Time for Britain to become self-sufficient in energy and food - Yorkshire Post Letters

I WAS astounded to read in your excellent newspaper that Drax power station is about to invest £100m in the USA, chopping trees down and turning the timber so obtained into wood pellets and then shipping these pellets halfway across the world to the port of Hull, finally transporting them to Drax Power Station to burn, which seems to me like palpable madness.

It may have escaped the notice of some of your readers that the eco fanatics and Greenies are always advocating the planting of more trees to capture more carbon from the atmosphere as opposed to cutting trees down to burn as firewood in the furnaces at Drax Power station.

If Drax is so flush with cash, that money would be far better used to reopen local coal mines, fracking for gas or investing in new oil fields in the North Sea, here in the UK rather than exporting all that cash to the USA.

I wonder just how much of the £100m came to Drax via government subsidies, given to them to persuade Drax to stop using coal? Perhaps a cleverer and more knowledgeable individual than I am could supply us with the actual figures which I think would confirm my worst fears, unless I am mistaken.

It is time for Britain to become self-sufficient in both energy and food so that never again are we relying on the whims or fantasies of some foreign tyrannical dictator.

From: Janet Berry, Hambleton.

We live near Drax Power Station and find it unbelievable that it is fuelled by wood pellets from Canada.

Are we mad? How can it be good for the environment cutting all these trees down and transporting the pellets all that way. I believe it is heavily funded by the taxpayer.

Is this really any better than coal, as was used previously?

I am also worried about all the wind turbines the Government wish to introduce, which are ugly and inefficient. What about fracking? Nuclear is going to take years to implement, so a very worrying situation.