The perceptive amongst you might have noticed a small gang of students knocking around outside the Union looking as green as an envious Hulk after a dicey kebab.
Apparently, our fauna-shaded friends are promoting people and planet’s ‘Go Green’ campaign, encouraging us wasteful student types to be friendlier to the environment.
I say allegedly because I didn’t actually see them up close myself, so don’t know the in-depth details of the campaign, but as you can see I’m taking the message very seriously by ensuring that this page maintains its high standards of name-bar green-ness.
In all seriousness though, it’s important to do what we can for the environment, recycling and all, so hats off to you guys in green, and also to new initiatives to make the Union bars more environmentally friendly.
I can’t help feeling a little bit as though we might have the wrong end of this old campaigning stick to a degree though.
I mean, its all well and good to encourage people to turn lights off, but surely that’s a personal preference anyway; turning off lights saves money.
The real questions that need to be faced up to over and above what you or I can do about it while watching Neighbors.
In a truly advanced country though should we need to be polluting every time we boil the kettle or flick on the tv?
Ultimately, we should be in a society where, assuming you can afford it, you can use as much damned energy as you want without feeling guilty or destroying the environment, and that means one of two things: renewable energy sources or nuclear.
Dilemma eh? Worse still are the dilemmas within the sources. The recently proposed Severn barrier could potentially produce around five to six percent of Britains energy as I understand it, and all nice free ozone layer saving hydro-electric energy at that.Wind turbines have the potential in offshore batteries to provide a number of coastal towns with power whilst land based turbines can power a number of small villages, hugely cutting the amount of power we consume from our main plants, which, if nuclear, would produce an abundance of relatively clean energy for the big cities.
However, a barrier would also destroy Severn estuary habitats, and produce very expensive energy due to the immense cost to build.
Wind plants of course, really destroy that beautiful view that so many people love to look at over the top of their Daily Mail and naturally, no-one wants to live next to a nuclear power plant; it destroys your house value faster than living next door to a thousand strong camp of all-night raving new age travellers with a penchant for collecting ASBOs.
I guess we’ll just have to make do, since they’re all such clearly valid reasons for remaining stuck in the 20th century on a power source that is destroying the planet.
Or we can just take the extreme measure, and never use electricity at all, or maybe, just maybe, we can realise the greater social good and move off polluting power sources.
Sorry I’d love to write further but I’ve got to go. Apparently my laptop is contributing to the hole in the Ozone layer.
