From theherald.co.uk :

There is a sport more dangerous than any other, that kills far more people than boxing and yet there are no calls for it to be banned. Not rugby. Not equestrianism. Not even Ultimate Fighting. No, it's time to ban motorsport: not to save the drivers, who are probably at less risk of injury than footballers, but the rest of us. Unless you're George Bush or another Halliburton henchman, you'll probably admit by now that the world is in severe danger. It's not a threat to our great-great-grandkids, something distant that will happen to someone else, but a real and present danger. A couple of degrees more global warming will trigger catastrophe. We need to cut carbon emissions by 90% in the next 20 years or so. Cars that do 3.5 miles to the gallon are not unacceptable. Motorsport is the most wasteful, harmful, pointless leisure pursuit on the planet. One F1 team has one-use-only wheel bolts that cost £600 each. They use about 1000 a season - such is the level of the eagerness to burn money and resources in the sport. F1 cars - and we don't mean to pick on one branch of motorsport, but figures are more readily available - emit around 1500g of carbon dioxide per kilometre, almost nine times more than the average new road vehicle. Add in the hundreds of flights every team uses between testing and races and one recent estimate put each driver's carbon emissions for the eight-month season at 54 tonnes: more than 10 times as much as the average Briton emits in a year. That's not even counting other factors, such as the teams that have two wind tunnels running 24/7. The faster the car, the faster it destroys the Earth - simple. Winning races and saving the planet are not compatible. The industry is beginning to realise that their behaviour is unacceptable. NASCAR, the biggest sport in the USA, made sweeping changes to their fuel policy this season: they switched to unleaded. Seriously. The American Le Mans Series is switching to E10, a blend that is 10% corn-based ethanol (so that's just the 90% gasoline, then). The Indy Racing League is a bit better, with a fuel that's 98% ethanol. Over here, Lanarkshire Team Clyde Valley Racing, the only Scottish-owned professional team in the British Touring Car Championship, are on E85. But biodiesel creates more problems than it solves. The price of food goes up greatly as land is used to grow crops for fuel rather than food. In some parts of Mexico the price of corn has increased 50% because of demand from biofuel producers. And the vast amounts of land necessary encourages the felling of tropical forests. At the start of this season, Honda unveiled their new F1 car. Instead of the usual advertising and sponsor logos it has a picture of the Earth on it. Wow . . . it still does four miles to the gallon, right? "Climate change is probably the single biggest issue facing our planet and F1 is not immune from it," trumpeted a statement from the team CEO. Ya think? The response from one environmental group's spokesman was perfect: "We're not sure what painting an F1 car green will do for the planet, but it sounds rather like the definition of greenwash." This practise of putting a positive spin on environmentally unsound behaviour is widespread. Oil companies spend hundreds of millions of pounds (a miniscule fraction of their profits) on adverts explaining how much they care about the planet while, er, not actually doing anything much. Motorsport is now catching up, pardon the pun. Max Mosley, the president of the FIA (and son of British Fascist leader Sir Oswald, but that has nothing to do with this subject . . . probably) gave an interview last week on formula1.com, admitting that his sport must change. "Formula One does not happen on another planet, so we have to adapt to reality," he said. "Cars that need 75 litres of fuel per 100 kilometres are no longer cool. "The new FIA programme will lead Formula One into a new era. It's a matter of do or die!" (Their exclamation mark). His plans - there were no details, just general waffle about CO2 - will, if accepted by the teams, come into effect by 2011. Hopefully, his tracks aren't covered by melted ice caps by then.

Well, whaddya think of all this crap ?