Disposing of nothing.

When I was a horrible child, we had proper bins. Big galvanised steel ones with lids that were capable of handling the ashes from the coal fire even if they were too hot to touch. They weren’t as big as the vast black plastic thing on wheels we have now, they had no wheels at all. Just handles.

Bin men used to come around and lift these things without ever once measuring how far they were from the kerb or worrying about what was in them. They had no lifting device, just a truck with sides they opened, then they lifted and poured the contents of the bin into the truck and put the bin back.

Not one hi-vis jacket to be seen. No complaints about bin lids being a quarter of an inch too high.

Then again, not much went in those bins. Coal fire ashes, mostly. Newpapers went in there because they were part of the coal fire ashes. Cremated paper. We didn’t throw away much food because we didn’t have supermarkets selling packages of food in amounts nobody could possibly eat in the timescale allowed.

I remember the first nearby Carrefour in a town called Pontllanfraith. There was much excitement but when it opened, nobody really know how to work it. Get the stuff yourself? What’s that about? How do we get half a pound of this stuff that’s all in one-pound bags? What the hell – trolleys? What are those for?

Trolleys are insane. I rarely use them and only ever use the low-volume ones. People arrive at tills with the massive trolleys piled high with enough food to get them through a zombie apocalypse and I wonder at their reasoning. Sure, you can have several well stocked freezers but if the worst happens and the power goes off…

Incidentally, if there is a zombie apocalypse and you insist on me going outside to smoke, you’d stand a better chance with the zombies.

Back to those bins. We threw stuff straight in. No plastic bags or bin liners. Now I have a bin in the kitchen which takes 70-litre bin bags. When that’s full I take out the bag, put in a new one and put the full one in my massive wheeled disposal box outside. It has occurred to me, often, that bin bags are bought simply to be thrown away. Fortunately we have lots of mysterious charities here who seem to think I buy so many clothes that I must throw out a whole bag full every week. They deliver loads of plastic bags which fit my kitchen bin.

When I do clear out old clothes, I put them in the big RNLI clothes box. They are in plastic bags, as requested, they just have the name of the wrong (and likely fake) charity on the bag.

Supermarket plastic bags are a new phenomenon too (if you are old like me). We used to get stuff in paper bags which were good for starting up a coal fire. Plastic ones stink when they burn. I remember buying sodium chlorate in a little brown paper bag. Nails and screws too. None of those hard-plastic bubble boxes in those days, those packs containing ten screws each when you need eleven. If you wanted eleven, you bought eleven. There is actually a local shop that can still do that for common sizes – yes, this is a hick town but I like it that way. I can buy one hinge in there. One. Grasp that, drones. That shop sold me the little block of beeswax I use to seal model boat rigging so it doesn’t get damp and sag.

Now we throw away much of what we buy – and we buy plastic bags for the sole purpose of throwing them away. I must admit that the free supermarket bags have been a blessing. I use them to line my office bin. Still, I can cope without them.

Inevitably, this scenario leads to the throwing away of nothing at all at enormous expense.

And so it came to pass that the Government devised an expensive, insane and ridiculous scheme and the Church of Climatology rejoiced, and nobody with more than half a brain was even remotely surprised. Do political parties select candidates based on their gullibility these days? It certainly looks that way.

Their idea is this. We grow plants of a kind that will suck up carbon dioxide. So that’s any kind of plant at all, if the politicians were capable of the merest hint of understanding of biology. When I was at school we had to learn the biochemical pathways of photosynthesis for A level. I was pleased that bugger didn’t come up in the exam. Now they just learn that ‘some’ plants are good at .taking up CO2.

Then we burn these evil, contaminated witch plants and steal their power. Then we capture the CO2 we have just released by burning the plants that have already captured it. How we do this is not explained. Then we hire lots of minimum-wage-slaves to shovel this stuff into coal mines to hide it, so next year’s crop can’t sneakily absorb it. We will know the world is safe when all the plants die.

I have this image of baffled  guys with shovels being told to shovel the contents of an apparently empty truck into a hole in the ground. You know, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that MPs don’t know what ‘it’s a fucking gas, you idiots, and it all blew out of the truck on the way here’ really means.

Carbon dioxide dissolved in water produces carbonic acid. Pump enough into the ground and those plants struggling to find enough CO2 in the air to live on will also find that their roots are being wrecked by soil acidification. As ‘sustainable’ ideas go, this one will bring on Armageddon within ten years. What a bunch of dicks.

Leaving aside the nonsense of turning arable land over to growing stuff to burn instead of to eat while simultaneously telling us all to eat more veg and less meat, there is a better idea.

Just ram all the spare vegetable matter into the old coal mines. No need for special crops, use all the waste stems and leaves of current crops. It is exactly the same. Pack it in hard. There goes your CO2, it’s all locked up in buried plant material and there is a bonus.

Give it time. When the  human race actually manages to grow up and see what a teenage dirtbag it has been, that rammed-in vegetable matter might well have turned into new coal, or at least peat. A huge supply of energy for the (hopefully) less idiotic world of the future.

As for now, there is no point trying to help the drone government to understand. They are incapable of it. Let them play their silly little games right up to the point of piano wire and lampposts.

I probably won’t live to see it but for the future people, I recommend the bass strings. The high strings are like cheese wire. Far too quick.

Maybe I will live to see it if I continue to studiously ignore all that Puritan health insistence. Indeed, as I am both well pickled and thoroughly smoked, I might last longer than Tutankhamun.

 

Tonight’s randomness has been brought to you bu Caol Ila, because I am not working tomorrow so it’s safe to stink of peat all day. There are probably typos in there but I don’t care.