Tonight:
9°c
Perhaps it was Sienna Miller's advice that finally pushed me over the edge. "I can't avoid flying," she said, surprised to have been asked the question when she was on radio to push a climate-change message as ambassador for fashionable green pressure group Global Cool. "But I can start taking less baths."
Well, that's going to save the planet, isn't it? A slightly smellier Sienna. Just so long as she doesn't have to do anything substantial, like cutting back on her jet-setting lifestyle (was that holiday in Ibiza for work? Or her Australian beach jaunt less than a week later?).
Sienna's "light green" attitude is easy to mock, but it seems to be catching. Yesterday a senior UN official, head of the Convention on Climate Change, no less, proposed paying poor countries to cut their emissions so we rich nations don't have to. The not entirely illogical reasoning of Yvo de Boer is that it costs less money to reduce Third World emissions, so companies in the West can offset their own size-20 carbon footprints by, say, greening a Chinese toy factory. A pragmatic move, in terms of instant damage limitation, but ultimately it just lets First World polluters off the hook.
It's not just big companies that are at it. This week a new BBC series, Outrageous Wasters, showed how an ordinary, if relatively well-off, British family did more than their share to destroy the planet. Between them, they had 15 televisions, switched on most of the time. Even after a stern lecture, they showed no remorse - they'd worked hard to earn their money, why shouldn't they enjoy it?
It took an inspection of their binbags - packed with quantities of perfectly edible food and unrecycled packaging galore - to shame them.
When their rubbish was dumped in a picturesque lake, which the family were forced to clear, their (supermarket) chickens finally came home to roost.
So often it is the mundane matter of rubbish disposal that brings the eco message home. The contents of our bins are daily proof of our wasteful tendencies. A new Mori poll shows two-thirds of us now back a "pay as you throw" system, which favours recyclers.
But this isn't the real issue. Much of the content of my recycling bin is packaging. Does that mean I'll be rewarded for buying more packaging as long as I throw it out correctly?
Surely I should be buying less in the first place and recycling more at home, instead of shipping my rubbish to Indonesia for "sorting". Composting, refilling and re-using, however dull sounding, are better solutions.
Offsetting schemes and recycling incentives are all very well, but they are not the answer to climate change. We have to start challenging our assumptions that we have a God-given right to lead lives of hedonism, comfort and convenience and damn the consequences.
And if Sienna Miller stopped emitting so much hot air, the world might be a cooler place.
