We can all do our bit to stop global warming. However most suggestions we hear are pretty miopic or limited. Obviously I have been unable to post in the past few months as I have been giving my full attention to worrying about the planet.
So, here are my top 10 tips for saving the World :
1. Build more roads. Blindingly obvious, free flowing traffic much less polluting than congestion. And, of course, remove all road humps.
2. Penalise families. Probably the single most environmentally unfriendly thing you can do is to have children. Any couple having a child nowadays are responsible for all the emissions that child ever causes and additionally for half the emissions of all their grandchildren, a quarter of emissions of all their great-grandchildren, etc ... At a conservative estimate of 1.7 children born per descendent, having a child makes you responsible for 6.7 peoples lifetime emissions. We urgently need green taxes to penalise families and marriage.
3. Stop using gyms. Exercise is very bad for the environment, as it vastly increases breathing rate and the production of waste carbon dioxide.
4. Legalise assisted suicide. If someone volunteers to stop producing carbon dioxide, why do we attempt to stop them?
5. Don't drink bottled water. Increasing numbers of people choose to buy expensive dirty water, bottled straight out of the ground, shipped in from France rather than drink the free clean water that is conveniently piped straight into their kitchen.
6. Always buy products packaged in non-biodegradable plastics. You may have heard of Carbon Sequestration, methods of locking carbon away so that it cannot end up as carbon dioxide, well you can do your bit towards that. As plastics are generally polymerised carbon compounds, the more plastic you can get into landfill sites, the better for everyone. However watch out for the biodegradable warning on packs, as some scurrilous companies try to bring in these awful new plastics which rot to produce loads of carbon dioxide.
7. Bury people. Once they are dead, obviously. Cremation creates a lot of unnecessary emissions.
8. Live underwater. With the oceans being a huge natural carbon dioxide sink, if we all lived underwater we could easily deal with all the CO2 we produce by having it absorbed into the ocean so that it would not end up in the atmosphere.
OK, I haven't quite made it to ten reasons, so I can offer some balance with my favourite counter-arguments to doing anything at all :
9. There is a lot of dramatic rhetoric delivered about how terrible it is for the polar ice caps to be melting, but there is an underlying presumption that the poles should be covered in ice. The only reason that they are covered in ice is because we are in an ice age. It has been a fairly long ice age so perhaps we should happily allow it to finally come to an end.
10. We also hear often that we shouldn't interfere with nature. Well, to me this sounds like a reason not to change our actions in order to affect what is happening to the environment. Humans are as natural as trees, flowers, elephants, warthogs and hurricanes and should be allowed to continue exerting their natural effect on the environment.
I hope that clears everything up and the world can now stop obsessing over this.
So, here are my top 10 tips for saving the World :
1. Build more roads. Blindingly obvious, free flowing traffic much less polluting than congestion. And, of course, remove all road humps.
2. Penalise families. Probably the single most environmentally unfriendly thing you can do is to have children. Any couple having a child nowadays are responsible for all the emissions that child ever causes and additionally for half the emissions of all their grandchildren, a quarter of emissions of all their great-grandchildren, etc ... At a conservative estimate of 1.7 children born per descendent, having a child makes you responsible for 6.7 peoples lifetime emissions. We urgently need green taxes to penalise families and marriage.
3. Stop using gyms. Exercise is very bad for the environment, as it vastly increases breathing rate and the production of waste carbon dioxide.
4. Legalise assisted suicide. If someone volunteers to stop producing carbon dioxide, why do we attempt to stop them?
5. Don't drink bottled water. Increasing numbers of people choose to buy expensive dirty water, bottled straight out of the ground, shipped in from France rather than drink the free clean water that is conveniently piped straight into their kitchen.
6. Always buy products packaged in non-biodegradable plastics. You may have heard of Carbon Sequestration, methods of locking carbon away so that it cannot end up as carbon dioxide, well you can do your bit towards that. As plastics are generally polymerised carbon compounds, the more plastic you can get into landfill sites, the better for everyone. However watch out for the biodegradable warning on packs, as some scurrilous companies try to bring in these awful new plastics which rot to produce loads of carbon dioxide.
7. Bury people. Once they are dead, obviously. Cremation creates a lot of unnecessary emissions.
8. Live underwater. With the oceans being a huge natural carbon dioxide sink, if we all lived underwater we could easily deal with all the CO2 we produce by having it absorbed into the ocean so that it would not end up in the atmosphere.
OK, I haven't quite made it to ten reasons, so I can offer some balance with my favourite counter-arguments to doing anything at all :
9. There is a lot of dramatic rhetoric delivered about how terrible it is for the polar ice caps to be melting, but there is an underlying presumption that the poles should be covered in ice. The only reason that they are covered in ice is because we are in an ice age. It has been a fairly long ice age so perhaps we should happily allow it to finally come to an end.
10. We also hear often that we shouldn't interfere with nature. Well, to me this sounds like a reason not to change our actions in order to affect what is happening to the environment. Humans are as natural as trees, flowers, elephants, warthogs and hurricanes and should be allowed to continue exerting their natural effect on the environment.
I hope that clears everything up and the world can now stop obsessing over this.
