Sun November 05, 2006

Another Inconvenient Truth

CALL YOUR POWER COMPANY RIGHT NOW AND ASK FOR GREEN POWER. IT MIGHT COST YOU ANOTHER $5 A MONTH AND ITS THE BEST THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW. ALMOST ALL OF THEM OFFER IT, ITS SUPER CONVENIENT TO JUST CALL UP, IDENTIFY YOURSELF AND THEY SWITCH YOU OVER RIGHT AWAY. AS SOON AS YOU DO THIS, YOU BEGIN FUNDING THE CONSTRUCTION OF MORE WIND FARMS. DO IT RIGHT NOW.

NOW GODDAMIT, NOW!

Most of the measures people normally take to help “The environment” will have no effect on global warming whatsoever. Let’s take a look:

* Recycling: Irrelevant. You might have less landfill on your desert planet. I can hear your grandkids clapping sarcastically as they die of thirst and heat exhaustion, or starvation.

* A hybrid vehicle. Next best thing to useless unless you charge it up on green power and avoid using the petrol engine at all. ALL emissions are bad, even guilt-free ones, or ones which are less than the joneses!

* A very small, efficient car. See above.

* Not using plastic bags. Not choking sea-turtles to death is good (they mistake these for jellyfish!) but it doesn’t reduce CO2 in the atsmosphere one bit. Happy turtles, nine billion dead humans and 99% of all land species wiped out.

* Not using CFC’s in your refrigerants or spraycans. Repeat after me: The hole in the ozone layer has nothing whatsoever to do with global warming. The hole in the ozone layer has nothing whatsoever to do with global warming. The hole in the ozone layer has nothing whatsoever to do with global warming. The hole in the ozone layer has nothing whatsoever to do with global warming. The hole in the ozone layer has nothing whatsoever to do with global warming.

* Protesting against nuclear power. Nuclear power results in radioactive waste, but is every bit as greenhouse-gas free as wind-farms. If its a choice between having to deal with radioactive waste and worrying about nuclear meltdowns, or a dark age starting in 300 years time, I’m going to pick NUCLEAR POWER every time.

Things you CAN do which ARE actually useful:

* Go to green power.

NOW GODDAMIT, NOW!

The thing with funding green power is that sooner or later collecting energy from the wind, tides, sun etc will come out a lot cheaper than burning coal. It already does in a lot of cases. If you push the cost of it down (more windfarms built = cost goes down due to scaling, more efficient models etc), more *businesses* will take it up too, and so will more people. Once this thing hits critical mass, all power companies will switch over. Coal emissions are almost equal to petroleum emissions, so this is a big deal.

* Cease using your car. Converting it to lpg is marginally better. Getting a smaller one is marginally better. Not using it at all is totally better.

* Using public transport is more efficient, but it mostly still depends on fossil fuels (just does it more efficiently than one person per car). If you use public transport, you must also lobby your government to convert their grid over to green or nuclear power.

* Support your government’s initiatives to go to nuclear power. Pressure the shit out of them to subsidise green power.

* The very first synthetic petrol replacement fuel you see and this might be “butanol” or it might be called something else, switch over to it. At any price. Just do it.

* As soon as people start making plastics from ethanol, buy products made of these plastics. Buy them up like your species’ future depends on it. It does.