Letters: Britain can be zero carbon – but only by becoming poorer

A green and poor land?

Sir: Your editorial (8 February) is a timely warning about what the government’s headlong drive to carbon zero really means. We seem to be intent on wrecking our economy in order to further reduce our 1 per cent portion of the world’s greenhouse gases. But while we are scrapping our petrol and diesel cars along with our gas heating and cooking, Asian countries are building coal-fired power stations because the 21st-century world needs electricity and that is the cheapest and quickest way to provide it. Their emissions are already many times higher than the UK’s. This problem is surely what the UN’s climate change conference in Glasgow in November should be dealing with. By 2050 the UK is in danger of being very green and very poor, with the atmosphere above us in a far worse state than it is now.
Ivor Williams

Tavistock, Devon

What will we eat?

Sir: With large acreages of good farmland already given over to the growing of biomass crops for gas, and now a demand from the Climate Change Committee for one field in five to be given back to nature, what are we all to eat? I would be interested in seeing a true costing of windfarms, taking into account all the excavations and concrete for roads and hardstanding for cranes, as well as the huge bases required.