This will be brief as it's both a little and a big idea.

High fuel prices hit the poorest first. In the saddest cases some people, particularly the elderly, feel that they can't afford to heat their homes and die of hypothermia. This has already happened, and could happen again. People with money tend not to die of hypothermia.

We are also concerned about using too much energy and increasing global warming, although it has been near-invisible as a news item this week (recession, India terrorism)!

I have felt for some time that if we (as a people, a nation, or whatever) were serious about reducing energy consumption we would turn our pricing system upside down. Why encourage people to use more by making energy cheaper at higher usage?  These are the unit costs on my most recent gas and electricity bills (in UK pence/kilowatt-hour):
 
 

So after I've used quite a bit the price halves.

If we want to cut down energy use surely the tariffs should be the other way round with the unit cost going up the more you use. This could have the important fringe benefit of eliminating fuel poverty, particularly if the first x units (where "x" is enough to survive) were FREE.

An end to fuel poverty?

This seems like an impossible dream, and I don't expect it to happen. I wish it would.
 
 

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During World War II we cut down lots of nice iron railings to support the war effort.

"The railings were said to have been melted down and used for munitions, but in reality this was often an exercise to boost morale"

This is a quote from the COI News Distribution Service, and is therefore somewhat official. Will we say something similar in the future about waste recycling?

I arrive at these pessimistic thoughts because of recent news about the "recycled" waste mountains which are building up in the UK (see for example "Recycling industry in a slump"). This is because the price for waste has collapsed thanks to reduced demand, which is in turn due to the credit crunch (banks have a lot to answer for already - no doubt this will grow). And a large part of the market is China. On the other side of the world!

I would think that many people rather like the idea of recycling, as summed up by the nice (green) official logo above. This gives us a comfortable feeling of things going round and round, with no waste and no demands on the planet for additional materials. Of course everyone realises that it can't be as simple as this, but we would expect it to be close. The recent news highlights just how far from reality this image is.

I guess that most of us think (or thought) that, for example, the waste paper we carefully sort out is collected and taken to somewhere not too far away where it is reprocessed into slightly brown paper or the like. Far from it - literally! It turns out that much of it goes to China and the Far East. I have no axe to grind with these countries at all. My hangup is about tranportation. Clearly shipping to "round the corner" and the "Far East" involve using up vastly different amounts of energy. And I thought that was what much of this was about! 

I am particularly worried that I have heard several people who are (were) recycling converts saying basically "What's the point"? There used to be a rather clever saying - "Think globally - act locally". I thought this encompassed much of what we needed to do to save the environment and, ultimately, ourselves and our children.  But, if our waste goes half way round the world, what's the point?

Could it be just to boost morale? Like the railings?
 
 

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