So My Very First Blogad Was an Environmental Menace
I didn’t realize that the Blogad placed at BizzyBlog last week about Valentine’s Day bouquets and accompanying trifles was so environmentally incorrect.
But there it is, in the UK Telegraph:
Valentine bouquets ‘are bad for the planet’
Last Updated: 1:53am GMT 10/02/2007The Valentine’s Day bouquet — the gift that every woman in Britain will be waiting for next week — has become the latest bête noire among environmental campaigners.
Latest Government figures show that the flowers that make up the average bunch have flown 33,800 miles to reach Britain.
In the past three years, the amount of flowers imported from the Netherlands has fallen by 47 per cent to 94,000 tons, while those from Africa have risen 39 per cent to 17,000 tons.
Environmentalists warned that “flower miles” could have serious implications on climate change in terms of carbon dioxide emissions from aeroplanes.
Andrew Sims, the policy director of the New Economics Foundation, said: “There are plenty of flowers that grow in Britain in the winter and don’t need to be hothoused.
Obviously, my advertiser was promoting shipments within the US, but the “point” was the same. And the “point” is dumber than a bunch of rocks. The “flower-mile” calculators act as if there’s a single plane dedicated to carrying each bouquet (no, actually each individual flower — Ed.) to its destination. How ignorant can you get? By their logic, a plane traveling 3,000 miles across the country with 1,000 overnight envelopes has traveled 3 million “letter-miles,” and all overnight letters should be banned to save the planet. Zheesh.
And the end of the UK Telegraph article gets back to a point I made a couple of days ago near the end of this post:
….. a spokesman for the Flowers and Plants Association ….. said the boom in Third World flowers would help poorer countries to build schools and boost the economy.
Lifting Third-World living standards is nowhere near as important as environmental purity over something that most likely isn’t even a problem.
