Gareth Kane on our terrible dirty secret
Playing around with the UK Government's new carbon calculator, Gareth Kane asks are we being honest with ourselves?
Last week I tried out the UK Government's swanky new Carbon Calculator. I threw in my stats and got a grand total of 3.82 tonnes - compared with a national average of 4.48t - pretty good but helped by the fact that I haven't flown in over a year. The calculator is very swish and easy to use, but I was concerned with what it didn't count - food, clothing, other products, work, waste disposal etc, etc.
This got me thinking. Environmental author Chris Goodall reckons that if you take the UK's total carbon dioxide emissions and divide them by the population, then you get 12 tonnes each, not 4.5tonnes. So we are responsible for almost three times as much carbon dioxide what the Government is telling us we are responsible for. But is that the whole picture?
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Stumble It!
President Bush has once again lived up to his hype and rejected any binding agreement for the USA to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite Tony Blair’s insistence that he can influence the president, he has once again failed to deliver any tangible evidence of this so-called ‘special relationship’. Maybe there is a special relationship, Bush and Blair seem to have an affinity with each other that allows a lot of give and take between them, Blair gives a lot and Bush happily takes a lot. Joking aside, where does this leave the rest of the world? 
US president Bush has confused the issue of global greenhouse gas emissions control in a clever move to stall any real progress at the G8 summit next week. Where anyone with any kind of concern for our planet’s future, and hence our own future would see this as a disaster for greenhouse gas emission reduction, our prime minister, Tony Blair called it an important step forward. An important step forward? To undermine the rest of the world’s efforts and to refuse to accept any responsibility for global warming is a step forward? Where British and German officials have stressed that a requirement for the next international climate agreement should be binding caps on carbon pollution for developed nations and limiting climate change to 2 degrees Celsius, President Bush is refusing to accept any cap on greenhouse gas emissions for the USA, as he thinks it will damage the economy. 
There is growing concern amongst some members of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) about Japan’s request to allow them to hunt a limited number of whales around some of its coastal towns. They are agreeing to stop hunting the endangered Humpback whale in exchange for this. New Zealand and Australia are especially up in arms about it. Greenland, Russia and Alaska also want to increase their quota for hunting whales. While many countries are oppose to whale hunting, there are some communities that depend on the whaling industry for their existence. This is another example of human interest conflicting with the environment.
