Does a burning book give off CO2?

The Spectator has recently introduced an Australian supplement, which I think is mostly a waste of space (apart from the hilarious articles by Patrick Cook).

More annoyingly, when they actually manage to print something that is worth reading, they don't post it on their website. Maybe they think us poor antipodeans have not made it onto the Algore superhighway yet?

So you will have to put up with my memory for a minute, because I read an article on book burning, then finished the magazine and binned it.

The article said that there are many students in Aus planning on holding book burnings when school finishes. One bloke with a Faceplant or Mystupid page apparently had 2000+ idiots lining up to hold a massive book bonfire somewhere or another.

That's nice. Nothing demonstrates how much you valued that expensive taxpayer funded education like burning all evidence of it.

Now these little pyros have sat through 12 years of education, and supposedly been brainwashed by an avalanche of politically correct, environmentally friendly, gaia loving pap.

Really?

Hasn't really worked, has it?

If any of the tree hugging guff had rubbed off, surely these trogs would be wanting to recycle these products of gaia, rather than letting off a few tons of carbon.

Then again, given the lack of critical thinking and analysis skills that I have seen in the younger members of our workforce, I doubt that many could work out that burning books = production of CO2.

Which apparently is a bad, bad thing.

If you suggested to my mother, a product of the Great Depression, that one should burn one's books instead of selling them second hand to someone else, she would happily encase you in concrete and dump you off the continental shelf.

I thought we were supposed to be reducing our environmental footprint, consuming less and all that sort of thing.

Well, maybe that's only something that other people should be doing. Like fat yanks perhaps. Doesn't apply to us. Nooooooooo. We're not hurting the planet.

How did we allow so many self-absorbed, materialistic little wankers to survive through to adulthood? Aren't you supposed to be able to buy a hunting license in order to keep their population down?