The PM goes Green (a little)
March 15th 2008 09:14
The price of oil is going up and up, and it’s just another thing to add to our woes, with Global Warming and Climate Change hitting us from opposite corners (or maybe the same corner: it’s beginning to be hard to tell!) Soon it won’t be worth paying the car insurance because we won’t be able to drive the thing anyway!
In this week’s NZ Listener, one of the feature articles is on matters green, but there’s also a sidebar a couple of pages later on what the Prime Minister is doing for the planet. To be quite honest, she’s taken her time over some matters, and is hardly showing much leadership so far.
‘Last year she put in a compost bin’. Now compost has been a way of recycling for centuries. How come the PM is only getting around to that
now? She’s also ‘bought a good cloth bag’ so she doesn’t bring home ‘a whole lot of plastic bags.’ Goodness me. That’s enterprising of her. The rest of us have been doing this for a while.
Again, ‘last year’ she had underfloor insulation installed. No wonder the country is slow to move on the green scene, if the PM only got around to something like that in 2007. It’s not as if she can’t afford it.
‘And she doesn’t use a heated towel rail.’ I should think not. Apart from being so passe it isn’t funny, heated towel rails have always been a waste of energy. She doesn’t use a dishwasher either - ten points for that, Helen, but considering there are only two of you in the house, that’s hardly a big deal.
But she did turn the temperature down on the hot water cylinder, ‘years ago.’ Twenty points for that.
The feature article I mentioned above is highly concerned with the amount of air travel people are doing. Helen isn’t going to give up her air points yet; she feels NZ would become hugely isolated without air travel. We’d lose out of tourism and exporting. But we may lose out on these anyway. Air travel is going to be an area of huge conflict in the next two or three years. Just this week the media here has made a considerable fuss about the amount of junketing by air that politicians are doing – at the public’s expense, mind you. The Children’s Commissioner spends more than half her time out of the country flying to one conference or another. And politicians who sneak their spouses in under cover of taxpaid air travel are also coming in for criticism.
More on air travel in another post.
In this week’s NZ Listener, one of the feature articles is on matters green, but there’s also a sidebar a couple of pages later on what the Prime Minister is doing for the planet. To be quite honest, she’s taken her time over some matters, and is hardly showing much leadership so far.
‘Last year she put in a compost bin’. Now compost has been a way of recycling for centuries. How come the PM is only getting around to that
Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand
Again, ‘last year’ she had underfloor insulation installed. No wonder the country is slow to move on the green scene, if the PM only got around to something like that in 2007. It’s not as if she can’t afford it.
‘And she doesn’t use a heated towel rail.’ I should think not. Apart from being so passe it isn’t funny, heated towel rails have always been a waste of energy. She doesn’t use a dishwasher either - ten points for that, Helen, but considering there are only two of you in the house, that’s hardly a big deal.
But she did turn the temperature down on the hot water cylinder, ‘years ago.’ Twenty points for that.
The feature article I mentioned above is highly concerned with the amount of air travel people are doing. Helen isn’t going to give up her air points yet; she feels NZ would become hugely isolated without air travel. We’d lose out of tourism and exporting. But we may lose out on these anyway. Air travel is going to be an area of huge conflict in the next two or three years. Just this week the media here has made a considerable fuss about the amount of junketing by air that politicians are doing – at the public’s expense, mind you. The Children’s Commissioner spends more than half her time out of the country flying to one conference or another. And politicians who sneak their spouses in under cover of taxpaid air travel are also coming in for criticism.
More on air travel in another post.
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