Slimming for the Beach

Europe’s great heat­wave of 2003, which claimed an esti­mated 35,000 lives and cost the continent’s economies an esti­mated £7bn alto­gether, may also have fuelled fur­ther global warm­ing. A team of more than 30 sci­en­tists reports in Nature today that the scorch­ing tem­per­a­tures and pro­longed drought have sti­fled Europe’s for­est growth and released huge quan­ti­ties of car­bon diox­ide into the atmos­phere, to feed still warmer sum­mers in future.”

Guardian Report
Let’s read that again.
35,000 peo­ple were killed in a heat­wave in Europe, caused by global warm­ing.
Why doesn’t this ter­rify us? Is it because it didn’t hap­pen in one fell swoop? Is it because it hap­pened in a vil­lage here, a small town there, a for­est fire some­where remote, and in cities it was mostly the old and dis­abled who died?
Even now, so-called busi­ness friendly polit­i­cal par­ties, in both Europe and the United States, ignore the evi­dence. This despite the fact that there is over­whelm­ing evi­dence
that eco-awareness is good for busi­ness. (See Paul Hawken’s The Ecol­ogy of Com­merce and Nat­ural Cap­i­tal­ism: The Next Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion ) .
Hope­fully Ger­many will not go back­wards in this regard when a gov­ern­ment is finally installed.

Mean­while, back in lit­tle old, glob­ally insignif­i­cant Ire­land, the pow­ers that be in Dublin decided to aban­don par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Euro­pean Car-Free Day. As Mary Raf­ferty reports in The Irish Times on Thurs­day (sub­scrip­tion only),

Sus­tain­able Energy Ire­land this week pub­lished the results of a sur­vey designed to analyse pub­lic atti­tudes to global warm­ing and our respon­si­bil­ity for it. Sched­uled to mark Energy Aware­ness Week 2005, it com­pared the views of peo­ple in Dublin, Cork, Lim­er­ick, Gal­way, Water­ford and Dun­dalk.
Most star­tling of the results is that uniquely in Ire­land, a major­ity of Dublin­ers (57 per cent) do not believe that their actions con­tribute in any way to cli­mate change. Even pres­i­dent George Bush has stopped try­ing to get away with that one, which make this level of denial among Dublin’s cit­i­zens acutely dis­turb­ing. Across the rest of the coun­try, over two-thirds of peo­ple accept the over­whelm­ing sci­en­tific evi­dence that their actions do indeed have an effect on global warming.”

Pre­vi­ous Car-Free days were unpop­u­lar with motorists who dis­cov­ered that pub­lic trans­port in Dublin was lam­en­ta­ble. This is the appar­ent excuse for drop­ping the day alto­gether, a clas­sic case of shoot­ing the mes­sen­ger.
Any­one who knows the Dublin sub­urbs is aware that it is lit­er­ally impos­si­ble to live in many of them with­out a car. This is because of decades of bad and some­times cor­rupt plan­ning.
And peo­ple com­mute so far to work, it isn’t always prac­ti­cal to bring a neigh­bour or friend. But there is no excuse where this is prac­ti­cal; there is no excuse for SUVs and other unnec­es­sar­ily large, pol­lut­ing cars, which should be taxed to the hilt; and there is cer­tainly no excuse for say­ing it is some­one else’s problem.