The environment is a hot potato – of that, no one doubts. Such is the hotness of the potato though, that some are ill-prepared to handle it, coming up with the wildest and most improbable ideas to stop its steady fall to the floor. At London club Chinawhite, instead of staff distributing internal memos on paper (wasteful, unless they’re very important – certainly the policy at News Hour) or email (eminently sensible), workers are being instructed to move messages about the nightspot on CDs. It feels as if the company has become stuck in a parallel version of the 1980s in which eco-craziness replaced greed. Completely bonkers.
Still, is the great British inventor the man to handle the hot potato? Does he have the gloves for it? We shall see. Because, on this very Friday, Al Gore and a slew of billionaire businessmen in fine suits will assemble to hear tell of Earth’s saviour. Kane Kramer, the one-man force behind MP3 technology, is the star attraction at the £1,000-a-head dinner, and claims to have developed a method of micro technology that will revolutionise the green market. Is he right? Turn to news sources this weekend to get some indication.
In the meantime, we may be best taking the route offered by the French and Rob Newman – turning back the clock. Our onion-loving friends in Europe have begun employing horses to take children to school, threatening to turn the 70 towns involved into dung-strewn hotbeds of bacterial infection. It can only be a matter of time before the government drafts in gangs of slaves to haul the country’s locomotives, bypassing strike-prone employees at a stroke.
Harried by urban warfare and industrial action, Sarkozy needs to employ the disaffected, unemployed masses somehow. Perhaps in a variant of the Stanford Prison Experiment, switching prisoners and guards for slavemasters and unpaid, non-volunteer workers. A bold social policy indeed.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 