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Road Rage

by | 17th, May 2005

‘THE new Range Rover Sport is the Andy Fordham of the sports car world.

”Oi! Get orf my Land Rover!”

Like the hulking darts player, the latest Range Rover to roll off the Ford production line guzzles fuel and is about as sleek and sporty as, well, a 30-stone darts player.

And just like the man his legion of fans call ‘The Viking’, the Sport will have many admirers. And, according to Greenpeace, many of them will live in Chelsea and have porcelain-fine children who need to get to school come Hell, and thanks to the car’s towing mechanism, very high water.

“How many times do we see Land Rovers and Range Rovers being driven by mums and sometimes dads on the school run in towns and cities across the UK?” asks Ben Steward, Greenpeace’s spokesman.

While we stand on a pavement in Hampstead counting, and Stewart tells us that “there is absolutely no need for them to be driven in these types of areas”, members of his group engage in some direct action.

So there they are, 35 Greenpeace activists pictured in the Telegraph storming a Range Rover factory in Solihull, sticking mock crime scene tape to cars and hoisting a white flag with the slogan: “Climate Criminals.”

Amid the din of protest, Mr Stewart is creating his own microclimate rich in carbon dioxide, and is now talking about how every year there are about “150,000 people dying as a result of climate change and 4×4 cars that do 12 miles to the gallon are not helping things.”

He stops short of explaining how these figures were arrived at, and blaming the Iraq war on the need to get oil to feed these monsters.

Meanwhile, the protestors, who, as the Guardian says, have disguised themselves as factory workers to gain access to the car plant, are busy chaining themselves to half-built vehicles.

It’s all very selfless and noble. But the Telegraph says Greenpeace may have missed its target.

Looking past the rather specious figure of 150,000 dead (so that’s what they put inside speed bumps), the Telegraph has worked out that one cycle of a dishwasher releases about 765g of CO2 – more than double that produced by a ride to little Jake’s school in the family Rover Turbo Diesel, which releases a comparatively Alpine-fresh 299g per kilometre travelled.

In all, the paper estimates that if we were to stop driving each and every kind of vehicle, and not just those Range Rovers, 99.9% of the CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere would remain.

Which makes us wonder why Range Rovers were targeted, and not petrol lawnmowers, airplanes or those washing machines.

Could it have something to do with envy – that most polluting of emotions..?’



Posted: 17th, May 2005 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink