Missing opportunities, fiddling while Rome burns

Gordon Brown, the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, had a pivotal moment recently where he could've changed things radically - but his timidity meant he blew a fantastic opportunity. Adding 5 quid to air tax on short haul flights will apparently bring in a billion quid to fight global warming - which is all well and good if the money is actually spent on that - but the crucial thing is that it won't change the habits of British people. They seriously need to be weaned off the 15 quid flights to Malmo and sod knows where else. People fly when they like and they do it far too often - because the pleasure is now, there is no thought to the pain that is to come for all of us. Living like there's no tomorrow.

Global warming is going to take more than a billion quid's worth of new ideas - it's going to take a radical change of behaviour in everyone - and that includes cutting down drastically on flights taken. I fly once or twice a year - I do not do it on a whim. Planes pump out greenhouse gases at the point in the atmosphere where it does the most damage. Shoving a fiver on to the tax will not change anyone's behaviour, and the way this dodgy government are going on with their demented plans to expand airports it seems that changing people's behaviour was never the point. Shoving 30 quid tax on short haul flights might have meant some paused for thought. One day perhaps we'll get a government that is prepared to take farsighted decisions on attempting to save this planet of ours, but whether we get that before it's truly on its knees is anyone's guess.

1% own 40% - a great recipe for disaster

So, if you were on a separate planet recently you won't have have heard that a staggering (and I mean that in a non-hyperbolic kind of way) 40% of the world's wealth is owned by a snivelling 1%. What does this mean? Well first of all that the disgusting inequality in this world is simply not a state of affairs that can do much good.

The rich get enormously rich, then they behave like pigs to enable them to get richer still. And yet, as we all should know by now, that when you're that rich, being a bit richer means shit. You don't even notice it. It has no consequences. Therefore, putting this together one could say that taxing the rich far more than we do now would save the rich from their own vile impulses - that of doing everything in their power to gain riches and power to satisfy cravings which will never be satisfied.

Take one of the super rich: Bill Gates - Microsoft's policy has always been an attempt to stampede over all others, creating software that would be run on every computer in the world. And what happened? Bill Gates set up a foundation to give pretty much all that money away. Now apart from the egoism of playing god here, there doesn't seem much point to it all. My question would be, why didn't you charge less for your software? Why don't you settle for less market share? Better quality control? The only objective was to crap over everyone else, and the end result is he's just dying to give it all away, which you have to agree is the good part.

The enormously rich serve no one. They have their billions locked up in banks forever. The money serves no purpose, it is never spent, it does nothing but allow banks to make huge profits. It doesn't get shared around, and in most cases it certainly does not get distributed to the poor.

What do lottery winners do with their millions when they win? Most buy huge houses, helicopters and Ferraris, then they go all out to show the world how great they think they are. Result: pointless greed, pointless purchases of nonsense goods, for only a complete tit would drive a Ferrari in the first place. Answer: make a 1 million pound limit on lottery winnings - share it out among more people who then will perhaps choose to spend more wisely. No one needs a helicopter to go to work.

So, there really needs to be a situation where the hyper rich need to, if not be throttled, but be reminded of their earthly duties to others, the ones who essentially have created their wealth for them. Time to balance things up a bit.

Green idea of the day

Have a bath with your loved one, or better still, take a sodding shower instead. In my case I get in the bath after my girlfriend, who likes it way too hot and comes out looking like a demented tomato. Barring the surface um, hairs, there really isn't much to complain about. And it sure as hell beats filling the sodding bath up again.

The plastic bag way to saving the planet

I chat with my girlfriend a lot about the environment - she's often of the opinion that things are irreversible and we're all doomed. Obviously we both feel that GW Bush was simply the worst thing that could have happened for the planet because of his disgusting;y foul attitude to the world around him - that's without the environmental catastrophe that is Iraq. However, I am still in the camp that refuses to give up - just yet.

I like to think of Jon's Plastic Bag Theory when things seem extra grim. I'm from the UK where people are more environmentally aware than in the US where only 20% of people even think that humans and their behaviour are having an effect on the environment. Maybe they think god's cooking things up a little.

Anyway, the Plastic Bag Theory goes like this: when you go to a shop, try refusing the plastic bags they offer you - at least a few times a day. Here in Japan I find it easy to refuse plastic bags where shop assistants are want to put even one thing in a bag without asking you if you need it or not. So, one person (me) refuses 3 bags a day, 21 a week, 1,000 a year. Lot of bags huh? In a population like the UK with maybe 20+ million shoppers - if they all did that we'd have what? 20 billion plastic bags NOT in landfills. Add this up worldwide and we'd be in the trillions of totally unnecessary plastic bags fouling up our one and only planet.

By doing this simple, seemingly inconsequential exercise we can see clearly that by all doing a little we achieve enormous things. If you live your life that way, of always having half an eye on what you need and what you don't, what can help and what can hinder, then things will move in the right direction. By doing this, you can move on to greater things - of restricting your car use, of recycling, of reusing, of making things last longer - it can all be done, and done easily.

The evil of GW Bush is that he barely recognises even a need to do anything. That's the joke: Americans are the least aware of the environmental disaster that awaits us, and yet they are by far the biggest polluters. Hilarious? No. An utter tragedy.

the funniest thing in the world - just what I need

My girlfriend sent me a link to Youtube of a panda snacking on some leaves. It nearly jumps out of its skin when the baby in front of her wobbles across the floor. The squawk it makes is nothing short of hilarious. The genius of Youtube, and of nature, to give us such fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnapzB-4tAk