[speckled wood]

Sadly I think that this denial will get worse and like so many inconvenient truths people will simply switch off when people do suggest that we have to break this love affair with the motor car and with cheap air travel. Anything that attempts to limits car use will be a vote loser, on the issue of cheap air travel taxing avaviation fuel is achievable but as to whether it will limit travel is doubtful so we have to target areas where we can do something.

1) is to heavily tax short distance air travel. Within the UK there is little real benefit i internal air travel and most of it can be viably be replaced by train.

2) Another area is to clamp down on gaz guzzling cars and to return the emphasis on fuel economy, by this means I believe that we could reduce fuel comsumption by 50%, and this can be achieved without reducing car numbers or any really significant effect on actual "neccessary" car use.

Truthfully a 1.3cc engine can (petrol or diesel) can deliver perfectly adequate performance and is enough to propel a comfortable family car and achieves speeds well in excess of the legal maximum, certainly there is no real justification for cars with engines above 2 Litres.

Targetting the car and air travel issue in this way is not likely to have all that much effect on votes. It might might not be enough but it will be better than the present situation.

3 We also need to look at other energy waste and the most graring example are all these street lamps left in the early illuminating empy roads and streets. If we only switched every other light out it would be a considerable saving.

Another forgotten issue is looking at what encourages people to buy gaz guzzling cars, and how they are marketed. As I said previously we need to return the emphasis to fuel economy, back in the 1970s and 1980s this was the big selling point for most cars, of course the fact that we had a system that most people could understand ie consumption figures in Miles per Gallon rather than as now Litres per 100 Kilometres was a help. Another area that influences and encourages waste are the "Lifestyle" Programmes on Television, where the designers encourage people install enegy wasting spotlighting, feature people with large cars. That the commercial channels do this is not surprising, but should the BBC be doing it?