Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

South Tyneside wasting it’s time

It will take more than the metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, population 152,000, to solve global warming. Even if a billion people turn off their lights this Saturday, the entire event will be equivalent to switching off China’s emissions for six short seconds. In economic terms, the environmental and humanitarian benefits from the efforts of the entire developed world would add up to just $21,000.

And it gets worse: the event could cause higher overall pollution than if we just left our lights on. When asked to extinguish electricity, people turn to candlelight. Candles seem natural, but are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. If you use one candle for each extinguished globe, you’re essentially not cutting CO2 at all, and with two candles you’ll emit more CO2. Moreover, candles produce indoor air pollution 10 to 100 times the level of pollution caused by all cars, industry and electricity production.

Bjorn Lomborg in The Australian

Well, it’s nice to know that we are being thought about by our antipodean cousins, let me know if there’s a run on candles at Asda won’t you. In the meantime I’ll be switching the lights out closing the door behind me and going to the pub where i won’t be sitting in darkness and enjoying the sport on someone else’s gigantic plasma monster!

Well, I may not be totally convinced by the so called scientific arguments yet, I’m still sceptical and think it’s a huge leftist plot to extort even more taxes for redistribution, but you cannot say I ain’t doin’ my bit.

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