The Environment

Ok, I'm breaking my rules, and putting more stuff in my blog.

This time, I'm looking at the environment, as I feel I stuff to say about it - and I want to clarify some things that people may have found slightly conflicting - they weren't, but it wasn't clear.

Carbon Neutrality

I think the way we should deal with the environment issue is through carbon neutrality. That is, we should not put any more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than we take out. As I think we have gone too far, I think that it would probably also be of benefit to take a bit of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. So, to explain how this all works, I have a little table. Note that, unless otherwise stated, I assume that all wood comes from managed forests, where enough trees are planted to counteract those cut down.

Increases Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide	Carbon Neutral	Decreases Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
Deforestation / Unmanaged Forests (trees not re-planted) Burning Fossil Fuels Cement and Concrete	Burning Wood, Charcoal or Oils from farmed plants Solar, Wind and Tidal Energy Nuclear Fusion Nuclear Fission (This is however environmentally a very bad idea. It takes far to long for the nuclear waste to decay into safe products, and I do not think we are good enough at keeping it safe in the meantime.) Steel Pile Foundations Recyling Paper	Wooden Houses Putting paper in a big airtight room, and leaving it there

Cars

Note that I have not condemned cars. I think cars are wonderful devices, which allow us to where we want, when we want, with as much stuff as we need. The only problems they have are due to us running them on the wrong fuel, which can be changed.

solutions to this include bio-diesel (eg. vegetable oil powered cars), electric cars (where the electricity was generated from renewable energy) and hydrogen powered cars (where the hydrogen was extracted using renewable energy).

Therefore, I differ significantly on government policies on road taxation. I think that congestion charging, toll road charging and road tax should be abandoned, in favour of a carbon tax applied to fossil fuels. This alone is not sufficient, as the new technology needs a big push to replace the fossil fuels. Therefore we need a huge investment in, and subsidies for this technology, so that people can all afford to make the switch.

Conclusion

So there we have it. Let's all put solar and wind generator on our nice wooden houses built on top of steel pile foundations. And let's put 100,000 wind generators and hydrogen plants around the coast to generate hydrogen for our cars.