Sunday, December 10, 2006
DESTROY THE PLANET FOR FUN!
The Guardian’s George Monbiot, a few weeks ago:
One of the reasons why so little has been done to stop climate change is that everyone makes an exception for themselves.
Including George himself, who next proceeds to demand restrictions on sport:
I don’t want to be a killjoy and I recognise that many sports are considered a matter of life and death by their fans. But climate change really is a matter of life and death. However important the next fixture might seem, it doesn’t compare to the drying out of sub-Saharan Africa or the flooding of some of the world’s major cities ... To avert [global warming], the latest figures suggest, we need a 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions from every economic sector in the rich world by 2030. And that, I am sorry to say, includes sport.
Beginning with ...
Motor racing. There is a direct relationship between an engine’s performance and the amount of greenhouse gases it produces: the faster the car, the quicker it cooks the planet.
Nonsense. A 40-year-old VW Beetle produces far more pollutants per kilometre than a modern Ferrari. Monbiot is an idiot.
Even sports such as football and athletics that are inherently harmless cause major environmental effects, thanks to the transport of spectators. The organisers of the Sydney Olympics did more or less all they could to make the Games as green as possible: they ran the buildings in the Olympic Village on solar power, used recycled materials and cleaned up contaminated sites. Even Greenpeace gave them a score of six out of 10. But Sydney is on the other side of the world. Just one return journey from the UK to Australia uses twice a person’s sustainable emission of carbon dioxide for an entire year.
Monbiot flew to Australia from the UK only a few years ago. Still paying off that carbon debt, Georgie?
Perhaps we should recognise that some sports are simply too wasteful to be sustained. It is, after all, just entertainment. Can we really live with the idea that we might destroy the planet for fun?
To his credit, Monbiot suggests a replacement for all the sports he would ban. To his eternal discredit, that replacement is ... I’m sorry; I can’t bring myself to type the terrible words:
For years a group of us struggled to find a sport that everyone could play. The young men were happy with football, but women, children and older people got hurt in collisions. We tried hockey, with disastrous results. Cricket and rounders lacked excitement. Then someone suggested ultimate frisbee and we have never looked back ...
It’s a great sport - I don’t why it isn’t played more widely.
A planet under the heel of frisbee people is a planet that deserves to be destroyed.