Postal Strikes Don’t Work
I’m just putting the new tax disc on my Lotus Elan. Incidentally, for the first time in some years, I’m taxing it through the winter, as I need the sun. I just need a new warm coat to go with the car. I don’t think I’ll buy it in yellow though.
I renewed the tax disc on-line after I received the demand in the post. I actually did it last Thursday in the middle of the postal strike and got the disc in the post on Saturday. So despite the two-day postal strike, the mail got through, perhaps a day late. But then it’s only the 28th of October and because of the strikes, the DVLA have given us all another five days. I also had a letter saying that.
I don’t know what percentage of vehicles are now taxed on-line, but in July 2007, Computer Weekly said it was over a third. I would be surprised if it was less than that now.
So how much has on-line purchase of tax discs cost the Post Office?
A lot!
I have a feeling too, that since the strikes of last week, the volume of junk mail I have been receiving is down.
Are these enemies of the environment coming to their senses?
I hope so!
Higher Eco-Taxes
I have always been an advocate of high environmental taxes on energy. I first wrote about this some years ago in a previous blog.
The main reason is that if the taxes are basically neutral and are balanced by a reduction in Income Tax, this measure probably would take a large number of people out of the tax system completely. This would give a greater incentive for people to work hard and cut large numbers of dead wood out of the tax collection system.
Obviously, if energy was expensive you would spend your extra money to save it, by putting insulation and energy-efficient heating systems into your house and getting a more efficient car. People would also work more from home and ideas would be developed to facilitate this. Perhaps pubs and post offices could become local business centres in both towns and the countryside.
The higher the taxes, the more innovative people will become.
Perhaps surprisingly, even if the measures were tax neutral, you would raise more money, because a lot of the worst gas-guzzlers seem to be owned by those with no visible means of support. i.e. higher eco-taxes would be a tax on the black economy.
So I was pleased to see the Green Fiscal Commission thinking my way.
They make one mistake thought, in that they feel there should be a high tax on new cars. That is wrong, as we want people to buy new cars that are fuel-efficient.
I think too, that we should encourage people to have a range of vehicles for different circumstances. For instance, you might use a very fuel-efficient runabout to go to work, but at weekends, you may use say a five or six seater to take your family and dogs to the coast. I would also replace Vehicle Excise Duty, with a small Registration Tax, that would be enforced very rigidly. You’d only pay the tax, when you bought the vehicle.
The Scilly Isles
I like islands and the Scillies, along with the Aeolian Islands are one of my favourite places in the world. When we went to the Scillies, we flew direct from Ipswich in my own plane. What a landing and takeoff, as the runway is short and with a hump like a camel!
But that was a long time ago!
Today, islands like the Scillies are in the forefront of the fight against global warming, as they will be the first to go under the waves. So I was interested to see that they were taking part in an energy saving experiment yesterday called E-day. As there is just a single cable from the mainland, you can easily see how much electricity the Scillonians are using.
So did they save much electricity? Not really, as the weather was against them.
But look into the web site and it is a mine of information.
Just look at the National page and see how many tons of CO2 we emit for a start!
The Return of the Elm
Look at the paintings of John Constable and you’ll see lots of English Elms. Sadly most of them are no more as they were devastated by Dutch Elm disease in the 1980s. At our previous house, we had several large specimens and I can remember the day they all came down. We’d tried everything that we could to save them, but you can’t resist nature.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about the English Elm.
Ulmus procera Salisb., the English Elm or Atinian Elm was, before the advent of Dutch elm disease, one of the largest and fastest-growing deciduous trees in Europe. A survey of genetic diversity in Spain, Italy and the UK revealed that the English Elms are genetically identical, clones of a single tree, the Atinian Elm once widely used for training vines, and brought to the British Isles by Romans. Thus, the origin of U. procera is widely believed to be Italy, although it is possible the tree hailed from what is now Turkey, where it is still used in the cultivation of raisins.
But, we still have some English Elm in this country and they seem to be resistant to the disease. This seems to be surprising, if they are all genetic identical, so perhaps they are not, or there is another factor.
The Conservation Foundation is now distributing elm saplings to schools, that have been grown from this possibly disease-resistant strain of English Elm.
This is the sort of initiative that we should all support.
Incidentally, some years ago, I met David Bellamy, one of the founders of the Conservation Foundation. One of my companies had won a green award.
He was not as I expected, in that many media experts are full of their own ego and never listen to your point of view. I found him to be very much a listener, who made some extraordinary incisive points, that many would not accept.
He is very much a maverick and we need more thinkers like that. They may not always be right, but challenging them often produces a train of thought and a result, that is infinitely better than a conservative approach.
I always describe myself as scientifically green.
The English Elm project ticks all the boxes, as those children in thirty years time will want to take their kids back to their school to show their children, their elm trees.
Conservation is Dangerous
I’m watching Stephen’s Fry program called “The Last Chance to See” on BBC2. One of the people in the program told how six enviromentalists had been killed in Cambodia and hos the Amazon and it’s famed piranhas was much less dangerous.
A couple of tales illustrate this.
Perhaps ten or twelves years ago, my late wife and myself were staying in the Datai on Langkawi. This hotel regularly makes the top two or three in the world and having stayed there for a week, you know why.
The hotel organised tours with two local wildlife experts. One was Malaysian and the other was the son of a British squaddie and his Nepalese wife. To say he had the air of a hard bastard was probably an understatement. But he needed to be as poachers and collectors were always trying to either shoot or dig up something. At the time, they’d just taken on the Malaysian government about preserving the last piece of rainforset on Langkawi. They’d won at the time and my son has confirmed in the last few weeks that it is still there.
So perhaps to get things done, you not only need good economic arguments as they did, but you also need a touch of the Rambos.
It must have been about 1988 and I was in San Francisco. I needed to get to San Jose, so I took a shared limousine as one does. Or did! Hopefully, they’ve built a more affordable rail system. But I doubt it! I hadn’t hired a car as someone was driving me around.
Two of us got in first and like me, the other was something in computers. We were then joined by a tall, slim man about fifty or so, with a long grey ponytail. He had a powerful bearing and looked extremely fit under a linen suit.
I thought for a moment he might be into something like drugs, but he told a tale about how he had been in US Special Forces in Viet Nam. He’d retired as an officer and was now working protecting World Bank projects in the Amazon rainforest. He talked about how if you harvested plants and trees very selectively, you could give the people an income about ten times more than they got from subsistence agriculture where you burned the forest.
But this didn’t work because to do this you needed to built tracks into the jungle, which allowed the cut and burners to do their damage easily and also because by giving the people a good income, you broke the power of the loan sharks who preyed on them.
Hence the need for men like him to protect the projects and those that worked on them.
Just as Stephen Fry’s film showed, to get conservation to work, you must get the economics right and make sure you control those violent men, whose interests you destroy.
The Anonymous Widower 