all you ever harp about is how badly done for you are by the modern world, you moan about the move from polluting diesel and now you're moaning about cutting pollution from burning wet wood, holy handbags man.
No, I don’t feel badly done by at all, and it seems strange to me that despite knowing nothing about me you seem to feel that you have an uncanny insight intomy motives.
Different people have different life experience and different levels of common sense. One of my experiences is living in London, prior to the Clean Air Act, when most people couldn’t afford to heat their homes with coal, and hardly anyone could afford any other type of fuel, and the skyline was full of industrial chimneys adding to the problem. I was a teenager when we had the really bad smogs that killed thousands every day – I remember that bus inspectors used to walk in front of buses, carrying flaming torches to guide the driver and that I once had to abandon my car because I couldn’t see the end of the bonnet and it was 4 days before I could go walkabouts trying to find it.
I’ve also travelled a lot, and have been in a number of far eastern cities where the pollution is so bad that it’s rare to be able to see the sun, so I do know – first hand – about pollution and the effects that it has and am 100% in favour of reducing it.
But responses should be measured and need to be affordable and politicians of all political persuasions don’t seem to get this. It’s all very well banning diesel cars from city centres, but some of us absolutely need to have diesel cars and can only run one car and can’t switch to public transport, a pedal bike or an electric car when we need to deliver or collect something in a city centre just because politicians want to look good.
And again, politicians seem to lack understanding of the differing needs of differing people. It’s all very well regarding big diesel 4x4’s as a big no no, taxing them heavily and doing everything possible to discourage them when they’re used as Chelsea tractors, but low paid agricultural and other rural workers actually need them just to get to work, and shouldn’t be penalised. And, of course, there are no viable alternatives for these people, just as there are no viable alternatives to heating rural homes by burning wood.
In the perfect, idealised world of the eco warrior, diesel can be replaced by either petrol or electric – except that petrol 4x4’s doing about 10 mpg aren’t viable and anyway don’t have the torque needed for rural use, when towing trailers is an essential part of daily life. And, at present anyway, there are no viable electric alternatives.
And something else that you may not know – the life expectancy of an off road vehicle that has to be driven across fields regularly is about 3 years – the cow muck in the fields dissolves metal, which means that even if the capital cost of these expensive new vehicles didn’t matter, new eco-friendly vehicles are a ridiculous choice for the job.
And I’d be much more supportive of the politicians who waffle on about their green credentials if they weren’t such hypocrites. Boris Johnson famously took a day trip to Afghanistan just to avoid the embarrassment of having to vote on the Heathrow issue, costing the taxpayers £20,000 and creating a lot of pollution. And he and many of the other posturing hypocrites like to ride their bikes around London, demonstrating their green credentials but of course they have their expensive and polluting Range Rover cars right behind them, and in fact create extra pollution because they have a higher level of security when they aren’t contained in the relative safety of a car.
So no, I’m not whinging, but I do have experience of life.