windmills = world peace

Godammit. In my important keynote online State of the Cranium address of last week, I forgot to mention the environment. I'm obsessed by it all! I'm not the best enviro person around but I really care about it. That makes no sense does it. In 2006 I must make it my New Year's resolution to recycle far more than I do.

I also forgot to mention Europe and the EU as big interests.

I'm also more and more interested in business ... at many levels. As an idealistic teenager I don't think I really appreciated just how money is important. God do I understand now! And how multinationals carry as much, or more, influence than many govts round the world - including some of the democratically elected ones. Interesting article in The Independent about how carbon trading is now becoming a big thing. Developing countries are making a business out of it "you pay us to maintain the rainforests". Amazing. I hadn't thought of carbon trading in quite that way ... though had previously been impressed with the whole idea anyway.

It's largely the developing countries that have all these important rainforests in them. They are, as is often said, the lungs of the planet. How to develop the developing? Pay them to keep the planet going. Amazing.

And hands up who is yet to make a link between the Iraq war and global warming? OK so it goes like this. It's a given that the war happened because of oil. It's not a cliche, it's not cynicism, but as Julia said in the comments on my last post ... how can we just happily ignore these huge must-be-truths and keep Bush and Blair in office?

back to that link. If we moved away from oil and fossil based fuels as the main source of energy in the west, suddenly our governments would care less about skermishes and wars and dictators dictating in the Middle East. We care about the gulf because there's loads of oil there. Should anything happen to cut the flow of oil, westen economies would be undermined. And if western governments got hold of the oil sources, then their economies would be able to boom due to lower priced fuel.

If we put money into renewable energies and alternative energy sources, Iraq (for instance) wouldn't matter to Bush or Blair. Or, rather, wouldn't be on their radar in quite the way they are now.

So, renewable energies = less war? = less imperialist forcefulness? = less islamophobia? = a slowing down of the greenhouse effect? = a cure for continued global warming?

In short ... windmills = world peace.

Scary news about the slowing down of the Gulf Stream thanks to melted ice caps thanks to global warming (today's news). Global warming could ironically mean Britain gets colder.

• FYI, The Independent is a national newspaper in the UK, very intelligent and with liberal leanings.

(apologies if this all just sounds like badly thought out blurb, I'm slamming all this down quickly. Remember ... I set this blog up to teach myself how to write again ... years of sub-editing and being forced to think hard about what I write has done my writers gene in, this is therapy)