I am back, and some meanderings on Climate Change...

Hello all,

I know its been a while since I last posted, and apologize to anyone who was waiting. The passing of my mother-in-law threw everything into a bit of a spin for a while and real life took total priority over everything else I am afraid.

Now, obviously, that has not stopped my mind latching onto things that I feel like ranting about. I could wax lyrical over the most recent of events to get my goat – the way the press handles the hand-over of Basra to the Iraqis, the shocking twist in the search for Madeleine McCann (I never did trust her parents for some reason), the regular diet of health related scare headlines etc.

These are just a tasted of what caught my attention, and I may expound upon my feelings regarding these things in due course, amongst many other topics. However, today I reserve the bile that has built up in my spleen over the last few weeks for one of the most annoying and pointless topics to enthral the chattering classes lately – climate change.

It was while watching a show called “Dumped” on TV a couple of weeks ago that I really started becoming aggravated. The premise was simple – get a bunch of volunteers for an eco-themed TV show, don’t tell them where they are being sent, then drop them off on a landfill site and get them to show everyone how extravagant we are with what we throw away by thriving on the dump.

Throughout the show, contestants who did not buy into the whole ‘make the world a better place through sleeping in piles of crap’ were given a patronising commentary, bullied by the slightly scary hard-core eco-warriors in the group, and harangued for lack of effort and vision by the shows revolting ‘expert guide’, Rob Holdaway, who seemed unable to understand why the group was not building five bedroom palaces using the detritus of society.

The attitudes of Holdaway, and the tone of the show in general, really got to me. The basic fact that we, as a prosperous 1st world society, throw away excessive amounts of rubbish that could be put to further use by someone enterprising, interested, or desperately poor enough to try is no surprise to most people. The implication, however, that those who do not try and use every article of crap left over from our daily lives to the absolute extreme permutations of usefulness are somehow deficient is, frankly, insulting.

Yet this attitude seems to becoming more prevalent in society. Local Councils in the UK force recycling through various methods – sometimes refusing to collect your refuse unless you sort through the recycleables. Others level fines. There is talk about increasing council tax on homes that produce “excessive waste”.

More than just about any other Anglophone country, the UK has bought whole heartedly into the ‘climate change is without doubt our fault’ theory, and this is spreading to all aspects of life, including an increasing fanaticism about recylcing. Once again, the communal societal guilt about our own prosperity that possesses the chattering classes is getting in the way of the lives of the silent majority of normal people in the country.

Not that I am actually against recycling in principle – it makes sense to do so within reasonable limits. What annoys me is that those who are less than rabidly enthusiastic about doing so are labelled as somehow deviant and callous. Likewise, I don’t oppose cutting down on other pollutants, although mainly this is due to a selfish personal desire to lower the levels of carcinogens that I come into contact with on a daily basis.

But the idea that me, as an individual, is responsible for climate change, pollution, and hundreds of thousands of tons of waste every year, that I as an individual am killing our planet and setting us on a course for global apocalypse is nonsense. What is worse is that the chattering classes that control the media would have me think that I can somehow have an impact on solving the world’s environmental problems.

While developing economies such as India, China, Indonesia, Brazil etc continue their rapid and impressive growth with an impressive disregard for pollution output and gas emissions, what possible difference can I make in my modest Buckinghamshire home? Does my not recycling my cans really make much difference when China is throwing up coal-fuelled power stations on an almost daily basis? While the great unwashed of Europe and can fly hither and yon on budget airlines for a financial pittance, generating more pollution in one flight than my car will in an entire year?

Please.

It is amazing though how many people buy into this rubbish. Individuals can have a negligible impact on environmental issues, even if they are inclined to commit themselves wholeheartedly to the effort. As always, its government and big business that truly have the say – and in this case, the worlds ecological future (again, if you believe the hype about global warming) is in the hands of governments and big business in countries which have spent decades getting this far in a quest to achieve the prosperity of the west, and who are hardly going to stop what they are doing because we say so.

Until a scientific community, which is almost evenly split in opinion, can categorically agree that human activity is either causing climate change, or at least speeding up the process we will get no-where. And even then, once the scientific community reaches consensus, it will be up to the developed world to reign in the developing – not up to you and me to cut down on how much crap we throw away every week.

To partially steal a line from Mr Gore, the “inconvenient truth” is that nothing that you, I, or even the UK, can have any effect on the greater global output of pollution, green house gases etc and even thinking that an individual can do anything about it is a terrifying level of hubris and self delusion.