Sunday, May 1, 2011

The Royal Wedding


Over a billion people watched their TVs to see Prince William and Princess Kate marry. The wedding was wonderful and gave us all a brief respite from the wars going on in the Arab lands. It is hard to place the carbon foot print on the wedding but it was pretty high given the jets and limousines needed to bring in the rich and famous guests. The 300 million or so TVs that were on for a couple of hours consumed about one hundred million kilowatt hours of electricity. Generating electricity emits approximately 1.25 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour. Therefore the carbon dioxide emitted around the world to watch the fanfare on TV equaled approximately 125 million pounds or about 60,000 tons. This equals the emissions of 10,000 cars driven for a year. No doubt that the carbon emissions were worth the joy of witnessing a fairy tale wedding. For me the most enjoyable part of the wedding was to watch Kate being driven in a 1950s vintage Rolls Royce from her hotel to the Abbey. Wow what a beautiful car! The second most enjoyable part of the wedding was to see the newly-weds driving in the 1970s vintage Aston Martin convertible after the wedding ceremony. These vintage cars are brilliant even though they are such fuel hogs.

Gasoline prices for mid-grade for my 1999 C280 spiked to $4.45 per gallon at my local service station and it looks like we may hit $5 a gallon in mid-summer. I know the folks who read my blog in the UK, South Africa, and New Zealand think this price of gasoline is a bargain. So do I. I am all for the US government adding another $1 a gallon as a tax. This only equals a tax of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Giving Bright Source, Bloom, Solyndra, Tesla, and all the other pig companies at the Federal trough the equivalent of $1,000 per ton of CO2 saved makes this level of gasoline tax a bargain for the tax payers. Now that the President has released his long form birth certificate and has proved he was born in Hawaii and not hatched in Kenya, he should start to attack the Federal deficit. I believe a gasoline tax of $1 per gallon will bring in about $100 billion a year.

The Donald keeps on saying he is going to run for president. I don’t think he was an invited guest to the wedding so for at least a day or two he was upstaged on the airwaves. His two pet enemies are China and OPEC. His wife designs and sells jewelry on QVC. Of course if one goes to the QVC website and investigates where the jewelry is manufactured, it states “Made in China”. I am sure if one investigates where the oil for the jet fuel for his plane was extracted it will state “Extracted in an OPEC country”. He is just the living embodiment of the hypocritical junk we live with each day. The real Royals at least provide real entertainment with fairy tale weddings. Had they used some horse drawn carriages they may have been able to cut down by a minuscule fraction the carbon footprint of the joyous event. Given that we emitted so much carbon simply watching the telly, I am actually glad that Kate got to the church in time in that marvelous Rolls Royce.

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