Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Carbon footprint and our environment

As scientists make us believe, and I have no reason not to trust their findings, our carbon footprints are large, far too large for our environment to cope with and therefore need to be reduced. For a number of years now the discussion on how to reduce this footprint centres around reducing heating requirements, reducing dependency on oil based products, flights abroad etc. Again I have no difficulty with the sentiments of these discussions but they do tend to irritate me as these are in my opinion too much focussed on the "common" man and not on businesses.

In the whole discussion I have never come across information or discussion on the carbon footprints of arms for example. No, not the limbs hanging from ones shoulder but those carried around on your shoulders such as AK47' and Uzi's and the bigger ones such as missiles, rockets, bombs, clusterbombs, mines, tanks to name a few. I am sure that a reduction by half would have an enormous positive impact on the environment not to mention humanity. But I am probably very naive to think that the arms producers, sellers and buyers would be open to such a policy by the governments who allow them to exist.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Gaza conflict

Anybody following the Gaza conflict would possibly ask a number of questions and may be as confused as I am at present. I am totally against violence of any kind, but at the same time recognises anybody's right to defend themselves against attacks. So Israel is within its rights to defend itself against the rocket attacks by Hamas from Gaza. However, the Israeli attacks seem to me to be totally out of proportion, viewing Al Jazeera, it is reported today that more than 800 people in Gaza have lost their lives since the start of the conflict, a majority of them being civilians, i.e women and children, while Israel have suffered 13 (thirteen) casualties, 3 of them being civilians. Surely something is wrong if the UN and the western world can not see anything wrong with this conflict.