I see our Dunc has solved the whole Climate Change thing.

Duncan Stewart, for those of you not familiar with him is an Irish architect who has made a name for himself for being environmentally friendly.  He is such a convert to the New Religion that he is now incapable of uttering a single sentence without including the words "sustainable", "renewable" or indeed "environmentally friendly".  He permanently wears a hard hat such is his fear of the sky falling on him.  I suspect he even wears it to bed.

He is also the only person to feature on my bucket-list as I have this tremendous desire to drop a non-sustainable, non-renewable, environmentally unfriendly nine-inch concrete slab onto his hard hat [from a great height] to see how renewable his head is.

To put it succinctly, he is an smug little wonk with an extremely irritating, patronising tone of voice.

Anyhows, as I said, our Dunc has come up with the answer that is going to save the world.

All we have to do is provide our own power, heat our own homes and walk to work.  Now this may sound like obvious old [hard] hat, but obviously you don't know our Dunc.  You see he wants each village and town to have its own generators and central source of central heating.  He doesn't say if each village has to have its own schools [primary and secondary] and its own university to cut down on travel but it wouldn't surprise me knowing him.

I really don't think he has thought this one through though.

I suppose if each village and town consisted of a single multi-story tower that contained housing, shops, schools [university?] and offices then he might have a point.  It would be a simple enough job to heat centrally and would certainly cut down on travel.  However, I am more than a little surprised that he, as an Irishman and an architect isn't aware that there aren't many villages like that in Ireland.  In fact there is a tendency for a central hub and then housing which sprawls out and spreads for miles until you reach the next village.

And then there is the niggling problem of power.

Now it's all well and dandy if you have a swiftly flowing river running through your community, but surprisingly not all villages have such a luxury.  And don't mention wind, because there are days when there is a dead calm.  You could always import power from the next village which happens to have its river, but they may need all their power for some local industry, so you'd have to be connected to several villages, in what we would call a grid ….. oh, hang on…..  Woops!  Dunc wouldn't like that!

So we would have to have a system where each village is fighting with their neighbours over who has priority for electricity or else entire communities would have constant blackouts.  All out war for power between villages and towns sounds like a bit of fun?  Unless we use sustainable, renewable, environmentally friendly candles for our cooking heating and lighting?

Talking of heating, how does that work?  Miles of heavily lagged piping laid along country roads and lanes?  Forgeddit!

Producing our own fuel for our transport?  What a load of shit!

I get the impression our Dunc would like us all to live on a sustainable, renewable, environmentally friendly planet which is more akin to Ireland five thousand years ago, where we can all amuse ourselves building portal dolmens and burial tombs?  Basically the simplest solution is to abolish the use of electricity and petrol.

I can say however that he is making his little contribution to the environment.

I save electricity by instantly switching off the television whenever he's on.