The world at your fingertips

Isn’t technology great. Some research and design team at Citroen spent months designing the exhaust system on my car. They put a lovely little chrome bit on the end, built it of durable stainless steel so it will never rust or fail. They then spent another month or so designing and testing the bracket which would hold it on, with it’s large rubber dampers to make sure my bottom doesn’t get all vibrationy when I drive. Then, moments before the staff Christmas outing probably, they spent 2 minutes deciding the method of attaching both items together would be two minute bits of bog-standard welding. Ultimately, I now have to throw away a perfectly good exhaust which is unrecyclable and buy another one. All that technology, all those man-hours, and currently good old-fashioned rope is saving the day.

There’s been an element of that lack of thought in green politics lately. David ‘is the Camera-on?’ has outlined a superb way of saving the world – by taxing people out of the sky. People who fly are evil, world-haters who want to see the planet ruined. Amazing really. These people pretend that they’re flying off to some world beauty-spot, but really they’re only doing it to make sure another bit of the Suffolk coast is lost under the sea. If it was Norfolk I could see the logic, but hey, I’m from Suffolk.

So he’s made it a little sweeter – You’ll be taxed heavily for flying, but they’ll knock a penny off income tax or something. Great. I can sleep safely in my bed tonight knowing I won’t fry through lack of ozone in my sleep.

Except I won’t sleep soundly because of this tax plan. If he can afford to offer tax-breaks elsewhere, he must be assuming air-miles won’t be down – he’s counting on receiving the tax money and everybody still flying as normal. Secondly, why use environmental taxes on schools and hospitals? The schools have been told today they must now start teaching foreign languages so that people will be able to speak Spanish but never be able to afford to go there, and hospitals will have shiny new wards but doctors won’t be able to graduate because they’re unable to fly abroad to do their electorate year. Why aren’t these ‘green’ taxes being used to plant trees, design cleaner engines or invent those Starfleet Teleporters?

What about buses? The government spends millions a year subsidising and paying bus companies to run rural routes which continuously run empty. Stagecoach are claiming a CO2 emission of 0.58 KG per passenger journey, but surely this must be higher because every bus I see only has two pensioners on it, and they got on with a free bus pass and don’t pay taxes anyway. Plus, if we all start using busses, there’ll be more on the roads, more CO2, more fuel will be used as the busses are heavier etc. Plus think of all that extra tarmac needed to repair roads crushed under constant bus usage. The Climate Outreach Network, the UK’s only active charity working to educate on climate change, is making a case that buses and trains are in fact worse per passenger mile than a carefully used car.

I suppose though, we can all see the world at our fingertips. Why go to Iceland when you can see some pictures on the internet? Why stand behind the Niagara Falls when you can take a 360 panoramic tour online? Because they’re absolutely amazing. There’s no noise like Niagara on the planet, and no landscape so Earthly as Iceland, that’s why. And what about the extra drain on the environment as weall buy computers and use them constantly to tour the world? How many extra landfills and windfarms will we need then?

‘Camera-on’ wants us all to stay in the UK and only fly once a year at the most. So that’s okay, we can expect to see about 57 places abroad in our adult working lives. The only thing is, before we all started going abroad in the 1970’s didn’t we used to have wars? Weren’t we very wary of other cultures with widespread prejudioe and racism, and ridicule of religions other than Catholisism and CofE? We’ll start being worried that the world is flat and that vikings are going to start pillaging Norwich again.

Except it gets worse – we’re being priced off the road. So we can’t go abroad, but we’ll also not be able to go further than the corner shop unless we earn 100k a year to run a Nissan Micra. We’ll all know our neighbours as well as Karl and Susan Kennedy, but the next generation of Britains might be wary of people who aren’t ‘local’? We’re all doomed to accept that Little Britain may actually be a clever prophecy worthy of Notradamous.

But it’s okay, there is a saviour. Thankfully we can learn all about foreign countries and other British counties. The only people who will be able to afford to drive and fly and travel the world will be Tory MP’s with their inherrited wealth. The only problem is that as most of them own half a county each in housing and grounds they can spend 57 years exploring the acreages and shooting the wildlife. They may never actually get around to going outside the electric gates at the end of their drive.