David Hicks' Daily Doings

If you read my previous post you might wind up thinking I'm one of these-here "greens". I'm bloody well not.

I saw the Green Party marching and protesting against the war in town today. Lots of drum banging and wistle-blowing[1]. However, it strikes me as being far too late to start "protesting" about the war now. I think my attitide to the war was best summed up by a 100-plus-year-old First World War veteran being interviewed by The Times newspaper the other day (to praprhase): by the time the shooting starts, things have already gone very wrong. Not wanting a war is a fine sentiment, and one that I heartily agree with, it's just that I think it's a bit late starting your protest the day the tanks start rolling towards Bagdad. The chain of events that precipitated this balls-up started years ago, and it's back then they needed to be stopped.

[1] Which is fun, if done for its own sake. I've got nothing against a good, old-fashioned carnival, after all (looking forward to Strawberry Fair this year!). It's just a shame that people have to make statements all the time. Can't people just enjoy themselves?

A bit more on the hydrongen economy thing:

Seemingly, the oil and gas companies are thinking they could extract hydrogen from their oil and gas. This is excellent news. Now, it might not be great right now from an environmental point of view, but it does provide a good bridging mechanism between our current power system and a hydrogen-based power system. What I'm thinking of here is doing away with the National Grid (for forigners, the National Grid is simply the network of power lines that carries electricty to all locations around the country) and replacing it with veihcle-based delivery of fuel cells / rechargable batteries / whatever. If nothing else this would do away with the whole power-lines-might-cause-lukemea thing, and it would stop the bloody power going out every time we got a bit of a high wind.

Once you had a standardised system of power-cell distribution set up, anyone could join in. All you'd need is some means of generating electricity (solar panels on your house, a bit of woodland growing biofuels, whatever) and some means of charging fuel cells with it (an excellent oppertunity for someone to start flogging charge-o-matics for 100 quid a go on eBay). That way, you could sell home-grown power the same way people sell home-grown potatoes at the side of the road. It's not complicated, the big power companies wouldn't have to lay off millions of workers, and we'd slowly but surely move to nice renewable power all around. Sorted.