While Net Zero seems to be top of everyone’s agenda, I’ve noticed few ever mention the cost – not least to the environment.
I’ve become used to speakers at events routinely talking about “our journey to Net Zero” with little regard for the fact that their wealth and their lifestyles – and those of their children – are going to be among the casualties.
But a more obvious casualty in this mindless adherence to rules is the very thing they think they are saving.
I’d planned to write about the green movement’s dishonesty and hypocrisy but I found so many examples I’ll save those for another day. But ironies, inconsistencies and complete stupidity are in plentiful supply, locally, nationally and internationally.
Councils everywhere have announced their climate emergencies and Reading, one of the councils on this list of those who want to reach Net Zero earlier than the Government, is as enthusiastic as any. It declared a climate emergency five years ago and wants to reach Net Zero by 2030.
So when big improvements to the Hexagon Theatre including a multi-purpose studio space were announced, the council said that, as part of the Government-funded development, the 1970s building is going to be “decarbonised”.
What is not going anywhere is the asbestos the building is riddled with. About 20 years ago, during my days working for the Reading Chronicle, we were sent a story by an agency which had covered the death of a Hexagon employee. This was in the days before these stories went online so I can’t provide a link.
However, I do recall the woman employee’s death was due to her exposure to asbestos over decades working there. The council has assured me the building work will follow best practice and I’ve no reason to disbelieve it. But it’s a classic sign of our insane times that we remove carbon for all the miniscule difference that will make and leave asbestos, a long-proven killer – but them’s the rules in 2024.
Climate has to be considered in almost every council decision. Meeting agendas are rarely without references to it and many councils have “climate” in the names of some committees, although it is now often tagged onto the title of a broader committee.
However, Wokingham Borough Council still has a climate emergency overview and scrutiny committee. Its January 9th meeting was cancelled. The council didn’t hold another until February 29th. Presumably this is an emergency that can wait.
Saving the environment by ruining it seems to be a recurring theme among the green movement.
In Oxfordshire, the proposed Botley West Solar Farm, Europe’s biggest of its kind, involves 3,200 acres of the county’s countryside, three quarters of it in the green belt and nearly half of it the best agricultural land. Those fields are to be smothered by 2.2 million solar panels. Vociferous campaign group Stop Botley West mentions the damage to biodiversity among its concerns.
Then there’s the U.K.’s biggest, the 940-acre Longfield Solar Farm near Chelmsford. It was approved last year. Campaigners opposing it complained of the damage to biodiversity and the loss of high-quality farming land.
The BBC’s Countryfile recently featured West Fen Farm in Cambridgeshire where a decision is imminent on a 300-acre solar farm. It too, takes up excellent arable farming land.
People used to argue that it’s one thing ruining the environment for solar farms but how do you store the energy? Well, it seems the solution is you ruin even more of it.
People living near Rookery Farm in Granborough, Buckinghamshire are fighting plans by Statera Energy to site 888 hideous shipping containers in the green and pleasant rural setting they had chosen to live in.
While ‘biodiversity’ is a word which has risen up the scale of green talking points, ‘habitats’ is another. You’ll rarely see a planning application of any scale without a report detailing how the applicant plans to look after homes of the bats, mice, bees, snakes or all manner of midges and insects. And in the world of 10% biodiversity net gain, it’s only going to increase.
But koala bears living in Clarke Creek, Queensland, Australia are finding 1,450 hectares of their habitats being chopped down for development of massive wind turbines.
As you can discover from this two-minute audio clip from Ben Fordham’s interview with Aussie MP Keith Pitt last November, guidance has been issued that, should a koala bear be injured in the process of destroying its habitat, it should be smashed over the head with a blunt instrument and killed.
As so often happens, the fact checkers got to work on this story in a bid to deny it. However, the best this ABC ‘fact-check’ could do was say it lacked context. But the fact check itself inadvertently reveals more of the horror of the whole process.
Chopping trees down seems to be rife in the environmental movement. In Scotland where the Greens and SNP formed a marriage of political convenience in 2021 to keep a grip on power, the Government chopped down 16 million of them for wind turbines. Well, we’ve got to save the environment.
Lagging behind in the tree-felling environmentalist league table is Sheffield, where 17,500 trees were felled by the city council last year before the authority issued an apology and accepted many of them were perfectly healthy.
In Plymouth last year the council sent in men with chainsaws in the middle of the night to chop more than 100 trees down in Armada Way in the city centre, allegedly to stop people having sex and taking drugs under them. They are going to plant 200 trees instead so it would seem the anti-social locals can return after all.
And of course, there’ll be no letting up. More houses, more cars, more energy, more renewables – the cycle may never stop in our lifetimes.
At the end of our journey to Net Zero, its supporters imagine we will live a carbon-free utopia where butterflies are everywhere and we’re all holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
I suggest we are being forced by billionaires to live like slaves for negligible benefit which will lead only to a dangerous centralisation of power and the loss of our way of life. It’s impossible not to hear what the numerous campaigners and people whose jobs depend on the climate industry have to say, so maybe we should look more closely at what they do.
I’d like to save the environment. If only we could protect it from the environmentalists.
Alan Bunce is the Editor of regional property website Thames Tap. This article was first published on the U.K. Property Forums website.
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The trees felled by more rural councils are mostly an obsession by safetyists with the miniscule risk of a tree falling in a storm and injuring someone. Those felled by city councils are more to do with the trees reducing the reach of the high band 5G essential for keeping track of people in the new ‘smart’ and 15 minute cities
Yup that sounds like the real reason when you consider a mature tree goes through thousands of times more carbon than a newly planted tree. Not that carbon is a problem, of course.
The asbestos example is a good one but so is the idea that we pretend to stop a little bit of warming which would if it was really true help to alleviate the 20 times more deaths that actually occur because of cold. All over the western world local governments and national governments compete with each other to see who can pretend to save the planet hardest and fastest, usually with the most hair brained costly schemes when there are serious issues that this money could be spent on. On a much bigger scale we in the wealthy west send billions of pounds and dollars to poor countries for some turbines and solar panels to bribe them into not using fossil fuels. The only fuels that can bring them out of the abject misery they face. Over a billion of these poor people don’t even have any electricity which wealthy people in Europe etc would never accept, yet we are telling these people that they should leave their coal in the ground because of global warming, something they have never heard of. What we are really doing with this nonsense is telling these people that they can never have electricity. —-This is not only absurd but a diabolical disgrace.
It reminds me of Labour Councils becoming “nuclear free” in the 1960s to 1980s. Presumably they had umbrellas to deflect the fall out and filters to make sure no nuke generated electricity reached their meters.
so it is now.
abolish agriculture, chop down trees and spread panels made from polluting chemicals all over them. And with no plan for dealing with broken and end of life panel material.
“In Plymouth last year the council sent in men with chainsaws in the middle of the night to chop more than 100 trees down”
These psychopath councils have gone beyond their remit. They should be prosecuted.
My personal theory why people are so keen on killing trees is that they just hate that these are taller than them.
There used to be a beautiful row of mature chestnut trees on the riverside front of former HMP Reading which was called Chestnut Walk because of them. During lockdown, the council had them all destroyed because “they were diseased”. They’ve planted new ones but I’ll never live to see this close lined with actual trees again.
In building sites it is routine for builders to obtain arboriculturalists’ reports which call for the destruction of healthy trees. Builders and most of their customers don’t like trees, whatever they say.
there is an obligation to enhance biodiversity but it is not practiced and no one seems to bother.
Don’t forget the devastation wrought by HS2 either, the concreting of middle England, to save a few mins on a journey from ‘somewhere outside London’ to ‘somewhere outside Birmingham’. If you can afford a ticket …
Headlines are important.
The headline to this article should be “Green Politics and Policies Damage Us and The Environment” or just “Greens Are Damaging the Environment“.
“Let’s Spare the Environment From the Greens” is too weak.
A local ‘Green’ made the mistake of stopping me on my way through our local market to harangue me about my green credentials.
He did not expect me to retaliate and he certainly did not practise what he was happy to preach to everyone else.
It gathered quite a crowd and enough support for my side to see him pack up and move away.