I see that recent remarks by Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has caused the shares in the Drax Group to plunge. All he said was that it made no sense to him to transport wood chips across the Atlantic to burn in Yorkshire to produce electricity. The Telegraph says that this is the equivalent of burning 25 million trees a year, though how many are actually felled is not clear.
Kwarteng told MPs "That isn’t sustainable". Just so. It's never made sense to me either but we still lavish £zillions a year (actually £2.4million a day) in subsidies and pretend it's green (just as the EU pretends that Putin's gas is green). Worryingly (for Drax), Kwarteng said that there may come a time where we just draw the line and say it isn’t working. Huzzar! Drax commented that they didn't find the minister's comments helpful. Well, I did.
I now hear that the OECD is on the case after receiving complaints of corporate greenwashing. Drax denies all the allegations, saying that its business activities follow industry best practice and science, and meet or exceed applicable standards internationally.
But what a glorious case study this would be for a school green group to get to grips with. It has everything: heroes v. villains, public waste v. necessary investment, sustainability communication v. greenwashing. Maybe it's already a hot topic in Yorkshire schools and I just don't know about it.
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