It may seem pretty obvious but hanks to the clean benefits of solar energy it has no such problems. Leaking solar energy is not likely to do much damage. We should be focusing more and more on the clean renewable energy technologies we have available to provide for some if not all of our energy needs and we need to put more effort into reducing our energy requirements so we can call an end to the oil based economy and start on the clean and renewable energy based economy in the future.

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Didn’t we just have an iPhone released that was supposed to be the best phone on the planet? Oh, maybe that was a year ago. A whole year, wow. So what has changed since?

Sure, the iPhone looks cute and it is a beautifully designed little thing but does the world really need another 110 million mobile phones thrown in the rubbish bin because a thinner, faster, improved screen version has been released? Hopefully, the old models will be recycled but is the the great achievement of the human civilization, to be able to come up with another wasteful technology product that everyone feels they must have and then replace, every six or twelve months?

The success of the human race may prove to be its downfall. Like a virus that grows and grows until it eventually kills its host we have come to dominate our home planet. We have bred and increased the population to the point where the resources of the planet are being stretched to supply our needs and our needs have grown along with the population.

Once we would have been happy to have enough food to eat and enough wood to build a shelter and keep warm. Now, it seems, we have to have homes and lives full of technology that is draining not just our capacity to provide the energy to power all these gadgets but it is also draining us of the limited time we have every day.

Thre was once a time when a product had a limited lifetime. That time was usually limited by how long it would last before finally breaking down. With todays efficient design and manufacturing that is far less of a problem and manufacturers have had to find another way of convincing us it is time to replace a product.

The result is a constant stream of new releases. Just like with the washing powder adverts of years ago, each new version of our phones, computers, TVs and cars is New And Improved but can life be sustained at this pace?

Humans have been successful because we have been able to think ahead and learn from our mistakes and we are naturally lazy and always look for a better and easier way of doing things. We have developed technology that has enabled us to improve our health, our comfort and our lives to a degree unimaginable to people of a few generations ago but how much longer can this go on at the incredible rate of change we are experiencing these days.

A thousand years ago at a time when the Romans were conquering Europe people no doubt thought of it as the end of the world and for many of them, it probably was, but in those times change took decades or even centuries. Looking forward it is impossible to imagine what changes there might be in the next thousand years but one thing is very clear. We cannot go on as we are doing right now.

The popluation is growing enormously and there are few undiscovered places left to be exploited to supply our growing needs. Our demand for resources grows exponentially though the supply of those resources is finite and reducing as we use them. In the past plague, pestilance and wars kept the population in check while local supply of food and resources limited the possibilities of the local population. Now the worlds resources are available to all, at a price, but the cost is more than just money.

We have been on a consumption binge that has lasted twenty or thirty years but the financial impact of this became clear when the world financial system came close to collapse. Hopefully, we are working our way out of the problems that caused but it is easier to print money to sort out a fnancial crisis than it is to find the minerals and food to sort out a world short of both.

The simple fact is that we cannot continue as we are now. The new iPhone may be a magnificent example of man’s ingenuity, design skills and technological achievements but we need to face up to the fact that we need to reduce our consumption of the resources available to a far more manageable level if we want future generations of humans to have any chance of having a happy and healthy life.

The resources we are throwing away will not be replaced. When they are gone nothing will be left for the future. It may not happen within our lifetime but if we have any concerns for future generations then we should be thinking about the long term consequences of our actions now.

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We are always being told how safe things are and that there is no need to be concerned. The oil industry would claim an excellent record but that is of no use when things do suddenly go terribly wrong.

Just suppose this was a nuclear power plant that suffered catastrophic failure and it was as difficult to shut down and secure as this oil well is proving to be. What chance would the local population have and how wide an area of the country might be permanently unusable?

It is all very well saying there is only a one in one hundred thousand chance or whatever the figure is, but when you have 1,000 nuclear facilities around the world that suggests we can expect to get one failure every ten years.

We actually have 437 operating nuclear power stations at present, according to the European Nuclear Society, with another 55 under construction. The old plants are reaching the ends of their lives in many cases and new construction is likely to be safer and better designed than the earlier ground breaking installations but if there is one thing to be learned from the OIL rig disaster in the USA. If it can go wrong, it might.

It doesn’t matter how many safety features you have installed. You can train people until they are blue in the face. Whatever you do, nothing is certain and mistakes, errors and unexpected events can occur that throw all your plans and security measures out of the window.

We are facing an enormous environmental disaster from a simple underwater pipe that carries oil out of the ground heaven forbid we ever have to deal with a nuclear power station out of control that we are unable to shut down or contain.

Accidents happen, that’s why they are called accidents, and I don’t care how well you plan something is sure to go wrong sometime though human error or malfunction.

Remember the spacecraft that crashed into Mars because some of the calculations had been done in Imperial measurements and others done in Metric? They were very clever people who managed to make such a careless mistake. People make mistakes, it’s what makes us human.

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So, when I heard that government ministers were supporting a proposal that we should have fewer cows and sheep and we should all eat less meat which would reduce our intake of saturated fats, it all made a lot of sense. At least, it did until the ministry of agriculture heard what was going on. They reacted rather forcefully stating that farmers and the meat industry would not agree. Really? The meat industry would oppose us all being healthier and improving the climate? Now there’s a strange thing.

Suddenly all the other supporters in government started to backtrack on cows and this time the methane was pouring out of the mouths of Ministers in their eagerness to deny they actually supported the idea. It seems the votes of farmers and the meat industry matter far more than the health of the nation and the planet.

I guess it was hoping for a lot to think that any member of parliament would put the health of the nation and the climate before getting votes. Silly me for thinking they might.

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If removing the plastic bag from society were the answer life would be nice and simple but of course this is simply the tip of a very large iceberg. The truth of the matter is that the plastic bag you carry your shopping home in is almost irrelevent in terms of using environmental resources. Many people reuse them for all sorts of uses. I personally use all the bags I get as bin liners for my kitchen waste bin.

It is what goes in the bag that is the problem. All the waste materiels you get when you have unpacked your shopping, the tomatoes that might have been shipped in by air from Spain, or Egypt or Chile. Strawberries out of season flown in from the southern hemisphere. There is just so much STUFF.

If Gordon Brown wants to show he really has green credentials he needs to lead a change of mindset that stops and thinks about what we buy and where we buy it from. We have been encouraged to think that buying new stuff all the time is good for us and good for the economy. It certainly generates money but good for us? Hardly. There are as many if not more unhappy people around now as there were years ago before all this consumerism came along. New TVs don’t make people happy. They give us a brief moment of elation as we get our new toy but that feeling soon fades. We are much like our children and we would get as excited and almost as much satisfaction from playing with the box as we get from the new toy that came in that box.

We don’t need to worry much about the plastic bag. The amount of material used in the making of them is negligable and their environmental impact can be reduced through the use of bidegradable versions. It isn’t the bag we need to worry about. What we should be worrying about is the fact that the contents of the bag have had a lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere to get it in the shop for us to buy and put in our plastic bag and most of the time we don’t need them.

This is the tragedy of the environmental crisis we face. It isn’t that we have damaged our planet to get food for our children. We have damaged the planets ability to support life so we can have new and bigger cars, new abd bigger tvs, newer fashionable kitchens replacing one that was only put in a couple of years ago, trips to foreign countries for stag nights and strawberries at christmas.

It hasn’t made people happy and it has caused immense damage to the environment we depend on for life itself. We may already have done too much damage for human being to survive in the future, only time will tell, but as an epitaph we will be able to read. Here lies the human race. A wonderful opportunity wasted by greed for money and material things.

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