Green madness
In response to Vic Thomas’ letter (A wasted vote; SN, 3/8/19), I feel compelled to answer.
Although I share Vic’s concern about our environment and the dangers of climate change, I must state the Green Party hardly seems a rational vote to improve the situation.
Very sadly the true environmental friendly Greens were long since taken over by the ignorant activists who in former times were the anarchistic, ultra-Left, anti-globalists movement.
Now slightly sanitised, their present agenda has no basis in science and is frequently anything but environmentally friendly. Just a single example from our own about Shetland Council’s Green leaning faction.
We have the biomass idiocy; we import woodchip for heating purposes. Burning wood is more polluting than burning coal not only the CO2 in the wood released, but fossil fuels are burned for importation and in the chipping process
Further to that, huge areas, tens of thousands of hectares, of mixed mature woodlands are destroyed, vital habitats annihilated and vital biodiversity lost. The very woodlands we need to absorb and trap CO2 lost, utterly pillaged. It is utter lunacy to claim this is a renewable energy source.
It will take 50 to 100 years for a new forest to grow, capturing the equivalent gas. Now if this wood were selectively harvested and stored anaerobically, the CO2 would be trapped, eventually becoming peat or in millennia petrified into coal. The science is so simple but is beyond the comprehension of the Green movement.
We have huge gas supplies on Shetland, far less polluting than burning the wood chip. Sadly our Green friends scream that gas is fossil fuel so we can not burn that, but just export it for others to burn!
I could go on about destroying our peat beds (Viking Energy) using Helicopters, 16 gallons of fuel per hour minimum (Viking Energy), Interconnectors, £770,000 of plastic and copper (Viking Energy). Thirty square kilometre ground footprint, massive quarries, 10 k plus of new roads, tens of thousands of tons of concrete (enough said).
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Not a murmur of dissent from our environmentally friendly Green potential MSP, nor our SNP candidate, who actually promotes industrial wind farms. A non-Greeny vote is not a wasted vote; a Green vote is a lunatic vote! If our potential MSPs are so scientifically illiterate or politically blinkered as to remain silent whilst our home environment is trashed, reject then with contempt.
Ian Tinkler
Clousta
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