Save the Planet NO WAY

Saving The Planet

The latest buzz word is “Saving the Planet” every political party and every council now have jumped on this bandwagon and we the public must be saved from ourselves for we are all “Doomed”. What this translates to is another way of “Taxing the Public”. £1500 to £2500 on car tax, more fuel taxes, more air flight taxes, more climate taxes on electricity, gas etc and do these taxes go purely to save the environment? I doubt it! Of course the first to feel the impact of this is the workingman, the rich and government officials will be able to afford the increases without a blink of eye.
Do their proposal actually achieve their aims? Re-Cycling form Waste Bins something the Government want every council to do for example, a recent report in the news suggests that Re-Cycling with its collection and processing can be as harmful to the environment and will be certainly more expensive. Every right-minded person realises that we have got to do something but does it always have to cost the individual money? Here are some of my suggestions:

1) Streetlights, why do we need a street light every 10 yards? Take the roundabout at East Street Sittingbourne, it has a multitude of lights on the central reservation, lights around the outside and then the footpaths have yet another set of lights. Do we really need the streets to be lit up like daylight? For those who argue (wrongly I might suggest) that they are there for safety reasons, why are the streets still lit up at 2,3,4,5 in the morning? How much electricity this would save? The problem is the government would lose VAT.
2) Why do we import Fruit and Vegetables into the UK when some are grown in abundance locally, think of the environmental damage caused by shipping apples etc form South Africa, Australia
3) Why do we need plastic bags in Supermarkets surely paper would and what about encouraging shoppers to bring their own, this was the norm 30 years ago
4) Why so much packaging. Instead of polystyrene why not use paper or cardboard which can be rotted down.
5) Why not use vegetable oil as fuel instead of Petroleum oil?
6) If the government want us preserve the environment they should give us Solar Panels but then again how much tax would they lose electric sale.
7) Instead of importing so much food why not encourages the public to eat seasonally i.e. only eat fruit when it is cropped.
8) Surely the jaunts MP’s and ministers who travel all over the World can be curtailed look at the damage there travelling does to the environment. Most of there work can be done via the Internet and conference calls.
9) The European Union apart from being the most corrupt and inefficient organisation in the world, there Parliament causes a great deal of pollution for example once a year the whole EU parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg how much pollution does that create?
10) Why not give us grants to sink large tanks into the ground for those of us who have gardens, rain and wastewater could be collected. With this we could flush our toilets, water our garden etc, with a filter system we could even wash our car?

The fact is Government, Civil Servants and Political Parties do not want real change they just want to pontificate and keep their grubby hands in the peoples till.


Martin Clarke