It's a hard life being a borderline misanthrope in the world today. When you aren't wrestling with the existentialist angst that comes from being one of several billion people flying through a bleak and unknown universe, whilst drinking a cup of tea in your bath robe, you have to endure never ending torrent of opinion stated as fact blog rantings, misinformed discussion forums, reality TV, chat shows, derivative sitcoms, trite films and all the people who gain celebrity as a result. The rational among you at this point will probably think "Well if you don't like it don't watch or read this crap Cheap(that is the popular adaptation of my nickname within my on-line circle, that or CT)". I tried this at first, but have long passed the point where the Discovery channel could further my knowledge of Sharks and WW2 Tanks. So now, I often find my self sitting in front of the TV, surfing channels in a vegetative state bemoaning the vegetative idiots who watch and make this crap. Noticing the ever so subtle irony of the situation my brain goes into denial mode and formulates a rosy excuse for my rather obscene indulgence in this arm chair to TV fornication.

The subject of this excuse, and this article unsurprisingly, is Contrary Thinking. I mean, hey, if I at least recognise I'm watching puerile thrash it isn't as bad as actually watching and enjoying it right?

It has been a long held personal philosophy of mine to always try out the counter point to anything presented to me as fact or opinion. At first I'm sure it was spawned from teenage indignation -read angst- at how pesky grown ups would have me act and behave, but it also had an effect on how I personally distinguished my self from peers. The first time I remember actively pursuing this line of thought was in an R.E. lesson against my classroom nemesis Giles. He was throwing around popular platitudes along the lines of  'God is nothing more than an immaterial construct conjured up in the minds of men to ease the burden that comes with the questioning of our very existence and purpose in this universe', equivocations were made to Santa, the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy. Aside from the whimpers of the molly-cuddled mommy's boy Thomas who seemed to be coming to the great Santa debate a few years late, this went down with the whole class rather well.
 
I found this annoying, admittedly my reasons were rather superficial in that it was less to do with his argument and more to do with Giles looking good by using what I thought were nothing more than regurgitated popular sentiments. I countered by citing an article from the New Scientist in our school's library written by an eminent scientist, who's name I sadly cannot even pretend to remember. In the article he tried to engender to the reader the awe he felt after a lifetime of studying and observing the seemingly concurrent sequence of small coincidences that makes up the sum of all human knowledge about our physical universe, and how, leaving all religious dogma aside, he couldn't help but wonder if something omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent had created it all.

Our teacher, a rather unfortunately named Brother Damien, finding him self between a rock and a comparatively dense volume of space, had to choose between one boy's outright blasphemy and an-other's questioning of Christian doctrine but acceptance of the possibility of God's existence. My first offensive in the Giles wars had resulted in a victory.

Petty teenage rivalry left long behind, I had still managed to hang onto this party piece of a personal philosophy, and by party piece I mean just that. Far too many times than can be recounted here, I have used this little trick in discussions, often gaining me faint praise. I mean even if I'm wrong at least I made people think about what they thought they knew right?

One of the beauties of science is that its initial position is always sceptical. It begs you to back up any theory with empirical evidence. There I was with all the glorious power of rational thought distilled into these two words, Contrary Thinking. The only problem being I hadn't really got a good grasp on the final piece of the puzzle, the empirical evidence.

The event that spurred me to even start to try and grapple with this problem was the shocking discovery that Jeremy Clarkson agreed with one of my most popular theories, one which I would happily spout to anyone and everyone willing to listen, sadly a limited audience of one wino and his dog. This further begged the question, when did Dave and his dog meet Jeremy Clarkson and why hadn't he told me?

Joking aside, and not to demean Jeremy Clarkson, he is amusing in a school boy who never grew up sense but hardly a sage in the socio-political arena, here follows a small insight into how I changed my position on this theory and subsequently how I modified my philosophical party trick.

Electric cars. Good for the environment right?
Well it seems both Clarkson and I had arrived to the same short sighted opinion that in effect no they weren't. Highschool physics gives you a rudimentary understanding of thermodynamics. You cannot generate electrical energy without expending another source of energy to create it. Plugging a car into a socket every night would only mean you were getting the power from a coal burning power station. So in effect your carbon footprint hasn't changed. What about Hydrogen/Oxygen fuel cells? Well you get both of those chemicals from water, and how do you separate them? Electrolysis, which entails having two electrodes in a fluid which has a current passed through it. So again you have most likely used more fossil fuels. At this point the two of us had stopped, obviously we had unearthed a great paradox in the silly electric car debate right? Well Dave and his dog had seemed impressed as I passed him a smoke.

So how could I be wrong? There are a lot of minor points like electric cars pollute less in areas of high population density, less kids with asthma etc. Also electric cars can be more efficient with small tricks like generating more electricity when you brake.

The big one for me though is this:

Take 10 million electric cars and 10 million petrol cars.

Now say it takes 20 fossil fuel burning stations to power the 10 million electric cars. In my initial argument what you would see is that you have two different ways of producing arguably the same amount of carbon emissions. On further thought though I realised what you have is 20 carbon footprints compared with 10 million, a far more consolidated and manageable problem. What's more it isn't an overnight phenomenon, you won't wake up tomorrow to find 10 million George Jetsons on their way work in hover cars. A steady change over to electric cars would actually force governments and power companies to address an ever growing demand in electrical energy, a problem that in today's political climate would most likely require a "Green" stance. The means of "Green" power generation is wholly another topic so I'll touch on it briefly before getting back to the topic at hand. While wind and solar are fairly inadequate when it comes to powering even small cohorts of the population (wind power even has a detrimental effect on natural habitats), it would seem the "Green" approach is still slightly flawed. You have to consider the effectiveness of hydro electric power and also Nuclear, much to the consternation of the rampantly Green lobby. Nuclear, while arguably presenting many dangers to the immediate human and animal population surrounding power plants, is on a macroscopic scale much less of a danger to the world at large than our current state of carbon flatulence.

How has all this changed my little personal philosophy?
I still extol the virtues of Contrary Thinking, but in a world full of rhetorical posturing, of the ilk where every ones problems have a fundamental legacy in someone else's misdeeds, its good to ground your self with some facts before being a sanctimonious twat like myself.