Cugel wrote: ↑7 Aug 2022, 10:51am
Mick F wrote: ↑7 Aug 2022, 8:53am
I'm off out with the petrol brushcutter shortly, and if I have enough energy left and the day doesn't get too warm, I'll get out the petrol lawnmower.
Why should landowners and gardeners pay full whack for the petrol for hand-operated machines?
Is it possible to get a tax rebate?
Somehow, I doubt it.
Despite going a bit soft and getting an e-bike, I haven't used a fossil-fool powered gardening tool in many years. Why bother when the hand-applied tools are so much more satisfying to use and even impart a touch of various kinds of fitness? One suspects that there is machine-fetish occuring.
Those machine men in their gardens (and they are so often men) are a blasted anti-social nuisance, with their rackets and stinks! I suspect the same lads are also guilty of the occasional bonty-stinks & fugs, as they burn wet cutting from their machines as well as a sneaky tranche of plastic rubbish they've been saving up. Oh yes they do!
As to those log-burning stoves ..... Well, tut tut tut.
When I'm dictator, fossil fool toys will all be melted down to make those ploughshares, which large hairy-hooved horses will be encouraged to pull about. Think of the pleasures to be had from communing with a horse down some leather straps as you perform an ancient tradition with a big proper tool (the ploughshare or perhaps something even more fangly)! So much greater than making an irritating noise and stink with a probably dangerous little man-toy liable to trim you as much as it does the greenery.
Cugel, fond of large axes and saws (not a fetish, no).
We'll run and hide in the exhaust smoke where you'll fear to tread! Although I did ditch the old petrol lawnmower because it was so noisy and smelly. Think my primus stoves are the only smelly things left - they cause young people to gather round in amazement that people once 'risked' using such stuff, also that something 70 years old works so well
The thing is, are we missing the bigger picture? With a steady transition to battery power and almost all ICE vehicles on the road now cleaned up, I reckon there are two issues to which we're as blind as most were to exhaust emissions in the 1970s.
FIrst, that it's still possible to own a car with a huge engine (say, over 3 litres) and be allowed into low emission zones for free. That's crackers, especially when little old ladies have had to trade in their 1 litre Yaris because it was a couple of years too old. Tailpipe emissions aren't limited purely to what governments check. Second, tyre and brake emissions. Directly proportional to a vehicle's mass and torque outputs, these had already overtaken exhaust emissions (particulate) a decade or so ago. This surely must now be rising to or over 70%.
We're breathing in the dust from tyres, it's toxic and not regulated. And until it rains hard enough to wash dust into our water courses, from where it harms the fishy things we eat, tyre dust is re-suspended with each passing vehicle. Cars are growing heavier and more powerful, especially with electric power. Accelerating beyond a given rate is not necessary and can be dangerous in itself, having a vehicle which typically carries one or two people plus 20kg of luggage weigh 1,5 tonnes is madness, let alone the typical 2.5 tonnes of today. Government classes a Tesla as 'zero emission' and owners pay £0 . What a lot of nonsense.
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-search ... mpliant=on
https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news ... -tailpipes
https://www.opb.org/article/2020/12/04/ ... ho-salmon/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9720313358
https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news ... sing-tread