Back in the real world

George Monbiot makes a compelling case for whether or not the human race cares enough about global warming to do anything about it until we're actually, physically forced to (see here). This latter point is something my father and I were talking about just last night: people will not do anything about global warming until they are forced to change their behaviour by the world around them - while it is welcome that The Sun has finally woken up to the fact and is educating its readers for the first time (shame it's about ten years too late), most people will ignore this until it's too late. And while I'm not proud of having flown to Canada and back on another long-haul flight, I can tell you now that there are worse things I'm doing to the environment by buying non-locally produced food or purchasing another DVD or not asking enough questions about where goods come from. And we're all sadly guilty of that.

As an aside, the new Conservative government in Canada is about to abandon its pledge to the Kyoto Protocol - its emissions are currently 34.7% above 1990 levels, and the government made a very irresponsible claim in saying they'd have to ground all aircraft and ban all cars to meet that pledge. The previous Liberal administration had done nothing to curb emissions, so I understand their quandry, but a bit of common sense - which as I've said before is sorely lacking in this world - wouldn't go amiss. Thankfully, just before we left a Canadian news panel revealed that many Canadians are not happy with their government's (lack of) efforts, and want them to follow California's laudable lead in repositioning itself at the edge of cutting low-carbon technology. After David Milliband's comments at the Labour Conference, which were hugely encouraging, I'm hoping our government finally wakes up to the need to put this particular issue at the front of everything else we do - and I include the war against terrorism in that.

I was called for a secondary search at Edmonton Airport yesterday as we went through the security check. I could pretend it was down to my dark hair and beard, but the fact is my walking boots set off the alarm (and not in the beep-beep way it had done for Toni, but rather by a nasty single long beep). Once they were removed and placed on the security scanner I was able to pass through without setting off the machine and the secondary search - which I had done in public - was professionally executed and didn't make me feel worried at all. These inconveniences are there to make our lives safer, and I'm not going to begrudge anyone for doing their job. But making security at airports tougher is a long way removed from some of the rights our governments are attempting to curtail in the increasingly laughable aim of supposedly protecting those freedoms. Wil Wheaton makes an impassioned criticism of the Bush's administrations attempts to effectively make torture legal in the US - see here.