Sunday 6 January 2008

Carbon footprints

CairnsBlog lurker, Cairns Yacht Club stalwart; chair of the Cairns Heritage Group; president of the Cairns Tropic Jazz Club, Caravonica's Rob Williams wants us to all stomp around a little less.. even the Cairns Post.


Old mate Gavin King tells people like me to move on and forget the past.

Hey Gav, this city of Cairns and the rest of the country, exists because old farts like me right back to our great grandfathers, and grandmothers with their families worked their guts out and you rubbish us for wanting to keep a little bit of our history to remember from whence we came.
Unless you were a test tube baby, your grandparents, dad and mother, must really feel proud of your self-righteous rhetoric crap too. Of course if they really get pissed off they could burn your baby photos.

So put this in your pipe and smoke it boyo.

You are an anachronism in this day. Does the word Khyber means anything to you?

I say, “he that is without a footprint, should take the first step.”

The tabloids, including NewsLtd's Cairns Post, are urging us to calculate our "carbon footprint".

I suggest that if the printed newspapers in Australia were to cease production right now, there would be enough carbon saved to put us 50 years in front of every country on earth!

Consider that to just name a few of the savings:-
  • Millions of tonnes of rainforest timber would be saved.
  • We would avoid the energy needed to produce the wood pulp and make paper, polluting the environment with bio-toxins in the process.
  • The energy used by thousands of Newspaper employees driving to work in their air-conditioned offices and burn up billions of units of electricity.
  • The energy used to print on billions of pages.
  • The noxious vapours created in the place when they wash down the presses with volatile chemicals.
  • Energy for delivery
Ultimately the massive savings when we avoid having to dispose of the paper when it has to be burned or buried where it directly adds carbon and methane gas production to our atmosphere.
The promise of the computer was to deliver us from the evil of the printed page.

The weekend papers are 20mm thick. The written content is full of tripe and propaganda that is irrelevant to our knowledge with the whole process damaging to the well-being of the planet.

The printed page is always days, sometimes weeks, behind any internet news.

Dinosaurs are extinct, likewise the printed newspaper is long past its use by date.

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