TPaxe - you said <<Would love to read about this as I'm going to Paris later this year and would love to join the group!>>
...and you have the gall to question ira's mind? Personally I have been lurking on the side on this thread questioning yours.

Keep lurking RobJame as that is the perfect for the group www.groscon.free.fr

As I mentioned before, lighten up, I wouldn't know how to let down a tyre if I fell over it. I'm helping a friend do research into making people aware the pros and cons of gas guzzling, giant stomping vehicles and the rest of it and how it's changing the face of a foreign city.

Whoever is following this thread can get a little more insight of what goes on in another country, especially Paris and it's changing environment.

Ira's tone came across a little wild-eyed mad, sort of scary.

Sandi_travelnut, surely one of those statements is the polar opposite of the other.

But, TPaxe, those giant jets you arrived and left in are doing much more damage to Paris (and everywhere else) than a few SUVs. I find it hard to believe that there are THAT many; you'll find a lot more in any American city.

This is just political theater and accomplishes nothing except smugness and conflict.

Dear TPaxe,

Can you tell me the qualitative difference between letting the air out of a tire (or tyre) solely because you feel justified in doing so and setting off a bomb for the same reason?

((I))
PS, my car is a Vibe - 33 mpg, which is not as good as a Peugeot 307 Diesel, but I can't get a Peugeot in the US.

The rhetoric that gets spewed by people who must believe what they are saying is amazing. Take:
<<Most petroleum comes from people who support terrorism.>>
This is simply untrue yet the poster must believe it. In 2004, 29% of the world's oil production was from the Middle East and do you accept that all Middle Eastern countries support terrorism? Wow.
Forget that and consider the thought processes of someone who lives in another country believing they have the right to visit another country and do something illegal under the banner of "Just doing my bit for the environment". And we are concerned about the kids....

Oil doesn't come from "the Middle East", it comes from specific countries in the Middle East, and many other places. In OPEC, the biggest producers are Saudi Arabia, who very much do support terrorism; Iran, ditto; Iraq, which is now the incubus of terror thanks to our genius foreign policy there; then the UAE, which may or may not support terrorism directly but through whose banking system most terror dollars pass; Nigeria, which is too busy terrorizing its own miserable citizens to fund terror elsewhere; Libya, which just recently got out of the terror business, and a few other countries with dubious (and worsening) human rights records of their own, like Venezuela and Indonesia.

Outside of OPEC, the biggest producer by far is the former USSR states, including Russia, which absolutely funds (and practices as official government policy) terror. There's China, which is a human rights basket case. Aside from the US, Canada, Mexico, Norway, and the UK, the rest of world production is trivial. The newest zones of exploration by the big oil companies are in human rights free-fall zones like Equatorial Guinea, where only grinding poverty, soon to be allieviated for the torturers at least by oil bribes, has kept the death toll below the international news radar. It's going to get a lot worse.

Every drop of gas you put in your vehicle is paid for with gallons of human blood. It's tragic to think otherwise.

I just saw a statistic (for Canada ) which stated that cars produced only 10% of our greenhouse gases, while industry was over 60%. So perhaps our focus needs to be a bit wider.

I don't have a reference, but I was under the impression that agriculture (including deforestation) was number one, but roughly equal to both cars and industry, with aviation a lot higher than you might expect. I'm probably wrong. And whatever the numbers are, China is throwing them into a tizzy.

Michael are you suggesting Kyoto...France ratified Kyoto didn't they?
fnarf - finally something I can agree with you on - "probably"

Hi robjame,
I was surprised at that statistic, since I always assumed that cars were the worst polluters, and therefore something that should be a focus in any pollution reduction strategy, and would give the best payoff.

I believe France did sign Kyoto.

Robjame: how lovely of you to say so.

Please don't think that my comments about oil are in any way supportive of anyone's desire to vandalize people's cars, which is pointless political theater designed to assuage one's own ego, not do anything serious about the environment.

From anything that I have read it is very difficult to quantify the causes of greenhouse gases.
The part I object to is the use of political rhetoric (another type of pointless political theatre) as a "proof" to an argument.
"Every drop of gas you put in your vehicle is paid for with gallons of human blood."
"Most petroleum comes from people who support terrorism."
"Remember "when you ride alone you ride with bin Laden".
With a little research you will discover that these statements are untrue and IMO detract from any intelligent idea that you put forward - and can be compared to letting the air out of SUV's tires.

"With a little research", eh? Most petroleum does, in fact, come from countries which support terrorism. I gave you a detailed breakdown of them, mentioning virtually all of the significant petroleum-producing countries in the world. If you would do a little research yourself, you'd see what petroleum extracting countries are generally like. Have a peek at the last National Geographic's article about life in the Nigerian oil fields. I have done my research, and I'm correct on the facts; all you have is prejudice and know-nothingism.

so I assume you don't use any gas at all so as to not support terrorism?

No, of course I do. I'm not better than anyone. Even people who don't drive cars use oodles of petroleum. But at least I'm aware of the state of the world, and interested in what the outcomes are. It's people who pretend that there are no consequences to anything that get under my skin -- like the poster who thinks it's "environmental" to take a jet thousands of miles to let air out of someone's tires.