environmental rant

i saw the latest ecological movie the other day. it wasn't all that great, but one fact did come through loud and clear: in the coming years, there will be more than 1 billion environmental refugees in the world. that's like trying to rehouse China. and while a lot of the problems are, of course, pollution-related, some of it is clearly just wastage. do we need the latest car, the latest computer, the latest phone? the amount of 'old' stuff that is just being thrown away, and usually ends up in poor countries, polluting elsewhere than at home. on the bus tonight, there was a girl saying she was going to buy herself a third ipod. cos she really needed one... and i realise that the world economy would suffer a setback if we didn't buy all this stuff all the time. then again, we could try to live with a little less. or, we could stop having shareholders.

on TV the other night, i saw that NASA was considering a multi-billion plan to send 'umbrellas' or 'mirrors' or whatever they called it, into space to divert sunlight by a few degrees to help cool down the planet a little. if it's gonna cost tax payers around the world that much money, wouldn't it be simpler to spend it on a better economic and environmental plan? but unfortunately, it already seems that nothing can possibly come out of the Copenhaguen summit, what with China being a) the biggest polluter in the world and b) the biggest owner of US dollars and thus America's saviour. this is going to be another useless waste of money...