Green demands are becoming ludicrous

I HAVE been watching events in Egypt fairly closely this week while wondering precisely what volume of greenhouse gas was generated in transporting all the delegates there.

Anyway, by all accounts, in this country we would appear to be doing pretty well on the international scale of climate-readiness. Which would be very reassuring were we something more than an insignificant land mass off the north-west coast of Europe.

Certainly, when you consider China’s 27 per cent contribution to annual emissions and the USA’s 11 per cent it becomes clear that any effort we make is barely going to register at all in global terms.

Setting that aside, we are at least standing on the moral high ground and trying to lead by example, but whatever we do never seems to be enough for the increasingly militant Green lobby.

And because it’s always difficult for them to break through the defences of the huge multinationals, who are the real offenders, the searchlight invariably swivels back to the farming community: a small, fragmented sector of the economy whose activities are carried on in full view of the general public.

The demands for farmers to become greener are getting ever more ludicrous, the latest to catch my eye being the suggestion of adding acid to slurry stores to neutralise the contents and mitigate their harmful effects when used. I seriously wonder what goes on in these peoremaining ple’s heads. Have they actually considered the effect of spreading slurry so treated on the land?

Then there’s the hand-wringing over the £1.8 billion worth of fruit and veg which is either bought and binned every year or remains unpicked, in both cases decomposing and racking up the greenhouse gas emissions.

Again, the Greens’ eyes focus in on the farming sector. But if crops are unpicked it’s either because supermarkets won’t pay a price which covers the cost of their production and harvesting, or that thanks to our departure from the EU we no longer have armies of Eastern European workers available to pick.

In neither case can the blame be laid at the farmers’ door. It should be clear, even to an environmentalist, that the last thing any farmer wants to do is to watch his crops rotting where they were sown.

Meanwhile, we have another branch of the green lobby bleating on about landscapes being spoiled by the mushrooming of wind turbines and solar panels – despite the fact that renewables offer us a real opportunity to increase our energy self-sufficiency.

Farmers who have been eagerly snapping up the proffered contracts are constantly sniped at and branded as greedy environmental vandals.

So how will the Greens react to the proposal to take 1,000 hectares of the Blenheim Estate out of production and install the biggest solar farm in Europe?

Viewed from afar, all these wranglings have the appearance of rats fighting in a sack. And – according to one body of scientific opinion – quite unnecessarily since what we are going through is nothing more of one of the cyclical global warming events that have occurred at various times in the planet’s history.

The difference being that on the previous occasions there weren’t any farmers around to blame.

It should be clear that the last thing any farmer wants to do is to watch his crops rotting