Idle State

I've just finished reading Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" - basically the book of the film of the slide show. I randomly picked it up while wandering about the shops the other day. Actually - "reading" is a bit of a stretch. Perusing is probably a better verb since there isn't actually that much text in it. It's more a sort of printed slide-show.

It's an interesting "read". Actually - the pictures are great and the slides just as compelling as the film. [Hold that thought while I go and change my incandescent lightbulbs over to compact fluorescents.]

Two things surprise me about the book.

Firstly - it's printed on nice glossy paper. At a guess, I'd say that this is not the most greenhouse-gas-emission friendly produced paper. It's nice to touch though.

Secondly - I bought the book in Qatar (actually - it's available at The One). Qatar isn't the most fastidious country I've been in with regard to emissions reduction, concern about global warming and caring for the environment... far from it. I was driving around the north west beaches of Qatar a few weeks ago and found the amount of refuse along the shoreline staggering and saddening. That's an environmental disaster in it's own right. I wonder how many copies of the book will be sold in Qatar?

If nothing else, it's a pretty coffee table book, a relic of what will shortly be pre neo-environmentalism [Google Shellenberger and Nordhaus' Break Through on post-environmentalism].