FREE
The The
...\Portcullis A...
15 August 2023
Issue no. 154
ISSN 2632-3389
Fiddling with Nero As Europe burns, we ask if Somerset Council is really doing all it could or should about the climate emergency? In 64 AD a great fire swept through Rome and it is said that as he watched the flames, the Emperor Nero played on his fiddle. The story perhaps owes more to Shakespeare than Suetonius, but it is apt. As we sat down to work on this article in the last weeks of July, southern Europe was burning. China had recorded its highest temperature on record and a swathe of southern America was struggling under temperatures of over forty degrees. If ever the impact of global warming needed reinforcing, then this summer has done that and more. Councils up and down the land have declared a climate emergency. But it has often felt a rather academic exercise. A worthy thing to “Morning stretch” Great Crested Grebe on the Somerset do but followed by what? Somerset Council too has declared a climate and ecological Levels by Ben Pullitz. For more information and to buy Ben's emergency, back in 2019. Declaring an emergency is easy. It is a 2024 calendar please contact www.feathersandhills.com matter of talk, agreement and stating a fact. The fact that there is an emergency is relatively uncontroversial these days. The question is, beyond talking about it and making gestures, what is the Council doing about it. More talk or some real action? On what they grandly call “the built environment” – by which they mean our homes – Somerset Council offer all kinds of initiatives that homeowners can take to reduce carbon emissions. But what about building new houses? On this there is silence. They have policies around farmland too. But this is predominantly around the DEFRA ‘Environmental Land Management Scheme’ (ELMS). It is as the Council say, an opportunity to work with farmers and landowners to adapt their farming practices (Turn to p26)
1