Only slightly overweight American who wants to spend time pontificating to camera instead of doing some exercise. I wish these people would learn that for men over 25 only your mother wants to see a picture of you.

The very high electricity costs in the UK are due partly, though not solely, to using the bills to subsidise “renewable” energy… which may result in buying electricity from China albeit generated in UK territory or waters, using plant bought from China even if physically made here.

I suppose the USA making ethanol from grain reflects in part a strong resistance in that country to electric cars.

Although their days of ridiculous “gas-guzzlers” are over apart from so-called “SUVs” and gigantic motor-caravans, it seems many US motorists want only petrol-fuelled cars on principle. Given the sheer size of their country perhaps they have a point if they need, or wish, to make very long-distance journeys. Yet battery-powered cars are made or imported and sold there; and outside of city-centres I think a much larger proportion of American motorists’ homes have drives than here in the UK.

Nevertheless, industrial-scale grain growing merely for vehicle fuel rather than for food, is not good.

That love of SUVs has crept Eastwards though, rather like the domestic waste-bin lost from Alabama that recently washed up, all barnacle -y, on the beach near Weymouth. There are plenty of lumpy Toyota Landcruisers and Ford Rangers on British roads, along with big commercial-type vans, that seem owned as status-symbol cars for everyday use.

The US railways also still use mainly Diesel locomotives because electric traction is largely confined to major cities and their surroundings with considerable commuter traffic. I  don’t know if Amtrak is planning or building trans-continental electrification; but there is a 400-mile “HS2” equivalent being built in California – despite no “HS1” experience, and apparently as relatively costly and contentious as our attempt.

(A hurricane had washed the polythene wheelie-bin into the sea.)

I have just finished reading an eye-opener of a book, Not The End Of The World, by the statistician Dr. Hannah Ritchie (senior researcher in the ‘Programme for Global Development’ at Uni. of Oxford, and an honorary Fellow of Uni. of Edinburgh). Pub. Penguin – Random House, 2024.

She has made a particular study of climate-change and its effects, and of agriculture, and our world-wide responses to it. Optimistic that we can deal with the problem, and feed ourselves – if we have the will to approach it properly -Dr. Ritchie shows and explains very clearly not only the problems and solutions; but also the ignorance, simple misunderstandings and surprising myths hampering the efforts.

What is particularly surprising perhaps is that Dr. Ritchie shows we already further along the way in environmental, food and health matters, than many of we, and the policy-makers and headline-writers, might imagine. Though not of course everywhere, and we should not be complacent.