Stuff like this just makes me angry.

It's about a proposition by the UK government to show Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth at UK secondary schools. Remember, we're talking secondary schools here, not primary. These are kids who are well able to form their own opinions about topics, not 6-year olds who soak up everything you show them. The criticism is that

"Climate change is important, but it should be taught to children in a neutral and measured manner. Indoctrinating school children in this manner is unprecedented and unacceptable."

I like the second sentence, especially the words "unprecedented" and "unacceptable". What exactly, Mr Dimmock, do you call advertisements? From early on, children are bombarded with this shit (sorry there is no other way of saying this), advertisers specifically target children. Yet, this is acceptable?

Of course, there is a difference between advertisements and An Inconvenient Truth. Advertisements involved a lot of money, companies live from the revenue they provide. They lie, a lot of the time. Actually, they always lie, in some way, be it through the way they glorify or the claims they make about their product. They have a VERY specific target, namely to make people buy more stuff. And a lot of them very specifically target children at an early age. An Inconvenient Truth, on the other hand, is a documentary. It reports the facts. And - if you disagree with me here, scroll down to the post "Deniers" - they don't take a political side on an issue. Because politics has nothing to do with this discussion anymore. Climate change is fact. Man-made climate change is fact. So, an Inconvenient Truth is merely reporting the facts, maybe in a very flashy way, but not near as flashy as advertisements falsify the facts.

The inconvenient truth about An Inconvenient Truth is that it might make people become political. It might make them write to their MP to pressure for change. It gets people off their couches, makes them think, unlike ads that discourage any sort of thinking. And a public that thinks is the last thing some people wantt.

So, they've finally done it. After its privatisation a while ago, the Deutsche Bahn (now Die Bahn) has decided to enter the stockmarket. The first result: prices are rising by 2.9%, the second price increase in one year. While the German government preaches wanting to cut their emissions by over 50% (which isn't enough anyway, but that's a different issue altogether), Die Bahn is making sure people stay in their cars - or people who used to use the train now go out and buy a car, because it simply makes more economic sense to drive (at least if you car-pool).

The main argument for privatisation is usually an increase in efficiency: a private company has to try to make money, thus their service will be better than the service a publicly owned company provides. But there are certain services where profit simply has no place, such as hospitals and public transport. The train has to operate at a loss on certain parts of the network, because it provides a service to people living in remote areas. For a private company, especially one in the stockmarket, this doesn't make sense: if they aren't subsidised by the government, keeping parts of the network that produce a loss open is simply not profitable. This is why trains shouldn't be privatised. Britain is a prime example. The service is inefficient, the rail network falling apart, the fare system impossible to comprehend.

Generally, I'm not a big fan of the stockmarket. Actually, I think companies selling shares in the stockmarket is the source of a lot of problems: if I finally decide to switch my electricity supplier to a company claiming to protect the environment by using renewable sources, I don't feel too great finding the following statment on their website:

We believe that corporate responsibility is essential to the maintenance of financial strength and to the achievement of our core objective, which is to deliver sustained real growth in the dividend payable to our shareholders.

How exactly does this fit into their "green" credentials? It could be that there is a lot of money to be made with investing in renewable technologies, but I don't think that this will fit in with their core objective. Appearing "green" on the other hand will, because this way they catch idiots like me.

This leads to another, related, issue: as long as a company is in the stock market, it always has to put the interests of its shareholders before other interests. The interests of the shareholders are very simple: growth. More, more, more. Thus, the incentive is to "greenwash," to appear to care about the environment to attract business from well-meaning people. As Monbiot puts it, it's not evil people who will destroy our place on this planet. It's well-meaning people who switch their lights off, buying green products until the water is up to their necks.