Net Zero Nuts 

As a regular user of Trainline, the one-stop-shop website for rail travel in the UK and Europe, I receive many unsolicited emails from them most of which I ignore. But I’m a sucker for an email that is headed ‘Congratulations Roger’, as I assume they are going to offer me something. So it was when I opened an email the other day to see what I was being congratulated for and, more to the point, what I was going to get. It would be an understatement to say that I was somewhat disappointed.

Trainline were emailing me to tell me how much I had reduced my carbon footprint by using the train instead of my car. I didn’t have the heart to email them back to tell them I would have reduced it even further by not using the train and staying at home. Desperate marketing or what?

The implication is that by continuing to use the train I was helping to save the planet and, the more I used it, the more I would save it. This defies logic which has clearly also gone whizzing over the heads of any of the carbon counting functionaries at Trainline. But no marketing team worth its carbon is ever going to convey the message that you should use them less, which would be the only effective way of reducing our carbon footprint.

The absurdity of this practice of telling us about our carbon footprints is glaring. They take no account of why I was taking the train, and I am sure that if I emailed them back to tell them they would have a collective conniption. Inevitably, I am heading to London Heathow airport to take a long-haul flight to either the Middle or the Far East. I’ve done it three times so far since December. What’s more, I have flown half the legs in Business Class and half of them in First Class and, as every carbon counting environmental activist knows, these generate more carbon…apparently.

To be honest, I don’t give a single solitary toot about my carbon footprint. I’m clever enough to know that the trains will be running anyway as will the planes, whether I am on them or not. And the opportunity cost to me of not being able to use my car when I am sitting on a train means my wife is never out of it making gas-guzzling short trips around our town visiting members of the family or longer trips to visit relatives or our other place in North Yorkshire.

But the real reason I don’t lose any sleep over my carbon footprint is that I believe, on the one hand, that the whole concept is a scam and, on the other hand, that nobody else who matters seems to care about it either. When I was at school, we learned about the carbon cycle which is ‘nature’s way of reusing carbon atoms, which travel from the atmosphere into organisms in the Earth and then back into the atmosphere over and over again’. Excess carbon in the atmosphere is assumed to be a result of our carbon generating industries which then leads to global warming.

The purported ‘excess’ amounts of carbon dioxide are laughably small. Carbon dioxide makes up 0.04% of our atmosphere and it has been shown, but not widely publicised, that far from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to global warming, that it is global warming that leads to rises in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. We actually seem to have little or no influence on global warming which, in any case, is probably cyclical and has reduced over the past few decades. There is no global warming crisis.

Carbon dioxide is essential for plants to survive and to make the sugar which is then used to make all the other components of plants which feed us and the animals we eat. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is necessary, increased carbon dioxide is good and is leading to the acceleration of plant growth.

It must, therefore, be this excess growth which is leading countries to fell millions of trees as they are in Scotland and Germany to make way for the erection of wind turbines. No doubt, for every acre of trees felled and every wind turbine erected, someone somewhere is being congratulated on reducing his carbon footprint.

Of course, every tree felled will increase atmospheric carbon dioxide as it will no longer be able to absorb it. Then what happens to the trees? They are sent to former coal-fired power plants which have been adapted to burn wood and burning wood produces more carbon dioxide than burning coal. Fact! But, as explained in Not Zero by Ross Clark, burning wood while it does add to atmospheric carbon dioxide de facto, it does not do so de jure as the burning of wood by power stations is not included in our figures for carbon emissions as it is considered a ‘biomass’. So that’s OK then.

None of the above is made up, unlike the prevailing nonsense from our governments, bodies such as the Royal Society and global philanthropists such as Bill Gates. I expect that I will soon be the recipient of yet another cheery email from Trainline letting me know how much further I have reduced my carbon footprint and gone into carbon credit. I am tempted to email them back saying that, if I am in credit then in the interests of achieving net zero that, while I was away using their trains, I Ieft my car with the engine running in the station car park. After all, it’s only logical.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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