Tuesday, August 01, 2006

The climate 'extremist' changes tack

If you've visited this blog before, you'll be confused because I've changed its name! It used to be 'the climate extremist' but I decided that wasn't very helpful. The reason I called it that at first was because flying will soon be the biggest contributor to global warming of all so I refuse to travel by air. As a result of this stance, a friend accused me of being 'an extremist'.

My aim was to encourage like-minded responsible citizens to help make this no-fly stance not 'ex-treme', but mainstream. People who fly for frivolous reasons (like tourism) are killing the future, not just for my kids, but for everyones.

But it's not just air travel that's the problem. It's the way we live on the planet, using far more of its resources than it can possibly sustain whilst the global population ticks away, inching upwards at about 3 per second, and now standing at around 6.6 billion. Refusing to fly for non-essential reasons is just one small thing any of us in the rich world can choose to do which will make an impact once there is a critical mass of likeminded people. There are a host of other things too, some of which I'll doubtless blog about in the future!