Doing our bit for the Environment?

A much-awaited report has been published about the environment. Rightly it states that no one nation's efforts alone can reverse the race towards the greenhouse effect. We could all suffer extremes of climate like hurricanes, tornados, rising temperatures etc. Melting polar ice-caps could cause rising sea levels - drowning great tracts of land and leaving up to 200 million people homeless and hopeless. Whole countries could be literally washed away. Drought could become so extreme in some areas that new deserts are formed and hundreds of millions of people would have to either move away or die. The report goes on to say that the rising economies of countries like China and India go hand in hand with their increased carbon emissions and they must be brought on board in some new "Super-Kyoto"-type agreement on controlling climate change. New-found industries in the former Soviet bloc are also contributing more and more as their industrial clout strengthens.
Government ministers in the UK are talking of further restricting high carbon emissions by taxation. Tax gas-guzzling cars. Apply carbon taxes to every flight of every aircraft. Yes, I agree that this could possibly reduce the number of people who wanted to use these forms of transport or make them restrict their use of them. And, in an ideal world, the additional taxation revenues could be put towards helping Joe Public to become more energy efficient in his or her daily life.
I also heard on BBC Radio 4 a little anecdote which is worth recounting. In the months when fresh home-grown strawberries are not available we import them from various countries around the world. Spain, other Mediterranean countries - even from as far as New Zealand. Some poor geek had sat down and worked out some figures and came up with this one: the amount of carbon emissions generated to get one punnet (around 150 grammes) of strawberries in an assignment from New Zealand to the UK is the equivalent to 11 average school runs in a Chelsea Tractor. I should point out to my non-Brit readers that a school run is classed usually as an unnecessary journey to take a single child to school when the little tyke should have been encouraged to walk and that a Chelsea Tractor is a 4x4 MPV, usually with off-road capability which is never used, which uses much more fuel than an average family car.
Now Brits are congratulating themselves that they are more-or-less on target to meet their Kyoto obligations for cutting carbon emissions by 2010. It is stated that the Yanks create nearly 25% of all emissions while we contribute just 2.4%. Great - aren't we good little boys and girls!
Hang on a minute. The world population is about 6.5 billion. the population of the UK is about 60 million - less than 1 per cent. It does not take an Einstein to work out that each Brit is contributing more than twice the emissions of the world per capita average.
How about consuming more home-grown food? Not importing unnecessary goods which could be made at home (or done without). Turning out the lights. Not leaving the TV on standby. The list can go on . . .
In the DIY shop where I work we are running a save energy promotion, selling wind turbines, solar panel heating, more efficient heating boilers and radiators. In the next part of the store we have started selling this year's crop of Christmas lights. The slogan on the banners reads: "You can't have too many lights".
Nuff said.