Some day I’d like to hear about a forest twice the size of London getting planted without there being a gigantic airport built.
Some key figures from the 2024 Forestry research summary:
https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/publications/forestry-facts-figures-2024/
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There are now 3.28 million hectares of woodland in the UK (as of March 2024)
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Woodland area in the UK now represents 13.5% of total land area
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20,660 hectares of new woodland were created in the UK in 2023/24 (compared to 12,960 in 22/23)
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There was a 59% increase in new planting and 28% increase in restocking in the UK in 2023/24
Hopefully that’ll make you feel slightly happier :)
Increasing airport size as a way to stimulate economic growth seems like dated thinking to me. Flights are increasingly not used for business travel as communications technology has advanced. All you’re really doing is trying to maintain hub status for London which doesn’t drive economic activity outside of the airport industry.
Heathrow needs a third runway as much as it needs a rollercoaster. A huge construction project, with all the emissions that brings, that paves over houses, green spaces and the M25 (on a bridge).
Finally, I guess we can see why Labour whipped against the environment bill last week.
The level of production of CO2 is so vast that planting trees is not going to do anything meaningful. We need to sharply and rapidly stop producing CO2 immediately and work on viable scalable CO2 removal and storage methods with urgency.
We need to sharply and rapidly stop producing CO2 immediately
Can I recommend a new law requiring billionaires the travel only by trebuchet. May solve more issues then just CO2
The depth of climate crisis denial is depressing. We should be cutting drastically down on flying. We should be cutting drastically down on miles driven in cars. Nope, none of that.
The rationale of electric planes is unhinged. “We’re going to plan to expend energy as if future technology has already been implemented”.
That’s beside my point, considering that all commercial electric aircraft being developed are basically all at or near the “announced plans to develop” stage and they’re already talking about expanding airports using these erstwhile emissions savings as a rationale. It would be more honest to say they don’t actually give a damn about the climate.
