to do; What we had to do. Make the best of what they are given. They can rage against their parents for ruining the world if they want to, and because their trendy lefty teachers think it's really cool. But how many of them will volunteer to give up their playstations, smart phones, trips to and from school in the big shiny 4x4 or airline flights to somewhere sunny on holiday every year? Hardly any of the little buggers. Climate change sucks. But it can't be switched off with a solar panel and a vegan cook book. We didn't survive the Cold War by un-inventing nuclear weapons. We cannot survive global warming by un-inventing industrialisation. The next generation will just have to roll with it and use their ingenuity to make life tolerable. PS: Apologies for the downbeat nature of this post. I probably should have added a health warning at the beginning. It's just life as they say. I don't believe it's the end of the world or anything, just a turbulent new age we are entering. There's still plenty of time for football and other good things...
Wasn't Dodgy Dave going to mend "Broken Britain"? Stability with Dodgy or chaos with Red Ed? Blame the lefties.
It's just a matter of perspective as far as I'm concerned. Our industrial civilisation (about 200 years old) is like a sandcastle on a beach compared to the force of nature, which is the tide coming in. We can dig a moat around our sandcastle, or a big wall of sand around it in our efforts to protect the sandcastle. But when the tide goes out it will be gone like it never existed. Natural climate change has created and destroyed forests, coral reefs and deserts for millions of years. Ice ages have come and gone - I've been told we are between them right now, with the next big freeze predicted at 5,000 to 10,000 years ahead. Mass extinctions are the norm, not the exception. Yes, we have contributed to climate change, but we did not invent it. And the climate change of the past 100 years isn't even a blip on the scale of time that life has been evolving. Tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes devastate vast regions and kill untold numbers of people. Then what do the survivors do? They move back into the devastated areas. Just like surviving animal species have done for uncounted millions of years after natural disasters. Those animals did not know the long term dangers. We do. So what's our excuse? Protest by all means at the corruption and injustice in the world. Protest about dictatorships, and all the other ways people are rotten to each other. But for pity's sake why make the lives of thousands of londoners miserable for weeks on end protesting about the tide coming in? Poor Greta and her starry-eyed disciples have their hearts in the right places. So do 99% of the rest of us. If she has the courage of her convictions Greta will refuse the Nobel Peace Prize - firstly because Peace is nothing to do with what she's talking about, and secondly because it's just a blatant attempt by the Global Establishment to integrate her back into the fold. Nothing spikes the guns of a Revolutionary better than giving them an award. But in the end Extinction Rebellion have no right to put their concerns ahead of the rights of other people to go about their normal lives. It's the same principle as anti-RD protesters at Charlton. They had every right to protest loud and long, but no right to disrupt matches which other supporters had paid to watch.
A few months ago I went on an E.R. rally and march from Parliament Square to Hyde Park. Just for a few hours I believed that something could be done to preserve the environment for future generations. Years ago I was one of over a million on the Stop the War march. I genuinely believed that Blair had to listen to sense. All in vain as it happens. But for a short time I was gullible enough to have hope, and don't see anything wrong with that.
To be honest Lardi, most of your posts regarding this seemed along the lines of criticising the protesters before worrying about the planet, in order to convince everyone to do nothing, so the last two posts were simply a confirmation that you have written the planet off as a dead end. Sorry, but there are still things to do if there is the political will to do them. Back in the seventies, it was legal to tool about in your car with no safety belt on, and when the government finally legislated to introduce it, the usual old crusties were out there moaning about freedom to choice being taken away and their right to emerge through the windscree in a car accident with their head removed. Now seat belts are worn as a norm, and the mortality has come down. Reducing plastics, planting trees, hitting poluting nations and companies with huge tax increases, and turning to more environmentally friendly energy sources can all be implemented, but it needs movement from above. The current government are already trying to lower food standards in order to attract US trade iniciatives, and regulating industry has always been a bane to them. Like gun control in the USA, you can weep on about how long it will take, but until you take the first steps and start to do something - which you seem to regard as the apothesis of evil - nothing happens. You can type #prayfortheplanet on Facebook, and see how much good it does, or you can try and get a government who will act. Criticising the protesters is to push for the planet to die.
I'm not against their right to protest, although I believe nothing can be done to halt Climate change and I don't share their belief that the whole of Mankind faces extinction. I am 100% against their assumption that they can break the law and stop other people earning a living and going about their normal lives. They have no right to deliberately stop London for two weeks - or even one minute. If the police mistreated them, they would go crying to their lawyers and sympathisers in the media. But they have no respect for the law or for the rights of other people. They display selfishness of the most immature kind. They're not protesters, they are criminals.
Great post Ken, you are a very thoughtful poster. I, in my small way, have bought a new car a Toyota Yaris hybrid and cashed in my Audi gas guzzler. For shorter journeys I either walk or cycle. This is just a piss in the Ocean but I feel I need to do something. But without the full cooperation of huge polluters like India, China, US, Indonesia it is just a piss in the Ocean. I have no problem with People's right to protest as long as it is legal. We, the consumer, have got to change our way of life.
We were going to get solar panels fitted when we moved 5 years ago, but then Amber Rudd removed the subsidy on the grounds that "The solar panel industry was doing so well it doesn't need a subsidy". Since then the number of firms fitting them has gone down from 7,000 to 1,300, the government has removed the feed-in tariff which enabled you to get a refund for any surplus produced which went back into the national grid. VAT on solar panels goes up from 5% to 20% this month. So b******s to solar panels, and 3 cheers for the fossil fuel industry.
My final word on Extinction Rebellion (much to everybody's relief I expect). They openly incite their followers to break the law. In my opinion they should be declared an illegal organisation for that reason. Their claim to be 'non violent' is a deceit which successfully grooms well meaning and normally law abiding folk, including youngsters, into believing that using force is an acceptable way to get what you want. They force the illegal closure of highways. They disrupt the lives of ordinary people by force of numbers. The disruption they cause is an act of violence against law and order, and civil freedom. Anybody who has sympathy for ER tactics and supports them, like some celebrities have done, has no right to criticise anybody who supports other groups which openly advocate breaking the law - including those who want to kill politicians or soldiers. Personally I have no faith any longer in Parliament, which has seized power but refuses to face the people in a General Election. Or the Supreme Court, which is a puppet of Parliament. However I still believe in law and order on the streets, and the rights of people to live their lives free from intimidation (mass or otherwise). And I believe in our brave and highly professional police officers. Shame on anybody who abuses them, by deliberately wasting their time and scant resources by being a stupid moron who won't even get up and walk away like a grown-up when he or she is rightly arrested.
That is exactly the reason I didn’t get Solar panels. The Government should be going all out to get us to drive battery operated cars by giving large subsidies to businesses. The same applies to solar panels and any other renewable energy. I would have bought a battery operated car, but firstly they are too expensive and secondly there are not enough charge points.
Guernsey is the most enviromentally-conscious place I've been. Spotless. In a week's walking I didn't see a single discarded water bottle, and scarcely any litter at all.
Nice move by President Trump, abandoning the Kurdish former US Allies in Syria. With friends like him you really don't need enemies.
He doesn't seem to realise what a huge error he's making. Let's see how Republican support for him stands up. He appears to have made this decision on his own.
I think he's actually flipped his lid. The bloke is now openly barracking foreign governments about digging dirt on Joe Biden for him. He doesn't see anything wrong at all with that. He's miffed at Denmark because they won't sell Greenland to him. He wants to be able to order US border guards to shoot Mexican migrants in the legs if they run away. He's tweeted threats to destroy Turkey's economy. And he is refusing to cooperate with an Impeachment inquiry, in clear breach of the Constitution. Never mind impeachment, the fella needs a rubber room and a jacket with the arms sewn together.
