The machine stops

As I write, the death toll in Myanmar or Burma has overshot the 100,000 mark. Just to put it into a Malta perspective, that is a quarter of our population being officially declared dead. Goodness knows how many are missing presumed dead and the amount of injured people must be staggering!

Since the famous tsunami, there have been many natural disasters that have afflicted this sad, polluted and war-torn planet. It is as if nature is taking its revenge for the terrible abuses we humans have perpetrated over the centuries. We have pumped the earth of its natural oil to use for fuel and burnt it up at the rate of knots. We have delved deep into the bowels of the earth for gold and diamonds. We have scarred its surface with our quarries and have generated huge mounds of putrefactive rubbish, which nobody knows what to do with.

The teeming multitudes of India and China, despite there being six million bicycles in Beijing alone, according to the song, are evolving so fast that the pollution generated by this development is unstoppable, making all the attempts made in the more environmentally-conscious West pathetically laughable.

So, the pundits are all saying that the price of oil will escalate to an all-time high where, if prognostications are correct, it will stay. Lino Spiteri has warned that this could affect our economy so radically that we can kiss the famous electoral promise of a 10 per cent tax cut goodbye!

With a meter reader who left me the dire warning that my consumption was "abnormally high", I tremble to think what sort of bills I will be receiving from Water Services Corporation in the near future and, believe me, my demands are modest!

Will I be buying myself a bicycle in the near future? I suppose that if push comes to shove I will have to. Not that it solves very much. With a basket in the front, one can manage modest shopping but then what about taking paintings to and from the frame-maker's which is an integral part of my work?

Imagine me pedalling furiously to and from Attard from St Julians with large frames strapped to my back. Now had there been public transport worth its salt then it would not have been so laughable but, as things stand, the mind simply boggles at the unimaginably restrictive life we will be condemned to lead unless we have oodles and oodles of money to pay our fuel bills with.

So what about wind energy? What about solar energy? With high winds whipping our islands every other day and the sun drenching us practically all the year round these sources of energy, should, by rights have long been institutionalised. When providing a 20 per cent alternative energy source was laid down by the European Commission, it was before the crisis that is happening now was even dreamt of. I am sure that nobody realised how drastically things could escalate.

With a major war going on in the Middle East it is small wonder that this looming world energy crisis has been kept at bay for so long and how, despite all my own words of warning that have been falling on deaf years since the invasion of Iraq, our government has not managed to produce an iota of solar or wind energy and has merely slapped on those revolting surcharges.

I have been told that even with those surcharges the cost of supplying energy to Malta and Gozo is still largely subsidised; so much for Alfred Sant's promises to remove them, which really shows how we Maltese must learn to take electoral promises with a sack of salt and not a pinch.

How right were those people we either called impractical visionaries at best and eccentric oddballs at worst, people who have been advocating the use of alternative energy sources and warning us all that sooner rather than later we are going to have to either change our lifestyle or eventually have it changed for us. Unbelievably we have buildings that have been constructed in the last 10 years that are unable to sustain the inclusion of energy-saving devices like solar panels simply because their eventual use was simply never taken into consideration. This is shocking. Talk about being optimists!

The unrest in the Middle East will not abate even as the allied forces are slowly withdrawn with their tails between their legs after being in an impossible place like Iraq for well onto five years, leaving it no more stabilised than it was.

With Iran consolidating itself as a nuclear power despite all the sabre-rattling protests from the established bullies in the playground who resent the arrival of yet another of their kind, the fossil fuel situation can only worsen with oil-producing nations holding others to ransom unless Think Green becomes a way of life; very difficult under the circumstances I must admit but not impossible. If we go for it now we may still have a chance that when the crash happens we may not feel it so catastrophically.

If we postpone and procrastinate by commissioning reports and feasibility studies over which to waste years of precious time, we will one day come face to face with a machine that has truly stopped; once and for all. And then what do we do?

kzt@onvol.net