Friday, December 23, 2011

How I make children happy using 100% renewable energy, by Father Christmas

Santa Claus
Wow! We are so honoured! Renowned philanthropist Santa Claus has agreed to post his annual message to the world on the Low Carbon Kid blog. 

Over to you, St Nick...

Hello everyone.

Up here, near the North Pole, we are very aware of global warming.

In the summer, I have water from melting ice dripping through the grotto roof like a tent in Wales.

I've got polar bears knocking at my front door for sanctuary, because the icebergs have melted.

It's not right.

'Course I do everything you'd expect.

All the wrapping paper is recycled from post-consumer waste and everything gets used again, composted or recycled.

I used to be green anyway in the days of old. That's before those people at Coca-Cola got hold of me and turned my costume red.

In those days, the grotto was heated with a wood fire.

Nowadays we heat the workshops with a geothermal system that runs on hot water from underground. Much less polluting and totally renewable!

All of my elves are on a vegetarian diet, which is far better for the planet.

I mean, if a veggie diet is good enough for Rudolph and the other reindeer, it's good enough for us.

The problem is the methane from the reindeer. They don't half make a lot of it!

Not much I can do about that, but I do take the reindeer poo and compost it in a biodigester, collect the gas and use it for the cooking on the old range.

Okay, so far so good.

But now, you know those folk in Brussels are spouting some new nonsense: they're going to make me pay for my flight emissions over Europe, bringing me into something called the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.

While I've got a present for them. I'm going to run my sleigh on biofuel!

I've got a deal going with the Brazilians. They've been making bioethanol out of sugarcane since the 1970s, and that's all I need to run my eco-sleigh on.

Well, it doesn't power the sleigh itself. No, that wouldn't be powerful enough to go around every child's bedroom in the world in just one night, would it?

Don't be daft.

Together with electric power from the geothermal plants, I run a special particle accelerator in my underground grotto.

CERN aren't the only people with a particle accelerator, you know. It was my present to myself back in 1951. I've been extending it ever since.

Being immortal gives me plenty of time to do this research. I have to - to keep up with your population growth.

So, there, I accelerate protons to close to the speed of light, smash them into some carborundum atoms and create a few trillion neutrinos, which, as you know, can travel faster than light.

Using these, I can cancel the influence of the Higgs bosons in my grotto in order to create particles you lot haven't discovered yet.

(Hmm, perhaps I should give CERN a Higgs particle in their Christmas stocking...)

These new particles are called anti-gravitons.

What do they do? They cancel out the effect of gravity, of course.

What did you think they would do with a name like that?

So, using advanced entanglement techniques, these particles are then linked to all the particles in my fleet of sleighs (you didn't think there was only one did you?).

Then, powered by the faster-than-light neutrinos, and floating in the air as a result of the anti-gravitons, I control the sleighs remotely from my grotto near the north pole.

And that's how I can deliver presents to every child in the world in just one night.

Did you think it was magic? Hah! How little faith in science you have.

All to make the children of the world happy.

Jeremy Clarkson, eat your heart out. You are like a paralysed snail compared to me.

And I am running exclusively on 100% renewable energy.

Happy Christmas, and pass the brandy!

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