The Smoking Ban: bad for the environment?

Snickers Man

Now some might think me crude and flippant and suggest that I go contact Brainiac but something I learned today got me thinking.

Apparently, one of the world's leading Carbon Offset companies, as cited in a report from the non profit organisation Clean Air Cool Planet (see page iv of the preface),AgCert is headquartered in Dublin.

Now what these guys do is go to huge dairy and pig farms in Mexico and Brazil and gather all the "effluent" into a massive pit, whereupon it is burned. This reduces the CO2e gas emissions from all that dung by a huge amount and so the guys claim credits which they then sell on to genuine polluters so that they can continue polluting.

Apparently 19 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases are caused by farm animals' poo so anything that can cut large amounts of it back has to be a good thing, yeah?

But I got to thinking: Since the smoking ban, the air in pubs here has been a lot cleaner and your clothes don't smell bad the next day. But the downside is (and I'm not alone in thinking this) that you notice the flatulence a lot more as the night goes on.

There could be two reasons for this.
1) in the old days the smell of cigarette smoke overpowered the stale bodily aromas or

2) the many glowing cigarette ends that used to be dotted around pubs burned off the methane, rendering it odourless.

If the latter scenario is true then it would follow that an awful lot of methane isn't been burned off the way it used to be and so it's going into the atmosphere. And as Methane is 21 times more harmful (kilo for kilo) than CO2, that can't be a good thing, can it?

So my question is: should smoking be permitted once again in pubs for the sake of the environment, or should it become socially acceptable, in fact socially mandatory, to set fire to your farts once you've let them go?

Call me flippant but according to the most recent financial report from these AgCert guys they won contracts worth €114 million just from burning cow dung.

Just curious.

PS I don't smoke and don't drive an SUV.
Or own farm animals.

DrFunkenstein

But the addition of candles to pub tables would surely serve the same purpose?

As well as creating nice atmospheric lighting, albeit with the additional risk of fire, seeing as most punters would prob rather finish their pints than waste precious nectar on putting out fires

Mucco

Unfortunately the reason is no. 1. The smoke covered the smell. I'd be more concerned about these patio heaters every pub seems to have these days.

C

Cabaal

DrFunkenstein wrote:

As well as creating nice atmospheric lighting, albeit with the additional risk of fire, seeing as most punters would prob rather finish their pints than waste precious nectar on putting out fires

No more of a risk of fire then loads of drunk people holding sticks that are on fire