This comment isn't about green issues, it's about creeping authoritarianism.
Now, while I understand and accept all the science, and am well aware of the coming ecological catastrophe, I'm slightly fucked off that years after it became obvious, private citizens, and small businesses have been sold diesel vehicles but are now going to be required to ditch them overnight (more pollution getting rid of the vehicles themselves now, of course) and shell out for petrol driven replacements, which is not really that much of an improvement and particularly enraging when you remember that politicians have colluded with the fucking evil Oil Industry for decades to prevent clean fuel transport.
I'm all for this in theory of course, but, are we going to get compensation for the vehicles we HAVE invested in? Probably not.
So, to this end, we were approached by another arrogant busybody at Dieppe on Sunday telling us to turn our engine off in the queue for the ferry (we'd been there like, 2 min, he just couldn't wait.) The miserable sod was driving a brand new hybrid, well nice work if you can get it, privileged middle class prick, and he actually called our van 'your dirty smelly OLD van' this is the Tory attitude, the" 'I've got a nice job and a big house Why Can't You" idiocy. When did he get appointed as the diesel Police? I said, NO, sorry, not at the moment, my husband is charging his phone. He started banging on so I said NO again and he stalked off and glared at us for a while like a thwarted adolescent.
We could, if we can find a plug on the ferry not in use, charge it on the boat. With electricity generated presumably by it's diesel engine. Was he planning to drive round Dieppe, 300 yards across the port, and harangue any French diesel owner failing to switch off their engine in a traffic queue? Probably not. Because people with authoritarian issues just act out on on the nearest victim.
The thing is I'm fairly Green, of course, but the ferry 100 yards away was also belching out diesel, I didn't see him NOT using that! Later on as we were disembarking I saw the little shit again and I said to Aldo in a loud voice: What fuel did you say this ferry uses again? Diesel, he bellowed. And then I said, did you know, that as you are virtuously recycling your plastic milk bottles, that there's a ten thousand square mile chunk of Russia that is already so toxic that no human will be able to go there for centuries? People in the queue were smirking. He was fuming.
Clearly, there is a new kind of Green fascism taking hold. Nobody is going to take any green measure which is going to destroy their business or cost them their hard earned money, until Big Corp and Government does the right thing and acts across the board. That's the reality.
I don't go round the World bossing strangers around and they are NOT going to do it to me. This is how people like Trump get elected, people are just so mindlessly obedient. Just stop it.
