Prometheus Reversed.

I get regular emails from the campaigning group Avaaz. They usually ask me to sign a petition or send a representation to some politician or other in furtherance of their causes. One of their causes is climate change, and they often promote the idea that we must all earnestly aim for ‘zero carbon’ by some date in the not-too-distant future if we’re to save the planet.

Do you realise what zero carbon would mean? It would mean taking fire out of the world. And that makes me wonder whether the Titans of Greek mythology really existed, not as gods but as a group of wise old aliens who knew where carbon emissions would lead. So maybe it isn’t Donald Trump and the oil industry we should be blaming for holding up progress, but bad boy Prometheus who started the whole thing in the first place.

I didn’t muse on it for too long. What I did muse on for a while without reaching any conclusion was a picture of the big bomb - GBU 43/B I believe it’s called – which the Americans have just dropped on IS. It has a stars and stripes pasted on the front close to the nose cone, and what I couldn’t decide is why there’s something fundamentally absurd about putting a flag on a bomb.