Use fewer plastic bags: Save world

Following the Guernsey and Jersey supermarkets' recent announcement that they would charge for plastic bags, both the Press and the Beeb ran vox pops interviews with generally supportive islanders.

Although I'm a big old cynic when it comes to the supermarkets' motives behind this action, particularly chains like M&S which insist on including stacks of unnecessary glossy packaging on their own brands, I've got to agree with the sanity of the move on litter grounds, and as a libertarian, it heartens me that we got there without any legislation being necessary.

Plastic bags are an eyesore and a menace to wildlife. Charging for them means everyone gets a little reminder that the world needs some TLC every time they reach the end of the check-out queue. There's even a chance that charging for plastic bags will reduce our oil consumption by some microscopic proportion (though that's not clear-cut, because the re-usable alternatives involve a lot more oil in their manufacture).

But the madness of it is the vox pops still contain plenty of people talking about this as 'doing their bit for the environment'.

I predict that when such people pass away, their heads will be drilled open and their brains exhibited as curiosities in 22nd century museums. There is a vast, yawning chasm between using a jute bag once a week, and the kind of changes we are going to have to make to 'do our bit for the environment'.

Another oft-heard comment that tries but fails to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem is that this is a 'step in the right direction'. Sadly, it ain't necessarily so. Trying to step in any direction usually results in inadvertently generating more CO2 - for example by traipsing halfway across the island in a car to stick some bottles and a couple of cardboard boxes in a skip.

Then the assumption is if we make lots of steps in this direction then the world as a whole can arrive at the destination. In reality, any slack created by Guernsey in the demand for oil will be picked up oil being consumed elsewhere. I don't just mean that Guernsey can only have a small impact - I mean it will have no impact, because what drives CO2 emissions globally is fossil fuel production and callous economics.

Apart from a readjustment in the 70s, world production of oil has increased every year since the industrial revolution started. No economic forecast of world fossil fuel extraction has been adjusted down because climate change makes it less desirable, even with the Kyoto agreement and the EU's laudable pledges of big CO2 reductions. Guernsey can't stop oil being produced, all we can do is change where it is consumed.

The climate change scenarios predicted now even by most moderate scientists constitute a monumental international crisis. The only realistic solution is a virtually impossible unification of world leaders behind some incredibly tough and painful decisions to reduce fossil fuel extraction in the face of relentlessly rising demand - economics would deal with the rest of it, as long as global thermonuclear war doesn't break out first.

But in any case, the alternative to us solving climate change is that climate change will solve us.

In the meantime, we are not powerless. The chattering classes can remove their heads from the sand, educate people to face up to this problem, and lobby for however long it takes for real action to reduce global CO2 emissions instead of token measures.