Aussie wonders why Beijing is polluted

250,000 motorists joined Beijing's "No-car" event on World Environmental Day, using alternative transport along with the 1,289,000,000 Chinese who don't own cars.

But according to an article in Monsters & Critics, no-car day had little effect and things are as bad as ever in Beijing.

"I drive to work everyday and today was no different", said Melinda Turner, an Australian teacher at an international school. "It took me 20 minutes to cover about two miles - the traffic was as bad as ever. And the pollution was the worst I've seen for weeks."

Quite.

Did she miss the point of no-car day?

Did she think she was exempt?

Was it just for "them"?

What is with people's belief that clean air is some kind of right which should be bestowed upon us? That we somehow deserve it? We're modern. We won't put up with dirty air. Bah to the government. Bah to the utilities, burning all that coal.

Meanwhile the coal plant manager turns up for work rubbing his hands with glee at all of the black stuff he can turn to smoke and ash...

Get real people.

It doesn't work like that.

There is no "they" who's gonna clean up the planet.

It requires individuals to drastically reconsider their energy use.

Not just turning the lights off when you remember. Not just turning down the air conditioning, heating, water heating - these are all tidying measures.

None of these actions, NONE of them, will make the merest difference a year from now when there are an extra 85 million souls on the planet, 85 million living breathing human beings added every year to the world population.

Just their respiring alone will add 2 billion tonnes of CO2 to our atmosphere. And that's before they've produced or consumed ANYTHING but air. That's before they eat any food, construct houses, power their lives. Reproduce themselves.

We may be saving the planet for our grandchildren, but it's them who are going to choke us with their constant in-out respiration at 46 grammes of CO2 exhaled per person per minute as the population grows and grows.

As the air grows heavier and hotter, will they move us to low oxygen old folks homes? In sooty backwaters? Will there be mass euthanasia, funded by selling the "avoided carbon" on the emissions trading markets? One human life cut short by ten years saves 241 tonnes of carbon dioxide from respiration.

"Thanks for leaving us so much coal and so many desolate broken down puny wind turbines, now fuck you," say our grandchildren.

"Thanks for bringing us into a world of seven billion people, but really, thanks most of all for those little green recycling bins. Top effort. NOW GET BACK IN YOUR CARBON HOLE."

They should, really. I wouldn't complain, we've got it coming. We need to reprioritise our carbon dioxide use. Cleaning up our act is one thing. But a total denial about the real cause of our problems is not the way to go.

Hong Kong utility CLP for example has announced its latest "green" campaign; it will plant 30,000 trees here in Hong Kong. It's quite a big deal locally, it will create eight or nine forestry jobs (it should do, unless they're just going to scatter the seeds around then f**k off and leave them for 30 years). It will be very pretty, up in Tai Lam country park and it will help clear the air in the area.

But in terms of CO2 reduction, it is utterly pointless. The trees would be better planted as city shade to reduce air conditioning cost.

At maturity, this many trees will absorb 170 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere in a year.

The Hong Kong population will exhale this much carbon dioxide in their breath in 36 seconds.

CLP's Castle Peak power plant will exhale this much carbon dioxide through its stack in 5 minutes.

So really, we're pretty much screwed whatever we do. Tree planting is not going to save us. When the world population reaches 10 billion, we'll need more trees than we have space for. That's when we'll need to start sending tree farms into space, when earth will enjoy rings of orbiting trillion-acre CO2 removal factories.

An electric utility planting 30,000 trees is just a gesture. It's what people who drive to work want to hear, they want the "big bad utility" to do something green like this. They want to get excited about a cause. They want to point the finger at the power generator, the power plant built, approved and paid for by them but owned by the scapegoat entity wrapper we call utilities.

It's easy and it's fun.

Which t-shirt is the rad grad do-gooding greener going to wear: the unrealistic "DEATH TO COAL, PLANT MORE TREES"? The practical "FIX THE FGD UNITS AT 600MW COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS"?

Or, for the brave, the only real solution to the CO2 problem: "STOP REPRODUCING"?

Malthus was right. He just had the wrong commodity.