Mel Stride’s website still boasts of bringing in net zero law despite Tory u-turn: Yorkshire Post Letters
Mike Baldwin, Raven Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield.
In its annual State of the UK Climate report, the Met Office said what we all know: the UK is experiencing a period of 'historic and unprecedented change'. It notes 2025 was the warmest year on record, dating back to 1884, joining 2024, 2023 and 2022 on the list of the top five warmest years ever. The UK Health Security Agency recently said: 'Climate change is already making heatwaves more frequent, longer-lasting, and more severe'. We are now experiencing the fourth heatwave this year. Excess deaths alone in the first two in May and June rose to 2,877.
More than half of England is officially in drought, confirming the dire situation being experienced by our farmers. Temperatures above 25C trigger heat stress in farm animals. The scorched pastures have dried up grazing land forcing farmers to use stored winter feed. Milk yields have been reduced by 20 per cnet. The heatwaves have significantly impacted UK arable farming by triggering the earliest harvest in decades, causing variable crop yields.
This comes after three of the five worst harvests on record this decade due to extreme weather. Tom Lancaster of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit has said: 'The only real guarantee against these impacts getting worse is to reach net zero and bring our climate back into balance'.
Strange then that Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride recently stated: 'I will keep doing everything I can in Parliament to speak up for the men and women who work with such pride on our farms' when he and the Tory Party propose to scrap The Climate Change Act.
Strange that this is the Act which was strengthened in 2019 by Theresa May when Mel Stride himself sat around the Cabinet table. Strange that Mel Stride's own website still says: 'In 2019, one of Mel's last acts as a Government minister was to support the UK in becoming the first major economy in the world to legislate for net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050'.
Mel Stride has stated that one of the reasons he got into politics was 'the need to protect the environment for future generations'. And yet now, in proposing to scrap the Act he and the Tory Party, along with Reform UK, are quite willing to shamefully sacrifice not only UK farmers and our food security, along with the vulnerable sick and frail elderly during heatwaves, but also those same future generations.
Emma Grainger, Ottery St Mary, Devon.
In 2020, Kemi Badenoch described Net Zero by 2050 as "crucial" in a government press release. Now she says it's "impossible." What's changed? Plenty.
Six years of scientific progress have made the case for Net Zero clearer than ever. Six years of technical development have made solar panels cheaper and given us affordable batteries to smooth out the gap between supply and demand. Six years of North Sea decline have made our own oil and gas uncompetitive. Just this week BP put its entire UK North Sea business up for sale.
Six years of geopolitical upheaval have sent fossil fuel prices higher and made them more volatile. Six years of climate events have brought record hurricane seasons, wildfires on a scale unseen in Canada, Oregon, Australia and Europe, floods from Pakistan to Valencia to Derna in Libya, the latter killing over 11,000 people in a single night. Six years have brought accelerating polar and glacial ice-melt. And six years of official reports have made the security risks of climate change unmistakable.
Badenoch doesn't dispute that the climate is changing. So what's really going on? It's hard to read this as anything other than a response to Nigel Farage and the collapse of Tory support.
She's boxed herself into a corner and now tries to defend the indefensible. It makes no sense, and it leaves her increasingly out of step with public opinion as well as science. Someone in the party needs to make her see sense before she does something very stupid.
Alec Suchi, Allerton, Bradford.
Robert Johnson expresses his disapproval of those who remain unconvinced of the need to adopt ' net zero' policies, (The Yorkshire Post, July 31). Yes, this summer remains very hot and dry, but it is too early to state categorically that all subsequent summers will follow suit.
The climate has always changed and will continue to do so irrespective of human agency, as evidenced by periods of warming and cooling, varying from warm periods to various ice ages during the planet's existence.
What is not certain is whether this current warming is part of a natural cycle or due entirely to human action. There are scientists who remain sceptical of the 'official narrative', but they are not given access to the mainstream media and are thus effectively marginalised.
It is certainly prudent to conserve our resources, reduce air and water pollution, protect our woodlands and wildlife from increasing urbanisation. But our actions need to be in some proportion to our contribution to greenhouse gases which is one per cent of global emissions and not so excessive that it ruins our economy.