Coffee blunder

I love stories about officialdom gone mad, and this is a splendid example.

Ms Burcu Yesilyurt was fined £150 by Richmond Council, London, for pouring coffee down a drain before getting on a bus. She was told she had broken the Environmental Protection Act 1990, which makes it an offence to dispose of waste in a way likely to pollute land or water.

Apart from the fact that she was totally unaware of this obscure law, probably like the vast majority of us, she couldn't see any obvious harm in pouring a small amount of undrunk coffee down a drain.

We don't get fined if we pour coffee (or any other polluted liquid) down our kitchen sink. So why is it an offence to pour it down an outside drain?

In any case there must be many people, and companies, causing serious large-scale pollution that really does merit a fine - a huge fine. Is Richmond Council pursuing them with the same diligence? I doubt it.

The council quickly responded to the ensuing uproar and rescinded the fine. But why was she fined in the first place? Couldn't the council officials simply have pointed out the law she was breaking and warned her not to do the same thing again?

Pic: Burcu Yesilyurt

Gas guzzlers

When parents drop off their kids at the two nearby schools, more and more of their cars are those massive, gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles (SUVs). Usually there's only two people in them - parent and child - and I wonder why such huge cars are necessary.

SUVs are increasingly popular in the UK, despite being so bad for the environment. By early 2023 more than half of all new car sales in Europe were SUVs or the like. Why oh why?

Jenny and I still have our humble nine-year-old Renault Clio. It gets us from A to B and that's all we need. If we had had children we might have acquired something bigger, but what would be the point?

When I was young, most people drove bog-standard saloon cars, as they were then called, and strangely enough children still got to school and parents got to the supermarket. Nobody hankered after vehicles more suitable to pot-holed rural farm tracks.

My parents didn't even own a car, so I walked to school and back every day. Cheaper and healthier than being driven there.

Clearly the SUV drivers don't care about the enormous carbon emissions, hefty fuel consumption and danger to children (I read that children are eight times more likely to die when struck by an SUV compared with an average passenger car).

What is it with these fashionable monsters?

PS: I realise some of you may actually own an SUV. Do tell me why, I'm always open to debate!

Can I do more?

I don't think much about climate breakdown these days. It's one of those things I have little control over, so what's the point of dwelling on it?

Jenny and I do whatever we can to avoid over-consumption, atmospheric pollution, long-distance travel, global supply chains and all that, but at the end of the day there's only so much we can do as two individuals.

Our contribution to climate breakdown is miniscule. The real offenders by far are manufacturers, big corporations and the very wealthy, and they're the ones that need to drastically change their perspective and their belief that they can exploit the planet's resources indefinitely. Sadly there's little sign of their doing that.

I could spend all day obsessing about what more I can do to reverse climate breakdown, and drive myself totally neurotic with anxiety and fear and self-doubt, and it wouldn't do much for my mental health.

But the media contribute to the idea that we should all be scrutinising our every purchase and every activity and asking ourselves if there's more we could do to save the planet and curtail our selfish and extravagant spending patterns.

An entirely hypocritical stance of course, as the media do everything they can to increase our consumption levels with their pages on property, motoring, fashion, travel, home furnishings and all the rest.

Given the general head-in-the-sand attitude and lack of urgency on the part of the biggest polluters I don't see any realistic chance of climate breakdown being reversed, and we might as well prepare for the worst. Many people have already had a taste of the worst in the form of extreme weather events like floods and heatwaves.

And there are still people who deny climate breakdown is even happening.

Casual flyers

I've always been captivated by planes. As someone with no understan-ding at all of aerodyn-amics, I constantly marvel that these incredibly heavy machines (the Dreamliner is 190 tons) somehow not only manage to take off but travel thousands of miles across the world with no visible means of support.

Jenny is even more captivated. She was an ardent plane spotter as a kid, and often visited Heathrow, which was close to her parents' house.

When we first met we were always financially stretched, so we didn't actually fly anywhere until 1994, when we went to Venice, Florence and Rome. Before I met Jenny my only flights were in a private plane flown by a friend's mother, and a short family hop from the now defunct Lympne Airfield in Kent to Paris.

Now of course we've flown all over the world and think nothing of it. Unfortunately millions of other people are equally casual flyers and the resulting pollution has made us rethink our flying habits. We may abandon long-haul trips altogether. But short-haul trips are unavoidable to go elsewhere in the UK.

I've never been afraid of flying. Planes are maintained to much higher standards than the average car, and besides, the flight crew don't want to die because of some botched repair job. If the crew are happy, so am I.

I do always wonder, when I'm in a really massive plane trundling down the runway, whether it'll actually take off or end up in the adjoining field, but of course it always does take off.

Our only edge-of-the-seat experience was when our plane from the US was coming in to land at Gatwick in thick fog. The pilot circled several times before deciding it was okay to land, and when the plane touched ground there was a huge round of applause from the passengers.

I could say something about in-flight conditions - and the food - but I'll leave that for another day.

The end is nigh

It's a funny old thing, this climate change. There's precious little sign of it in my everyday life. I carry on eating, drinking, sleeping, driving, socialising as if nothing unusual is happening.

Yet the scientists tell us all the time that the world's climate is drastically changing and if we don't take radical action our normal lifestyles will collapse.

Well, I have to believe that many scientists must be right. So I alter my habits wherever I can to do my bit to prevent armageddon. It remains to be seen if armageddon really is upon us.

The biggest problem, we are told, is that we all (in the West at least) consume far too much. We're forever rushing after the latest fashionable accessory or car or bit of furniture, and we never stop to think how many of the world's resources are being squandered and how much it's polluting the environment.

And all that's fed by the modern idea of shopping-as-leisure-activity which has somehow replaced shopping-for-what-you-need. Once upon a time if we needed something we went out and bought it. End of story.

Nowadays there are flashy shopping malls everywhere we go and we're encouraged to go shopping as a pastime in itself, something to do on a rainy day, somewhere to take the kids and have a meal while we're at it.

Of course while we're there we find ourselves picking up all sorts of bits and pieces, some of which we need and some we never even thought of until we saw them beckoning from a shop window.

So - more plundered resources, more pollution. And then when we have a periodic clearout, if the junked items can't be recycled they create yet more unwanted, festering landfill*.

But if you still believe in shopping-as-necessity, you're regarded as a bit of a crank who's still living in a bygone age.

So there's the question for climate scientists. How do we put a brake on the shop-till-you-drop culture? How do we take the shine off those tempting malls?

* The UK still dumps 54% of its waste in landfill. The German figure is 1%

This post is part of Blog Action Day which this year looks at climate change. Over 13,000 blogs in 155 countries took part, including Baino in Sydney.