Carbon emissions will never get down to zero

IT is all very well our political parties and XR saying we must get our carbon footprint down, but they are being a bit two-faced about it.

We are still getting our steel from China, one of the most polluting countries in the world.

How can we buy from them, while telling everyone else what to do?

As well as denying our own coal mines/steel works and jobs.

The people pushing for low emissions should realise you will never be able to get it to zero.

Whatever you get rid of will have to be replaced by something else, which may even be worse.

We use technology which has rare elements in it (catalytic converters for example), the carbon produced by mining for the rare elements in these items must far outweigh the benefits of clean exhaust.

I would be more impressed if XR, etc, actually went litter picking, or better still, didn’t leave a mess in the first place.

If we try to erase years of accumulated abuse to the world too quickly, without a unified front from all countries, we may end up suffering from ‘whiplash,’ doing more harm than good.

How many years have G7 been meeting?

They could do that by Zoom and save the travelling.

I would rather we had a steady progress that made a real difference, rather than lurch from one ill-thought-out idea to another.

The only way to go carbon neutral is to go back several centuries, when everything was done by hand and we only used what we needed to survive.

Even then, there would be some carbon, from burning peat or wood for heating and cooking, for example.

Somehow I don’t think that idea will go down very well.

Mrs T Newman Gloucester