Ageism is alive and well in many walks of life (1)
You recently raised the issue of ageism. Approaching octogenarian status, I don’t think of myself as old and nor do my fellow surfing mates. However, try applying for a new credit card or travel insurance (in Australia at least) and it is a totally different story. The hurdles to jump over for a credit card are incredible, whereas a younger person can walk into a bank and come out with one straight away. As for travel insurance, the premium is almost as much as the trip (18 May, p 32).
What these institutions are saying is that they don’t want you as their customer 鈥� that you are too old. When it comes to banks and insurance, ageism is alive and well.
Ageism is alive and well in many walks of life (2)
A few years ago, I took issue with a survey that allowed people discretion when it came to questions of nationality, ethnicity, gender and so on, but not age. I find the apparent belief, commonly espoused in the media, that people over a certain age need to be treated differently to others highly condescending and insulting. As Clem De Pressigny points out, ageism is arguably the last prejudice considered acceptable.
Smells like an excuse to continue business as usual
Your report that farmed pigs appear to find life less of a struggle when they can smell a pleasant odour is frankly sickening to read (18 May, p 14).
This farming is undoubtedly for pork production, where young pigs are castrated, overcrowded and have no access to exercise in the natural world. These animals become aggressive to other pigs and self-harm.
That isn’t green or ethical farming. Surely the real story is why this is allowed to carry on?
More possible ways to offset carbon from flying (1)
Like Graham Lawton, my views on offsets to balance carbon emissions from flying evolved from interest to scepticism. How do we know these programmes have substantive, long-lasting impacts? We don’t (11 May, p 22).
However, there may be a more effective solution than either not flying or waiting for offset programmes to prove their effectiveness: we can shift our focus to supporting renewable energy. Instead of evaluating offsets, I pay extra via my electricity bill into the state-wide . The money goes directly to purchasing renewable energy. I figure that makes up for the carbon emissions associated with my flights.
It takes a bit of investigation, but I bet there are similar options in other places, for homeowners and renters alike.
More possible ways to offset carbon from flying (2)
I applaud Lawton for outing flight offsetting programmes as greenwashing. As many of these projects are fairly obscure and the market for carbon credits is equally murky, consumers are put off any form of offsetting, which is also a problem. Similarly, many people are stuck with an oil or gas boiler and a petrol or diesel car, at least for the next few years 鈥� what can they do?
I would suggest that the best form of offsetting is to donate to projects and charities that are working in the right direction 鈥� for example, by improving cooking stoves in lower-income countries. One resource for such projects is the .
Let's try bathing our streets in a lemony hue
May I add an additional consideration to the debate about LED street lighting? In the days of sodium lamps, it wasn’t unusual to fail to notice an amber traffic light among the street lamps. This was exacerbated if the shape of the road and height of the lamps meant that the traffic light appeared to continue a line of street lamps (Letters, 18 May).
Now that white LEDs have become common, the confusion that may arise is between street lamps and car headlights. This is another argument in favour of coloured LEDs. Such LEDs can be more efficient than white ones. We would need to choose a colour that is unlikely to result in confusion with other lights on the road. I wonder whether the more distinctive lemon-yellow of early LEDs might do the job.
Blame climate change for the end of civilisations
In my view, the ultimate source of civilisation-ending events, of the sort detailed in your look at the downfall of eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age societies, is invariably drastic climate change. As your article says, “so much chaos, simultaneously, is surely no coincidence”, and while clear-cut evidence for climate catastrophe is currently lacking, so are any other plausible causes for the collapse of long-standing Bronze Age civilisations (11 May, p 32).
It surely beggars belief that people who had lived for hundreds of years under Mycenaean-style palace states should choose this time to rise up “because they want[ed] a more egalitarian and uncomplicated society”.
Tripling down on cosmic unknowns
So cosmology may now need “dark radiation” as well as dark matter and dark energy. But the only reason these three imaginary fiddle factors are required to make observational data fit the standard cosmological model is because gravity is assumed to be constant everywhere (18 May, p 8).
When you have to imagine and include three unobserved physical processes in a theoretical model, most rational people would start to believe that we are using the wrong model.
Another vote against alien megastructures
Dyson spheres and Dyson swarms are a means of collecting massive amounts of energy from a star to power an alien civilisation. Surely any advanced society would have arranged to minimise the use of energy, as we are trying to do on Earth, so why would it need the whole or a large fraction of a star’s power? Presumably to run the air conditioning to keep themselves from melting (18 May, p 12).