In Denial...

It seems that I can't even sit in my car, in a lay-by, minding my own business, without being accosted by climate change deniers.  I say climate change deniers, but that's just an assumption on my part.  A logical deduction, if you will, based upon our brief exchange.  But to get back to the beginning of the story, there I was the other afternoon, pulled up in my favourite lay-by, sipping my coffee, listening to the radio and trying to keep cool in the sweltering heat by having the driver's side door open, when this black BMW pulls up behind me.  Nothing unusual in that.  Sadly, there are a lot of BMWs about in this neck of the woods.  Anyway, being naturally suspicious and having watched too many spy movies, I surreptitiously watched the vehicle and its occupants in my rear-view mirror.  I saw the driver get out and, to my surprise, start walking toward the open door of my car.  Now, as I'm a naturally paranoid person, (the job I do doesn't help), I seriously considered slamming the door, activating the central locking, starting up and driving off, leaving this character choking on my exhaust gases.  But I didn't.

So, this fellow, who I can see in my mirrors is your typical middle class BMW driver, trying desperately to look casual, suddenly says 'You're here quite a lot, aren't you?'  To which my unspoken reaction was 'What the fuck's it got to do with you, knob head?'.  However, what I actually said was 'Not really, why?'  (See how careful I was not to be confrontational - these BMW driving types think that they are in the ascendancy these days, so you have to tread carefully with them, especially when they think that they're speaking to a peasant).  He then starts going on about how there are plans to turn the field running alongside the lay-by into a solar farm by erecting arrays of solar cells.  This is something that BMW man clearly disapproves of and is obviously hoping I'll object to as well, presumably because the arrays will dazzle me as I try to drink my coffee every Tuesday.  Unfortunately, as I told him, he'd picked the wrong man as, you see, I'm very much in favour of renewable energy sources. 

I really don't understand these mooks who spend their time campaigning against wind farms and the like because they'll spoil the view from their mansion.  Will they still be objecting when the lights start to go out?  With older power stations closing down and 'the market' still failing to build replacements at the same rate, we're in danger of losing generating capacity.  And what about the afore-mentioned climate change?  We can't keep pumping pollutants into the atmosphere indefinitely.  Hell, I'm not naive, wind farms and solar arrays can't possibly meet all of our energy needs, but they're a start.  They are also a clean renewable energy technology that is available right now.  If nothing else, they'll buy us some time.  But, climbing down from my soapbox and getting back to the point, what really surprised me about the climate change denier - who had to return to his Beamer disappointed not have made a new recruit for his campaign - was that he had a child in the car.  Does he really not care about the kind of world he's bequeathing his off-spring?  Surely the 'blemish' of a solar farm is preferable to an unbreathable atmosphere, global warming and the like?  Actually, I take that back - the thing that surprised me most was that the climate change deniers are apparently now reduced to driving around country lanes in their BMWs randomly accosting people in the hope that they might be like-minded.  Talk about desperate!