Well Darlings,

I'm pleased to see so many of the UK public have used their common sense and proved they are not the idiots the government take them to be. A survey carried out by YouGov for the TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) has revealed nearly two-thirds of the public have come to the conclusion the government are merely using environmental fears as an excuse to raise tax revenue. It is something this column has on many occasions suggested, and now there is some proof to justify it. Figures contained in a dossier compiled by this pressure group show that green taxes have already filled the Treasury coffers to the tune of £10 billion more in a year than it would cost to offset the ENTIRE carbon footprint of the United Kingdom.

Is the Golden Goose now at risk of dying?

When we learn that international research into climate change reported the estimated social cost of carbon emissions in the UK for a year was £11.7 billion, and then that the receipts from green taxes (fuel duty, road tax and the Climate Change Levy) prove we paid a total of £21.9 billion to the government that same year believing it was necessary and that we were saving the planet, I suspect that goose may soon be as dead as the Monty Python parrot.

Averaged out, the statistics show that every household has through various levies imposed paid £400 in a year more than it costs to cover their own carbon footprint - and these findings are based on old figures (2005), those levies will have increased substantially since then and, as we all know, they will continue to increase whereas your footprint may not have increased in that time and could easily have decreased if you are a conscientious person now doing your bit for the planet. So where is all this extra money going? Why do the government continue to try to make us feel guilty and want to take even more of our hard-earned shekels? A surplus of £10 billion in a year (and it is sure to be a lot more than that now) is one hell of a sum of money - you could run a couple of wars on it! Oh, of course - silly me! - we probably have done!

At the time of this survey nearly four out of every five people polled were OPPOSED to the so-called "pay as you throw" refuse collection schemes being adopted countrywide to encourage recycling, and this strangely is the exact opposite to what many local governments claim, and would have you believe, is support for the idea in their areas. Are we being told porkies just to swell local authority funds? I think it needs investigating! We need to realise that all those being polled had none of this recently released information, but now everybody has been made aware of the excesses to which they are being squeezed you can bet another poll today would show even further opposition to the "pay as you throw" schemes, and probably to ANY further charges whatsoever in the name of saving the planet.

I wonder how all those people now forced to rummage around in their rubbish, separating it and storing the stinking stuff for a couple of weeks (at least), only to still run the risk of being fined should they make even the smallest mistake, feel about the scheme now? £10 billion a year (and rising) could in a very short time provide enough environmentally-friendly waste disposal depots to cover the whole country where the maximum amount of waste possible could be reclaimed for recycling, and without any inconvenience at all to the public, whereas even when the current scheme is fully adopted nationwide we can only hope at best to reclaim a fraction of that amount.

It is all about taxes, and nothing about the environment, folks! Personally I prefer my environment without all those unsightly and smelly bins we now see more and more of lined up and overflowing outside our buildings, be they domestic or business. It is beginning to look, and on a warm day smell, as if we are actually living on a rubbish tip! I can hardly wait for the next harebrained scheme that someone thinks up in the name of the environment - could it be sticking our backsides out of the window and dumping in the street? Like living with our rubbish, we did that in the Middle Ages too! If we had to bag it and bin it, so that after we had stored it outside of our front doors for a fortnight or so it could be taken to fertilise the fields of potatoes and cabbages, we could save whole reservoirs of freshwater and the carbon footprints of all those sewerage treatment plants. Of course, we would still need to separate the . . . No, I won't go there - you may be eating!

There is one thing we should all have learned by now: politicians do not do "sincere". They seem not to know the meaning of it, so we need to question everything they do and everything they tell us - both locally and nationally. There is no more costlier smile than that of a politician - and I fear some of the costs we are incurring today, neither us nor the planet have any hope of paying.

We owe a colossal and growing debt to our planet, and yet no government is prepared to do what is really necessary to repay it so long as they can continue to make vast sums of money out of the public for "a crisis". Yes, many countries are looking to reduce their carbon emissions and reach targets, as all those costly meetings suggest, but few - including the UK - actually achieve anything like those targets and some, not accepting them, hardly bother to try. Many environmentalists say these targets are so soft as to be almost meaningless, and they call for far more stringent measures to be adopted. Nevertheless having the targets, too soft or not, does give the appearance the problem is being tackled, and that then gives some credence to the government adopting the recycling schemes where people have to ferret around in their waste performing stupidities in the belief they are saving the planet.

It is a sad fact that all the efforts of these concerned people, although admirably undertaken, are likely to assist the planet no more than had they taken a thimble-full of water away from one of our recently flooded areas, but whilst they believe they are helping the planet they will suffer any inconvenience and happily pay whatever charges are imposed upon them - and for now that is all that matters.

No-one can deny the importance of recycling - it made sense even to our forefathers, and they knew nothing about damage to the planet - but the ways in which we do it are equally as important. They don't always need to be costly either, to us or the planet.

Where once we used to return items like beer bottles from whence they came and they would go back to the bottling plant on the next available empty lorry to be sterilised and used time and time again - the whole exercise hardly thought about and costing the environment next to nothing - today we use up vital resources and spew out car emissions taking them to bottle banks where they become chipped, smashed and unusable. This necessitates transporting them half way around the country, using up more resources and producing more emissions, to a place where furnaces - yes, you've guessed it: using up even more of our vital resources and emitting vast quantities of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere - melt the glass that is then possibly made into another bottle which will require transporting all the way back to the bottling plant. Now, quite honestly, if we have the well being of the planet at heart does this make sense?

If we are truly worried about the environment, do the plastic bags freely supplied by every shop and supermarket make any sense at all? A proper shopping bag could last a lifetime, not just one trip only to then become a serious liability to the environment. Consider just how many plastic bags must be discarded every single day. It is ridiculous! Are so many fast food containers really necessary? We used to manage well enough without them, so do we really have to walk down the street today eating out of them, with some people then discarding them thoughtlessly? Is this progress? When junk mail has such a miniscule return and only works because of the vast amounts of it produced and distributed, should we really be using up our resources entertaining it? It is not only annoying, it is costly to the planet. Is there really any justifiable benefit to a hammer being sold in a plastic moulding attached to a large backing cardboard? I fail to see one. Why do pizzas and frozen meals, already shrink-wrapped, come in boxes with pictures that bear little resemblance to what is inside? Is this not another waste of resources? Considering the amount produced, how large is the footprint? As they are undoubtedly primarily for advertising the product, would not a single picture at point of sale suffice?

If we stop to think about it, there are so many ways in which we could cut back on harming the environment. So many things we could be doing right now to improve matters before having to resort to spying on the public and imposing penalties on people for just being human and fallible. I feel that in this worrying time of global warming, any government that permits all this extra unnecessary and costly waste being produced, costly in both ecological and financial terms, and which then has the gall to spy on us and charge us for removing it, can only be acting in their own financial interests and not genuinely in the best interests of the planet or the people.

In a world where we can allow the rich and famous to traverse the globe in near-empty airliners and ignore their carbon footprint, where we can wage wars and contaminate the atmosphere with the results of massive bombing campaigns, where we can allow vast areas of tropical rain-forests, the lungs of the planet, to be cut down and destroyed, where we can have huge air shows and firework displays without considering any cost to the environment, and where natural disasters like forest fires, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are already responsible for such enormous changes to the environment anyway, I find it somewhat strange that a few politicians believe they have the moral right to charge and persecute someone for accidentally disposing of a piece of paper incorrectly by placing it in the wrong refuse bin under the pretext they are doing it for the planet.

Whose planet is it anyway?

"The Bitch!" 8/09/07.

About the Author

"The Bitch!", a weekly UK News Review column, is hosted by the author and columnist Michael Knell. These articles appear on the Blackpool Gay Directory website, but are not usually specifically gay in content. More information on the author: http://www.michaelknell.com and on the directory: http://www.astabgay.com.