Vote GREEN.

I don't buy all of this environmental catastrophe round the corner stuff. We're in a much better place pollution wise than we were 40 years ago and no doubt the developing countries will sort themselves out when they're rich enough as well. Enviro angst is the preserve of rich westerners anyway, the rest of the world is just trying to scrape a living.

 

Enviro angst...an interesting term Just thinking of my own neck of the woods when I started work yellow winter smog still happened in London and could last for days. If you fell in the Thames it was an immediate stomach pump job and as for walking on a beach the biggest hazard was lumps of tar which stuck to everything. Now no smog, clean river water and the worst beach hazard is dog poo....how things have changed.

 

Yes, hugely and for the better.

 

Living where you do Owen you might remember the River Don back in the day, Nothing lived in it, It really was poisonous, It's got Otters and Salmon living in it now

 

This is probably due to the destruction of our industry as much as anything clever anyone did.

 

Agreed Yonks ago I was overlooking a new build in Birkenhead the shipyard were quite excited about a new craft that was approaching completion...very odd looking thing however its intended purpose seemed very strange at the time...to oxygenate the upper reaches of the river if the oxygen level dropped below a certain point. Seemed a bit crazy at the time but now there has been a visible increase in marine life it all makes sense.

 

All of those policies sound awful, right? Well, I know all about it. Living in London most of them are being implemented in one way or another already. We've seen a huge change over the past 15 years, and I've not found it easy to take. In fact it's one of the reasons I'd like to move out of the city.

But like it or not, I reckon many of these changes will be introduced elsewhere sooner or later irrespective of who you vote for. Motoring is going to get harder for everyone.

In defence of the Greens, the edited policies in the OP take them completely out of context, they're part of a much bigger plan to reduce the number of miles that everyone has to travel, and also include stuff like:

TR200 The Green Party believes it is the government's responsibility to ensure that all urban and rural areas of the United Kingdom are served by a public transport system that will allow for a large proportion of the current private motorised journeys to transfer to these modes. To this end, it must ensure that public transport is designed and planned to create a user-friendly service, that is reliable, affordable, accessible, integrated with all other sustainable modes and environmentally friendly. Public service, not private profit, must be the primary function of public transport.

I find it a little sad that people are in such denial about the state of things. Whether or not you care about or believe in climate change, the fact is that at the current rate we're going to run out of fossil fuels and when that happens the only workable plan is to rely on nuclear power. Personally I'd rather make what fuel we have left last, and enjoy it.

 

The ONLY green policy guranteed to work is to eradicate mankind....if anyone of them have a genuine green agenda, that is the ultimate solution.

Mankind, whatever the financial free market system, needs to consume...the only way to cut back on that is to cut back on us....any argument in the middle is moral higher ground fantasy.

 

That might apply to the UK but China is building vast quantities of coal burning power stations and everyone is still looking for more oil to burn. It won't get better til it's all gone!

 

We're like kids who got the keys to the sweet shop decades ago and we've been stuffing our faces ever since. It's only now that we're beginning to realise all these sweets aren't good for us.
Trouble is all the poor kids like India, China and Africa have watched us gorging on sweets and now they are getting their own keys and they want their turn. So, as a planet, we're not only going to carry on stuffing sweets in our mouths but we will have more and more mouths to stuff them in.

 

And so is Germany. About three a year while we put useless windmills up that cost more to buy and run than they produce

 

But whose to say this isn't the very definition of evolution?

In fact, we come, we burn brightly for a while and then we are gone.

The green agenda only does two things:

Prolongs our existence.
Hopefully stops us taking other life forms with us.


Nature allows for a dominant species, dominant species are easily whiped out by something new.

With us it will be someyhing we invented that either kill us, or kills our agriculture.


Selfishly I'm glad I lived in the Western world in this time...I had no say in it....but these are the pinnacle times I suspect, when you are gone you are gone.

 

The Germans are building coal burning power stations because they've said no to nuclear. They're also invested heavily in renewable energy. We're getting new nuclear plants.

 

We're not passive bystanders in the process of evolution. I share your cynicism about what's likely to happen, but I haven't quite given up yet.

 

A lot of industry is still there, it just employs many fewer people than it used to. Companies just aren't allowed to chuck their pollutants into the rivers / atmosphere any more.

 

No, evolution is adaptation to an environment, we've changed the rules by artificially manipulating it. Western society is unsustainable, the whole world can't do as we do and own cars and eat meat and bury rubbish in holes in the ground, it just can't work. I saw a stat a few years ago which I can't find now which said that the U.S is 5% of the worlds population but consumes 60% of its resources or something like that.
We can't all industrialise.
I reckon humans are in the adolescence stage of development, nearly grown up, but with no sense of responsibility. Religion is on the decline(historically), if we make it through the next 500yrs or so, I think we'll be better able to control ourselves. Hopefully there will be something left to leave the future generations.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one!

 

I sense we are agreeing - my only small point is with nature, it adapts to whatever it is presented with, artificial or not (fishes inhabiting ship wrecks, rats living in sewers etc).

Just because we are the creators of something deemed artificial, whose to say that isn't the natural path anyway?! Evolve through modification.

 

That's the point, we don't chuck chemicals in rivers anymore but developing countries do. Rampant development and consumerism might be an anathema to the Greens but billions of people worldwide disagree and we all inhabit the same planet.
The EU have gone a long way already to control pollution in Europe, what we need next is assistance to developing countries to build their own sustainable lifestyle and that means we will all need to shoulder the burden collectively.
It's no good banning cars in the UK if 50 million new cars pop up somewhere else.

 

We haven't (and can't) change the rules. Every living organism on the planet affects its environment. A long time ago the earth's atmosphere contained no oxygen and a lot of CO2. Over millions of years, plants and animals changed that by absorbing carbon and releasing oxygen. Limestone consists of carbon taken from the atmosphere and coal and oil likewise. By burning up these carbon sources to produce energy, we are simply returning to the status quo. If the human race becomes unsustainable don't worry. It will be a good day for everything else on the planet!

 

This is because people have campaigned to highlight the damage that was being done and the powers that be have eventually taken steps to address the problem...so, while I agree that some improvements have been made, you can't say that all is rosey in the garden by any means. The plain fact is that our present way of life (Western imperialist industrial consumerism) is simply unsustainable...or to put it another way, it could be sustainable only if you hold with the view that it's fair to allow a tiny proportion of the world's populace to consume the majority of the world's resources. The inevitable outcomes of this imbalance are continued warfare, poverty, malnutrition, mass migration, epidemics and environmental degradation....ie roughly where we are now....