DEAR SIR: All we now hear about is emissions of CO2 or methane, all a complete nonsense as the food must be produced somewhere to feed the world, so why not here?

It is all on the same planet. Surely everyone isn’t going to simply stop eating? But it is on the credit side of the calculation that we are falling flat on our faces.

How many in the farming community are aware of what the PSO levy is, who pays it and who benefits from it, all €500m a year of it?

It is of course the bit added on to the bottom of our electric bills each month and was designed to provide support for the development of renewable energy production and other climate change mitigating actions. This includes a large whack for wind but also a considerable sum for biomass, indeed €100m a year. Doesn’t everyone remember the great talk of all the district heating and CHP plants we were going to have all around the country, all using highly efficient modern plant, operating at up to 80% efficiency as per Scandinavia, Germany, etc? All fuelled on sustainable native-grown biomass, be it 300,000km of coppiced hedgerow, 22,000km of over-topped, now sterile spawning and rearing streams for our trout and salmon, vast amounts of forest waste, invasive species such as gorse and rhododendron, willow on the bogs and much more.

All of which we would also be able to claim carbon credits on to the big advantage of the landowners concerned and Ireland Inc as a whole.

But no. In order to keep the old highly inefficient (30%) peat stations going, which aren’t meant to burn turf anymore, we have been giving the €100m to Bord na Mona and a few other corporates to import the biomass from some other environment in the Americas or southeast Asia at zero benefit to our local economy.

You don’t need to look at who is involved here before quickly getting the picture.

As if all that is not bad enough, we then come to the massive failure to take advantage of what we could be doing by adopting on a very large scale what are called constructed wetlands.

This system, already developed and proven here in Ireland, could be applied to any farm which has even a small stream running through it and is the one and only way to deal with our excess nitrate and phosphate run-offs which all the anti-farmer and forestry brigade complain about.

By using such wetlands, planted with the appropriate sphagnum and sedges, tremendous amounts of carbon can be safely sequestered and added of course to our CO2 contra account, our streams and rivers purified into the bargain.

Come on our farming representatives – start looking after the interests of your members.

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