Letter: Peatlands hold key to emissions target

But there is another "low hanging fruit" with respect to reducing net carbon dioxide emissions that is being largely neglected in Scotland: carbon sequestration.

Scottish Natural Heritage reports that Scotland's peat soils hold almost one third of the carbon held by all of Europe's forests, and were all of our peatlands undamaged they could absorb 40 per cent of the carbon dioxide produced by Scotland's households from electricity use, (The Nature of Scotland, spring 2009).

Add to this the huge potential for carbon sequestration by soils, ground vegetation and trees were our uplands allowed to recover from their current overgrazed and denuded state and the challenge of reducing our net carbon emissions becomes far less daunting.

Reducing grazing pressure in the uplands, mainly by reducing deer numbers, would achieve this. It would also reduce flooding and erosion problems, enhance wildlife and landscape, and hence tourism, and maintain rural employment. The losers would be the sporting estates, frequently purchased as investments by wealthy persons from overseas, who cling to a Victorian mode of land management that should have no place in a modern Scotland. Why do we hesitate?

Roy Turnbull

Nethy Bridge

Inverness-shire

Theo Quick of Logica UK (Letters, 31 March) is yet another writer paddling a company canoe.

It may seem like a perfectly sensible idea to convert the nation's cars to electric power and hasten this by banning conventional ones in town centres. However, this pipe dream has not been thought through.

Even if the necessary infrastructure and a huge amount of additional electrical energy could somehow be provided the end result would be somewhat different from that pictured.

The government of the day would have to replace the revenue lost from carbon fuel by placing an equivalent tariff on electricity. As most people would recharge their cars at home, the price of domestic electricity would also have to rocket.

Robert Durward

Netherton House

Biggar

Theo Quick is right to highlight the need of an infrastructure to supply energy to "green" vehicles running on electricity.

However, he fails to mention how this electricity is to be generated. The only reason for reducing our reliance on petrol and diesel is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels but given the current illogical campaign against nuclear power the only realistic way of producing this electricity for cars in the time frame envisaged is to build many more coal and gas-fired power stations.

The supporters of electric cars have yet to prove that the greenhouse gas emissions from all the additional power stations will be less than that produced by our car exhausts.

Alan Black

Camus Avenue

Edinburgh

Your editorial, "Driven to distraction by latest European diktat" (29 March) takes issue with the "totalitarian fantasies" that lie behind the European Commission's 2050 strategy for transport, specifically the proposed banning of petrol and diesel-fuelled cars from European city centres by 2050.

Such a move, to mitigate against climate change by cutting EU transport emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, lies more than 38 years ahead in the future, and that's not a time frame that reminds me of standard totalitarian approaches to get urgent endeavours running on time.

Your short analysis neglected to point out the overall laxity, in fact, of the commission's intentions: its new strategy aims to cut emissions by just 1 per cent a year until 2030, and then 5 per cent a year after that.

The only concrete action it proposes within its current 2010-14 mandate is to expand airport capacity, which will make the headline targets even harder to reach. Another muddled manifesto for inaction from Brussels, then - it's a wonder they didn't label it "The Big Transport Society".

Greig Aitken

Cawder Court

Cumbernauld