What’s the carbon footprint of YOUR warhead?
By A J Summersgill

Published Sunday, April 13, 2008  |  Comments  | Print  | E-mail

It’s doing my head in - from where I’m sat the entire world (except perhaps China) is banging on and on about carbon footprints, climate change, global warming and what have you.  I can’t even plan a route on my PC without a dire warning of the damage my little jaunt is going to do to the planet.  Oh, and it now costs me more than £1.00 a litre for fuel - that’s about $7.60 a gallon by my (admittedly) very rough maths for you chaps in the US.

For a LEGO fan, this is quite scary - LEGO is of course made of plastic, Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) if you really want to know - and what’s plastic made from?  Oil of course…and suddenly the end of my world seems a little bit nearer.

But what about wars and things like that?  How does "going green" compete with the absolute and unfortunate need to smash armies into little tiny pieces every so often?  Will the Generals of the future have to start installing catalytic converters to their Cruise Missiles?  Will we see specially assigned troops routinely scouring battlefields under a flag of truce to recover all the brass casings from bullets so they can be recycled?  Will we have to start exchanging intelligence information with the enemy about what our AFVs are made from so that they can be sure not to destroy too many of them in case the sudden release of toxic materials threatens to overwhelm the natural order of the Earth until we plant a few more trees to make up for it?  To put it bluntly, what’s the carbon footprint of YOUR warhead?

One of the main side effects of course is the effect all this has on the weather - and the latest episode of Grunts is a rather frightening example of the kind of weirdness that’s going on - we had snow in the UK recently.  In April.  What’s that all about?