Archive for August, 2008
Enterprise Rent-A-Car are so shit!
We booked a van with Enterprise Rent-A-Car about 4 months ago, today just 7 days befor we are due to pick it up I get this from them! by email!
Mr. Starbuck,
This email is in regards to your booking for a cargo van on the 23rd of August.
Due to the burning man event, we have been overbooked 100+ CargoVans/PickUp Trucks.
Therefore, we are cancelling all reservations for the end of August. There will be no trucks or Vans available during this tmie period.
Thank you for your understanding. Please feel free to call our branch with any questions or concerns.Kylie Beren
Enterprise Rent-A-Car
Assistant Manager 23GP
San Francisco- Mission St.
415-522-5900
Can you beleive it? I can’t. I sent them this response (by email):
Dear Kylie,
This is totally unacceptable! Have you only just noticed you are overbooked by “100+” vehicles? What kind of system are you running? This van has been booked with you for about four months now, I did not book it yesterday, you cannot just cancel my reservation with one week’s notice, especially by email!
Because of the Burning Man event I am now unable to book another van, I knew this and booked in good time and you took the reservation. How do you not know when Burning Man is, it is not as thought this is the first year it has happened .
I need the van on the date I reserved it for the duration I reserved it for and I will be in to pick it up next Saturday.
If you have any “questions or concerns” about this then I can be contacted on 415-823-8109.
Yours,
Mr. Jon Starbuck.
No response from them yet………….
Coal
I have every intention of bloging something here properly one day……….. but for the time being here are a couple of links:
Oxfam come out against coal, Kinsnorth
George Monbiot has gone nuclear! (not)
Back in 2004 (?) Amanda Roll-Pickering (now Amanda Starbuck, my wife) was the media officer at C.A.T. when, as I remember events, Peter Harper, a C.A.T. employee, publicly made reference to the idea that, depending on the way you look at it, nuclear may be bad but not be as bad as the worst effects of climate change.
This was picked up by the Guardian’s environmental colonist George Monbiot (a man who’s writing I adore) and reported as “C.A.T. has gone pro-nuclear”. Amanda asked George to print an apology / retraction but he refused on the grounds that Peter had said it, which he had.
Since then George has moved near to C.A.T. and is, I presume, friends with Peter; they are both very nice charming guys with similar politics who live about a mile apart.
George recently made reference to the idea that we should not be looking at electricity in terms of financial cost per kilowatt-hour but at the environmental cost of co2-production per kilowatt-hour and if (and as George points out, it is a very big if) nuclear compares favourably maybe we should go with it.
Guess what is happening now? Everyone is shouting “Monbiot has gone nuclear!”. Of course he has not done anything of the sort, but am I wrong to find it rather funny?
Burning coal produces more radiation than nuclear!
Sounds absurd, does it not? But in this article in the Guardian George Monbiot points out a fascinating fact that coal powered plants produce much more radiation than nuclear plants!
The odd and widely-ignored truth is that routine radioactive discharges from coal-burning are greater than those produced by nuclear plants. Coal contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium. Though these are present at much lower levels than in nuclear fuel, a lot more coal is burnt, which means that total emissions are greater.
An article in Scientific American last year maintained that levels of ionising radiation in the bones of people living around coal plants are up to six times higher than the levels in people living around atomic power stations.
Fascinating but irrelevant because, of course, as I am sure George would point out too, the CO2 emissions from both coal and nuclear are enormous, and cutting these emissions must be a top priority. Most, if not all, forms of renewable energy production are much cheaper than either coal or nuclear and, of course, renewables produce no CO2 emissions and no radioactive emissions what so ever.
