Who is to blame for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

I'm puzzled and rather irritated by the constant stream of outrage from America, from its president to its ordinary citizens, as though they were not themselves to blame for that fact that some companies are drilling for oil in the seas off the coast of America. I mean, if you want to drive gas-guzzling cars, and fly everywhere from state to state, and use fossil fuels to power your air conditioning and heat your water for your daily shower, this is how your needs are supplied. And if you are demanding that oil be drilled off shore, then you are taking the risk (as with all such enterprises) that there will be accidents that cause this kind of spillage.
So what then? Are you prepared to pay more so that the companies that do the drilling can be already prepared, at great expense, for immediately dealing with any kind of accident no matter how rare and unlikely? How much more are you prepared to pay for your gas and air fuel to have that?
Or are you prepared to convert to wind farms and go by train instead of cars and planes? Who ever heard of wind spillages? (And don't tell me Nuclear is the way, because I can tell you that nuclear spillages are MUCH worse).
It's a matter of lifestyle choices isn't it? If you make the right lifestyle choices those sea birds won't be soaked in oil because no one will be demanding oil from the bottom of the sea. If you don't make the lifestyle choices, then don't blame the company that is working to give you what you are asked for at prices you were prepared to pay. They don't do it for fun. They do it because you pay them to do it.

Gardening the hard way

As I sit in my study (being on research leave, I'm doing a bit more of this) I watch other lucky people (the gardeners employed to do the shared areas of our courtyard) come and spend their time doing energetic things in the fresh air and the sunshine. Today they have been shooing leaves about with a noisy machine that pretends to be the wind.
Now, what more stupid activity could you engage in on a very windy autumn day, than shooing leaves about with a blower? What a waste of fossil fuels! The mischievous leaves briefly go in the direction you intended, but then you turn your attention to the next leaf, and the one you just deposited gets up and goes somewhere else, assisted by the much more powerful Boreas, who knows a thing or two about how to scatter Autumn leaves. When, briefly, you do succeed in making a small and rather loose pile of leaves in some corner, out of the wind, then you come along with the next two or three leaves you've just collected with your blower, and as you approach your untidy pile of leaves, the blower helpfully blows away the ones you'd already got there, in its attempt to deposit the newcomers. Off they all go again, and you're back to square one.
I don't know what you call this stupid machine for blowing leaves, but I am quite certain that it is one of the most useless inventions known to mankind. What you need (Mr Gardener) is a large outdoor broom and a pair of boards. Someone long ago, many thousands of years ago, invented the idea of a broom, and really this is one of the best inventions known to mankind. You sweep up the leaves with the broom, and then you pick them up in piles with the pair of boards (holding one board in each hand and pulling them hard together with the leaves compressed between them) and load the leaves into the wheelbarrow like that. It's easy. In fact, I don't think it's any harder than lugging that ineffectual blower around. And it's good for you. And it's quiet. And it would be much more satisfying for me to watch from my window, though it would make me more envious of your job.

Hot house peppers

Have you noticed that all the salad vegetables that are in the shops, especially in the winter, are always from Holland (except when they're from Spain)?

Last Spring I went to the Green Grocers in Norwich, which prides itself on supplying local produce, and was distressed to discover that it was stocking virtually nothing from Norfolk, or even from the UK. But there was plenty of produce from Holland.

So I asked the man in the shop why it was that we could only get tomatoes, lettuces, cucumbers and peppers from Holland, given that the weather in Holland is no warmer than here or, if anything, less warm. The answer was interesting: it's because Holland has virtually unlimited supplies of cheap natural gas with which they heat their greenhouses and thereby produce bland tasteless salad vegetables throughout the year, which still cost not very much even after they've been shipped over by sea and distributed by road transport. So even if we went in for growing stuff under glass in the UK, we'd struggle to compete with their prices, because the cost of the heating would be too high. It's not surprising that Norfolk growers don't offer produce grown in artificially heated conditions.

The carbon footprint you make by buying such produce is far from small, evidently. But for some reason the price does not reflect the huge quantity of fossil fuel that is being consumed to provide it at the wrong seasons of the year, and to distribute it to places miles away across the North Sea. Why is that?

Presumably the answer is that whereas we in the UK have already squandered all our North Sea oil and gas by distributing it at prices that were unrealistically low, Holland is still living in that profligate era. They are burning up their legacy, and producing tomatoes for which we are paying not nearly enough—nothing like what that fuel is really costing us and the world So we eat them carelessly, winter and summer alike, even though they are produced by burning up what small amount remains of the North Sea's gas and oil supplies. It doesn't strike us that they are costing the earth.

It seems to me that the squandering of scarce fossil fuel resources should be taxed to give some real sense of the cost of such produce. Because, once we've used up that fuel then not only are the wars for control of the oil fields in other parts of the world going to get worse, but we're all going to be at the mercy of that European gas pipeline from Russia. And it's fairly pointless worrying about global warming, and polishing your halo by offsetting the carbon emissions, if before global warming has a chance to get a hold we've all killed each other in the competition for possession of ever scarcer oil and gas supplies.

It's a bit like being under siege, with enough food and fuel for two weeks, but then feasting recklessly for ten days. Then, on the eleventh day, finding there's nothing left we shall fight each other to death over two mouldy crusts.