Tuesday, December 20, 2005

MIRROR, SIGNAL, CHRISMARTIN

It's one of the great soap opera plot staples - you need someone's guilty little secret exposed, you set them up to have a small accident somewhere they shouldn't be. And so it is with Chris Martin - soft, caring, socially aware Chris Martin. Yesterday, he pranged the back of a woman's car in London. Now, it's not so much that he shouldn't have been in London, but that someone who really worries about the planet and people on it shouldn't have been sitting behind the wheel of a SUV. Perhaps Chris is unaware that these vehicles - besides being inappropriate for a crowded city street - throw out enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. Perhaps Chris is unaware that the impact of global warming is going to offset all the limited gains of the G8 agreements this summer ("Despite contributing very little to global greenhouse gas emissions, Africa is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of global warming as a result of its dependency on agriculture and lack of financial resources to offset these impacts. The Gulf of Guinea, Senegal, Egypt, the Gambia, the eastern African coast and the Western Indian Ocean islands are at particular risk from rising sea levels. A one-metre rise would flood large areas of the Nile Delta, and the Egyptian city of Alexandria would be severely affected; a similar rise would swamp 70 per cent of Seychelles.

Meanwhile, significant extinction of plants and animals is anticipated over the coming decades, affecting rural livelihoods and tourism, if global warming continues unchecked. Hartebeest, wildebeest and zebra in South Africa's Kruger National Park, Botswana's Okavango Delta and Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park could be severely threatened by a predicted 5-per-cent drop in rainfall. Crop yields in some parts of southern Africa may fall by as much as 20 per cent. It is also predicted that malaria-carrying mosquitoes will spread to Namibia and South Africa over the coming decades, the Outlook states." [source: The UN Chronicle])

Perhaps he doesn't know all this. Or perhaps he just thinks his role in changing the planet is telling other people what to do.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps he's been to the Jay Kay School of Motoring-while-still-preaching-about-the-environment-and-that.

Anonymous said...

it's not an excuse, and it does look like he's being a bit of a silly boy, but under his steam the group donate 10% of their wages to charity, which is probably more than most. - Elvis

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

Rich men making small donations to charity they can well afford aren't to be sniffed at; but what's much more important than someone throwing a few quid at a problem is for them to actively change their lifestyles to avoid creating the problem in the first place.

There is no excuse for a musician to be driving an SUV in a city. It's pure selfishness.

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