George Monbiot writes something almost worth reading shock!

Sorry for the harsh title but I usually find his stuff pretty indigestible. It’s mostly smug gloom and always the government’s, the American’s or ‘Big Business’s’ fault. He seems to be a founder member of the new puritans who have leapt on the environmental bandwagon to give humankind a sound ticking off. You know the sort of line ‘ you may be happy, well fed and prosperous today but there’s some really bad stuff just around the corner’.....

But today’s Guardian extract from his new book is about his own house which seems to be about as environmentally unsound as mine is. Of course it’s not really his fault (even though he did choose to buy it) because "building regulations [covering its refurbishment] were both sparse and weak. Even those that did apply ... were not enforced". Nor, apparently, is it his fault that they now have a baby who needs the heating on. Quite why he’s bringing children into what he seems to think of as such a dreadful world or exactly how building regulations would be enforced in his idealised (perhaps a tad Stalinist world) we may have to buy the book to find out.

But I won’t be buying it. Have you any idea of the ecological damage the international book trade is doing to our planet?