What's Eating Me Today?

And the big news from this year’s Lib-Dem beano in Bournemouth is the proposal to tax off-road vehicles punitively because they are responsible single-handedly for killing the planet. Zzzz! Taxing 4x4s is so last year. Look what happened to Livingstone when he proposed it.

 

Fact: 4x4s (or rather SUVs, which is what is meant) are already heavily taxed as they mostly sit in road tax Band G. That's my problem for choosing to support a British manufacturer, but the government profits.

 

Fact: SUVs use more fuel than "ordinary" cars, so the Chancellor gets lots more fuel duty, which is more tax. Again, my issue for choosing a Land Rover.

 

Lib-Dems, go back to your constituencies and prepare for another 5 years in the wilderness.
 

BBC journalists... save us all a load of money and don't bother going to either the TUC or Lib-Dem conferences. Any speeches made at either of these junkets will have absolutely no impact on our lives. Move on, there is nothing to see.

Apparently our galant heroes of the road, the Highways Agency, that brave band of souls who spare no effort to keep our motorways clear of incidents, are to be given more powers to remove cars that cause an obstruction.

Does that include their own cars that trundle along the motorway at 55mph, convincing 75% of the numpty drivers that they are "real" police officers and thus slowing down the whole road? And will it also include the HA vehicles that clog up Tesco's car park near Preston while they consume their sarnies? 
               

According to the Red Rag, "Boris Johnson arrived in Beijing today looking tired and dishevelled". When does he ever look anything other than this?

 

Seemingly BJ was denied an upgrade by BA on his flight to see the closing ceremony of the Olympics (which apparently are taking place at the moment).

 

Congrats to Boris for slumming it with the proles and for having the chutzpah to ask for an upgrade. If you don't ask, you don't get. I would rather he flew economy and tried to blag a bigger seat for free, than paying vast sums of my tax for a flat bed and a glass of fizz, as Golden Gordon has doubtless done with his family. And don’t get me started on the alleged £20k “freebie” extended to Livingstone for his trip to China…
 

On Tuesday, the weather “experts” at the Met Office were predicting a washout for the forthcoming Bank Holiday weekend in the UK. Today (Wednesday), the same “experts” are broadcasting a forecast of warm sunshine for the same period.

How has the forecast changed so much in 24 hours? What is the point in using a £50million super computer to assist in weather forecasting if it changes its mind every day?

It’s about time this government institution is broken up and the millions in wasted I.T., salaries and pensions are invested in something useful, like a strip of seaweed for every household.
 

A quote from the Red Rag this morning: "Motorists would pay around £5 a time to queue-jump jams using American-style pay lanes".

Even though its summer and our hard-worked, underpaid MPs are supposed to be taking eco-friendly holidays in Suffolk or Cornwall, some of them just can’t resist announcing unpopular policies whilst sunning themselves under a knotted hankie.

Seemingly the Department of Transport is going to start trialling the technology and systems that will eventually pave the way for all car journeys to be tracked and charged. Ignoring the obvious intrusion into our mobility – every journey monitored, including speed (automatic fines, anybody?) – the intention is that by charging drivers for using roads, journey times will be cut as the cost of using a popular road at a busy time will deter all but the most necessary travel. Doubtless the government think that people commute to work at 8am and home again at 6pm because we enjoy it, rather than because our jobs demand it.

It’s not as if paying will make the slightest dent in the clogging of the road network. We will pay £5 to sit in the same jam, as this daft scheme will do nothing to cut congestion. I was in the US this summer and the reason this works there is that they have built extra lanes, rather than open the hard shoulder on a temporary basis, which is what our brain surgeon of a transport minister, Ruth Kelly, is proposing.

Instead of charging us to drive on motorways we have already paid for, why not invest a fraction of the £50bn annually taken from motorists to build a new network of toll-only motorways? That I would pay for, assuming it was as efficient and empty as the M6 Toll Road. However, this is as unlikely, since it would be greenwashed if it ever got past the idea stage.
 

I am indebted to Margaret of Eastbourne, a correspondent to Times Online on the subject of McDonalds’ unlikely success in France:

“Eating a burger a month produces the same carbon footprint as driving a Landrover 24000 miles”.

This comment was posted, along with others, including a couple of mine, in response to a story in The Times that the French have suddenly taken a liking to “le burger”. Seemingly, les grenouilles are flocking to the Golden Arch due to McDonald’s tarting up their “restaurants” so they are more like cafes and bistros, and also because they are using better quality ingredients than are foisted on other countries (Reblochon cheese on your burger, Monsieur?).

My take on this story is that you can’t polish a poo and that a fast food burger is as vile in France as it is in the UK, or anywhere else in the world. Indeed, the only redeeming feature of McDonald’s in France is that they have the decency to install proper toilets, the kind you sit on, rather than squat at. I find it hard to believe that a country that is supposedly as stylish and culturally advanced as France, still finds a hole in the ground an acceptable place to bare one’s buttocks. But that is not the point of my sermon today…

Let’s return to Margaret’s assertion: “Eating a burger a month produces the same carbon footprint as driving a Landrover 24000 miles”.

Since this was an off-hand post to an amusing online story, it is obviously scant in detail and even more so in fact, but as I have noted before, facts and details needn’t necessarily get in the way of a green scare story. So I tried to get inside Margaret’s mind and see if there is any shred of truth, since I am someone that likes to back up my words with a modicum of truth. Like the fact that the Green movement is all about making us miserable. Well, there is some truth in that…

The burger: A beef burger comes from a cow, which produces methane when it breaks wind and seemingly this is more of a source of evil than the exhaust of a car, so Margaret is on the right track there. The cow needs to be slaughtered and the meat processed, which requires infrastructure (and therefore power) and people (who drive to work – naughty, naughty), so that’s more carbons. The burger and its bun, relish and salad are packaged up in factories that use electricity and are staffed by people who drive to work. Then the meat has to be shipped to the outlet (more CO2) and sold in a restaurant that consumes lots of power, staffed by people who drive to work, or even if they use public transport, that transport does not run on air. Finally, the product is purchased by you and me, who drive to McDonald’s (those carbons are really racking up by now) and dispose of the packaging, which needs to be collected and disposed of, and doubtless that is not a carbon neutral activity. Also, all our breathing during the travel to and from the restaurant generates lots of CO2. And fatties, even more so.

So maybe there is a slither of truth in Margaret’s statement, but I bet I have applied more logic and reasoning to the argument than she ever did. Also, bear this in mind: the UK Met Office spends tens of millions of pounds on computers that supposedly predict the weather. And they get it wrong. Margaret and her ilk probably use sustainable ink to calculate their sums on a wattle and daub wall in their eco-home, or more likely Excel running on a Mac, which is a fraction of the computing power that Michael Fish has at his disposal. And he gets it wrong.

But even though it sounds like a lot of power is required to produce and sell a burger, remember that this needs to be divided amongst the millions of people who visit McDonald’s, Burger King and the like each day. Suddenly the CO2 figure per burger becomes a lot lower.

And I haven’t even started on the rest of her statement: which Landrover? A big one? A small one? One running on petrol? Diesel? LPG? How many occupants? Are the tyres pumped up correctly? Has it been serviced recently? Not easy, is it Margaret?

The final “fact”: 24,000 miles. Where did that come from? Is that supposed to be the average mileage of a driver? According to the Commission for Integrated Transport, the average UK driver covers under 10,000 miles per year, a lot less than 24k. Her figure appears to have been plucked from the recesses of a French pissoir.

So, all in all, Margaret’s argument is a little, shall we say, brittle. Scratch beneath the wafer-thin veneer – actually, it’s thinner than that; you would need an electron microscope to see how thin the veneer is – and the argument fails to hold.

But… let’s just humour our well-meaning hippie for a while. What if it were true that consuming burgers was 2.4 times worse than driving a Landrover (of unknown specification) for its average yearly mileage? That means I can offset my own 6,000 annual miles by giving up a ¼ of a burger. In fact, if I give up that fraction of a burger each month, I can have 12 years of conscience-free motoring. Now that’s what I call off-setting, and so much easier than paying someone to plant trees.

I’m off to McDonald’s now to suggest that they start making a 3/8 pounder and market it to drivers of large-engined vehicles who cover 6,000 miles per year. What a genius idea – a burger that offsets its own emissions. If I don’t post again, it’s because I’ve retired on the proceeds.

PS: Before the pedants write in, I know it’s “Land Rover” - I have a green and gold badge on the front of my car that says so. I was just quoting from our factually incorrect friend of the planet.
 

Was humoured by the headline at BBC online “Government launches data mash-up” and the associated story: “The UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects”.

They are inviting applicants to give the government some free consultancy on how it can best use the masses of data that it hasn’t yet left on a train or lost down the back of the sofa along with 12p and a dead spider. Actually, it’s not quite free, as Golden Gordon is offering £20,000 via the Power of Information Taskforce for the best ideas (another great use of my tax…)

How about, just for instance, a joined up work and pensions database, rather than two separate, monolithic applications? A single citizen database, instead of one or more per department? A single criminal database so that sex offenders and kiddie diddlers can be registered in one system?

Scrap all these redundant databases and two problems are solved: firstly, it is less information for civil servants to leave on public transport; and secondly, turning off all those databases and their associated CPUs and disk drives will save a fortune in electricity bills, thus cutting carbons and reducing the cost of government. And as an added bonus, it might just make government more effective too. Now that’s got to be worth 20 large.
 

Quelle surprise! MPs have voted to keep John Lewis and other retailers going during these difficult economic times by continuing to keep their hands in the public till to the tune of £24,006 per year. (Why the extra six quid?! Oh yeah, let’s really take the pi$$ and make it look like we calculated this extortionate amount scientifically…)

I realise that we all have to do our bit to stave off the credit crunch – which if one Labour MP is to be believed, is all in our heads and a figment of our collective imaginations – but how do we do that if our tax is squandered on 646 thieving barstewards who believe it is their right to be given free TV’s, iPods and dishwashers as a part of doing their job?

Why can’t MPs do what other travelling business professionals do and check into the local Holiday Inn or Marriott? Why do they need a separate flat or house to live in?

MPs say they want to be treated and paid like employees of private companies, so giving up their second home and plasma telly would be a good start. This could be followed up by performance-related pay and annual appraisals. Let’s see how many of the greedy, two-faced, lying gits stay in office after the first year. I volunteer to be HR director…
 

(No, not a spelling mistake. It just came out that way when I typed it…)

There was a “piece” on BBC Breakfast this morning about how certain nurseries are letting children play with dolls that are modelled as having Down’s Syndrome. I don’t have a problem with educating children in diversity (although I do have a problem with the concept of a doll having a syndrome – it is just a toy).

But why do we need to employ “educational psychologits” to tell us what is good and bad play for children? When you start analysing play, as with analysing what is “funny”, it ceases to be fun anymore. Let kids get on with it and they will sort themselves out.

Yet another career to be added to the Room 101 of civil service savings when I become Prime Minister, along with traffic wardens and bin snoopers.