Results tagged “Go Green” from Birmingham Mail - Is It Just Me

The Mail has launched its Go Green campaign this week and I must admit I feel a bit like Galileo and his followers back in the 1600s being branded heretics because they tried to tell people the earth was not the centre of the universe as the popular bandwagon of the day claimed.

Don't get me wrong I am not against going green and treating the earth with a little respect. That has been my philosophy all the time that Governments allowed raw sewage to be dumped in the seas, or allowed our rivers to become so polluted the only life they supported was bacteria that lived on the dead and a whole host of other acts of corporate and state vandalism.

The problem is that I don't subscribe to the current global warming bandwagon although I will admit as bandwagons go it has a very small carbon footprint, being driven as it is by smoke and mirrors. Some of the dodgy science backing up even dodgier claims would struggle to get a GCSE in even our Play School level exam system.

I just get the feeling that the pseudo science behind all this is about the same as waking up one morning and finding it is raining and a group of scientists then claiming that if it is the same for the next 40 days and nights then the earth will flood so give them wheelbarrows awash with readies and they will tell you how much it will flood, design an ark, create flood defences and then explain in detail, for a further sum, why the sun came out after three days and we are safe after all until the next time it rains.

Governments lap it up because it is yet another inventive way to raise taxes and takes bureaucracy into Alice in Wonderland territory while industry is happily trading in carbon futures and a whole raft of new companies and consultancies are being set up to estimate, manage, reduce, monitor of whatever else can be thought of to do with carbon footprints. Then there is bio-fuel which, as cons go, rates with the South Sea bubble. That nice little earner is managing to push up food prices, add to starvation and destroy rain forests all at the fill of a petrol tank.

I can't help but think though, that in 50, or 100, or 200 or 1,000 years or whatever the earth will be warmer or colder whatever we happen to do. I supect we make about the same difference as a raindrop in the Pacific but there you go.

But back to Go Green. Not subscribing to the dodgy theories on global warming is not to say that all is well in the world. We do need alternative sources of energy or one day our world will just stop; we do need to recycle more and throw away less and we need to cut down on energy use by, for example, buying locally produced products in season rather than strawberries in February flown halfway around the globe and we need to get back into some sort of balance with nature.

If you think about it every other creature on earth from bacteria and worms to lions and whales live in some sort of balance. They have a purpose in the great scheme of things to justify their existence. The odd creature out is man. We are out of balance with everything else on the earth. As for our purpose . . . you tell me.