Consequences of drive towards net zero are being overlooked - Yorkshire Post Letters

Almost every day we read of the obsessive drive towards 'Net Zero' but rarely do the proponents of this process recognise the consequences.

In South Wales the last open cast coal pit supplying high quality steam coal to heritage railways is to close. This follows Robert Jenrick’s refusal to allow opencast workings of a five million ton reserve in North East England to be developed.

For the heritage railways to survive, steam coal will have to be imported from distant sources such as Australia, Russia and South America.

Fracking for oil and gas is banned in the UK, so fracked fuel travels thousands of miles to satisfy some of our energy requirements.

Drax, the much praised, at least by its own publicity machine, and highly subsidised 'green' power generator imports wood pellets from forests in North America. That remote region is deemed to be the polluter, not the place where the burning occurs. What nonsense.

The steel industry, once the generator of great manufacturing, was damaged irrevocably by the UK slavishly following EU rules on power subsidies, whilst France, Germany, Portugal etc. ignored them

How can it be that in the 21st century, a supposedly advanced country, allows, nay encourages for the sake of off-shore shareholders, raw sewage to be pumped into rivers and seas.

This same country allows payments to chief executives and their ilk of millions of pounds for failure, and pays equally obscene amounts to facilitate their transfer to another lucrative position.

Wind farms now dominate the landscape, supposedly 'sustainable' but mostly imported and susceptible to weather conditions.

China will happily sell us solar panels along with many of the things we used to make when manufacturing was encouraged.

If net zero is ever achieved, it will not be the absence of carbon dioxide emissions, it will be the absence of the means of production.

And perhaps too late, it will be the end of the blinkered, shallow. pressure group dogma which dominates politics and government.

The outlook for our grandchildren is gloomy, not because of our emissions but because of the export of those emissions along with the jobs to India and China where they continue to increase the burning of coal.