Green Options

Nitrous oxide, more commonly known at your dentist’s office as laughing gas, is now the most prevalent man-made substance damaging the ozone layer. And it’s a greenhouse gas. Sadly, the joke’s apparently on us.

They are everywhere. We can’t see them, but little by little they are destroying our way of life. But for the first time ever, they are being caught red-handed. They are greenhouse gases. And today Deutsche Bank unveiled the world’s first real-time carbon counter to measure these microscopic murderers.

Both the developed and developing world agree that they have got to act quickly to curb carbon emissions but none is willing to take the initiative on the economic front of the fight against climate change.

Remember CFCs? They had the power to flavour teenage armpits and work wonders on refrigeration.

There’s two things I remember from when I was growing up. Well, not two things literally. That would suggest a woebegone adolescence. No, two things of environmental importance.

At 15, Chernobyl. A complete nuclear meltdown causing Europeans to duck for cover to avoid the prevailing winds.

Yeah, so plants are safer now, aren’t they? Well, look, personally, when you play with atoms, I still think of Hiroshima and Chernobyl, once smiling communities now nothing but cancerous shells of their former selves. Higher safety standards lead to greater complacency. No-one reading this can guarantee that another nuclear disaster won’t happen, so please, let’s leave that one alone. I’ve heard it all before.

(I don’t like things that glow in the dark really. I have innate misgivings.)

And as well as Chernobyl, we had an enormous hole in the ozone layer recognised for the first time.