Curb car use or world will get only hotter – Yorkshire Post letters

I DO agree with Jill Thorp in her “life between the lanes on the M62” column (The Yorkshire Post, August 17) that it is ridiculous to blame cattle farming for global warming.

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Historically, we have always had family farms raising cattle and, during the last century, we have had some of the coldest winters on record.

However, there are two things we can do to try to halt global warming. Climate temperatures appeared to begin to rise about 30 years ago, precisely at the time when traffic on our roads and in the air began to rise.

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It behoves us all to leave the car at home and use public transport whenever possible. However, whether public transport is available and affordable for everyone is another debate.

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Secondly, I am deeply concerned about what I call “battery dairy farming”. There are now huge dairy “farms” which keep their cows permanently indoors in pens, milk them three times a day and the poor animals never set foot on grass or even see daylight from one year to the next. The concentration of methane from these establishments must be enormous.

I look forward to a campaign against this intensive farming in the same way that there was over battery chickens.

I will continue to drink milk, eat red meat at least once a week, drive my car when public transport is not convenient and fly on my annual holiday when rail transport is not appropriate. But if we all do our little bit choosing the most environmentally-friendly way to do things, it would make a tremendous difference to halt global warming.

From: Paul Muller, Woodthorpe Gardens, Sandal, Wakefield.

IN order to reduce the levels of CO2 and nitric oxide in the world atmosphere, we must stop producing so many vehicles. Nearly every family in the Western world has two or three very large cars.

Only one small car per family. Each car to have a small high-powered petrol engine. Improve public transport so that all people can get to and from their place of work easily.

We must develop many small nuclear power stations throughout the UK because, once they are running, they do not produce any carbon dioxide to cause climate change – as in France.

If we have no gas, how are we going to heat our houses for three-quarters of the year? Electricity is too expensive. We live in a very cold climate for three-quarters of the year.

This can be done if the car manufacturers can be persuaded to produce much smaller family cars with either small electric or small, highly efficient petrol engines.