Apparently we are antisocial bastards...
Discussion
Mr Whippy said:
Every facet of industry and commercial activity put food on our tables. Just a shame car drivers seem to be the ONLY target of environmental destruction.
As far as I can see, the basic problem is that private cars are seen as a soft target because they are owned by one person, and that one person is going to be much more susceptable to guilt trips about the environment and punitive taxes.
It's much harder to inflict this kind of stuff on, say, industry that pollutes. Also, because cars are owned by one person, it's easy to enforce these measures by using the threat of the law which most people will cave in to through fear of what might happen.
Governments want to be seen to be doing something about the environment because it wins them votes for being 'caring'. The majority of the general public have absolutely NO idea of the causes of pollution or how to address it. They are blindly following a government-sponsored media campaign to make us believe that private cars are 'bad'.
Fast cars are perceived as being worse because many people are fairly puritanical about doing something they enjoy, they want to deny themselves because it makes them feel better. Human nature is always to want to achieve something, therefore, if someone has denied themselves a sports car for cost or reasons of practicality, then they won't like seeing someone who hasn't denied themselves.
silversun said:It is appalling how cars and driving get pummelled whilst air travel - which in terms of greenhouse-gas production per passenger mile is hugely more polluting - not only escapes criticism, it gets subsidised with enormous publicly-assisted airport projects and no duty on jet fuel. The overwhelming majority of driving is necessary for employment, doing chores, making the school run, etc. At the same time the overwhelming majority of air travel is optional nonsense like going to the Caribbean or Spain for a week to snore in the sun and grow skin cancer cells.
Every facet of industry and commercial activity put food on our tables. Just a shame car drivers seem to be the ONLY target of environmental destruction.
As far as I can see, the basic problem is that private cars are seen as a soft target because they are owned by one person, and that one person is going to be much more susceptable to guilt trips about the environment and punitive taxes.
It's much harder to inflict this kind of stuff on, say, industry that pollutes. Also, because cars are owned by one person, it's easy to enforce these measures by using the threat of the law which most people will cave in to through fear of what might happen...
Fast cars are perceived as being worse because many people are fairly puritanical about doing something they enjoy, they want to deny themselves because it makes them feel better. Human nature is always to want to achieve something, therefore, if someone has denied themselves a sports car for cost or reasons of practicality, then they won't like seeing someone who hasn't denied themselves.
Cars represent independence and personal economic success. The would-be masters of our Control Society will tolerate neither.
Funnily enough, the Grauniad readership seem to have turned on him. For a week since that article was published, the letters page has been full of rebuffle, pertaining to the freedoms extended by cars. Pertinant ones that should deliver a kick to Monbiot's balls included a woman who said that the safety and liberty of car ownership meant she could go out of her house after dark without fear of being raped, and another reminded Monbiot of the vital role played by private car owners during the Civil Rights protests in America, where Black people were banned from using taxis and often had their driving licences confiscated, so private car owners offered their services as taxi drivers for Black people fighting for their rights. Both ended upon the lines of 'tell them their antisocial bastards'.
To be honest, have to agree with the comments made by the guy on
www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/07/06/war-x-4/
The USA loves the big motor cars and dont care about fuel efficency, if they paid the same tax as we did and had to pay for their 4x4's then it might be different.
In this country, they are great for farmers and people living in the country, but not really needed for anyone living in the towns, 98.56% of them, who never go off road and like them simply to look cool. Then when they hit other vehicles or people, they trash the other vehicles and usually kill the people....
Might have escaped some people's attention that some fossil fuels are not going to be renewed, ie they run out and having an mpg of 3-5 instead of say 55 mpg in the diesel that I drive, then the fuels run out faster.
Lot of off road are diesel, but guess petrol is easier and who cares if it takes £100 to fill a tank, as it is likely to be very common soon.
Flames are generally ignored
www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/07/06/war-x-4/
The USA loves the big motor cars and dont care about fuel efficency, if they paid the same tax as we did and had to pay for their 4x4's then it might be different.
In this country, they are great for farmers and people living in the country, but not really needed for anyone living in the towns, 98.56% of them, who never go off road and like them simply to look cool. Then when they hit other vehicles or people, they trash the other vehicles and usually kill the people....
Might have escaped some people's attention that some fossil fuels are not going to be renewed, ie they run out and having an mpg of 3-5 instead of say 55 mpg in the diesel that I drive, then the fuels run out faster.
Lot of off road are diesel, but guess petrol is easier and who cares if it takes £100 to fill a tank, as it is likely to be very common soon.
Flames are generally ignored
Scraggles said:
To be honest, have to agree with the comments made by the guy on
www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/07/06/war-x-4/
Really? Why? It's nearly all lies.
Suckmychrsitmas said:
It's quite extraordinary just how inexpensive it is to fly these days: the cost in no way reflects, especially when compared with driving, the actual environmental damage caused.
And what makes you think that the punitive taxes levied on road transport are actually used on environmental remediation? Always assuming that you can actually assign costs to environmental damage in the first place. All the lentilista publications I've ever seen (i) make these numbers up & (ii) completely ignore the benefits of private road transport.
Monbiot's a melon; green on the outside and red in the middle.
Gazboy said:
To be honest, have to agree with the comments made by the guy on
www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/07/06/war-x-4/
The USA loves the big motor cars and dont care about fuel efficency, if they paid the same tax as we did and had to pay for their 4x4's then it might be different.
In this country, they are great for farmers and people living in the country, but not really needed for anyone living in the towns, 98.56% of them, who never go off road and like them simply to look cool. Then when they hit other vehicles or people, they trash the other vehicles and usually kill the people....
Might have escaped some people's attention that some fossil fuels are not going to be renewed, ie they run out and having an mpg of 3-5 instead of say 55 mpg in the diesel that I drive, then the fuels run out faster.
Lot of off road are diesel, but guess petrol is easier and who cares if it takes £100 to fill a tank, as it is likely to be very common soon.
Flames are generally ignored
Normaly I'd carefuly argue the point, but today I can't be bothered- that's a load of bollox mate.
Ditto, except I will add one thing:
MPG. Since when did it become a sexy Top Trumps fact? There was a time when cars were either 'thirsty' (below 20mpg), 'average' (20-40mpg), and 'economical' (40+ mpg). People just accepted this, bought what they could afford to run and ceased giving a s
. Nowadays I notice that cars are sold on the precise mpg figure that a car gave when attached to a rolling road somewhere in a lab. The car will never do that figure, and the chances are that during normal driving it will fall into the old 'thirsty', 'average' and 'economical' categories.
I had a friend of mine the other day tell me that 40mpg was 'thirsty' and 'terrible'. Why? If you can afford to put it in the tank, why should other people condemn you by making it an issue.
However, I will concur that the Americans don't pay nearly enough fuel tax. Neither, for that matter, do airlines.
I don't think that taxes derived from road transport are used for environmental remediation to the extent they should be and I never contended they were. And assigning a monetary value to environmental damage will be arbitrary, of course, but that's not to say it is not worth doing.
I actually feel that taxing people more heavily for driving a fuel-inefficient car, such as one of the larger 4X4s, makes sense, but that it's idiotic to do this without dramatically increasing how heavily, say, air travel is taxed first and abandoning this idee fixe that increased airtraffic is an essential requirement for a healthy economy.
I actually feel that taxing people more heavily for driving a fuel-inefficient car, such as one of the larger 4X4s, makes sense, but that it's idiotic to do this without dramatically increasing how heavily, say, air travel is taxed first and abandoning this idee fixe that increased airtraffic is an essential requirement for a healthy economy.
Suckmychrsitmas said:
I actually feel that taxing people more heavily for driving a fuel-inefficient car, such as one of the larger 4X4s, makes sense.
No! As I said, the mpg fascists have outlandish, lab-based ideas as to what constitutes a 'thirsty' car, and believe me, anything less than a Prius would be buggered. In their mind, a car is either 'economical' (199.9873762065730127665 mpg in simulation), and anything less is 'thirsty'. It's like a schoolboy with Top Trumps cards declaring everything except a Bugatti Veyron to be 'slow'.
Put the tax on fuel. If the car uses more, you pay more. Simple, and leaves no room for lab-based rationalising of mpg, or tracking-based control either.
Scraggles said:
To be honest, have to agree with the comments made by the guy on
www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/07/06/war-x-4/
Rumour has it his next target for excessive generation of CO2 is historical re-enactments.
Twincam16 said:
No! As I said, the mpg fascists have outlandish, lab-based ideas as to what constitutes a 'thirsty' car, and believe me, anything less than a Prius would be buggered.
Each year the SMMT ( a car trade group) have an annual economy competition. I read about the one a few years ago. The route started and finished at Gaydon, went straight across Brum, into Wales and up and down every steep hill they could find.
Within the competition there was a trophy for the car/crew who managed to exceed the cars official mpg figure the most. One of the very few cars that failed to do so was the Insight, a pre-Prius hybrid. The insight was supposed to be able to do 80 mpg, but when took over a proper route, even with expert drivers the car was unable to acheive anything like. It was of course the diesels who exceeded their mpg figure the most. Hasn't an Audi A2 tdi been driven round the coast of the UK at an average of 115mpg, almost twice that of an Insight?
TBH, I agree with many of Monbiots sentiments, but lord, his articles are shot through with gaping holes. The man really does talk so much nonsense it is all but impossible to weed out the accurate facts.
Suckmychrsitmas said:Couldnt agree more, so how about slapping massive amounts of tax on bus and train fares for starters. If we are ever going to genuinely tackle environmental issues, we need to get people off buses and trains and into cars, even the dirty thirsty ones are cleaner and more economical than the best that public transport can offer.
I'm suggesting tax be used to encourage people to drive more environmentally-friendly vehicles.
Suckmychrsitmas said:Modern private transport vehicles are very environmentally friendly, why don't you focus on a better priority like diesel engined buses? Bus worshippers like Prescott, Livingstone and sundry lefty dinosaurs are causing more harm to air qualty by expanding the bus fleet than all the 4x4 owners in the UK. I use the term 'harm' as 'damage to the environment' is bog standard, vague, woolly ecoclaptrap that needs to be specified before it has any meaning. Sounds like there's a bit of carbon dioxide envy in there smc, you still believe in man-made global warming then? Quick, join the majority of scientists that take another more realistic angle before the next ice age sets in...what follows is a true account, in factual terms, of a recent sequence of events, portrayed in PH styleee:
I'm suggesting tax be used to encourage people to drive more environmentally-friendly vehicles.
true believer Naomi Oreskes might have said:
With an international climate conference approaching, I carried out a literature search in December 2004 using my expert timing and sense of occasion, using the keywords 'climate change' for publications between 1993 and 2003 listed in the ISI database. As a result I examined the abstracts of 928 peer-reviewed research papers, 75% of which endorsed the man-made global warming viewpoint proving that there is a clear consensus on the causes of climate change. I submitted my findings for publication and was pleased to see the result of my work spread around the globe following publication in the journal Science
Ah but...
Dr Benny Peiser of LJM Uni who tried to replicate this work could have said:
Naughty naughty, when anyone puts those words into the ISI database to carry out the literature search as described, it highlights almost 12000 papers, what happened to the other 11000?
After a pause...
Naomi Oreskes might have said:
Ah, yes, well, you see, what I actually did, but not what I said in my published paper, was use three words 'global climate change' not two words 'climate change'. I'd better send a correction in to the journal Science hadn't I
She did. But Dr P was on a roll...
Dr Peiser could have said:
OK, let's skip over the notion that those three words might skew the survey towards papers which endorse man-made global warming, or how the mistake in reporting your search words occurred, because when I carried out the same search as you I found 1247 papers of which 1117 included abstracts. When these were examined, only 13 (1%) explicitly endorsed man-made global warming...whereas 34 i.e. between two and three times more papers, rejected the view that mankind's activities were driving recent climate change. Looking at the big picture, only one-third of the papers either support or assume man-made causes, meaning two-thirds don't, so the real consensus is...
Naomi Oreskes said:
Meanwhile the UK Government Chief Scientist Dr David King, the same man who masterminded the nation's response to the last Foot and Mouth epidemic, accompanied by the prestigious Royal Society, go out with statements supporting the BLiar emissionary position on global warming quoting Oreskes study which has been comprehensively rubbished. Anti- 4x4 campaigners and sundry pinko-greens also spout the same discredited survey to the n'th degree. Of course given that Oreskes' original result was given wide exposure in credible publications like The Independent
the fact that it contained a schoolgirl error and had been instantly falsified was of course...totally buried. So go to it man-made global warming true believer 4x4 haters, put up some credible science.
Or STFU
>> Edited by turbobloke on Tuesday 3rd January 16:27
turbobloke said:
Sounds like there's a bit of carbon dioxide envy in there smc, you still believe in man-made global warming then? Quick, join the majority of scientists that take another more realistic angle before the next ice age sets in...what follows is a true account, in factual terms, of a recent sequence of events, portrayed in PH styleee:
You're saying that the majority of scientists hold that man's burning fossil fuels is not contributing to global warming, not to mention having other undesirable consequences, e.g. increasing mercury levels in the sea?
Suckmychrsitmas said:Yes read the figures, they were obtained by replicating Oreskes' survey. Between two and three times as many scientists surveyed said they preferred the Whiskas view that cats and man are not causing climate change
You're saying that the majority of scientists hold that man's burning fossil fuels is not contributing to global warming
Suckmychrsitmas said:Well seeing as you mentioned it, what has heavy metal contamination got to do with climate change and 4 x 4s? There may well be a connection but I'd prefer you to explain it.
not to mention having other undesirable consequences, e.g. increasing mercury levels in the sea?
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