Purple a tool for raising awareness -

There is something curiously childlike and beautiful about a 1 metre/yard diameter purple balloon... all my kids love them.... even my 15 year old son enjoys them... they move through the air with great grace... combination of their high mass and high 'air' resistance... they move in slow motion... oh and there is their exquisite perfect spherical shape...

if full of pure CO2 they would weigh exactly 1 kilogram... heavier than air...

my family's carbon footprint is 9 tonnes CO2 p.a (for 6 of us, primary footprint ie home energy and all travel including air) or 9000 kg

rather neatly, that's 1 'yardstick' balloon of CO2 - that my actions cause to be emitted - every hour... of every day... of every year.... not good (and i am trying hard - its better than some... and worse than others!)

when we imagine that load of balloons dumped into our rapidly shrinking air-fill space remaining - we may get a nasty jolt (the total available 'air fill' space remaining is roughly 20% to 40% of what we had 200 years ago - (ie it is 60 - 80% full now) based on 400 to 450 ppm upper limit CO2 levels. 200 years ago it was 300ppm

We are at 380ppm now, and rising at 2.5 ppm per year. At this rate we hit the lower 'full up level' in just 8 years. Some say we have exceeded it already.

If CO2 were purple we would have seen the sky change colour during our lifetimes. We would have taken action. But we are starting to see it now and we can get oursleves out of this mess as fast as we got ourselves into it - but only if we acknowledge the scale of the problem - the biggest issue of all time

in the history of humankind never before has something so invisible, unspoken, and by and large irrelevant moved centre stage so fast

each CO2 bubble we can avoid will be a drip in the ocean saved

Carbon will be the currency of the C21st (Dr Brenda Boardman, Oxford Univ)

the problem won't go away - until we start weighing it

the futures green - but only after we have done away with all the purple

editor
Moderator
Registered: Jan 30, 2006
Posts: 29

Feb 09, 2006 at 09:33 PM

Reply with quote

Thanks Coach.

I wonder if we could have a Purple label on all the things we buy? The idea of a carbon tax is a little too abstract for me. What is carbon to most people anyway? A lump of coal? A bit of black stuff that you compress into diamonds? What would you do with a bit of carbon?

Now the idea of a purple tax, well that could be interesting! When you buy a car it could have a purple index. When you buy batteries for your game-boy then well they could also be purple. Apple could make iPods with a purple rating..... Instead of going nano why not improve upon the purple index ?

Why not put a purple scale on to the Bananas we eat? Local apples could have a low purple factor..... but oh dear then we are on track for a Purple Police to make sure people are not scamming their purple quotas!

I think the whole idea of Purple is wonderful. Reds, Blues, Blacks and Silver have been in dominance for far too long.

__________________
Ed

Previous Thread | Next Thread

Bookmarks

Digg

del.icio.us

StumbleUpon

Google