Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

The Japanese environment ministry’s website was brought down on Wednesday by an onslaught of visitors giving pledges to reduce their carbon footprint in exchange for a discount on Big Macs. That’s right: in exchange for a promise to take some small action to reduce global warming, people can get a coupon that enables them to buy, at a wallet-friendly price, a product that comes from an industry that is itself one of the worst offenders in terms of greenhouse emissions. And this attracted such a swarm of interest that the servers were unprepared to deal with the traffic. Somehow, I suspect that this sort of program is likely to have a net negative impact on the climate– even before you add in the way that the positive publicity is likely to impact McDonald’s sales long after the coupons have all been redeemed.

And people wonder why I like to run around squawking about how we’re all doomed. (OK, so I made that part up.)

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