Too high a price to pay
MARGARET Forbes (Letters, January 23) is very sincere in her green crusade against anyone who dares to suggest that the UK’s expensive policy to reach net zero by 2050 is pointless while other nations break their promises. The cost of the UK’s net zero will be well over £1.5 trillion for the UK’s 1.13 per cent of global emissions. She makes pleas about our peat bogs: every turbine built on peat land has displaced peat with 30,000 tons of concrete. She is rightly concerned with nature but turbines mince up tens of thousands of birds and bats every year.
She appears to have faith in Friends of the Earth but the Advertising Standards Authority ordered Friends of the Earth to remove unsubstantiated, scaremongering anti-fracking posters which claimed that the chemicals used in fracking caused cancer and contaminated water supplies.
With this latest fuel crisis countries are digging up and burning more coal. China needs it to feed its 1,082 coalfired generators and those under construction. Ms Forbes will also be aware that at COP26, China and India forced through that coal would be “phased down” not “phased out”. Clark Cross, Linlithgow.
I BEGIN with the assumption that Margaret Forbes approves of windfarms. In this context it is therefore odd that she has pleaded over the years for the protection of insects, peat bogs and forests.
A study published by Christian Voigt in January 2021 estimates that 1.2 trillion insects are killed by German onshore wind turbines annually. It is also well-documented that peat bogs have been ripped up, particularly in Scotland and Wales, to make room for wind turbines and their access tracks. For the same reason, thousands of trees have been felled and this is welldocumented in countries like Germany, the US and UK.
It seems we have to destroy the planet to save it.
Geoff Moore,
Alness.
I AGREE with Margaret Forbes that the young hold the key to climate change action. They need to know about new technologies, so tearing up peat for the sake of wind turbines is a definite no-no. We need to invest in new nuclear power technologies like those developed by Rolls-Royce which are one-tenth the size of Hunterston B, which closed recently after 46 years of supplying electricity to 1.7 million households.
Forests are being harvested for wood chips and pellets for biomass boilers.
Reducing plastics is a good idea also but we still need oil for paints, medicines, plastics and fuels. Michael Baird, Bonar Bridge.