Carbon hoofprints

Julian Kenny
Tuesday, January 5th 2010

The newspaper photograph said it all-Prime Minister Manning having his hair cut by his barber in, of all places, San Fernando! As we all know when he travels on the roads of T&T he does so in a gas-guzzling convoy, sweeping everything aside. Contrast this with the Buccoo Reef Trust’s genuinely sensible plea to citizens to fight global warming by recycling, walking, turning off appliances etc, and planting a tree!

If the Prime Minister is in any way sincere in his born again crusade to save the planet from global warming/climate change you would have thought that it would have been less polluting to have had his barber travel to his palace on his own, not necessarily walking, but by PTSC service. Better yet, one of his foreign domestic staff might have been a professionally trained person appointed to an officially established post of hair dresser/barber. Just think of the carbon emitted to clip a few strands of receding gray hairs from his head, generously estimated at, say, one gram. Assume that the convoy consists of three SUVs and one Class E Mercedes and that it travels at the speed limit of 80 km per hour (ignore the motorcycle outriders) and assume the distance both ways to and from San Fernando is 100 km. Assume, also, that those types of vehicle emit carbon at the rate of 200 grams per kilometre. Any SEA student could easily calculate that clipping of Mr. Manning’s hair will have added about 80 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and as human hair is not readily degradable a gram of carbon will have safely been sequestered wherever it is dumped, compatible with the remedies of carbon capture and sequestration. Now this is not a particularly large quantity of greenhouse gas and such quantities are highly unlikely to add to the cause of coral bleaching or ocean acidification so it may safely be ignored. It is nevertheless part of one giga hoofprint of the leaders of all countries, as they tackle the civilisation-threatening phenomenon of climate change, including the hoof prints of all those who drive the process. Take, for example, the Copenhagen summit on climate change. International newspaper reports claimed that it took no less than 1,200 limousines to transport delegates from airports to hotels and meetings. We were also told that about 400 arrived by executive jets that had to be flown on to satellite airports, the main one not having adequate parking space. We saw also Air Force One arriving with President Obama and entourage for meetings of less than 24 hours! There are of course some giga players on the climate change scene, notably Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The curious thing about these two is that neither is actually a climatologist, or indeed a scientist. Both whip around the world, the former we are told by executive jet, the latter noted for having told about 2,500 members of the IPCC by e-mail that they were all ’Nobel Laureates’, both obviously contributing significantly above per capita emissions. But let’s get back down to earth. Al Gore has a BA in Government from Harvard University and is a politician/businessman. Pachauri has engineering degrees specialising in railway engineering as well as a doctorate in industrial engineering/economics and like Gore has business interests and has rather more hair than Gore, and indeed Manning. According to the international media both have considerable business interests and curiously interests that are supposedly closely tied to the climate change issue. Both we are told will benefit handsomely should there ever be an internationally accepted curb on greenhouse gas emissions. According to John Broder of The New York Times November 2, 2009, Gore as a partner in Silicon Valley venture capital heavyweight Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, ’could become the world’s first ’carbon billionaire’’ According to the Telegraph of December 21, 2009, Pachauri ’has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations’. You get it now? But simply dumping hair clippings seems such a waste. Why not recycle them, not that I can think of any option. Possibly UWI biotechnologists/climate change authorities might devise a hair-to-bio-fuel/fertiliser technology. It does not go down particularly well with me but in the early 1940s human hair was actually recycled. In fact the Germans actually recycled hair shorn from the millions of Jewish victims, men, women and children murdered in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. The hair was collected, tonnes of it, and used to make felt footwear for their submarine crews who stalked the convoys to England. Felt slippers are extremely silent when they make contact with metal decking. And silence is absolutely essential in submarine warfare, unlike in warfare in T&T politics! Source: http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161578350