Climate leaders

SIR – William Hague (Comment, April 23) underplays the leadership provided by UK industry, particularly the British Standards Institute (BSI), when it comes to climate change.

For 16 years I led the UK delegation to the International Organization for Standardization committee, drafting voluntary standards on carbon footprinting, climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation. I was supported by knowledgeable and diligent colleagues from industry and academia, as well as regulatory and certification bodies.

Critics should note not just this Government’s achievements in the introduction of renewable energy, which has significantly reduced the country’s carbon emissions, but also its support of BSI and its members in their international work. Nigel Carter

Devizes, Wiltshire

SIR – The Extinction Rebellion activists staged a “die-in” at the Natural History Museum (report, April 23), which is known for its dinosaur collection.

But do protesters not ask why the dinosaurs became extinct in the first place? It was certainly not caused by wicked Western industrial capitalism.

They should realise that Mother Nature has always done things such as destroying the dinosaurs’ Jurassic jungle habitat. Climates have always changed.

I fully support our doing whatever we can to protect and conserve the natural global environment. But seeing Nature as a tortured goddess ravaged by capitalist economics and curable through city-paralysing protests is infantile fantasy. Dr Allan Chapman

Oxford

SIR – I have just picked up the beer cans, plastic bottles and empty crisp packets thrown by passers-by into our garden, separated them into categories and put them in our plethora of bins.

Am I an eco-warrior, or an old lady who gets ever grumpier at the thoughtlessness of others? Gillian Lurie

Westgate-on-sea, Kent