Green own goals

The reports that three big business firms are urging the authorities to redouble atttempts to decarbonise energy production so Scotland can set a better lead in “greenery” are puzzling, because it would only be bad for business.

Our decarbonisation is also futile, since we are responsible for well under 1 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases. No one elsewhere internationally would notice if we decarbonised our home and industrial production, unless our whisky, shortbread, tartan and

tweed exports were priced out of business.

Already, well-meant but mere token “greenery” has cost us dearly, for example, aluminium smelting, Michelin

tyres and now Rannoch Smokery, since industrial costs are heavily dependent on the price of energy.

Fuel poverty in our homes looms, as winter weather

deepens. The only beneficiaries in all this are foreign firms who take over our lost manufacturing. A causal link between greenhouses gases and climate change being far from finally established, we have been scoring industrial and financial own-goals for far too long.

It is time to rethink our climate change policies and end the self-harm we have allowed ourselves to impose.

(DR) CHARLES WARDROP Viewlands Road West, Perth