Friday 16 January 2009

I Have a Plot

Yesterday I joined thousands of others in becoming one of the "beneficial owners" of a plot of land acquired by Greenpeace right where Heathrow's runway 3 wants to be.

You may have seen it discussed on Question Time last night where they had British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh on the panel. Last night as I was watching the show somebody brought up the fact that runway three would add to Heathrow's carbon footprint more than the carbon footprint of the entire carbon footprint of Kenya. Mr Walsh retorted that many people has said that to him but nobody had ever been able to tell him what the CO2 emissions of Kenya were.

Surprise, surprise within a minute of him saying it I had googled the answer combining two sources to give him an approximate answer. First I found out that Kenya's carbon footprint in 2003 was 0.25 metric tonnes per head, then Wikipedia gave me the results of Kenya's 2007 census which gave them a population of 31m there (even a 2008 estimate of 38m).

Therefore Mr Walsh the answer to the question that you apparently get asked so often is so easily found that one would have expected a little bit of research on your part before going on Question Time where just such a statistic would more than likely be thrown up on a week like this. Somewhere between 7.75 and 9.5 metric tonnes.

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