Lower carbon footprint == happiness bollocks. (via An obviously unhappy Eeklanidan import. I mean, chatting away with him, I got the impression he hated the place. sigh.)

The European Happy Planet Index used carbon efficiency, life satisfaction and life expectancy to rate the countries.

Ignoring the summary introduction paragraph, this is what we hit. I am sorry, but since when is my happiness on the planet anything at all to do with carbon efficiency? Hello? Oh woe, my life is horrible because I haven’t filled my green bin every other bloody week (grrrrr) with 40% of the waste I generate from my house. Oh woe, my life is filled with unhappiness because in the winter I turned the thermostat up to 20oC. Oh woe, my life is meaningless as I drive a car that will never, ever be a hybrid. (And the engine should still run on leaded, but that is hard to get, so I add in lead, erm, additive.)

The survey, published by the New Economics Foundation and Friends of the Earth

Aha. I get it now. It is the new tell-you-how-to-live-your-life brigade. Those bigots who will brook no one living in any other way than their proscribed way. Those freedom-denying, diktat-dealing control freaks. I for one agree that socialism is repression and its end state is mass murder and horror, and the green totalitarians are nothing more than failed collectivists trying to force us to hark to them in new clothes.

Iceland’s combination of strong social policies and extensive use of renewable energy demonstrates that living within our environmental means doesn’t mean sacrificing human well-being. (Emphasis mine.)

See? Social policies. Weasel words. No, it doesn’t mean sacrificing human well-being, it means charging a tenner a pint. Living within our means. Hell, let us all head back to the forests. Then again, there are those who said that leaving the oceans was a bad idea…

“What is the point if we burn vast quantities of fossil fuels to make, buy and consume ever more stuff, without noticeably benefiting our well-being?

Won’t someone think of the children? I feel pretty happy. My children are well-adjusted, getting a good education (which could be better, but that is me being old and grumpy, I keep getting told) and live in a fine (if flat) area. And he loses points for using the word ‘stuff’.

Europe as a whole has almost three times its “fair” global share of carbon emissions.

Ah, that word fair. It isn’t fair. That’s not fair. Play fair. Boo-hoo. If I could calm down, I might dissect that piece further. But no. I have other things I need to be doing.

Rename it to the smug git authoritarian index and be done with it.

And while I am ranting, it seems Yahoo have made another arse in the best social networking site. I wanted to buy a pro account for Cassandra. It used to be, you went to their page, and there was a link to ‘buy this person a pro account’. Or something like that. Whatever it was, it wasn’t hard. But now, dear God, now. It took me longer than it should have, with my ire rising (having had it upped due to being trolled by that obscene Guardian link at the top) all the time. So you can’t do it. That is the upshot. You have to buy some dumb activation code that they enter. Please, Yahoo, I have managed to ignore your buying of flickr (I went to the wire before lying through my teeth on a get-a-Yahoo-account page) but this has tipped me over the edge. Take a decent interface, and bend it to your hideous will. You suck Yahoo, plz leave. kthnxbai.

  1. angry bunny. funny I should read this today I was toying with the idea of an “anti contryside alliance rant” after seeing the slogan “the countryside alliance, when they’re not shagging sheep they’re killing foxes” on a colleagues desk, but you know me, never bother to do the research so thought i’d skip it.

    1
    Adele
    Tue 17 Jul, 8:51PM

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