Oh for goodness sake.
"All ministerial journeys are carbon neutral" quoth the PM's spokesman.
What on earth does this mean? At best, it means that the fuel is a bio fuel - so it turns current CO2 into current carbon-based fuel... but no doubt using coal-generated electricity to undertake the chemical processing.
At worst, it presumably means that they are patronising some 'noble savage' (Rousseau, qv) somewhere to plant a couple of trees which might absorb some of the carbon from the air. So they are turning fossil carbon into current carbon - albeit currently trapped in a tree - which will be released back to the atmosphere the moment our 'noble savage' needs to boil a kettle. Moreover the CO2 produced in the ministerial journey will not be reabsorbed at the same time as the journey, nor even in the same year, but presumably with a considerable lag.
What tosh. And these people who are 'conservative with the truth' govern us.
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Oh come on you know, the XJ has a boot full of sapling birches, 50ltrs of John Innes's finest, two shovels and a watering can, the chauffeur and ministerial aid get out and plant a tree every 10.23 miles (or should it be 16.24 km, oui oui) while the minister sits in the back reading the Guardian, eating celery and drinking an Innocent smoothie ..........
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Why are we supposed to give a damn about this whole carbon rubbish, given that cars account for less than 10% of UK carbon emissions, and the UK itself accounts for less than 1% of WORLD carbon emissions, and China are building nearly 1000 coal fired power stations?
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Call me Mr Cynical, but doesn't it justify Mr Brown taking even more money out of our back pockets?
It's all just an exercise in balancing HM Gov's books.
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I think you will find that all ministerial XJs have been modified. They now run on hot air.
The two shovels in the boot are only used to remove the bovine excrement generated in the rear seats.
John Innes is not required. :-)
On a less jovial note. A climate model developed recently at Lawrence Livermore predicted that planting trees outside tropical latitudes would actually increase average global temperature.
Kevin...
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...and now away from politics and back to motoring, please.
PG
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>...and now away from politics and back to motoring, please.
I thought we were safe after 11pm on school nights?
Kevin...
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"..and now away from politics and back to motoring, please. "
Politics and motoring seem to be more and more intrinsically linked these days....
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Politics is just motoring pursued by other means - to misquote someone - Bismark, von Clauswitch ?
But the carbon-neutral thing is worth examining to see what it could possibly mean in motoring terms.
Obviously if the car runs on fossil fuel it is impossible to make it carbon-neutral - there is no practicable process for making crude oil out of exhaust gases and burying it in the ground. But if the car runs on 100% real bio diesel (not the 5% mix that is legally all it has to be) then I suppose planting a tree that might last 100 years is equivalent to a crop of rape seed or soya replanted every year. After adding in whatever is necessary to cover the car's manufacture, other running costs, and final scrapping, presumably it is theoreticaly possible to come up with a "trees per mile" planting rate to leave the car's existence carbon-neutral.
But unless the PM is going to do his own planting in his own spare time, he is going to be paying someone else to do it. That will require the generation of economic resources to pay for it, and that will have an environmental cost too. What would be the environmental consequences of half the population permanently engaged in planting trees in order to offset the carbon effect from 15 million cars?
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I don't know about 'carbon neutral' ( which, to be pedantic, is incorrect, carbon is fine, it's carbon dioxide that's the problem - I do hate that sloppiness that creeps into public/media speak) but would suggest that most ministerial journeys are 'intelligence neutral' at best & would be as well conducted by phone/video conference call.
But however CO2 neutral a journey might it's certainly not 'heat' neutral, which is produced whatever the source of fuel, so will add to the total amount of heat that the CO2 is keeping in the lower atmosphere.
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I'm slightly baffled by this whole 'carbon neutral' thing. It may be good science, it may not - but it seems to me that
1) If these government ministers and other greenies are so concerned about carbon, why don't they plant twice as many trees and become 'carbon positive'?
2) It means that the person who runs a top of the range V8 SUV can convince himself that he is greener that the person who runs a Toyota Aygo simply by virtue of making payments to a tree-planting charity, and
3) Surely if this catches on, there will be no space left in the planet to plant all these trees.
(Ahhhh, maybe that's it. Eventually they will have to start ripping up roads and airfields in the tropics to find room for the trees that gas guzzling greenies are paying to have planted in their effort to be carbon neutral.)
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Carbon neutral policies are being pursued vigorously in the US. Ethaol production from corn is the key one. One of the unintended consequences (yes: in acoordance with the Law of ) is that corn prices have risen and world food shortages will soon diminish.
If we were really carbon neutral, it would involve for everytonne of carbon pumped into the atmosphere, producing a tonne of growing carbon.
Now any thinking idiot (i.e apart from politicians ) recognises that green things take years to grow. Instant treees do not happne. So id the carbon neutrality within 12 months or our lifetime?
Well of course they don't say cos politically it would be unacceptable to have a 20 year lag whilst the tree or whatever grows to take 1 tonne of carbon out of the atmosphere.
And of course, trees take up space used to grow crops or cows or sheep or windfarms. Has anyone done the sums of the areas involved?
Cow execrement baffles brains .. sums the whole thing up..
madf
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We will know when we are getting somewhere when all government journeys are entropy neutral.
But to do that they can't travel.
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doh!
"food shortages " should read "food surpluses"
madf
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