After weeks of doom and gloom over Lebanon and terrorism it's time to lighten the mood, so today this column celebrates the positive side of those stories: the massive environmental gains resulting.
The best news, of course, was the damage done by last week's alleged terror plot to the airline industry. Hundreds of flights have been cancelled, businessmen are looking seriously at the possibility of going by train or using teleconferencing so they don't need to travel at all, and many ordinary travellers will have been put off flying by the whole experience. Even now the extra searches are keeping the number of flights depressed, and it may take the industry years to recover. Thousands of tons of CO2 have not been released into the atmosphere, and the people living under the Heathrow flightpath have had a chance to snatch a bit of sleep.
The Israelis have been doing their bit too, of course. The wholesale destruction of Lebanon's road system means long-term savings in emissions from both car travel and road haulage. True there were short-term losses from the traffic jams resulting from the mass movement of refugees, and more recently from their return, and of course tanks are pretty heavy gas-guzzlers, but over time the CO2 account will be heavily in the black. Many Lebanese, too, will be reduced to cooking, if at all, over open wood fires - very ecological! The pièce de resistance, though, was the total destruction of a whole powerstation! That too had its minor downside in the massive oilslick that has devastated much of the eastern Mediterranean, but that's oil that will never be burned!
Hezbollah could not match that, but they did their best. Keeping thousands of Israelis cowering in their cellars when they would otherwise have been out in their cars or shopping (think food miles!), and I think they also managed to take out one or two of those gas-guzzling tanks. They themselves stayed firmly where they were, despite the reprehensible attempts by their opponents to get them to move north.
Even the Americans were unusually restrained, insisting that no British minister - and specially not the Prime Minister, who ought to be setting an example - go anywhere near the Middle East. Condi did go, but only once.
As an environmentalist I can only congratulate all concerned on their care of the planet, and look forward to the next round. Maybe it will even include a nuclear exchange which, while it probably won't be extensive enough to bring on a Fimbulwinter, should throw enough junk into the upper atmosphere to set back global warming a couple of decades!
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