Enough to Make an Environmentalist Weep

Sometimes there is no limit to excess as this story in the Guardian illustrates:

"...if you want something so weird that, when you stop to consider it, it may well make the historians of tomorrow blanch, it is the current craze for popping over to New York to do the shopping. With the pound now close to two dollars, almost every newspaper has been advertising the delights of heading for the airport with a couple of empty suitcases. From jeans to sneakers, digital cameras to handbags, cleansing balm to CDs, who could resist the lures of Macy's, Bloomingdales or New York's branches of Virgin, Apple and Gap?

"Put the shopping mania and the flying mania together and you get what has become glamour for the middle classes, if not quite the masses. Once hopping over to America for the weekend was the kind of thing you read about Hollywood legends or City tycoons doing; now it's available to most people on a salary, if they want it badly enough. We shouldn't be snobbish: flying to shop is not intrinsically worse than flying to see old buildings. But it is environmentally suicidal. Mad. Bonkers.

"Yet it is a madness that feeds on itself. A different segment of the air travel market makes the point eloquently. Apparently the pre-Christmas alpine skiing season is in trouble for the obvious reason - lack of snow. Races have been cancelled from France to Norway. Here is yet another small piece of the mountain of evidence about global warming, to which the air travel mania so notably contributes. And what is our reaction? Apparently it is to head for North America - I mean fly there, of course - where the snow is still plentiful and the skiing top notch.

"We know it's not sustainable. Yet millions of us, probably most of us, are terrible hypocrites. We want to do something about global warming. The thought of those sparkling glaciers disappearing into history is terrible. But this year, at any rate, the skiing break matters more. Who knows how often the chance will come? Let's not linger. The same goes for shopping and the weak dollar (caused in part by the awesome overhang of US debt, another symptom of the consumer economy running riot). This is not sustainable but it's here, now, so let's grab those suitcases and head to the airport."

Yeah, well I still don't think you need a big-arsed SUV just to fetch your groceries!