Saving It for Whom?
10th February 2025
I’ve been reading about the English government’s ideas for making England Net-Zero by … ten to twenty-five years from now, depending on the version of the plan. In addition to phasing out hydrocarbon fuels (diesel, gasoline, natural gas), it requires the reduction of agriculture by ten percent or so, and installing lots of solar farms and wind turbines in order to eliminate “dirty”sources of electricity like coal and gas-fired power plants. Part of the thinking behind this taxation aspect of this environmental plan is to redistribute the farmland away from the traditional owners and encourage newer families to move out of the larger cities and take up farming. Higher-intensity agriculture will also be needed, in order to replace the crops and livestock that will no longer be grown or raised because of the Net-Zero requirements.
I‘m a conservationist, not an environmentalist. Team Wise Use is my group. I”m not opposed to preservation of parts of the landscape and wildlife. I’m not opposed to careful development of other resources, either. The key is the balance, and thinking long term. We as a society have seen solar farms and wind turbines in action for several decades now, and … they are not living up to the ideal of producing electricity efficiently for large-scale applications. Small scale? Absolutely, and wind energy works very well in some places and applications, solar likewise. But it has not scaled up thus far, and the tradeoffs in damage to the landscape and biota should give one pause.