The other day I was accused of being ‘one of those greens’, what did they mean? a lettuce? a sprout maybe? This came about because I don’t own a car at the moment and use my bike instead.
It did make me think though, my mindset has certainly changed over recent years but no I don’t think I’m ‘a green’ as such (and I like bacon too much). Looking at the car situation; I’ve not got one simply because I don’t need oner at the moment, I expect it is highly probable that I’ll have one again at some point in the future and I imagine that this will be be primarily caused by future work requirements. In the meantime, it is doing me no great harm to manage without and it certainly feels a bit cheaper.
For the record, I do believe in manmade climate change and do have some concerns about it but not to the extreme of being a ‘full-on green’, I do also see significant quality of life improvements that can go with a less car-centric lifestyle for many people. Actually, I do watch quite a lot of YouTube videos with a slant towards green issues but this is mainly due to an interest in emerging technologies, things seem to be moving and changing at a speed that I have not seen before and I find that quite exciting.
In some ways it would be good to be young again, I do feel that the changes which are going on will have a fundamental impact on our lifestyles and I don’t buy into the concept that it will all be for the worse. I see the medium-term future as being a potentially exciting time that I will either miss or be too old to get involved in but that’s life.
I’ve never been frightened of change and see it as generating opportunities. Fundamentally, I feel that if we try to solve climate change issues by just changing one technology for something else (e.g. petrol cars for electric), we are missing a huge opportunity to improve the quality of life for massive numbers of people. As a society, we seem to spend an awful lot of our time charging about simply to fund our ability to charge about and that is surely a crazy way of using what is the limited number of years we have in a lifetime.
I’ll sit back and watch. This topic is generally polarised by age group and for once I’m with the young.
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