More than 10% of farmland in England is set to be diverted towards helping to achieve Net Zero and protecting wildlife by 2050, the Environment Secretary will reveal today. The Telegraph has the story.
Swathes of the countryside are on course to be switched to solar farms, tree planting and improving habitats for birds, insects and fish.
The move is part of a consultation being launched by Steve Reed, the Environment Secretary, on how the competing priorities of food production, Net Zero and nature should be reconciled in England.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs estimates that 9% of farmland would need to be removed from food production by 2050 to meet green targets, the Telegraph understands. A further 5% is expected to be mostly taken out of production owing to a decreased level of food output, and another 4% will share space with trees.
Mr Reed will insist that his framework will not impose changes on landowners, but the figures are likely to reignite Labour’s row with farmers who expressed concerns that the strategy could lead to the Government telling them what they can grow and where.
The Government will say that the land use framework consultation, which was first promised under the Conservatives, will protect the most productive agricultural land.
In a speech at the Royal Geographic Society in Kensington, Mr Reed will say: “Using the most sophisticated land use data ever published, we will transform how we use our land to deliver on our Plan for Change. That means enabling the protection of prime agricultural land, restoring our natural world and driving economic growth.”
The Government has ambitious targets to increase woodland in England by 20%, or about 265,000 hectares, by 2050, accounting for a third of the change in farm use. It has also set a target to build 1.5 million new homes, install hundreds of square miles of solar panels and onshore wind turbines, and protect 30% of the land for nature.
The UK is committed to reaching Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, meaning as much carbon is removed from the atmosphere as is produced. Tree planting targets are expected to be a major contributor to this, as is the restoration of peatland.
Some 70% of England is farmland, and a 9% reduction would bring this down by 760,000 hectares.
Farming groups have warned of growing threats to food security, expressing concern over the implications in the Government’s analysis. “Whenever the state gets involved, its tendency is to only become ever more prescriptive,” said Victoria Vyvyan, the President of the Country Land and Business Association.
“Government must build safeguards into the policy to prevent mission creep, or else it is entirely possible that, in years to come, the man from the ministry will be telling farmers what they are and aren’t allowed to grow, plant and rear on their land.”
Worth reading in full.
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Another professor ie quack. Lead on Prof. You first. De-carbonise and show the way Bolshevist.
Another idiot who has never worked, never built, never created, never did anything.
Fossils don’t make hydrocarbon fuel. It is an abiotic, not organic process. Lose the stupid terminology. Fossils are made from water and cement in a compressed period of time. Has zero to do with carbon anything.
A good post, but the down tick left me wondering the intellectual capacity and dexterity of the carbon based life form that initiated it. Perhaps the use of dendrochronology would be an appropriate means of measurement.
Professor Kevin Anderson seems to be a very good reason why the University sector needs to be drastically reduced.
“Fossils are made from water and cement in a compressed period of time.”
What exactly does this mean?
With any luck, his students will end up taking on proper jobs and adopt more rationale attitudes, otherwise they’ll end up on the dole. In the meantime. It looks as if Anderson is exploiting his academic position to campaign for a controversial group of policies.
They are not “controversial”————-They are TOTALLY ABSURD
Well, I think the answer to this piece is self explanatory! He’s a fecking Loon!
No so long ago people with such ethereal veiws would have been taken away in a straight jacket as a lunatic and would rot away the rest of their lives in an asylum somewhere!
Sounds like today’s universities are the new asylums!!!
IIRC, the old asylums have been converted into up-market gated communities.
Are the wealthiest people ever to have lived now overcome by collective guilt? Or have we simply become brainwashed by the false climate change narrative that pretends to be about the environment when it is really about the world’s wealth and resources? As the population recently hit 8 billion and the amount of coal gas and oil in the ground remains finite, the Sustainable Development idea is that the wealthy west who have used up more than their fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground should STOP doing that.———————– In order to convince the western populations that they must ration everything and go without, you need a very a good or at least a plausible excuse and that excuse is CLIMATE CHANGE. But almost everything claimed by the pretend to save the planet people is either totally false or at best a tiny smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency. The Eco Imperialists at the UN, ably assisted by a bought and paid for media (like the Climate Show on SKY NEWS) are convincing most (but not all) of us that an apocalypse is under way, and every aspect of our life must now be controlled by the Central Planners or we face extinction.——-This extinction is entirely based on the output from un-validated climate models which do not even understand the basic climate parameters. eg —–Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS). If that number is high there may be some warming, but if it is low then there will hardly be any. ——Guess what? That number is NOT KNOWN. It is simply assumed to be high. The climate alarmists that you see almost on a daily basis on TV News claiming billions of us will die take the worst case scenario’s from those fanciful models and present them on TV as ultimate truth, with presenters never ever seeming to question any of it. They are given the platform to spout this stuff which has zero evidence to back it up, and people sitting at home will be under the impression that it all must be true. A few recent storms and floods will accompany these propaganda messages as visual confirmation of the coming apocalypse to further convince the unsuspecting public. ———-Wake up people this is the biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated.
If we went along with the misanthropic quack’s recommendations to reduce us to serfdom just how much less carbon would be emitted to the atmosphere would it make any difference at all considering China or India?
CO2 = plant food.
“a refit of U.K. housing stock, a withdrawal of all combustion engine cars in favour of expanded public transport, electrification of industry,”
How much energy does this nutcase think would be necessary to completely overhaul our entire housing stock and infrastructure?
Are wind turbines and solar panels doing to be producing the energy to make the steel and concrete and copper cables and mining and transporting the rare earth minerals to build this eco-utopia?
Or are we going to be using MORE oil, coal and gas than we would have done if we had not tried to carry out this hare-brained scheme?
The three battlefronts are climatism, wokism and covidism, each designed to instill fear of crisis, then strip the individual of money, liberty and power.
It’s that simple.
With a very few noble exceptions, the British LibLabConSNP Unaparty is totally committed to all three. They are aided by big tech, corporate multinationals, quangos, unions and academics.
The great news though is there’s more of us than them.
Resist, oppose and disrupt.
So much for the Age of Enlightenment. As I see it, we are currently in an Age of Re-darkenment and these people, (God knows what their internal psychological state is like) the useful idiot shock troops of the billionaire elites who fund them, are the most dangerous people around. I can only imagine how they infect the minds of hundreds of naive and starry-eyed students who go out to do his work and spread the gospel of ‘The End is Nigh’ on metaphorical sandwich boards in businesses, education and in politics.
The climate alarmists don’t like be hauled up on their science. Not one bit. They would rather shriek at you about ‘97% of climate scientists said’ or ‘CO2’ or ‘Polar bears are disappearing’ or point at hockey stick graphs and tell you we’ve only got 5, 10, 15 etc years left and that we’re all going to burn, be drowned, freeze our balls and tits off, or whatever it is we’re going to suffer (sounds like the calls for damnation for all heretics, doesn ‘t it?). It is all irrational and to be perfectly blunt, it is emotional.
The emotional aspect is highly important here. We live in an age of uncertainty with no vision of a future other than the dystopian one offered by the WEF and its acolytes. People are scared. They’re scared of disease, the climate, war, poverty, homelessness etc. It’s all so emotional but then ’emotional’ is a good hook for a movement. Once you’ve scared people, you can offer them redemption, through climate activism (preaching the gospel) and you’ve got ’em. Explaining the actual science or at least asking for a debate about the science is not going to happen because it’s heresy. So, yes, it is a cult based on emotional reactions to perceived crises. Nothing more. And that’s why we’re in a spiritual war, as I see it. Ultimately, it is a battle for souls.
Any scientific credibility the new UN report might have had is called into question by its “extensive use of ‘woke’ buzzwords”, it said. Variations of the words ‘equity’ and ‘inequality’ are said to appear 31 times in the 36-page document.
So it is woke to talk about equity and inequality? What next? Democracy?
Wouldn’t be a bad candidate because whoever is governing the so-called democratic countries, it’s certainly not the people. These have only a very limited, indirect input into the political system.
“So it is woke to talk about equity and inequality? “
Yes. I don’t really know what “equity” means in this context; I just know its meaning in relation to having shares in a company. Perhaps you could explain what “equity” means. As far as “inequality” goes, assuming it means that some person’s lot in life is “unequal” to some other person’s, then it’s simply the natural state of affairs, and indeed the only possible state of affairs, so it seems fairly meaningless to me.
What I have observed is that people who talk about “equity” and “inequality” usually want to come and interfere with me and my family, take away our stuff, prevent us from doing things we want to do, so my default position is that such people are my enemies, until proven otherwise.
Equity has sneaked into the lexicon in place of equality. It’s useful to know the difference:
Equity refers to fairness and justice and is distinguished from equality: Whereas equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances.
Thanks but still not clear on the difference. Would equality be giving everyone one smartie, and equity would be distributing smarties on the basis of how many people already had (favouring greedy sods who had eaten all theirs and penalising the prudent who had conserved theirs)? Bit like Biden’s monstrous student loan forgiveness plan, thankfully about to get thrown out by the US Supreme Court.
Yes precisely. Equity means making sure people from some groups are bestowed with benefits and advantages that are purposely denied to those from other groups.
Whilst pretending that what is happening is fair.
It’s a recipe for real trouble.
“It’s a recipe for real trouble.”
At this point I fear that the only way this is going to end is with one side utterly defeated and miserable. Hope it’s not my side. Compromising has not worked – for every inch given, a mile is demanded and then taken.
I can’t help but think it’s a deliberate policy.
It’s the old divide and rule coloniser’s trick to get people to fight amongst themselves instead of uniting against the real enemy.
Systematically preferencing some groups over others is what we did in India and several other places. And what the Belgians did in Rwanda.
“I can’t help but think it’s a deliberate policy.”
100%.
Believe me, ToF, it will absolutely our side.
That is precisely the intention.
All the rest is just lipstick on pig.
Miss Dolly has it.
Another way of putting it, is that whilst most people would hope for equallity of opportunity (irrespective of who or what you are); the “Equity” team campaign, often violently, for equallity of outcomes.
So no matter how thick or lazy you are, you must be protected against the intelligent and conscientious.
Curiously, I’ve yet to see anyone suggest that young healthy East Africans must be weighted down when running in competition with young healthy runners of English heritage. This, of course would be most inequitable.
Another interesting factoid is the recent TV celebration of the kind donation of cricket kit to youngsters needing proper kit to learn and play with.
Excellent idea.
The recipient club featured on the telly was the Sheffield Caribbean Cricket Club. Nice to see the youngsters kitted up.
Of course, if you are wondering about establishing a Cricket Club for kids of other ethnic backgrounds, you might need to consider what you call it.
At present, if you fancy a job as a male actor in TV ads, be aware that equality of opportunity is not apparently necessary when interviews are conducted. But “Equity” will certainly be enforced.
Colonization began when Greek city states founded colonies, daughter cities inhabited by settlers from original city, all over the coast of the Mediterranian during the centuries before the Peloponesian War. That’s actually the very origin of the word and daft utterances of history-blind ignoramuses who genuinely believe the world originated in 1492 are best ignored. Not all of what they write or say is that easily exposed as idiocy but one can rest assured that nothing is more well-founded. It’s all just rambling about imaginary big picture scenarios fuelled by a deep aversity to paying any attention to details. That’s boring stuff other people can worry about.
This photo from this morning sums it up
Next event
Wednesday 29th March 11am to 12pm
Yellow Boards
Junction Eversley Road &
Langley Common Road, Arborfield,
Wokingham RG2 9PS
Anderson’s diatribe shows a “50:50 chance of warming not exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”. Who in their right mind would outlay such huge expenditure and have such huge life changes imposed on these odds? And if a professor thinks 50:50 is certain catastrophe, he should consider whether the ‘prof’ title is justified.
The Prof title is seldom justified. It means they are narrow minded and only a bit proficient in a single narrow speciality.
It’s hopeless to try having a conversation on “The Conversation”. Some professor always tries to shut you down with an “argument from authority” which doesn’t work too well with me! They should change its name to “The Narrative(tm)”.
A quick read through the article in Conversation shows lots of of CO2 references but little to no mention of temperature. I wonder why that might be…
I escaped from the silo of climate catastrophe dogma some time ago but most of my friends are still there, actually arguing with similar themes that their graphs are accurate, their opponents cherry- pick data and the academic and professional credentials of those experts prdicting doom mean they must be correct. One argument I didn’t have an answer to is that ocean temperatures are increasing and are more indicative of alarming increase in heat even though atmospheric aren’t as shown in a recent DS article.
If you want to see real climate hysteria watch Jacob Rees-Mogg interviewing a Just Stop Oil activist on GB News 27 March. She made Greta look sane.
Electrification of ‘industry’? Where does he think electicity comes from?