Saturday, May 13, 2006

A hard addiction to break

I was idly looking through some of the photos (often very striking, and most from amateurs. Such is the liberating power of digital) on the BBC weekly round up - http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/in_pictures/4765621.stm - and the caption of one (# 9), more than the image itself, struck me:

'Baghdad residents line up to get fuel, currently limited to 30 litres (8 gallons) per person twice a week.'

I wish in no way to minimise the hardships the people of that poor blighted country are suffering, or try to make a sensible comparison between the realities of work and social travel between various countries' transport systems, but if this was a rationing, 60 litres a week per person seemed quite a lot. 

And puts 'normal' consumption, and hence emissions, around the world in rather frightening consequence.