If you’re reading this and do not hail from the UK – you are probably better off – and will have even less of a clue what I’m banging on about than usual.
Think I’ll stand in the next available election. “The Hedonist Party Party”. Manifesto – just have a good time. Fuck everyone else, buy another guitar . The planet’s spinning off its axis, a one-way ticket, likely getting its own back on the sprawling, out-of-control Humanity that clogs its pores and poisons everything.
We are drowning in a sea of plastic of our own making. Anyone thinking of handing their loved one a diamond ought to think again. Plastic also lasts forever, bottles, circular in one dimension, that ticks a box, can be re-used and re-cycled if you can be arsed. Think they’d probably choke you with it though…
What use is a diamond that lasts forever? Extracted from the earth with untold blood, pain and suffering. Admittedly it can scratch glass if you find that useful, and I guess there’s a degree of satisfaction lobbing it down the nearest drain when you’ve just been jilted.
So all our beloved politicians are jumping on the climate change bandwagon. Pity for them it’s not a massive vote winner. All spouting off in the great televised Climate Change Debate. Boris, the pompous fuck, couldn’t even be bothered to turn up, had something more important to do than save the planet that day.
The great British public always votes for what’s best for the individual, save a Groat here and there, better off in your pocket. Fuck the Big Picture they all say. We need more in the system, pay more tax, not less, get stuff done, built, staffed and up and running.
But climate change? Nobody cares until their roof blows off, then past caring once again at the end of the same street, as long as it wasn’t your roof of course. Or flooded out maybe. The new unpaid for DFS sofa sodden and ruined, bought on credit. Who cares? Are the politicians bothered? Those calling the shots might not live on a hill now but they will soon buy one when the going gets tough and wet. In the meantime, they slash budgets and lay off at the Environment Agency, call in a dwindling number of soldiers to help out – are we getting the message yet?
The Climate Change Debate. We have one party proposing to plant 70 million trees usurped by another bunch of fuckers proposing to plant 300 million trees and several equally dumb random proposals in between.
Just where in the dying world can anyone obtain 70 million trees? Never mind 300 million. And it would need to be a mixed bag too, not just a forest of Christmas trees.
So a bit of rough maths, math if you’re still there in the US, one tree to 16 sq m. That’s 300 000 + acres of presumably green fields.
Or enough land to build 3.8 m houses if you subscribe to the space standards employed by the major developers – crappy neo-Georgian mock arts and crafts pastiche, false chimneys, Doric columns, cottage windows, curly barge boards – a maintenance nightmare for the future. Employing 200-year-old details with no thought for design. Low-density housing for the aspirational. Live in a house that looked like your mam’s and probably your gran’s. Why have we not moved on?
That assumes you were lucky and not living in the old-cardboard-box-at the-bottom-of-the-canal routine.
Alternatively, 9m contemporary homes on the same footprint in a more interesting thought-out eco-envelope. Efficient, sustainable, quality design, low-maintenance, economical to run. Communities.
However, this is something the landed gentry do not want to see, nor risk their dividends on. 9m oiks living cheaply, sustainably – can’t make money out of that.
We already know that in the UK 300 mm of insulation all round brings huge benefits and savings, yet the Building regulations require, nominally, 100 mm only. Why? Did somebody get a vested interest in burning lots of fuel for heat?
I cannot balance it all. In the UK we need a shed load more trees, more land to grow crops, more land for housing, more land for railway lines, wind turbines and solar farms – all on a small over-populated island.
It does not compute. I went to the Far East recently. Offsetting my guilty carbon footprint in my head as I hadn’t taken a foreign holiday for nearly 10 years and of course I walk to work – made me feel better. One rule for me, one for you.
So there I am sorting my recycling bin at home, switching off lights. Then Singapore. An air-conditioned excessive bling heaving metropolis. Quick hop over to Borneo. Different world and economy, rain forest, sweating like Prince Andrew in a playground, orangutans, a/c everywhere and plastic bottles by the ton.
Watched a TV programme about cows. They are to blame, ought to get rid of them. Producing vast quantities of methane from both ends, proper fucking us over. They had this beast merrily munching away at a sack of hay and some fucker’s only gone and put a plastic plug in its flank so you can stick your hand inside the munching cow and fish out whatever it just ate. Watch it from the outside, all churning round.
Plug the size of a tea plate. That’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen and trust me, I’ve seen some proper weird stuff. All in the name of science of course – that’s the cow, not stuff I’ve seen – that definitely wasn’t science.
So they are going to start feeding cows seaweed to cut down on the methane produced. There’s the oceans fucked over some more…..
It’s not rocket science. Stop eating beef. Most of the burning issues being bandied around, discussed now at COP25 in Madrid by the great and the good, flown all over the planet to get there – all this stuff has been known about since the late ’70s. We’ve recycled a few bottles, pulped some paper.
Christmas looms once again. We need to stop consuming vast amounts of useless crap. The fashion industry is globally responsible for about half the world’s problems, enough garments to clothe the whole planet 30 times over. Chest deep in fabric and CO2.
And the fuckwits still rush out and buy more stuff. It’s just been announced individual UK consumer debt is at an all-time high. Buying goods on credit, store cards. Drowning in fabric and disposable junk, paid for with credit while the big corporations pay less and less tax on the profits you just thrust at them with your plastic. That’s ironic – the old plastic gets you both ways.
I think it’s past the tipping point, the elephant in the room is world population, bet that doesn’t get a mention in Madrid. So it’s either head down and grow your own carrots or vote for the Hedonist Party next time round.
Have a lovely Christmas, recycle your wrapping paper and do a nut roast this year.
