Electrically-powered air con is a category error.
A con, if you will
…Nonetheless, I will this afternoon be travelling in an air-conditioned train and then an air-conditioned subway to watch a band with my son at the O2 in a (probably?) air-conditioned arena
…I forget the numbers but I remember reading that the UK has a low level of urban tree cover relative to other countries and that Portsmouth (where I live) has an unusually low level of tree cover among UK cities.
Which is how I found myself today walking to the train for a mile along a pure heat island of a road. Francis Avenue was perfectly aligned with the sun’s direction and nearly all of it has *no trees*.
And as I walked along it…
…I stared at all the parked cars on it and thought, not for the first time, this is spectacularly stupid.
The parked cars take up about 4/7ths of the width of the road, as they do on almost all of Portsmouth and Southsea’s roads. Just sitting there 95% of the time doing fuck all except being a heat amplifier.
And the oft repeated refrain in Portmouth transport circles goes something like
“Oh but Portsmouth is a crowded island city short on space. There is simply no room for trees”…
…Which is… bollocks.
Looking forward to the time in my old age when thousands of Portsmouth and Southsea people have an overdue epiphany and eject most cars from the city, and plant trees where they used to sit.
Replace abjectly stupid carbon-emitting death cult heat amplifiers with cooling stores of carbon and havens for life🌳
