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We wish you a Happy Christmas.
LETTER OF THE WEEK
Dear Editor
This comes with very best wishes to you and all at TCW, for a lovely Christmas and great things in the New Year.
What amazing progress TCW has made this year – now read and listened to and quoted with respect. But still, way to go. So keep at it, and sock it to them in 2025!
I remember a Christmas past, writing to thank you for having given me a voice. I’m still enormously grateful for that. But in these threatening times, finding a voice is no longer enough. It takes courage and determination to speak out, and that’s the really important thing that you and the TCW team have given me.
So, thank you again, and hopefully some of this seasonal donation will go toward a hearty toast to TCW and a great future. Very best, and ‘here’s tae us, wha’s like us!’
Janice DAVIS
Trump for Number Ten!
Dear Editor
All I wish for Christmas is for Trump to be our President (here in the UK) next year too. Given the dire state in which we now find ourselves, one I question every day in total astonishment, crazier things have happened.
Happy Christmas to TCW. Keep it up.
Richard Tonville
Doncaster
The cold comfort of a future without gas
Dear Editor
The UK population have been told they should ditch gas boilers which are used for hot water and central heating and buy electric heat pumps which are at least four times more expensive than a gas boiler to install and are noisy and far less efficient. Cooking by gas is on the Greens’ hit list. These diktats will require lots of additional wind electricity, which will not be there when needed. In the last 12 months wind could provide only 31.6 per cent of our electricity.
Have politicians, led by the nose by the green brigade, ever thought of the consequences of their decisions? My price for electricity next month will be 24.31p per kWh and for gas 6.25p per kWh. Even the gas daily standing charge is better: gas 31.78p, electricity 64.16. So electricity for cooking, heating and hot water will cost four times as much as gas.
So where, pray you politicians with your large, unearned salaries and gold-plated pension schemes, do you think people will find this extra money? Certainly not from the Winter Fuel Allowance.
Clark Cross
Linlithgow
Carbon-capture technology unproven and costly
Dear Editor
The Permanent Secretary at the Department for Energy Security (an oxymoron) and Net Zero, says that CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) is the best-value way to limit carbon emissions. (Mr Pocklington told MPs, ‘our assessment is that carbon capture, as part of a wider suite of policies, is the most appropriate and the best-value way to meet our carbon budgets and tackle climate change’).
But CCS will be fitted to the exhausts of gas-turbine generators (GTGs), making them less efficient and thus burning more gas. Also since the UK doesn’t have a large GTG maker, it will needlessly create jobs overseas.
What we need is around 20GW of SMRs (small modular nuclear reactors) to carry much of the grid baseload. They would be cheaper than GTGs per TWh delivered, they can be built here and would have a longer life expectancy.
So why are we spending £22 billion on an unproven CCS technology when we have a better homegrown alternative, SMRs, with a higher capacity factor? Also with SMRs, a larger portion of our electrical energy supply would be less dependent on international gas prices.
Roger J Arthur
Hollybank
Renewable energy promises are all spin and wind
Dear Editor
The Transmissions Pathway to 2030 (TP) aims to ‘unlock ScotWind’s full potential’ to provide power to the UK while helping to achieve Net Zero and mitigate the effects of climate change. This will require at least 1,800 kilometres of cables, a substantial proportion of which will be carried overhead on 60-metre-high lattice-design pylons at an estimated cost of at least £20 billion. It will also need numerous substations and battery-energy storage systems.
According to the transmission owners – the National Grid and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks – their supposedly democratic ‘consultation’ process has shown that ‘the public understand and support the benefits this massive investment could bring’. This is nothing more than pure spin, since countless voices of opposition are being raised throughout the land.
Like the wind industry they are also employing the tactic of offering a ‘Community Development Fund’ amounting to a paltry £100 million in order to mollify concerns. We have been repeatedly told the renewables sector would provide cheaper electricity, but this fallacy is now plain for all to see, and we will duly see our pockets picked again when the TP costs appear on our bills.
In 2019 Theresa May’s dubious parting legacy to the nation was an amendment to the 2008 Climate Change Act. It received minimal parliamentary debate and committed the UK to spending £50 billion per year in order to reach Net Zero by 2050. All this for a nation that is responsible for just 1.2 per cent of global emissions and is supposed to serve as an example to the rest of the world.
The Labour Government has declared ‘war on NIMBYism’. This is a blatant affront to democracy. Now, however, it is actively pursuing the development and eventual large-scale deployment of zero-emissions small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). A single SMR occupying just a few acres will continuously generate 470 megawatts. This is enough to power around 470,000 homes, which is the equivalent capacity of 150 onshore wind turbines.
If our political masters had resisted the pressures of the Greens and not procrastinated for so long on this option then this reckless expenditure and disruption could have been avoided and perhaps the climate-change gravy train would not be so lucrative.
Neil J Bryce
Kelso
Saracens Head kerfuffle a sign of the times
Dear Editor
When Spain was ruled by Muslims the Christians and Jews were classed as ‘dhimmi’ and a state of ‘dhimmitude’ meant they must pay a tax or fine called ‘jizya’.
A brazen Muslim fellow (the convicted terrorist Khalid Baqa) in Amersham seems to have ‘jumped the gun’. He is demanding about £2,000 from the publican of the Saracens Head Inn, stating he is deeply offended by the name and sign. As he has also declared he intends to be deeply offended by all the Saracens Head pubs, he would if successful clear about £60,000.
It will be interesting to see how our judges – many of whom seem to think we are already a Muslim country with Sharia law – deal with his attempt at extortion.
Kathleen Carr
Sheffield
Flatulent cows the small fry among weather villains
Dear Editor
Good to read a reasoned article on the current weather ‘events’, but I wonder how many people are looking up at the sky daily and seeing the jet trails that do not dissipate as do condensation trails but instead spread pretty rapidly into cloud coverage of the sun either at sunset (that seems to be a favourite time for these occurrences) or sunrise (another favourite time).
Not to mention that when there has been a break in the unusually high-altitude rain clouds that have covered much of the UK and Europe for several months one yet again sees those jet trails taking place behind those clouds, and now it has more or less been admitted by the powers that be, that, yes, geo-engineering, weather manipulation, using weather as a weapon, are realities!
Therefore there is human effect on the weather as a result of these experiments. But it is the fault not of cows breaking wind nor the burning of fossil fuels nor the much hyped carbon footprint of all us innocent of subterfuge; rather it is the result of idiots playing with cloud seeding for nefarious ends, and we ought to be making a really big noise about this, as it is totally despicable.
Sue O’Dea
