Well, it didn’t happen after all. We finished up with a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Quite an event for us Brits, accustomed as we are to rigid political boundaries and the centuries-old Parliamentary trench warfare of government v opposition, us v them, yah-boo-sucks Punch and Judy politics that passes for debate here. The idea of a coalition, of people from different parts of the political spectrum actually settling down to make things work in a practical, commonsense way is somehow not British. It’s the sort of thing they do in Italy, for God’s sake, or one of those tiny Central European states where vampires have tax havens. At least, as far as the United Kindom Parliament at Westminster goes, an institution that is both stabilised and hampered by the weight of its traditions. Of course, the upstart Assemblies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland know all about coalitions, and actually make them work rather well. But that is a topic for another day.

In a previous post, I wrote about how the fuss over the hung Parliament had obscured the great achievement of the Green Party of England and Wales in returning their first MP to Westminster.  Caroline Lucas’s  novelty value has attracted a fair amount of media attention, it will be interesting to see what happens to her profile once some of the shine has come off. However, right now her stock is high and media opportunities are plentiful. One of the latest is the publishing by Channel 4 News of an alternative Queen’s Speech, written by Dr Lucas. For those unfamiliar with these things, the Queen’s Speech is the centrepiece ritual of the State Opening of Parliament. A short summary of the (new or continuing) government’s policy intentions is prepared for Her Majesty to read in front of the assembled members of both Houses. It’s a farce really, Monarch As Mouthpiece, an excuse for paid representatives of the people to stop doing anything useful and instead take walk-on parts in a meaningless pageant. The whole jamboree seems to drag on for ever, the speech itself  lasts  two or three minutes. Have they not heard of email?

Caroline Lucas’s alternative Queen’s Speech adopts the traditional style and tone to which we have become accustomed, a string of  one liners of the “My government will” or “My government intends to” variety. It is customary for there to be few real specifics such as how, or when, these things will, or may, happen, and the language is carefully angled so that hardly anything is a genuine commitment. It would have been refreshing for this Green document to cast aside those conventions, as the new Coalition’s offering tried to do, but that’s a minor quibble. The content is much more important.

Some of what Her Majesty recited for us was fairly predictable, kicking off with the three main strands of the Green Party manifesto: low-carbon economy, promoting a fairer society, and tackling the economic crisis. Some items that you might have expected to get a mention don’t make it. We get a promise to “decommission Britain’s nuclear weapons”, but nothing about phasing out nuclear power stations and resolutely opposing new ones, as stated on page 35 of the 2010 Green Party manifesto. I guess that this, like a number of other manifesto commitments, had to make do with being subsumed under a general bullet point, in the interests of making the whole thing fit the sound-bite format. A shame that, while some really good points didn’t make it to the final cut, some totally dotty ones did.

Try this: “The redistributive tax measures will ensure that a non-means-tested citizen’s pension may be introduced at the level of £170 for individual pensioners and £300 for couples”. Setting aside the studied ambivalence of the words I have highlighted, do the Greens really want to give every eligible adult a hugely inflated pension without even checking that they need it or not? It’s absolutely right to ensure that people who are in genuine need do not go without, but, as with the current situation with winter fuel payments, well-off people will just take the extra cash and stick it in a tax-free savings account or a trust fund for their grandchildren. It does not address a need, it just diverts money away from those who are genuinely struggling.

Or this: “… a requirement for all companies to have at least 40 per cent of their boards of directors made up of women”. I have never been a fan of positive discrimination. Surely, if we are serious about “making Britain a fairer and more inclusive society”, the best person for the job should get it, regardless of gender, race, age, etc etc. I fail to see how this kind of measure does anything to advance women’s, or indeed anyone’s, interests.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I may sound critical, but there’s a lot to read in the Greens’ manifesto and surely no one individual agrees with 100% of it. Settling on your political allegiance is a balancing act, weighing the parties’ positions on each issue and coming up with a ‘best’, or ‘least worst’, fit. Until we have a system which allows every citizen to vote on every issue, there will always be voters who strongly disagree with some of their chosen party’s policies. In fact, it baffles me how any government can claim a popular mandate to do anything. Still, we must do our best with what we have. I surprised myself recently by becoming a member of a political party for the first time in my life, and yes, I joined the Green Party, in spite of my misgivings about some of their policies, and about the way that their core environmental messages are being diluted and buried by the ‘other stuff’. Maybe I can work to change that from within. Certainly, it’s better for me to be inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

So here we are, five days on from the General Election and we still don’t have a result. Having spent days cosying up to the Conservatives. the Liberal Democrats are now negotiating with Labour, although it’s being said that these new talks are not going as well as we might have expected given the vast acreage of common ground between the two parties.

The rolling news channels’ coverage of  events is becoming a tad desperate now. I use the word ‘events’  loosely because for some time now, despite the anchor persons’ claims that the whole thing is fantastically exciting and fast moving, damn all has been happening. When you see the scrolling banner at the foot of the screen proclaim “BREAKING NEWS: Gordon Brown’s car leaves Downing Street” you sense they are clutching at straws. The media feels obliged to cover this, and of course it is important. However, actual news is so thin on the ground that they are compelled to fill the void by interviewing an ever more surreal collection of British political faces, some of whom I was convinced had died years ago. And, of course, none of these interviewees actually KNOWS anything.

Since the world and his wife are now apparently qualified to express an opinion on what’s happening (allegedly), this reporter doesn’t want to be left out. I was appalled when I heard that the Lib Dems had started negotiating with the Conservatives, and frankly amazed, given the huge differences between them in terms of policy and values. I was delighted when it was announced that talks with Labour had started, but my enthusiasm for a ‘progressive alliance’ was tempered by a number of factors, most of them practical issues such as the House of Commons numbers game, public perception of a Lab-Lib coalition as a tacky stitch-up to keep Labour in power, and the complexity of managing a loose collection of parliamentary groupings. It wouldn’t be just Lab-Lib, but potentially all the other minorities such as Plaid Cymru, SNP, even the Greens. Sorry, Green.

Talking of which… Caroline Lucas was interviewed this morning, and was quizzed about how she would align herself with whatever lashed-up government emerges from the mess. She was politely but firmly consistent in saying that her voting would be determined on “a case by case basis”. No dogmatic party line to follow, no Whips to be obeyed on pain of political death, just pragmatic, common-sense consideration of the issues. If only everyone in Parliament could behave like that.

One final thought… given the tight numbers involved if the so-called Rainbow Coalition actually happened, we might even see a situation where our solitary Green MP held the balance of power in a crucial vote. How cool would that be?

All this chatter about the first hung Parliament for 36 years, and what is to  be done about it, has completely overshadowed a great event. The Green Party now has its first MP, after Caroline Lucas beat Labour into second place in the Brighton Pavilion constituency with a swing of 8.4%.

Hearty congratulations to Dr Lucas on her tremendous achievement.

I’m just about old enough to remember the last U.K. General Election to result in a hung parliament. I was certainly of an age to vote in 1974, but sadly my memory is  now too unreliable for me to remember if I actually did. Probably not, as I was still fanning the dying embers of student radicalism in those days, and I would very likely have rejected the whole democratic process as corrupt and generally irrelevant.

No change there then. Here in the People’s Republic of Suburbia, whoever I vote for a Tory wins by a country mile and five furlongs. My deepest regret is that the Official Monster Raving Loony Party has never fielded a candidate in my constituency, so that I could maximise the futility of exercising my precious vote. I didn’t even have a realistic chance of achieving anything through tactical voting, as the traditional Conservative majority is so vast that they could run a medium-sized avocado as a candidate and still win. Playing my usual game of  “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe”,  I stuck a cross in the Liberal Democrat box.

Little did I realise how close my vote would actually get to some tiny degree of relevance. Less than two days after I finally made it into the polling station to vote, the Liberal Democrats are locked in deep discussions over their role in engineering a viable government for the U.K.  Our media channels are glowing white hot with expert opinion, speculation and analysis over how the Lib Dems will use their 55 Parliamentary seats to bolster the two failing main parties, and what inducements they will accept as the price of their co-operation. Reminiscent of 1974, when Edward Heath failed to negotiate a deal with the Liberals and was forced to resign, leaving the door open for a Labour government.

I am an habitual Labour voter, so I naturally lean towards maintaining Labour in power by any means. My perception of the Lib Dems has always been that they are more natural bed-fellows of Labour than the Conservatives, although more cerebral, idealistic and principled than either. Those principles led Nick Clegg to announce on Friday that the Tories, as the party gaining the most seats and the highest proportion of the national vote, had the right to have the first chance to demonstrate that they can form a government in the national interest. Hence the first collaboration offer came from Conservative leader David Cameron. Details are sketchy right now, but it seems pretty certain that posts in a future Conservative Cabinet will be offered to Lib Dems, and some kind of accomodation may be arrived at over the issue of electoral reform, although probably falling short of instant legislation on full-blown proportional representation (PR).

It’s interesting how the PR issue has been seized upon as the principal motivation for the Lib Dems to work with one or other of the main parties. A relatively small number of activists aside, not even the Liberal Democrat rank and file are particularly bothered by PR, and it was never a major issue during the election campaign. And of course neither Tories nor Labour want it because it would undermine their positions as the ‘Big Two’ parliamentary parties. While I appreciate the energy being spent on a possible resolution to my perpetual “whoever I vote for the Conservative gets in” conundrum, there are many other policy differences between the parties that are much more important and far-reaching. The Lib Dems want to scrap the Trident nuclear deterrent, for example, while the Big Two want to keep it. The Lib Dems are opposed to expanding nuclear power at the expense of investment in renewables. The list of deep differences goes on. How will this cocktail of conflicts affect the future stability and longevity of whatever pseudo-coalition is arrived at?

In another parallel with 1974, we are embroiled in a deepening economic and financial crisis. In these troubled times, the priority must to establish a workable government that will last. A quickie marriage of convenience that can be rushed out on Monday morning just in time to keep the markets off our backs is not enough.

“Crikey! When they offered me the candidacy, nobody said I might actually win!”

I went to bed last night not knowing who London’s next Mayor would be, but still nursing a faint hope that all those transferable second votes would come galloping over the hill like the 7th Cavalry to save the day. I woke up to discover that my nightmares were real, and Boris Johnson is now running London for at least the next four years.

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t deadly serious. In charge of a multi-billion pound budget we now have a buffoon who by all accounts can’t run a bath. Taxpayers will be paying £137k a year to a man who, it is universally accepted, will be completely dependent on the quality of the team he assembles to do the job for him.

What worries me about this election is the way that Boris won so convincingly without the slightest trace of a coherent policy on anything. Londoners have dumped a highly competent public servant with a proven track record of controlling a huge organisation, and replaced him with a celebrity journalist chat show host who was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet. Not even the Conservatives’ first choice for mayoral candidate, Boris has been subjected to steady criticism from the Tory press:

“Never before having had the opportunity to observe Boris trying to conduct himself seriously and responsibly, I have to confess that his various attempts to do so last week were deeply disappointing. He just can’t do it. The harder he tried, the more insincere, incoherent, evasive and even puerile he looked and sounded, even enabling the liberal candidate to score points. Take away the gags and jokes and nothing much is left….”

Peregrine Worsthorne, in online journal The First Post

“One of Mr Johnson’s failings is a belief that the public is there to serve him, not vice versa. He has given much pleasure to millions over the years, but will that cause the Underground to work better, the Metropolitan Police to catch more criminals, or business to thrive in London? Or would a Johnson mayoralty be yet one more chapter in an epic of charlatanry – perhaps, since it is so serious a job with potentially no hiding place, the last chapter?

“Oddly enough, given how acute he is, that won’t persuade him to do it properly. The guiding theme of his life is the charm of doing nothing properly. His sins themselves are charming in that they are the sort of failings that upset the Edwardians, and few others since. He is pushy, he is thoughtless, he is indiscreet about his private life. None of this matters much to anyone these days, which is why he has gone so far in spite of them, and tomorrow may go further still.

“Lynton Crosby, the Australian public relations genius who has kept Mr Johnson out of trouble during his campaign, returns home after it. Then what? Who will guide the unguided missile? Who will support the figurehead? Who will ensure he turns up on time, or at all? How will they be accountable?”

Simon Heffer, in the Daily Telegraph

Ken Livingstone may not have been perfect; who is? However, over the last eight years he has proved himself a highly competent, imaginative and principled leader of one of the world’s great cities. Only in comparison with a professional showman like Boris would Ken lose out in the personality stakes. To quote Peregrine Worsthorne again:

“Last week was also the first time I observed much of him on TV, and I was worryingly impressed. For unlike Boris he showed that he could be both witty and serious at the same time.”

As an environmentalist of sorts, the ‘green’ thing matters to me. I’ve heard nothing from Boris on these matters apart from a vague, uncosted, statement of intent to replace the ‘bendy bus’ with a new Routemaster, and even vaguer promises to ‘work with’ local authorities on improving recycling. Ken Livingstone , on the other hand, has a long track record on environmental issues. Friends of the Earth rated Ken the greenest candidate in the Mayoral election, giving him nine out of ten. Said FoE Director Tony Juniper:

“He is one of the few British politicians to have shown genuine leadership on green issues and put London at the forefront of efforts to tackle climate change. His manifesto is full of exciting plans to go even further. Of the three main candidates for London Mayor, Ken Livingstone is the greenest.”

As George Bernard Shaw said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” In spite of using local elections to beat up a national government for policies outside local control, Londoners still deserve better than Boris. I keep coming back to a quotation from H.L. Mencken: “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under”. Now I consider myself a pretty decent bloke, and I suspect under the buffoonery and bluster Boris is too. In answering my original question, “What do we do now?”, all I can do, apart from fleeing London, is try to shame Boris into doing the very best job he can for the city that elected him.

We came home from our Easter break to find that the offspring had taken delivery of a sturdy parcel from the Mayor of London, addressed to me personally. “DIY Planet Repairs” it says on the box, “Will you help with the repairs?”. Inside, there’s a collection of prezzies from Mayor Ken himself:

• A china mug with the slogan “Only boil enough water for the cups you’re making”
• A “DIY Planet Repairs” button badge
• A handy four-minute shower timer
• A window sticker
• A set of labels to stick on your appliances, saying “switch off”, “turn down”, “unplug”, “wash low”
• A leaflet for a £49 loft insulation offer from British Gas
• Last but definitely not least, a booklet of energy saving hints of tips. There’s actually some quite useful information in this (he said grudgingly).

There was no covering letter with this bundle, so I can’t be sure why I received it. I certainly don’t remember asking for it. It was addressed to me personally, so I may have got myself on some mailing list at london.gov.uk.

Whatever the reason, I’m sure there must be thousands of other people who received the same mailing. Someone has spent a lot of money and energy on getting this lot sent out. I applaud the message, of course we need to save energy and water, but there’s no information that isn’t freely available in many other places. I can’t help feeling that the timing, a month before the mayoral election, is either clumsy or cynical or both, and may backfire.

I like Ken Livingstone, and I’ll vote for him once again in May, but I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate for a moment. Is it really the Mayor of London’s job to lecture his ‘constituents’ on environmental matters? There’s a fine line between policies that directly affect the welfare of Londoners, and using the power of the Mayor’s office to promote his own pet projects. Coming so soon before the election, freebies like this can only be seen as a campaign stunt using public funds, providing ammunition for the opposition. This would be a shame, because I don’t see either of the other two major candidates (sorry, Green Party) showing any desire to make a platform on environmental issues. For that reason alone, it’s vital that Ken Livingstone gets re-elected, and I hope this little parcel doesn’t work against him.

We can only hope and pray that the situation in Zimbabwe gets the right result, not only in terms of votes but what happens afterwards. The post-election unrest in Kenya could look like a vicarage tea party in comparison.

Grudgingly, I have to admit to a sneaking admiration for Mugabe. He’s a very bright bloke, with a hatfull of degrees, and at 84, in a country with an average life expectancy of 37, he seems to have more energy than a sack of ferrets. However, he’s presided over the destruction of a once-great country, he’s mad as a hatter, and he has to go. Whether the thugs and gangsters who all have a vested interest in propping him up will allow that to happen is another matter.

Twenty years ago, Zimbabwe was a beautiful, prosperous and relatively peaceful country, well endowed with natural resources. It had its problems, certainly, and climate change hasn’t helped, but nothing that couldn’t have been managed if Mugabe hadn’t interfered. The resulting slow motion train wreck has been a classic example of how to run a society and an economy into the ground with greed, stupidity, half-baked ideology and racism.

Is it time for Alistair Darling to be put out with the trash? Criticism of his performance as Chancellor of the Exchequer began as soon as he accepted the poisoned chalice of succeeding Gordon Brown last year. Yesterday’s budget, Darling’s first, has been widely condemned for not living up to its advance billing as a ‘green’ budget containing radical measures to address climate change.

Climate change got a mention right at the top of his speech, but nothing that followed looks as if it will come close to doing anything useful to fix it.

Here are the main green measures announced yesterday, in no particular order:

• The worst polluting cars will be taxed a bit more, cleaner cars will be taxed a bit less.
• Electricity companies may have to buy all of their permits to emit carbon after 2012.
• Retailers who fail to restrict the use of disposable carrier bags will be forced to charge a levy on them.
• A new aircraft duty, charged per jet instead of per passenger, will raise 10% more revenue in its second year of operation.
• All new office buildings must be ‘zero carbon’ by 2019.
• From next year, the Budget will incorporate a ‘carbon budget’, setting out a 5-year plan for UK carbon emissions.

And that, apart from the usual increase in duty on booze and fags, was pretty much it. Feeble stuff, from an environmental standpoint, which has generated some understandable heat:

“It is still very unclear from a consumer and corporate perspective how the vast majority of carbon reduction will be delivered.”
(Frank Sangster, head of KPMG’s environmental tax and incentives group)

“This certainly was not a green Budget, at a time when both the domestic sector and industry needed a green Budget.”
(Gareth Stace, head of environment at the EEF manufacturers’ organisation)

“The chancellor promised to put sustainability at the heart of today’s announcement, but he has merely tinkered in the margins. He should have made it cheaper and easier for people to go green.”
(Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth)

“It’s clear the chancellor has huge holes in his accounts and is trying to hide an old-fashioned tax grab behind a bags and alcohol smokescreen.”
(Stephen Robertson, director-general of the British Retail Consortium)

The measures announced yesterday would achieve a 5% emissions reduction by 2015, well short of our obligation to cut emissions by 20% under EU proposals. The new green taxes will raise an extra £1.6bn this year, rising to £1.77bn by 2011. This masks the fact that the proportion of tax revenue coming from green taxes will actually fall very slightly to 6.91% in 2008-09.

The general consensus among financial commentators is that the Chancellor’s view of the world economy’s current problems, and Britain’s positioning to cope with them, is very optimistic. He forecast increased inflation and reduced growth, portraying Britain as simply a victim of global economic turbulence. He also forecast a marked increase in borrowing, which is worrying against a background of market turmoil and credit squeeze. In predicting a strong rebound for the UK economy next year, based on the most optimistic set of figures he could lay his hands on, he seems to be whistling in the dark with his fingers crossed.

Could it be that all the spin about a ‘green’ budget, and the inevitable disappointment when it turned out to be nothing of the sort, was just a ruse to distract us from the real problem? We have a world economy in real trouble, the UK may well get dragged down by forces outside its control, and the government doesn’t have a clue what to do about it apart from trying to plug some of the black hole in its finances with cynically-spun ‘green taxes’.

We should never forget that a healthy environment relies on a healthy economy. Environmental investment is traditionally first to go when money’s tight.

Momentum is building to put pressure on China over its ‘involvement’ in Sudan. Stephen Spielberg has resigned as artistic director for the Beijing Olympic Games in protest at China’s support for the Sudan government. Now, an open letter, signed by Nobel Peace Prize winners, politicians, Olympic medalists and entertainers, criticises China’s President Hu Jintao for not taking action to prevent atrocities in Darfur.

“As the primary economic, military and political partner of the government of Sudan…China has both the opportunity and the responsibility to contribute to a just peace in Darfur.

“Ongoing failure to rise to this responsibility amounts, in our view, to support for a government that continues to carry out atrocities against its own people.”

Words are flying back and forth, but so far nobody has talked about a boycott of the Beijing Games. Just to get the ball rolling, I am declaring myself unavailable for selection for the Great Britain team for any of the sports which I play to an international standard. If that doesn’t get their attention, nothing will.

Meanwhile, the leader of the free world refuses to consider the idea of a boycott. George Bush has confirmed he will be accepting the Chinese invitation to attend the ‘Genocide Games’, saying that as far as he’s confirmed it’s “just a sporting event”. No, Mr President, international sport is all about politics, and this is the most politically-charged Games since Moscow 1980. To quote George Orwell:

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play, it is bound up with hatred and jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all the rules and sadistic pleasure in unnecessary violence. In other words it is war minus the shooting.”

Mr Bush should feel right at home. Apart from that bit about the shooting.

It’s funny how words’ meanings can change over time. I was browsing idly through our bookshelves the other day, when I came across an interesting little volume called ‘The Survivalists’. Nothing to do with Jerry Ahern‘s interminable macho saga, Patrick Rivers’ 1975 book is a serious review of the ‘alternative’ environmental movement in the mid 1970s. From the blurb on the back cover:

“It has become fashionable to write and talk about the environment crisis: about the Earth’s fast dwindling resources of food, raw materials and energy; about Doomsday. But it is all talk: life goes on as before.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

“Beneath the veneer of the Establishment there exists an Alternative of people ‘living the revolution now’…. Some are escaping to rural self-sufficiency, others to communes; some join non-violent revolutionary groups; the technically-minded begin experimenting in alternative technologies; some set off to fight world poverty; others do all this and more”

The people Rivers describes would nowadays be called ‘greens’ or ‘environmentalists’. Today, ‘survivalist’ conjures up a particular set of images: rugged individualists, preparing for TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) by stockpiling supplies and weapons in a remote hideout, sometimes with some form of extreme political agenda. For an amusing glance at the survivalist ‘sub-culture’, watch Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekend episode ‘Head For The Hills‘. But there’s a wide spectrum of preparedness, and a whole range of survival scenarios to prepare for, from Hurricane Katrina to getting stranded in the snow on the way home from work. There is a growing awareness that disasters don’t just happen to other people, and a realisation that our ‘civilisation’ is much more fragile and precarious than we used to think.

“A dedicated ‘conserver’ does not generate much garbage in the modern sense. Consider the following ultra-frugal conserver practices:
Kitchen scraps: Use every available scrap for animal feed or for compost.
Paper and cardboard: saved for re-use as stationary or for fire kindling, insulation.
Bottles, jars, plastic jugs, and plastic bags: washed and saved for re-use.
Candle stubs and soap scraps: save to periodically combine and re-use.
Steel and aluminum cans should all be carefully washed and sorted, for re-use as containers or raw material for various metal projects.
After being boiled for soup, most bones can be ground to make bone meal, or burned to make lime.
Scrap metal of all descriptions should be sorted and stored.
Wood ashes and fat scraps should be saved for soap making.
Twine, string and thread of all kinds can be saved for re-use.
Clothes worn beyond the point of usefulness should be saved for bandage material, quilts, rags, and insulation.
Electronics beyond economical repair should be cannibalized for their metal hardware and individual components.”

An excerpt from the manifesto of some low-impact hippy permaculture commune in West Wales? It ticks all the ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ boxes. It’s actually a recent piece of advice on post-collapse garbage disposal at Survivalblog.com, a preparedness web site that claims over 55,000 visits a week worldwide. If you can see past the ‘gun nut’ discussions, this is an wonderful resource for anyone thinking about ‘off-grid’ living, growing their own food, or just planning for a winter power-cut.

A common factor in survivalist philosophy is that our present-day consumerist lifestyle is unsustainable. Where Rivers’ survivalists and today’s greens seek to modify our behaviour so as to avert, or at least moderate, catastrophe, the typical Survivalblog subscriber is planning to maintain as much of his lifestyle as possible WTSHTF. The conclusion to the above advice reads like this:

Of course, most of these extreme measures should be reserved for post-TEOTWAWKI. The value of your time must be considered! Taking these measures now would probably alienate your spouse. Your family and neighbors would also soon notice your growing heap of stored “recyclables” which they would surely label garbage. It might not be to long until the fire marshal was called to condemn your stockpile as a fire hazard. Unless, of course you could convince them that all you were doing was “reducing your carbon footprint”.

Business as usual.