New Hang-out for book lovers.

I can't believe I haven't found this wonderful internet hideway for booklovers till now-
www.librarything.com
Basically it's an online library catalogue for all your books. You upload all the books you own/ have read and then you can see who has a similar library as your own. It also has handy book suggestions based on the data they've collected from contributors' libraries.
It looks like great fun and I'm going over to explore properly.
I might be gone awhile...

An Inconvenient Truth

I watched an Inconvenient Truth on DVD. Although I thought I had a fairly good grip on what was happening to the planet I got a shock when I realised just how far we, as a population had gone along the path of global warming.

I began to review my use of carbon. Like most people in the Western, developed world who are honest enough to do this, I didn’t like what I found. So I made some changes. I’ve gone around changing light-bulbs and switching off lights. I’ve re-programmed the central heating. I’ve booked a ferry for the holidays to save on flights. Always a recycler, I’m feeding the worms in the worm composter better than I have been in a while (in winter I had a tendency to just chuck out food waste because its cooooold outside). I buy more local food and I feel guilty that I can’t kick my fresh fruit habit in winter.

And it’s all a whole lot of hard work. Work we should all be doing, admittedly, and which gives a temporary feeling of smugness as we realise that we’ve just saved the atmosphere a kg or so of CO_2, but hard work nonetheless. And I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t just be a whole lot easier if politicians bit the bullet and legislated. The environment, and what’s happening in terms of global warming is just too big an issue to depend on ‘personal responsibility’. Especially when the people who are in a position to act responsibly and make a real difference, live, almost without exception, in rich developed countries – countries which will be the last to be affected seriously when (not if) the climate heats up.

We’ve talked about a carbon tax for long enough. We all know we’re going to have to pay one sooner or later, so why not sooner? Prolonged ‘public consultation’ just lines the pockets of big business lobbyists and government funded consultants and delays the inevitable. A higher VRT and road tax on fuel guzzlers and on the fuel they guzzle is a way of driving the market towards more sensible vehicle choices. As petroleum fuels get more expensive, money invested in a bio-diesel and bioethanol will generate greater returns, bringing more players to the market, forcing competition and driving down the price of renewable fuels. A light bulb tax, along with the removal of VAT from energy saving bulbs will reduce national electricity consumption.

Sure we’d moan, but hey, we’re Irish, we need to have something to moan about. And our moaning is always much louder before than after the change (plastic bag tax, smoking ban, random breath-testing). We could moan for the next five years and go hoarse, or just impose the taxes and get on with it!