14 DAY TRIAL // Simply by reading about this year's Olympic flame procession, it's impossible not to be astonished by the number of cars that followed it on its route through London: a total of 47 vehicles.
With just a quick glance at the procession, you can easily spot buses, trucks, motorcycles and regular family cars. Quite a long list of vehicles, isn't it?
Most people were annoyed by this convoy of automobiles because of the traffic jam and the general chaos they caused. Daily Mail's report on the matter emphasizes precisely these aspects.
The issues we want to raise are quite different ones: with the government and the officials constantly encouraging the general public to resort to public transportation rather than their own cars, why is it that they don't mind having 47 automobiles aimlessly follow a torch around town?
Studies show that one gallon of gasoline, when burnt to power a car, releases about 8.8 kilograms (that's 19.4 pounds) of CO2 into the atmosphere, reports EnergyRefuge.
Together with CO2, exhaust fumes coming from your average car also contain hydrocarbons, the most common of which are methane, particular matter and nitrogen oxides.
Now, you can tell by their fancy names that these substances are neither very environmentally friendly, nor things we want to have floating around in the air we breathe.
If one gallon of gasoline coming from one car inflicts this amount of damage on the environment, do we really want to do the math and find out what 47 cars can do?
In spite of hearing everybody talking about how gas emissions are incredibly harmful to the natural world and how they have serious consequences on climate change, nobody seems to notice the simple things we can do to prevent these things from happening.
The way I see it, if we are to continue using gasoline fueled cars, maybe we can at least try and use them for strictly practical reasons, rather than be in such a hurry to start our engines for purely recreational purposes.
And keep in mind that the Olympic flame and the Olympic games are supposed to be all about "mens sana in corpore sano", and not about harming Mother Nature and, implicitly, ourselves.