miércoles, junio 13, 2007

AA GILL ha perdido la paciencia con los ecocondríacos, y dispara a matar:
But let me tell you, you Peruvian-hatted puritan apostles of grassy nihilism, the single hottest problem facing the planet is not global warming, but the viciously smug fundamentalist prohibitionists of the green movement. Those wholemealy-mouthed ecologists, who devoutly wish to reduce everyone else’s existence to a self-righteous nose-drip probity that never moves more than four miles from the communal yurt, never eats anything that hasn’t been grown in the communal dung and never thinks anything that isn’t collectively miserabilist, are going to destroy life as we know it faster than an equator of traffic jams, a continent of unlagged lofts and a squadron of circling jumbos.

[...] As I was at a literary festival, I thought I might point out an unnoticed but enormous global waste – books. Do you know how many books are published in this country every year? Think of a figure, double it and times by your age: 206,000. More than any other country in the world. America vomits out 172,000. Oman, by comparison, publishes seven; Niger, five. The total number of books published in 1996 was 1,170,620. That’s new books. And it’s an underestimate. Given an average print run of, say, 5,000, that makes about 5.85 billion books a year. Each costs about £1.30 to make. How much cash is that? How many trees is that? How much trapped CO2 released back into the atmosphere? How much bleach and chemicals? How much power to run plant, dyes and glues and packaging and marketing? How much transport? How much effort?

In the UK, we buy 296m books a year and read fewer than a fifth of them. Paper publishing is a bigger polluter and waster of resources than all the air miles flown. Every book could be written once and put on the internet. But the eco-sermonisers never mention any of that. They never go for books, because they all fancy themselves as the next Lovelock or a bit of a Rousseau. They all want to write half a dozen.
Eso debe doler.