The Linux Extremist

I read an item in the newspaper yesterday which made me raise an eyebrow. Apparently, Al Gore is on his way to Oslo, Norway to accept his Nobel Prize for his work in “raising awareness” about climate change. From there, he will be going on to Bali for the present international conference on protecting the environment.

I really hope I’m not the only one who has spotted some disturbing things: air travel is supposed to be bad. It is supposedly a major contributor to the carbon emissions problem. Yet Al Gore and all the Bali delegates aren’t canoeing to their destination.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. These international conferences tend not to happen in crap, nasty places; rather, they meet in Bali, which is supposed to be beautiful, warm and have sandy beaches, and Rio which is beautiful, warm and has sandy beaches, and…you get the idea. Neither conference location is close or convenient for most of the delegates from countries that are supposedly the root of the problem, namely Europe and North America. In fact, Bali and Rio aren’t particularly close for the “new era polluters” like India and China. Indeed, if one wanted to pick places on the map that would require the most carbon burned in order to reach them, only the Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica would have been better.

Meanwhile, these same politicians and “experts” are drawing up a blueprint to tell the rest of us how to live. I can imagine Al Gore, puffed up with pride and pomposity, sitting down to a lobster dinner with these people, basking in the glow of their mutual self-righteousness. To someone who has to stand in a queue on a cold December day in West Sussex in order fill up their car with increasingly expensive fuel, this is an irritation. If they continue to fail to lead by example, these officials are bound to provoke a backlash.

I don’t think they get it. For someone who goes to Tesco on Saturday mornings and watches every penny, picking store own brand when possible and feeling like getting “Tesco Finest” is something of an indulgence, being told that one’s life has to change is fairly ridiculous. I’m not poor, Britain is not a poor country (clue: poverty doesn’t generally involve owning satellite dishes), but the grand assumption that I and others can afford more green taxes is ridiculous.

Forget the punishment element of it too. Public transport in this country is expensive and its coverage is too poor to get me to my work directly. At least in Britain I have some idea of the relationship of these costs to what I pay to drive myself; driving is cheaper. This cost in Continental Europe is masked through paying higher taxes. Meanwhile the governments of the world are expecting people like myself, and the Pierres, Hanses and Luigis to keep the economy going through spending and borrowing.

My father once told me, “it’s easy to be socialist when you’re rich”. The same applies to Green; these officials think about people like myself as an abstraction, part of a faceless mass that has to take on their prescriptions of less consumption, more taxation, and greater inconvenience. This elite feels they have done their duty by “raising awareness”; their lifestyles which span across the globe do not change.

They should be warned: the other day, I did give up my car because I was tired from spending hours on the road, due to the fact that planning for roads was simply inadequate for the demand. I had to take a cab from a train station to cover the deficiency in public transport. En route, the driver told me that he was sick of the taxes on fuel, sick of how the local authority had rejigged the traffic lights in favour of buses, and anyway, those buses were due to disappear given their subsidy had been cut off, and said that “no one trusts this government”. Unless the same people who tell us that our lives have to change, show some sign they can change their lives too (I know for a fact they could meet online rather than go cavorting with Balinese bikini girls), they will be met with this skepticism, and rightly so.

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