Growing rampant

Steve Schwartzman

Oct 5

Growing rampant on some of the Virginia saltmarsh mallows, Kosteletzkya pentacarpos or virginica, which you saw in the last post on the gulf side of Galveston Island State Park on September 19th, were a bunch of hairypod cowpea vines, Vigna luteola, as shown above. Next, have a look at one of the cowpea flowers from down low, where I'm wont to go:

And here's one in isolation that's even more sculptural:

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On the theme of "Do as I say, not as I do," the other day I happened across an article by Emily Smith from November 1, 2021, that began like this:

There is outrage after Jeff Bezos' $65 million Gulf Stream jet led a 400-strong stream of private planes into Scottish environmental summit COP26.

World leaders and dignitaries from all over the globe, including Prince Albert of Monaco and a host of "green" CEOs landed in Glasgow and Edinburgh over the weekend, creating what one Scottish news outlet described as "an extraordinary traffic jam [which] forced empty planes to fly 30 miles to find space to park."

The article went on to quote Matt Finch, of the UK's Transport and Environment campaign group:

The average private jet... emits two tons of CO2 for every hour in flight. It can't be stressed enough how bad private jets are for the environment, it is the worst way to travel by miles. Our research has found that most journeys could easily be completed on scheduled flights.

Private jets are very prestigious but it is difficult to avoid the hypocrisy of using one while claiming to be fighting climate change.... To put it in context, the total carbon footprint of an ordinary citizen — including everywhere they travel and everything they consume — is around eight tons a year. So an executive or politician taking one long-haul private flight will burn more CO2 than several normal people do in a year [italics added].

Of course those 400 private jets converged at a "climate summit" for the sake of "saving the planet," so it must have been okay.