Random stuff

One of my favorite bloggers is back Palestinian Princess , now married and living in New York. But still with incites of her home. Check it out. Also posts today from Irish Election by me today

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New Motor Tax will encourage more pollution. There Is a lively discussion over on politics.ie at the moment about the new Motor tax regime. With many posters pointing out that it will make old cars paying higher motor tax then new ones. Poster noodles

Just checked my car.. Ford Mondeo Diesel 115bhp TdCi, 2004. 154 grammes per Km. That makes me a Band C or E290 if it was a new car. However as mine is a 2004 car I will continue to pay 560 + 9.5% increase. Well done mr. gormleyE350 reduction for new car versus my car.

AS I said before.

In 1994 the Environment and Forecasting Institute in Heidelberg, Germany conducted a survey on the energy and environmental impact of a car through out its life time. Having driven 13,000 km a year for 10 years. It will produce 2,040m cubic metres of polluted air driving and 922m in production. This mean that about 40% of the emissions coming from a car in its 10 year lifetime comes from the manufacture. Or to put it another way. If you buy a new car every 4 years the greatest factor in the emissions in the car comes from the manufacture not the fuel.

So basically this new regime seems to be incentives new car purchases and more manufacturing costs. So while it will cause a drop in Irish emissions (as we produce no cars) world emission would go up.

Nice one I am not the biggest fan of John Gormley but that does not mean I will not say he has done well. In his carbon budget one of the policies is to

develop a national energy efficiency standard for lightbulbs, which will see an end to the use of incandescent bulbs by January 2009.

I have always liked that idea. Incandescent light blubs in the home constitute about 3% of our electricity usage in the state energy saving light bulbs 3 times less. So 2% off our electricity usage is a pretty good thing in my book.

Priorities Science or Arts funding.

With the recent results showing that Ireland was only middling in Science and Maths people were wondering why, why can we not improve this. Well One of the reasons is this. From the Irish Times

An additional €12 million has been earmarked for higher education research, bringing the total Government spend on science, technology and innovation to €133 million next year.

So we will spend €133 million a year on Science technology and innovation in 2008. Compared to €245 million on the Arts. Considering that physics based industries alone (not even touching bio-tech or pharmaceuticals ) have a share of the countries turnover close to 10% and construction. While Arts contribute next to nothing to that figure, do we have our priorities right? Is the Arts twice as important to Ireland as Science.