I've been thinking

Today's quote for the day: "The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."

We hear so many conflicting reports about climate change that I have never been able to make up my mind which side I believe in. This all started years ago. I was working in the newspaper industry when it became all the rage (and a government directive) for newspapers to be printed on paper with as great a content of recycled material as possible. On the face of it, that sounds a very laudable ambition. Just think of all those old newspapers that would no longer end up in landfill sites. But there is/was another side to the story. The old newsprint has to be collected and transported to a factory where it has to be cleaned of ink (using noxious chemicals) before it can be pulped and turned into fresh newsprint. The virgin newsprint, however, is/was imported, mainly from Finland, and was produced from timber grown especially for that purpose. There was a lot of rubbish talked about saving the tropical rain forests although no paper was ever made from that timber. What was usually (conveniently?) overlooked was that for every tree felled for newsprint, two were planted - and that growing trees absorb more CO2 than mature ones. All-in-all, recycling newsprint required as much energy as producing virgin newsprint, and resulted in less CO2 being sucked out of the atmosphere.

All that is not really what I have been thinking about, but it does indicate how ambivalent I am about the warnings of doom for our planet. All the same, it would not be a bad thing to reduce our use of fossil fuels and reduce the volume of CO2 we pump into the atmosphere. With that in mind it occurred to me that if every car driver reduced his/her weekly mileage by just 5 miles, this would make quite a sizeable difference. I don't know how many cars there are in this country (and I have no intention of trying to find out), but I do know that the population is about 60 million. Obviously, not everyone has a car, but if we assume that there are 15 million cars in this country, then a reduction of 5 miles a week for each of them would mean 75 million miles less each week = 3,750 million miles a year. If the average fuel consumption was only 25 miles per gallon, that would be a reduction of 150 million gallons of petrol/diesel used each year and several tone of CO2 less. And that's just in this country: if the idea spread to the rest of Western Europe, North America, etc the savings are potentially enormous. Just by driving 5 miles less each week.