Live Earth

So what should we all do?

The message is coming at me every day. I am a bad person. I have polluted the planet with my electric light bulb use, my foreign holidays and my need to buy food with over enthusiastic wrapping so now I am going to pay for my heinous crimes by either drowning in a flood or sizzling like a big pink sausage until I explode from over heating and it’ll be no ones fault but mine. As an individual I am responsible for the state of the planet but I changed my light bulbs, didn’t fly anywhere during my last holiday and have refused loads of plastic bags in the supermarket lately (except when I forget to take my own bag!)but still I am getting messages that polar bears are drowning due to the lack of ice to live on in the Arctic, people have drowned on the streets of Sheffield in severe floods and landfill sites in Hong Kong are still filling up faster than a speeding bullet. My individual effort didn’t do diddly squat.

Now this message is coming at you as well as me so don’t try and hide from it. I read the same papers as you do, I watched the Inconvenient Truth the same as you did and I have watched the same news reports as you did. So I have to come to the conclusion that it is YOU who is the bad person and not me.

This must be a true and indisputable fact because I have done what they said and nothing changed so I just have to assume that other people just do not have the same level of social conscious as me. Come on – spill – have you been as environmentally friendly as you could have? Search deep inside yourself and answer truthfully because if the answer is no then its your fault that the pollution in Hong Kong is causing more and more respiratory diseases, that the world wide UV index figures are rising because of the thinning ozone layer and that 90% of wastewater in developing countries is discharged into rivers and streams without any treatment.

How guilty do you feel now?

Never worry gentle reader we are about to be saved. This weekend in New York, London, Johannesburg, Rio De Janeiro, Shanghai, Tokyo, Sydney and Hamburg some singers and bands are getting together to sing some songs. Live Earth has come to save us all. Praise be I say. It never occurred to me that by flying a lot of rich rock stars first class to various cities, using hundreds of kilowatts of power to light their stages and power their PA systems and lighting while broadcasting the proceedings all around the globe that we could reverse the effects of our massive carbon footprint (I just had to use that phrase didn’t I, you are nobody if you don’t say it these days) on our sick planet and by the end of it the skies over Hong Kong will be clear and bright and all the polar bears will be happy on their ice flow once again.

It is truly heart warming to know that as well as those nice rock star chaps that the other partners http://www.liveearth.org/partners.php
in the Live Earth event are Phillips, Pepsi and Absolut Vodka, gosh I am so touched by their dedication to gaining a cleaner environment for us all, aren’t you?

Listen up – I have an idea! Let’s all burn our cars, wait a minute that will cause far too much carbon, OK no, let’s all leave our cars at home and turn them into greenhouses and get a horse. What about it? Are you in? So we return to the days of no motor cars and so no pollution in the atmosphere. As we all ride along the road people will come out from their homes with shovels and pick up the horse s##t for their greenhouses which used to be their car and life will be sweet.

But wait. If we all had a horse that would be 7 billion horses and think of the horse sh##t that would produce. We’d be up to our necks in the stuff and wouldn’t give a bugger about what we were growing in the greenhouse then because we’d choke on the methane. Back to the drawing board.