David Baddiel completely demolished the Live Earth premises that Global Warming is
a) completely down to us or
b) exacerbated by us or
c) can be significantly stopped or slowed by us
Well done Mr.Baddiel for bringing up the issues of "the science" and this strange new faux pas of being a
"Global Warming Denier"
Most of the celebrities seemed pretty half hearted. The Genesis keyboard man said something along the lines that we don't need to told to recycle again rather we need to hear some new idea.
Well Mr.Genesis keyboard man this is my idea: Global warming isn't a weather issue it is a whether issue. Whether or not we on this planet are prepared to share our resources such as access to good land more fairly?
Poverty stricken Bangladeshis were living a subsistence existence in the Ganges Delta long before Global Warming. Why? Because they don't get fair pay for their work or for the fish they catch and because the best land is controlled by the rich. The same applies to the Brazilian slums and the poor people who leave them in search of a new life by scratching meagre farms out of Amazonia. They were struggling like this long before Global Warming.
The Maldives and some of the Pacific Islands were not always inhabited in the past by humans? Why? Were they not habitable in the past? Unreachable until canoe technology developed? I'm not trying to be facetious about this, but I feel that we are not being given the full picture.
Lets look after the planet and do the right housekeeping because there is no doubt that we are polluting it and overusing its resources and murdering the poor.
But I wonder if all this climate change stuff is allowing us to trade a possibility for a certainty and thereby ignore the really bad things that we know we are 100 percent doing - namely exploiting the poor for cheap resources. Perhaps we here in the UK could lead ecologically gentler lives and ask every Bangladeshi, Maldivian, Pacific Islander, Rio slum dweller, and Amazonia farmer/logger to come here and share our bounty?
Perhaps not?
I wonder.
At the Live Earth Sydney concert it was good to see the Australian group Wolfmother's drummer wearing a No Nukes t-shirt. Why good? Because I wonder whether we are being smarmed into accepting 'clean' nuclear energy in order to prevent more Global Warming; in which case how do we stop Iran?
But overall LE came across like something arranged by the local secondary school kids but with whole lot less passion. I'm not really interested in hearing pampered stars witter on half-heartedly about climate change, or in the preceding week to see 'celebrities' going on trips paid out of BBC licence payer's fees to see the lovely jubbly elephants etc., for them to then ask me to ring up and give a donation when we have Darfur and all of the above mentioned issues (Click on my section Mongolia to see what I mean). By all means preserve wild life but the BBC have already two remarkable weapons in the fight,
(a) acres of pre-shot film - what was the carbon footprint of these celeb. jollies and
(b) Sir David Attenborough who out celebs any celeb when it comes to the Natural World.
Nuff said. Not quite.
David Baddiel should have a programme where he challenges every assumption about everything known to man. Perhaps he could start with the assumption 'subjective or objective'.
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