----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Haywood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2007 12:15 PM Subject: Re: [canals-list] Re: Proposed new car tax (OT) ON Line Petitions
> > You see Niall, you don't understand that it is possible to have a view on > this issue without that view being an emotionally extreme one. Whatever > makes you think that I think that cars are making my life a misery? Well, given that on 16/02/2007 at 01.48,in the post I was replying to, you wrote: "And shouldn't they just have to pay for making our lives a misery, the noise they cause, the stress they engender, the light pollution necessary to illuminate their nighttime journeys? etc etc etc" I can't really see what other conclusion I should have drawn. >How many > times do I have to say this? I am not anti-car. I am the owner of two > cars, > one of them a mass production classic marque which I keep on the road > because of my interest in the history, development and technology of the > motor car. > > But - a big but - in the same way that I like beer too, I don't spend half > my life pi$$ed. > > The facts is that the motor car is increasingly dominating our life and > environment. I don't know what experience you have outside of the UK, but > an > hour of LA, Peking or Delhi in the rush hour is enough for any sane person > to realise that things cannot be allowed to develop as they are doing. We simply don't have the population density of those places, and it is umlikely we ever will. If we did, there would be problems as a result. Those problems, as in Peking or Delhi, would not be restricted to cars. Their public transport, just like London's, is vastly overcrowded. This leads to problems like SARS. People think this can be fixed by throwing money at it. "Would you give up your car if public transport was better?" is the question often used to support car to PT transfer, but they never ask "what do you mean by better?" or consider if this is even possible. In many cases it's not. They want faster journeys, which means less stops. They want less transfers and more convenience, which means more stops. and so on. >The > motor car has changed all our lives for the better, but it has, and > continues, to change them for the worse. And I am surprised that anyone > with > their eyes open cannot see this. > > Just one example, since you restricted yourself to one in your posting. > When > I first came to live in London in the early 70s, the levels of traffic > compared to my home town Leicester were...well, they were incomprable. In > Leicester you could drive from one side to the city to the other in > minutes, > there were never traffic jams, you could walk up the High Street in total > safety. Nowadays traffic in Leicester is equally as bad as it was in > London > all those years ago. The traffic moves at crawl, it is constantly jammed > and > there were so many accidents in the town centre that tracts of it had to > pedestrianised simply to avoid casualties. This has come about for one > reason and one only: there are far more cars than there ever were. And all > the projections for car ownership, historically very reliable statistics, > are that they ownership will continue to increase at the same sort of > rates > it has been. This all goes with increasing population, but that is levelling out very fast, which is where the statistics fall down. On the same basis, by 2019, one third of the world's population will be Elvis impersonators. People simply can't drive more than one car at once. As you know, they can *own* more than one... > > But, you see, as someone who, against the overwhelming weight of > scientific > opinion, still doesn't accept that global warming is a direct result of > CO2 > emissions, much of it from cars, I just know you won't accept this. Not to start this again, but it's simply not true that the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion supports AGW. The political pro lobby has a stated policy of pretending that it does. The IPCC report does not represent the views of all of its members, it is merely the opinion of the most powerful faction at the time. The Stern report was the result of commissioning an economist to report on the worst case economic implications of the worst case GW predictions, on the basis of counting the entire cost of mitigation e.g. the entire cost of improving sea defences ignoring the fact that they have to be maintained and rebuilt anyway, the cost of this being already budgeted for and the additional cost of enhancement being potentially relatively trivial. There are more holes in IPCC and Stern, but they are all easily accessible on the 'net. I refuse to ignore the fact that the scaremongering from press, politicians etc is based on information which I immediately recognise as a familiar set of exaggerations of worst case scenarios, stuff which is just plain inaccurate, stuff which has been long discredited etc. I make decisions based on facts. -- Niall
