It struck me the other day how hard it is to buy liquid handsoap in an environmentally friendly way – even brands like Ecover and Waitrose, which should know better, don’t seem to sell (anywhere I can find anyway), refill bottles in which you can just put the old plastic pump thingy on the top.

So each time you buy handwash you buy a new pump: some future archaeologist excavating our rubbish dumps will probably think these were some weird cult item, used in daily ritual practice, due to their ubiquity, their arrival reflecting a sudden new religious trend.

But then I had a brainwave – I bought some bathwash – more than double the quantity for the same price, and am using that as a refill – and so far as I can tell exactly the same stuff.

But I’m going to go further – I’m giving up on bathwash and going back to soap – which when you think about it requires far less, even no, packaging. (Yes, okay it helps that I’m in Nice and bought a heap of lovely local, “all-vegetable” vanilla soaps, sans packaging.)

But this is just one more example of how we’ve gone mad on pointless consumption in the past couple of decades. (I can remember, just, when soap was all there was, arriving probably in a cardboard box, or possibly a thin plastic wrap around a six-pack – back in about 1980.)

It seems there’s an election in the air – zero-tolerance, support for “have-a-go heroes”, extra-clean hospitals, complaints about violence on TV – and that’s just from the Labour (ie supposedly “left wing”) side – who knows what the Tories will manage to find in response to that – “back to basics”? (Despite the fact it seems the leader’s wife, while now just doing the “supportive spouse” stuff, has both a real career, and a real politics – Green Party.)

But should we be writing the final days of a Labour government, I think this story sums it up: Britain is going to get rid of inefficient incandescent lightblubs, but very, very slowly, and only because big business has agreed it can.

Currys has agreed to stop selling the bulbs by the end of this year, Habitat by 2009, Woolworths, the Co-op, Asda, Morrison’s, and Sainsbury’s by 2010, and Tesco by 2011. Only Somerfield has declined to give a date for a complete phase-out.

The Australian government is to pay 1,000 farmers $150,000 or more to leave the land, at a time when more than half of all farming land is covered by government “drought” subsidies. It is not yet possible to say definitively that this is “global warming in action”, but it certainly looks awfully like it, even given that much of Australian farming has never been environmentally viable anyway.

The Australian farmers are just lucky they are in a First World money with cash to give away.

The National Farmers Federation is valiantly proclaiming that the land won’t be left “empty” – of course it won’t, the roos and emus are already there, and will be finding their own balance.

Yes, I know, I’m on holiday and am supposed to be cheerful, but I was walking around the bay this evening, in the light of a very nearly full moon, thinking there is, here, and in a lot of other places, an awful lot of very expensive real estate only just above the Med’s level – wonder if you could build a “Med barrier” to hold back the tide, about where the Greeks used to think the world ended?

But the really depressing bit comes from the news that penguins are suffering particularly badly from climate change. Yes, I know the fact they are cute and easily anthropomorphised shouldn’t be a factor, but it is….

Still, it is good to know that art inspired by climate change is getting a play – I’m still waiting for the great climate change novel, however.