Government cannot have it both ways

The Conservative party philosophy about carbon footprints is that what we do in England is small fry and even if we did not open the mine in Cumbria and provide licences to drill for oil in the North Sea, it would make little difference because huge amounts are emitted by China, the USA and others. Fundamentally the cobwebs can stay in their wallets because their strategy costs less.

They will say they think it is terrible that people throw rubbish around the streets of the city. In fact that is exactly the opposite philosophy of their carbon footprint strategy. People drop litter because they know it makes little difference to the global picture of plastics in the oceans, agricultural run-off causing algae blooms to kill off life in estuaries and human sewage in the rivers killing life there.

What difference does one bit of litter make. Fundamentally the cobwebs can stay in Tory wallets because to do something about rubbish would cost money.

They cannot have it both ways. Either we strive for a world that is protected from the worst aspects of human consumerism and other lazy ways of living or climate change will bring dengue fever to the UK, (it’s already reached Paris and they are belatedly doing something about it), and piles of rubbish will continue to fill the streets.

There are also the trends in the global economy that appear to show wealth will move towards Asia over the next decades. So as we still have some resources of oil and coal, would it not be sensible to keep them in the ground so that we can save them for a rainy day, decades or a century or more in the future, when we are a relatively poorer country and due to global shortages as other’s reserves shrink the earnings we can gain from selling the oil and coal will be larger. Nicholas Hales

Bath