How did the "extinction rebellion" protesters travel to their protests?
One has to wonder how the people who have been disrupting everyone else's travel plans travelled to their protest events.
There has already been much comment in one case where we know the answer: actress Emma Thompson flew 5,400 miles from Los Angeles to Heathrow to attend the Extinction Rebellion protest by people who among other things have called for limits on how often people can fly.
(A typical flight from LA to Heathrow produces about 1.67 tons of CO2 - roughly equivalent to the average UK person's carbon footprint for fifty days and much of it released directly to the upper atmosphere where the greenhouse gas effect is maximised.)
Some of them may also have come to the protest by car: the typical passenger car emits something like a pound of carbon dioxide per mile travelled.
There are exceptions to this as is explained here, but in general it would have been more environmentally friendly for them to travel by train, particularly using electric trains like those on the Docklands Light Railway.
I wonder how those who did travel to their protests by train would have felt had they been unable to get there because some other group of protesters for a different cause such as, for example, either side of the Brexit debate had decided to glue themselves to the train that the "extinction rebellion" protesters wanted to travel to their protest on.
I can't help think that if any Extinction Rebellion members had been unable to get to their own protest because UKIP's egregious leader Gerard Batten, more egregious candidate Carl Benjamin, and still more egregious advisor Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. Tommy Robinson) had glued themselves to the train in a Brexit protest, they would not have been made more sympathetic to the Brexit cause.
There has already been much comment in one case where we know the answer: actress Emma Thompson flew 5,400 miles from Los Angeles to Heathrow to attend the Extinction Rebellion protest by people who among other things have called for limits on how often people can fly.
(A typical flight from LA to Heathrow produces about 1.67 tons of CO2 - roughly equivalent to the average UK person's carbon footprint for fifty days and much of it released directly to the upper atmosphere where the greenhouse gas effect is maximised.)
Some of them may also have come to the protest by car: the typical passenger car emits something like a pound of carbon dioxide per mile travelled.
There are exceptions to this as is explained here, but in general it would have been more environmentally friendly for them to travel by train, particularly using electric trains like those on the Docklands Light Railway.
I wonder how those who did travel to their protests by train would have felt had they been unable to get there because some other group of protesters for a different cause such as, for example, either side of the Brexit debate had decided to glue themselves to the train that the "extinction rebellion" protesters wanted to travel to their protest on.
I can't help think that if any Extinction Rebellion members had been unable to get to their own protest because UKIP's egregious leader Gerard Batten, more egregious candidate Carl Benjamin, and still more egregious advisor Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. Tommy Robinson) had glued themselves to the train in a Brexit protest, they would not have been made more sympathetic to the Brexit cause.
Comments
This was an application specifically to mine metallurgical coal - coking coal - for the steel industry. You cannot run a modern economy without steel - which among other things is needed for renewable energy facilities such as wind turbines and tidal barrages.
You cannot make steel without coking coal.
At the moment the UK steel industry uses coal strip-mined in the Appalachian mountains using methods which are far more damaging to the environment than are proposed for the mine under St Bees and the Irish sea, and which then has to be transported over a large part of the USA and the Atlantic ocean, generating a larger carbon footprint that coal from the new mine will.
So this proposal has a net benefit to the environment and does not disqualify me from talking about people's carbon footprint.
I have however allowed the comment immediately above to remain up because it perfectly illustrates one of the problems with anonymous comments. If you do not sign your name even with a pseudonym, it is impossible for me or any reader of this blog to know whether multiple anonymous posts are coming from the same person and are meant to form a part of a structured argument.
In this case I was uncertain whether the childish insults I removed came from the same person as the first comment about carbon footprints so I added the word "coherent" in case the later comments were supposed to be an answer - I made very clear that I didn't think they were.
There is a simple way to avoid that kind of confusion - sign your posts with either your real name or a consistent pen-name.