Letters / COPOUT 26 – hot air and an expensive jolly
As a lifelong environmentalist I am totally against the charade that COP26 is and it should be re-named COPOUT26. Here are my well-founded reasons:
- The political high & mighty with their champaign slugging entourage are flying in to Glasgow from all over the planet in the most polluting form of transport to listen to things they already know about and have been repeatedly told about, but by and large have been and are thus far deaf or blind to it all.
- Three of the most significant climate polluters China, Russia and India refuse to attend making any potential agreements significantly useless, given the new global warming temperature figures and their past history delivering on agreements.
- The UK energy industry’s waste energy racket of over 53 per cent of all energy generated or brought in per annum, (worth over £9 billion alone to the energy industry) is an evil and environmentally criminal waste energy scam. This situation, however, can only exist because it is aided and abetted by a despicable Scottish Government in failing to even acknowledge this, let alone address this since it was made public by a study in 2015.
In addition, the ill-informed Scottish Government through its “rigged in favour of the developer” Scottish planning system is jointly responsible with the energy industry for polluting and destroying vast areas of Scotland’s magnificent landscape with its proliferation of mostly unnecessary wind farms, causing environmental vandalism and serious human rights abuses to a growing numbers of affected communities.
Until the waste energy aspect is dealt with as a priority, proliferation of wind farms utterly undermines any of the green renewable energy claims as each new and planned wind farm just adds its own 53 per cent waste energy to the waste energy racketeering.
To add insult to injury, the government supported energy industry is now to receive ‘constraint payments’ involving even more public money to compensate the industry when they are told to shut down their turbines when the wind blows too much.
This constraint payment alone is now driving the Klondike wind farm scramble, a wind farm scramble driven by greed in both energy generation, its annual £9 + billion in energy waste and now, the money from turning its turbines off.
Nothing to do with any renewable/environmental best practice at all.
If the Scottish Government cannot see this scandalous criminality for what it is and the human rights abuse that the developer skewed Scottish planning system is, it’s never going to see any solutions to climate change and will just remain part of the problem.
It begs the question what is their real motive for hosting COPOUT 26 when they have the levers already to deal with a shocking climate polluting racket?
There are many ways to address climate change, locally, nationally and internationally, with some of them quite simple, but sadly COPOUT 26 has nothing on its agenda other than hot air and an expensive jolly for a lot of politicians and their teams, whose individual and collective carbon footprint will be scandalous.
COPOUT 26 is a counterproductive showcase event of pompous bluster, extravagance, waste, plus a disgraceful opportunity for Glasgow businesses and accommodation providers to rip visitors off as they put their prices up by 400 per cent. COPOUT 26 has precious little to offer the planet’s serious and perilous situation.
I’ve tried a number of times to engage with Scottish Government ministers on a number of issues around better and more sustainable solutions to some big problems, based on a sound understanding of the engineering principles, the social and economic effects and simpler solutions to the causes of problems, but sadly no response.
Ditto with the new Scottish Green Party government ministers who are even more lost on social inclusion and sound green solutions.
Vic Thomas
Catfirth
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