Saturday 22nd July 2006

The papers have been debating if this current warm weather, or 'freak heat hell' as they like to describe any summer which isn't drowned out, is the result of global warming. This is debatable, some summers are warmer than others and everyone remembers the summers of their childhood to be blazingly hot whilst now they're generally rubbish, but the current weather aside we have completely messed up the planet into a state of uncorrectable tail-spin and here's the funny thing... nobody cares!

Whilst there are a few environmentalists banging the drum, as a whole - and I speak only for Britain - we're all pretty much aware of the problem but have absolutely no intention of doing anything about it. "Britain will be underwater by when? 2130?" we ask. "Brilliant. I'll be long gone by then."

"No - I don't think you're grasping this. The country will be underwater."

"Yeah but not me, so how does it..."

"How does it effect you? Because you'll be responsible. Your great great grandkids will either have to develop fins or live on a boat."

"Yeah but again, not me. And how hard can it be to develop fins? I tell you what's more, my brother lives on a boat. Loves it."

I think the scale of the problem is such that we simply can't allow ourselves to think about it rationally or with any degree of gravitas. We're not used to being accused of being responsible for anything on the scale of destroying the only planet we can live on, and so we tend to just try and shrug it off. We can take comfort in looking out of the window and seeing the sea is where is should be and there aren't burning ashes falling from the sky. We also quite like the idea of the '99% certainty' that we're destroying the world beyond any repair. Go that one percent, you da man!

I personally do nothing to help the Earth. What's in it for me? It's a bother, isn't it, saving the planet, any superhero will tell you. I drive a car, I like absolutely nothing more than the beauty of budget airlines, I prefer drying my hands with disposable paper towels rather than use a hand dryer. I do nothing. And on the drying hands issue (which is surely the cause of all global warming) what's worse... Using paper towels, which costs trees, or using a hand dryer which uses electricity and pumps out hot air which probably leads to global warming, probably? I'm no scientist but there must be a million hand dryers on at any given time in the world. All pumping out that hot, hot air. Surely paper towels are better?

I'll tell you one thing I recycle - wine bottles. I take my empties to the bottle bank. Not beer bottles, no, they go in the bin because I can't be bothered with them even though they're made of the same stuff, no I only take wine bottles. And there's a good reason for this, they make a great smashing noise when you throw them in. There's no fun in recycling a beer bottle, they're too solid and therefore don't break as easily. I'm all for saving the planet but there's got to be some gratification in it for me. Whenever I go to the bottle bank I take a sort of therapeutic pride in launching the wine bottle through the hole as hard as I can, like a baseball pitcher, to see how loud I can make the smashing noise. I'm ashamed to say that this childish pursuit is the sum total of my environmental efforts.

Do I think twice about flushing bleach down the toilet? No, Sir. I don't even feel guilt about flushing the toilet but supposedly you should. It takes energy to treat the water, yadda yadda yadda. When I come home and realise I've left the lights on in the kitchen, I think about my bill, not a melting glacier. We simply don't have the right mind-set, at this apparently crucial stage in the Earth's history, to rectify our habits.

What can I do? I don't want to contribute to ruining our lovely world but it seems you can't help but do so at every turn. They say you shouldn't leave you TV on stand-by because it uses nearly as much electricity as it would if it were on. Yeah, but that's a bother isn't it? It's a pain. The on off button on my ten year old TV must have been pushed less than thirty times in it's life.

It's a futile battle the environmentalists face and I think it's going to take something pretty severe to happen for the rest of us to wake up, and seeing as the planet's decay will be steady, I don't know exactly what sort of event it can be? We need something like global typhoon, a wind over the whole surface of the world, or maybe two - one enormous one rotating in the northern hemisphere and an identical one in the south - to make us open our eyes. But that's never going to happen. And the other thing that works against the environmentalist is that when they say "In one hundred years, we'll have to live in underground caves with artificially produced oxygen pumped around individual pods that we'll sleep and work in" we think, "Cool! Like Blade Runner or something? Like Total Recall?"

We're idiots.

To say we're fighting a loosing battle is a gargantuan understatement. For every person that buys a hybrid petrol-electric car, one hundred more are buying SUV's. Any effort looks futile. Did you know that at any given time during the day, there are over 2,000 commercial planes in the air over the surface of the United States alone? That's a fact, and I don't know the global figure, but let's be very generous and say there are therefore 15,000 commercial jets in the air at any one point around the world at any given second of the day. And that's not counting private planes, fighter jets, military carriers, goods planes, tourist helicopters. That isn't going to change. What are we going to do, ground them? Develop their engines so they run off hemp oil?

So maybe instead of trying to save the world, which would be the ideal, we should look to developing ways of living in a completely poisoned and messed up world? Wouldn't that be more sensible? It's inevitable, after all. We're too stupid and uncooperative to save the world. You know why we like the idea of wind farms? Because they look great. Truly, we're screwed and so we might as well get used to it.

Anyway, I don't have time to prophesise about how to invent ways of surviving in the future, I've got some wine bottles to destroy.

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