Stop green taxes fuelling cost of living crisis – Yorkshire Post Letters

SO now we have it, the cat is well and truly out of the bag, there will be a huge increase of about £700 per year on all our energy bills (The Yorkshire Post, February 4).

For OAPs and persons on low incomes, this savage increase will break their hearts.

Nobody had the guts to stand up at the much vaunted climate conference and ask the eco warriors who will pay for all this nonsense which you lot are advocating?

You can rest assured it will not be Government Ministers or high-paid civil servants, it will not be the wealthy prophets of doom from Sweden, but it will ordinary folks like us.

We do not have the benefits of high-paid government posts or even lucrative world publicity with all the rewards emanating it.

For the ordinary folk of the UK a £700 increase in their energy bills will be economically devastating.

We need to draw on our own reserves of natural gas and our huge reserves of coal to keep the British folks warm this winter.

If that means building carbon capture plants all over the place so be it, but please don’t let our most vulnerable people freeze to death. It is as unnecessary as it is obscene.

From: Martin Hemingway, Foxhill Court, Leeds,

WILLIAM Loneskie, supporter of coal and nuclear, opponent of renewables is back (The Yorkshire Post, February 3) with a letter championing pop-up small nuclear reactors dotted across the country carried on the back of lorries, and each generating enough electricity for one million homes.

Leaving aside the questions about quantities of electricity generated, about cost, which does not scale down with size, and time scale for delivery, there are more practical considerations.

Small modular reactors (SMR’s) will need sufficient water and power available under all circumstances, be safe from physical risks, terrorism, accident; they will require full protection against physical intrusion, 24/7 they will need security and control room
 staff, and they will produce the toxic and radioactive wastes that all nuclear generation produces and which we still have no way of disposing of safely.

Seventy years ago, nuclear held out enormous promise, electricity so cheap it would not need to be metered.

Now we know of the costs, financial and environmental, we have to accept that the promise has failed and devote our resources and energy to the range of renewables that 
together can provide energy security and reduced environmental risk.

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