Have you got wind?

[AdamW]

Ah, you see, I'm not contributing to that part of the problem... the water for my power shower is heated by electricity, not fossil fuels If I didn't have my shower the electricity would just be buzzing around electrocuting people or something.

People do waste a lot of energy. I remember when I was younger I used to hate it if my grandmother gave me a bath because she put about 2 inches of water in the bath! Why run the bath to the overflow when you can bathe in 2 inches? But now, I slosh about in it wishing the overflow was mounted a bit higher.

Realism? Well, in order to make the country work in a nice old fashioned fully organic, non-plundering fashion, we would first of all need to kick out a large portion of the population. We are a small island, we don't have the space for them for this lifestyle. The population of the British Isles was of the order of one or two million a thousand years ago before we deforested the place. It is now 60 million. We can't support that many people in a caveman fashion.

So we would have to pack off all the people who don't fit in with our utopia on to trains and send them off to somewhere on the continent. Wait a minute, didn't someone else once pack all the people he didn't like into trains and send them elsewhere?

Thus, to live like proper Greens we would all have to be a bunch of nazis. Now that is a rather silly extreme of what would have to be done to turn the United Kingdom back into the United Serfdom. Most environmentalists understand that we can't just go back to the dark ages. So "renewable" resources are the best solution (for now).

And thinking about it, the only reason humans live this far north is because they adapted. We started off wandering about naked in Africa, that is our natural state. To live up here we need to kill animals and wear their pelts, and build fires. Last time I checked there weren't many caves in Hertfordshire so I would still need to build a hut out of trees that I felled.

 

[oilman]

Ah, you see, I'm not contributing to that part of the problem... the water for my power shower is heated by electricity, not fossil fuels

Umm, what is used to produce the electricity? It is a high level form of power, and does not occur in nature except as lightening, (difficult to handle).

If I didn't have my shower the electricity would just be buzzing around electrocuting people or something.

The "something" being "nothing".

Realism? Well, in order to make the country work in a nice old fashioned fully organic, non-plundering fashion, we would first of all need to kick out a large portion of the population. We are a small island, we don't have the space for them for t............... ...........So "renewable" resources are the best solution (for now).

You originally asked about wind turbines, people are led to believe they are "non-polluting" in broad terms. You wouldn't need to start by "kicking out" loads of people, and why bring Nazis into the discussion?

 

[AdamW]

Umm, you misquoted me:

Ah, you see, I'm not contributing to that part of the problem... the water for my power shower is heated by electricity, not fossil fuels

You see, it's all about the wink on the end. I was being facetious. I know where electricity comes from! Just trying to lighten the mood, dude.

You wouldn't need to start by "kicking out" loads of people, and why bring Nazis into the discussion?

This isn't a dictation, this is a debate: you offered an opinion on one extreme, i.e. "Why do we have to plunder anyway?". I then took this to a different extreme "If we didn't plunder at all, this would be how it would have to be done". Back when we did live in harmony with mother nature, the British Isles only support a million or so people. Since then we have deforrested the majority of the island (it used to have a LOT of trees!) in order to plunder the land for food. If we turned it back to how it was, pre-human intervention, there would be nowhere near enough land to support us all. Hence needing to have a smaller population living here. It would make sense that those who like the modern way of life would move out, because they wouldn't want to live in huts and eat turnips.

I drew an analogy between full-on Greenism and the Nazis, as it demonstrates the irony of so many debates that happen all over the world, every day.

Now that is a rather silly extreme of what would have to be done to turn the United Kingdom back into the United Serfdom. Most environmentalists understand that we can't just go back to the dark ages. So "renewable" resources are the best solution (for now).

See, I even said it was a silly extreme.