Energy

We are being urged — and, in some cases, paid — by the government to plant more trees. Actually, this happens most years. I can even remember ‘Plant a tree in ’73. Plant one more in ’74’. It is a bit like saying ‘Have more babies’, without any provision for their care once born. It all depends which trees, where you plant them and how you tend them. If you walk through the country nowadays, or near new-build housing estates where trees have been planted in ‘mitigation’, you will see large numbers of saplings dead or dying, still in their tree guards, planted too close together and then forgotten. New

Positive thinking The government wants us to test ourselves for Covid-19 twice a week, using lateral flow kits which will be freely distributed. What is the risk of being ordered to self-isolate as a result of a false negative? — While the NHS claims that these tests produce false positives in 0.1% or fewer cases, an evaluation by Porton Down and Oxford University last year found a false positive rate of 0.3% in a hospital setting, rising to 0.39% in the community — in other words, about one in every 256 tests. — According to the Office for National Statistics infection survey, in the week to 27 March one in

Paradise lost Sir: After reading Jonathan Beswick (‘Critical mass’, 16 January) I am writing to express the shame I feel as a lifetime member of the Church of England at our Church’s attitude to this pandemic. Here was the greatest opportunity in 70 years to demonstrate care for our fellow people, to advertise our faith and love and to keep the Church in the public eye. I hoped that there would be thousands of Church members flocking to help the lonely and the isolated. But I find my local church locked. This was the chance for the Church to show commitment and sacrifice for the good of the community, to

Lockdown damage Sir: I am sick and tired of people taking the moral high ground and looking down on ‘lockdown sceptics’ like me as if we don’t care. It’s ironic, because while there is no clear evidence to date that national lockdowns actually save more lives (contra the interview with Matt Hancock, 9 January), there is plenty of evidence that lockdowns ruin lives. If anyone should take the moral high ground it is those, like myself, who witness this ‘collateral damage’ on a daily basis. Yes, the health issues are complex. And who would want to govern at this time? But when you know that your chosen strategy will result

Veritas vincit Sir: Professor Dawkins eloquently and engagingly defines true truth for us (‘Matters of fact’, 19 December). It seems to me that ‘true’ is a poor little four-letter word with a heavier workload than is reasonable. Historic truth may include ascertainable facts, which I suppose he would pass, but combined with conclusions based on available evidence or ‘true-to-life’ conjecture. Theological truth combines historic fact with unassailable moral principle and a journey of imagination beyond the reach of experience. It cannot be called untrue — only unproven. Perhaps we need to find a word with more gravitas than ‘truth’ for the scientists. I suggest ‘veritas’ — as found in vino.Charles

I love Suffolk. This Christmas I will be there with my family and we’ll almost certainly walk up the coast, joining dog-walkers, bird-watchers, hikers and even swimmers in one of the most beautiful and unspoiled parts of the UK. The secret of Suffolk is its relative inaccessibility. No major motorway connects it and once you arrive you’re committed to a sprawling network of country lanes that twist through heathland and grazing marsh, mudflats and reedbeds. Minsmere, a nature reserve that’s home to 6,000 wildlife species, is among its glories. The nightjar, the woodlark, the Dartford warbler and the silver-studded butterfly are just some of the rare species found there. At

Aviation, nuclear power and public transport — along with good restaurants, golden retrievers and hand-knitted bed socks — are, as Julie Andrews put it, a few of my favourite things. So in a week when the news is as depressing as I can remember since the dark winter of 1973-4, I might as well write about all of them. I’ll try to find points of light along the way but it’s not going to be easy. First the plight of airlines, now so extreme that it’s hard to foresee any outcome other than nationalisation for many major carriers. Even if the new ban on leisure travel ends, only pre-flight Covid

What a triumph of entrepreneurial empire-building — if that’s still an acceptable phrase — is the £6.8 billion acquisition of the Asda supermarket chain by Blackburn-born self-made billionaires Mohsin and Zuber Issa. Sons of Gujarati immigrants, these brothers have advanced from a single petrol station in Bury to a chain of almost 6,000 in ten countries with convenience stores and coffee shops attached. Now their company EG Group has brought Asda back into British ownership after two decades as part of Walmart, the big-box monster of American shopping. The pair’s success has been built on boosting the profitability of fuel retailing, in an era when big oil companies were pulling

All logic suggests that the 14-day quarantine for arrivals from abroad really is, as Michael O’Leary of Ryanair put it, ‘a political stunt’. The best explanation is that it was conceived in Downing Street — with minimal consultation, unless someone rang Armando Iannucci, writer of The Thick of It — as a sop to focus-group xenophobia and parental anxiety, as well as a show of grip after the Dominic Cummings debacle. Its absurdity is highlighted by news that the West Indies cricket squad is now quarantined, while 122 high-goal polo players were reported to have beaten the deadline by slipping in last Saturday on a charter flight from Buenos Aires

This year’s Nobel Prize for the silliest piece of scientific research must go to something called the Climate Accountability Institute, for revealing to the world that 35 per cent of all global carbon and methane emissions since 1965 can be traced to just 20 global companies. This week they were named and shamed in the Guardian and revealed to be, er, 17 oil companies and three coal mining companies. Scandalously, they have been pumping all this carbon into the air for their own self-enrichment while the rest of us suffer. As Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University – the fellow behind the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph – puts it:

The list of business leaders who have damaged their careers with a single word famously begins with Gerald Ratner, who wiped half a billion off the value of his jewellery chain in 1991 by describing one of its offerings as ‘crap’. Then there was Bank of England deputy governor Ben Broadbent, whose chance of succeeding Mark Carney plunged after he picked ‘meno-pausal’ to describe an economy past its productive peak. Now Standard Chartered chief executive Bill Winters has blighted his remaining time in post by telling shareholders they were ‘immature’ to have voted against his massive pay package. Having built his career with JP Morgan before joining Standard Chartered in

The world’s poor are, as we know, suffering under the yoke of capitalism, getting ever poorer as we rich grab an ever-greater share of the world’s resources and pollute the environment for everyone else. We know this because the Left keeps telling us so. But amidst the unrelenting gloom of an ever-more unequal world, one might think there would be a little room for reporting the odd piece of positive news. Yet it is not easy to find. One thing you probably haven’t seen this week are the latest statistics from the International Energy Authority (IEA) which show that the number of people without access to an electricity supply in

Gavin Williamson’s warning that the Russian Bear is sizing up the UK’s energy infrastructure is important as it brings long overdue attention to a troubling drift in UK energy policy. Britain’s electricity market is increasingly slanted in favour of importing more electricity from Europe and against securing investment in new power plants at home. Billions of pounds of domestic energy plant investment have consequently been put at risk, which will undermine the future security of supply and risk price rises. It is important to appreciate our growing reliance on imported electricity, as well as the fact that current planning will quadruple this dependency with consequences for prices, competition and security

‘I just want to say one word to you, just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.’ That iconic punch line from The Graduate, when a businessman gives Dustin Hoffman career advice at a cocktail party, has been circling my head ever since China announced that, as of 2018, it will no longer act as the West’s giant blue wheelie bin. Back in 1968, that businessman was righter than he could have known: ‘There’s a great future in plastics.’ We’re in that future — with dire consequences for aquatic life. Let’s review: what is recycling for? To reduce landfill, whose toxins can leach into groundwater. To diminish litter. To create a

Is the only reason Dry January is so popular because people tend to drink a little too much over the festive period? Or is part of it down to wanting to save money after spending too much on overly pricey last-minute Christmas presents? I wouldn’t be surprised if it were more due to financial reasons than health ones – though I can’t be certain. If much of it is down to money woes, then the news that household bills increased by 13% in 2017 compared to the previous years probably won’t make you feel much better. There are all kinds of factors involved in this statistic, but energy bills play