It would appear that the Queen is far more savvy or has a very savvy behind the scenes manager or manageress: The BBC reports that The Queen’s tour of the United States “is the Queen’s first carbon-offset state visit, where a donation is made to an environmental charity to offset the plane journeys made by the royal party.”
This seems such a contrast to the recent City of Westminster’s UK report, “Air pollution in London is higher that anywhere else in the UK. Westminster, as the heart of London, has the highest pollution levels. The main cause of London pollution is the millions of cars, buses, vans and motorcycles that use our roads every day.”
Further, the same report goes on to say, “All of the City of Westminster has been a Smoke Control area since 1969 where the emission of smoke from chimneys of dwellings is prohibited. Smoke from industrial or commercial premises is carefully controlled by orders under the Clean Air Act. This means that only authorised fuels can be burned. These include:
Gas, electricity, low volatile steam coals, coke
Patent smokeless fuels such as Phurnacite, Coalite, Rexco, Taybrite and Geocite.
Oil burning appliances like paraffin stoves may be used.”
However, Washington DC, in the American Lung Association Report for 2007, lists the Capitol city as 11th in our nation in air pollution…”Higher soot levels in the East are linked to an increase in electricity generated by heavy polluting power plants.” Another report lists Washington DC as ranked 67 out of 72 major cities, the higher the number the worse the air quality as compared with all other cities on the list. The EPA reports that poor maintainence, unrefurbished and derelict machinery in the power plants around Washington DC are the ‘meat” of the problems.
From all this, one might wonder if all parties from our administration and all parties from Buckingham Palace feel at home with one another, in part, based on being accumstomed to the same less than healthy climates.
Which turns us toward The Dinner.
Not Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner” currently mounted at the Brooklyn Museum after many years in storage… but the white tie dinner for the Queen.
It had been touted that the Queen was going to be treated to a dinner of high American cuisine. The BBC reports: “The banquet, for 134 guests, included pea soup, Dover sole and a saddle of spring lamb rounded off by farmhouse cheeses.”
Yet at The White House Restaurant, listed under Pubs, in the UK, one can find that “The kitchen also plunders the classics for grilled Dover sole… specials such as pea and ham soup, fish pie, lamb casserole…” not to mention a ‘lamb hot-pot’ at UK’s Bank’s Brewery, and ‘lamb’s kidneys in Madeira’ at The General Havelock Inn, also UK. At Three Shires Inn, one can top it all off with a “parcel of four cheeses.”
Cultural exchange: One might think everyone’d stayed home and they talked by phone… that being the least polluting of all by far.
And were George W. Bush to visit the Queen in London, I wonder what Buckingham Palace will serve him for dinner? And what kind of symbolic gesture he will make to offset the carbon used to get him there…
Strange, strange times we live in.