Meanwhile, keeping the sward green and encouraging it to grow requires – as well as copious water – regular applications of oil-based fertiliser.
What buggering oil based fertilisers?
We make fertiliser through the Haber Bosch process, in which we use methane (CH4) to fix the nitrogen (N) from the atmosphere to make ammonia (NH3) and then on perhaps to ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) which we then chuck over the fields and lawns (or in Ireland mix with derv which is the only oil based product and for a very different reason).
What fucking oil?
And note that this methane of which we speak is the major ingredient in that shale gas that we\’ve just found 200 trillion cubic feet of underneath Blackpool.
Seriously where did this \”oil based fertiliser\” stuff come from? Does it all go back to some twat in FoE or Greenpeace who doesn\’t know the difference between a [1C] alkane and a mix of [6C] to [10C] alkanes, alkenes, cycloalkanes etc?
You know, someone ignorant of what they speak and thus someone who could usefully remain silent?
Your last sentence sums up the Left-wing commentariat.
Green spaces of course have no benefit whatsoever to potentially rising urban temperatures. I suppose we could replace all lawns with white concrete.
I suspect that “oil-based” in this context means “requires external energy” (ie. temperature and pressure).
Of course, there’s nothing to stop anyone using energy from renewables in this process (snigger).
I never bothered to learn about the production process, so have accepted their lie for all these years. You’d think I’d know better. Thanks for enlightening me.
Keeping grass green in Britain does not need any excess water, and fertiliser just makes the stuff grow quicker so you have to mow it more often. It might go brownish every third summer but it should come back fast enough (so long as you don’t let it seed and go into senescence, at which point whatever you do it’s going yellow).
The argument is totally applicable to western US-ian cities (Vegas, Phoenix, Denver) where the natural vegetation is scrub and keeping lawn and traditional tree varieties soaks up lots of already limited water, but cut/pasting it onto Britain is just lazy.
I would guess ‘oil based’ is ignorant shorthand for fossil fuel based.
As to water – when was the last reservoir built in the south east? Late 70s I think. Thames water want to build one but it has become tangled up in red tape. How has population changed there? It’s no wonder there is a water shortage.
If you want you can get the hydrogen by eloctrolysing water, using electricity from renewable sources. But it costs more.
Can we please give up on this argument that because a left-winger said something stupid, all left-wingers must be stupid? One could make a similar argument about right-wingers. The Telegraph is not more intelligent than the Guardian.
And we have yet another case of British lefties thinking that Britain is America, that our problems are their problems, and that the solutions beloved by American lefties (that O so politically successful group) will work here.
The American lawn is a deliberate attempt to copy a traditional British pattern where it doesn’t fit the environment. The British lawn is pretty close to what just happens if you leave a bunch of non-forested land open to the British weather and graze or mow the grass before it goes to seed.
“all left-wingers must be stupid?”
No
Evil?
Yes
Full of oozing sanctimonious bullshit that seeks to disguise the evil?
That also.
The comment @ 7 really should come with the footnote: “Print out & frame.”
And there were were thinking the Graun existed to prove left wing lack of intelligence…….
The Guardian missed a trick. Cut leaves release methane and other GHGs, so even mowing your lawn with a push-mower is ecocide.
@9
All left wingers are evil ? Do try not to confirm all Arnald’s worst prejudices about the comments here.
I have the impression that some writers have used “petroleum” to refer to oil and gas. Then “petroleum-derived fertiliser” is fair enough: it needs only some ignoramus to assume that “petroleum” always means solely crude oil and, bingo, Guardian-level dimwittery.
That is, indeed, pretty much teh entire problem. If the British left, just for one minute a day, woult stop blindly following America, we might have a chance of a meaningful discussion once in a while.
Not one, to channel (island) our least favourite Frenchman, consigned entirely to the left.
Ian B – “That is, indeed, pretty much teh entire problem. If the British left, just for one minute a day, woult stop blindly following America, we might have a chance of a meaningful discussion once in a while.”
That is not entirely fair. The standard of debate has improved enormously because they are blindly following America. Because they used to blindly follow the Soviet Union. Remember the good old days when that sh!t Mandelstam and even Peter Tatchell were accepting free trips to Cuba? When Bea Campbell took time off smearing victims of the sex abuse hysteria to accept holidays from the East Germans? Even today half the British left follows France and the Euro-model rather than America which I am not sure is a big improvement.
You can use light oils as a feedstock in the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia. ICI used naphtha for a few years before switching to north sea gas as a feedstock. The reduction in atmospheric pollution when they switched from using coke to using naphtha was memorable.
However I doubt whether the Guardian columnist is really basing his/her comment on 1960s technology. More likely total ignorance because lawns do not, in general need fertiliser.
does anyone else recall the morale-building odours released during the destructive distillation of British coal?