OneAndOneIs2

There was a story on the BBC a while ago about traffic lights. Due to a relaxing of the rules, motorists should start seeing more green lights.

Why? Because a system can now be employed whereby lights will turn green when they sense a car approaching within the speed limits.

Sounds a very positive story, right up until you get to this part:

Previously the Department for Transport (DfT) had discouraged the systems which reduce fuel use, resulting in less tax being paid to the Treasury.

This, I thought, should have triggered national outrage and a tsunami of fury from green lobbyists. With all the concern about climate change, carbon footprints, Kyoto, and all that; With the cutting back of garbage collection in the name of recycling to help the environment; with some of the busiest, most congested roads in the world; in the face of ALL that.. we have a government department that was deliberately going out of its way to snarl up traffic so we'd have to buy more petrol.

Buy a 4x4 and you get villified by the Greens for burning more nasty fossil fuels than you need to. Even if you are in fact running it on biofuel. But the DfT deliberately forcing every car in the country to burn more fuel than necessary because they want the money? Not a murmur did I hear. Why?

I don't know. Truth be told, I don't much care. I drive small economical cars and stick to routes I know don't get congested. And I don't much care about all the climate-change, global-warming, earth-is-doomed stuff either.

Because here's what it all boils down to: It's a huge amount of hype about an irrelevancy.

It really is. Whether it's true or not, it doesn't matter. It's utterly irrelevant. Not because the climate isn't important, because it is. Not because there's nothing we could do about it, because there is.

It's irrelevant because of basic human nature. We like to think we care about the future. We like to think that if what we do today is going to cause future generations problems, we're the kind of people that care enough to do something about it.

Right. We care so much about the state of the word after we're dead, we'll inconvenience ourselves by selling the car and getting on the bus.

Get real.

Ask the tobacco industry how much people care about the future.

People won't give up an expensive, health-ruining, bad-smelling, socially-deplored drug addiction for the sake of their own future.. but they'll give up their shiny new car for people they've never even met?

Climate change. The world is doomed. And though nobody will admit it, the real inconvenient truth is: Nobody cares.

And that's a bad thing. Because there's so many good reasons to adopt greener technology. But they all get ignored in favour of beating people with the huge, heavy "global destruction" stick.

The most useful, intelligent quote I ever saw on the subject was a comment on a forum on the person website of the current mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and it was this:

"The Stone Age didn't end because they ran out of stone"

The whole world was set up for stone. Everybody knew how to work stone, where to find stone, what different stones could be used for... And yet they threw away all that tradition, knowledge, history, expertise, all of it, in favour of bronze. Because bronze was BETTER. Because if a piece of bronze got snapped in half you could weld it back together whereas a stone could only be thrown away and replaced. Bronze armour makes sense, can you imagine a stone breastplate? You can make mirrors out of bronze, stone can only take so much of a polish. You can melt bronze and pour it into a sand mould and you have any shape you like, you can only reshape stone by hitting it repeatedly with another heavy stone.

So.

If you want people to use greener alternatives, you don't do it by making them feel guilty about what they're using now. You don't try and legislate them away, or make them too expensive.

No, you make the greener alternatives BETTER. For instance, the ever-popular example of the low-energy lightbulb. It makes light, just like an old-school bulb. It plugs into the same socket. It costs less to buy(in the long run.) It costs less to use. It lasts longer. There's just no downside to using them. And if every home in America had just one energy-saving bulb, it'd be equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the road.

Have you seen some of the modern, green homes they can build nowadays? Have you seen how clever, how efficient they are?

The vast majority of costs in running a house are incurred by temperature control. Take a shower.

No, not go and have a shower. I mean, as an example, consider an electric shower: Cold water comes in. It gets heated up. It gets sprayed onto the skin, and then runs down the drain. The water is in contact with your skin for a matter of seconds.

The moronic, global-warming-centric approach would be to force you to use showers which pump less water. Or have us all taking sponge baths. Or just smelling bad. Because heating the water takes energy, and using energy is bad. So says stupidity.

If you want intelligence, look at the Great White Shark.

Not that it's a very clever fish. It's not. Fishes are stupid. But its body can do a very clever thing. Like other fish, the Great White is cold-blooded. The colder the water it swims in gets, the colder its own body gets. That means it slows down and can't catch prey so easily.

But the clever bit is this: Unlike most other fish, and indeed most other types of shark, Great Whites keep consistently warmer than the water they swim in.

As cold-blooded creatures, this should be impossible. The reason it isn't is that life is clever and can evolve systems that, effectively, get something for nothing. They have a heat-transfer system to keep the heat in.

Take two pipes, one hot and one cold. Put them next to each other and pump the water in opposite directions. The heat gets conducted out of the hot and into the cold. With the right design, you can get near-complete efficiency.

In Great Whites, this keeps the heat in so they can stay warmer and hunt better in cold water. A shower that used this principle would use the heat in the water gurgling down the drain to warm the cold water coming in, so no matter how long you spent in the hot shower, you'd use very little energy for heating the water.

A long, luxurious hot shower for free. It helps your power bills and it helps the environment. There's no downside.

Now take that one simple example and apply the same thinking to the whole house. Minimise losses, maximise gains.

Modern eco-houses generate more power than they lose. Next time you pay your electricity bill, think about the fact that some people are living in houses that provide an income for them by generating electricity instead.

Imagine if every house did that. That's when you get rid of fossil-fuel-burning power stations. A completely distributed power-generating system. No more power bills, no more power cuts. Better in every way. Attractive image, isn't it?

Have you heard about the vertical farm? Skyscrapers that grow food. And process sewage and waste water. And produce power. And free up farmland for other uses. And cut transport costs. And don't need pesticides or fertilizers. And don't get affected by drought or adverse weather.

That means.. Organically-grown, cheaper, fresher food that's more environmentally friendly than current technology.

And if every city block has one of these things, then sewage treatment is widely distributed, as is food production and power generation. That means, yet again, that it's far harder for a failure to knock-out a system.

Something else we see in the news a lot, along with global warming, is terrorism. Right now, a terrorist can hit a power plant and know it'll do a lot of damage. A distributed system makes this impossible. So it's cheaper, more efficient, more environmentally friendly, AND safer.

I could go on and on and on. There are so many ways in which being environmentally-friendly would mean life being made cheaper and better. Technology has, for centuries, been predicated on inefficient but simple approaches that assume a vast over-supply of energy. Simply by changing from "We have so much energy we can throw it away" to "How can we do the same thing for less effort?" can get us so many better ways of doing things.

All it takes is a little bit of intelligence. But that's so hard to find amongst all the hype and hysteria.

If the eco-nuts really want to save the world, they should shut up about all the damage we're doing to tomorrow, and start talking up the ways they can make life better today.