Kev wrote:
How come Ken Livingstone, the great environmentalist is allowed to get
away with dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Couldn't he have
linked into this by video conferencing. That is what we are encouraged
to do .

I assume you're talking about this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5237356.stm

Have you ever tried to have a multi-person meeting by video
conferencing? It doesn't work. It's a pointless and annoying waste of
time. It just about works for groups of 2-3 people, but the technology
does not yet exist to do anything more than that.

In addition, part of the point of the meeting is to raise awareness of
the CCI and the LCCLG among industry and the public - a video
conference would not have achieved this.

I find this a bit hypocritical, Mr Livingstone said: "There is no
bigger task for humanity than to avert catastrophic climate change. The
world's largest cities can have a major impact on this", unless you are
the Mayor of London jetting of to Los Angeles that is.

That's as morally retarded as saying "Churchill hated the Nazis because
they killed civilians, but he's a hypocrite because British bombing in
WWII killed civilians too"[*].

Obviously politicians of all types sometimes have to do things which
are counter to their long-term goals in order to achieve their
long-term goals; if you don't accept that, then the only society you
can possibly ever live in is an anarchy.
[*] let's assume that in this context that all bombing in WWII was
directed at military targets and that civilian casualties were an
unfortunate but unavoided consquence. I know this isn't quite the case,
but that really isn't the point here.

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org