Drax subsidies under fire
Plus some inspiring green reading recommendations for young and old
Good morning! I’m Sarah Hartley and this is The Northern Eco weekly update. As you’ve received this newsletter then either you subscribed, or someone forwarded it to you. If the latter, then you can click on this handy little button below.
As it’s the last Tuesday of the month, we’ve the latest book recommendations with a green tinge from Claire and Alan at The Wonky Tree bookshop for you to enjoy! Scroll down for the usual news headlines, which include:
MPs on both sides of the house and protestors call for an end to Drax subsidies
Plans for a 2,000+ acre solar farm
A draft of the 'most important policy document' for a National Park
But now, over to Claire and Alan………
One Garden Against the World : In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate by Kate Bradbury
“Just a reminder that all change starts with small steps - whatever we can do WILL make a difference.”
Description: Kate Bradbury has a new garden. It’s busy: home to all sorts of wildlife, from red mason bees and bumblebees to house sparrows, hedgehogs and dragonflies. It seems the entire frog population of Brighton and Hove breeds in her small pond each spring, and now there are toads here, too.
On summer evenings, Kate watches bats flit above her and for a moment, everything seems alright with the world. But she knows habitat loss remains a huge issue in gardens, the wider countryside and worldwide, and there’s another, far bigger threat: climate change. Temperature increases are starting to bite, and she worries about what that will mean for our wildlife.
In her uplifting new book, Kate writes passionately about how her climate-change anxiety pushes her to look for positive ways to keep going in a changing world. As in her first memoir, she invites you into her life, sharing stories of her mum’s ongoing recovery and her adventures with her new rescue dog, Tosca. One Garden
Against the World is a call to action for all of us – gardeners, communities and individuals – to do more for wildlife and more for the climate.
Climate change and biodiversity loss go hand in hand, but if we work together, it’s never too late to make a difference.
Birds, Beasts and Bedlam : Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Derek Gow
“Birds, Beasts and Bedlam continues the rich tradition of great British nature writing. An engaging book - where conservation is concerned, some people just go the extra mile!”
Description: Birds, Beasts and Bedlam recounts the adventures of Britain’s favourite maverick rewilder, Derek Gow, and his single-minded mission to save our rarest wildlife – one species at a time. Derek shares his personal, courageous and highly entertaining tales in Birds, Beasts and Bedlam, including how he raised a sofa-loving wild boar piglet, transported a raging bison bull across the UK, got bitten by a Scottish wildcat and, together with Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, restored the ancient white stork to the pioneering Knepp Estate.
After a Shetland ewe captured his heart as a boy, Derek grew up to become a farmer with a passion for ancient breeds. When he realised how many of our species were close to extinction – even on his own land – Derek tore down fences literally and metaphorically, transforming his traditional Devon farm into a 300-acre rewilding haven for beavers, water voles, lynx, wildcats, harvest mice, wild boar and more.
A project that is still ongoing today.
The Magic of Flight by Nicola Davies
“A beautifully illustrated interesting book containing a fascinating array of facts. A reminder about how vitally important the creatures that have mastered the art of flying are to our planet’s eco-system.”
Description: Our skies are full of life! From bats and birds to bees and beetles, the air around us is buzzing with amazing flying creatures. Explore how and why animals fly, and the many ways in which this incredible ability has helped them flourish on our beautiful planet, in this beautiful book from award-winning non-fiction specialist Nicola Davies. Packed with fascinating facts and incredible illustrations to pore over again and again, this stunning large-format hardback is the perfect gift to inspire children to treasure our planet's precious biodiversity.
The three most clicked links from last week were:
No 10 blocks beaver release plan as officials view it as ’Tory legacy’
How Newsquest and its seven AI-assisted reporters are using ChatGPT
In the news
🌳 Some important decisions are on the horizon about the future subsidies of the controversial Drax power station in North Yorkshire. The video clip above shows Labour's Barry Gardiner speaking during last Friday’s debate on the Climate and Nature Bill. His call for subsidies to end will be welcome news for campaigners who have amassed years of evidence of how much destruction burning wood causes to forests and wildlife around the world. They argue that energy produced from Drax is not “carbon neutral” because regrowing trees takes decades to make up for the carbon emitted when they are burned.
And there were also calls from the Conservative side of the house too. In the clip below, Sir Roger Gale asks of the Drax subsidies, “why are we allowing this, and why are we paying for it?”
The Climate and Nature Bill, which would have made the UK’s climate and environment targets legally binding, was dropped on Friday after Government Ministers cut a deal that will see Labour backbenchers input into environmental legislation. You can view the full debate on the Climate and Nature Bill here.
Frustrated campaigners also heckled Health Secretary Wes Streeting about the subsidies on Saturday as he used an address to the Fabian Society to call for the centre-left to challenge the populist right
🌳 New analysis has been published which shows that the UK should stop burning wood to generate power because it is not needed to meet government’s decarbonisation targets as Fiona Harvey reports at The Guardian.
🌳 It has also emerged that Drax lobbied Canadian officials for their intervention as the UK group sought changes to EU rules that could prevent the bloc from burning wood biomass sourced from forests in British Columbia, Rachel Millard at the FT reports.
🌳 Drax yesterday announced that it has agreed the terms of a deal to supply over 1m t of wood pellets per year to a US sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) startup Pathway Energy as Sam Baker at Chemical Engineer reports.
💦 A new sewer pipeline being constructed by Northumbrian Water will pass under the original path of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, reports Will Abbott at The Northern Echo.
☀️ A solar farm larger than the town it hopes to neighbour is planned in East Yorkshire. The Kingfisher Solar Farm is proposed on farmland three miles north of Beverley and east of the A164, reports Darren Greenwood at the York Press.
🦦 The otters of Gosforth featured on a recent episode of BBC show Winterwatch, writes AI Assisted Reporter Joshua Nichol at The Northern Echo.
🚜 North Yorkshire councillors have made a fact-finding visit to find out about pioneering research on regenerative agriculture taking place at a University of Leeds research farm, reports Joe Willis.
📚 Congratulations to college group, made up of Stockton Riverside College, Redcar and Cleveland College, Bede Sixth Form College, The Skills Academy, NETA Training, and Innersummit, which, Gavin Engelbrecht at The Northern Echo reports, has been named the winner of the Investors in the Environment’s (iiE) Sustainability Influencer Award.
💦 A £4.2m Yorkshire Water project at the Shaw Mills wastewater treatment works near Harrogate has been completed. By reducing phosphorus levels in the treated wastewater returned to the environment, the project Yorkshire Water said in a media release today the project will improve the water quality of over 29 kilometres of the river downstream of the works, writes John Plummer at The Stray Ferret.
💦 A Huddersfield company has been fined and ordered to pay costs totalling almost £9,000 after it polluted a river with bleach and killed hundreds of fish. Environment Agency release.
🌿 The draft objectives for the Yorkshire Dales National Park Management Plan 2025-2030 have been announced Described as the 'most important policy document' for the National Park, compiled by a coalition of 15 local organisations, including business representatives, writes Gavin Engelbrecht at the D&S.
”It took at least two human lifetimes for this tree to become the oxygen-giving, carbon-storing, flood-mitigating, bank-stabilising, natural-cooling asset it is today.”
🌳 Campaigners fight on to save the Otley Tittybottle oak and tulip trees, reports Sarah Mumford at Yorkshire Bylines.
⚡️ The government has been forced to issue a clarification after Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) sent a misleading press release to local media.TVCA had claimed in a press release it sent on Thursday that Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen had been “appointed” to the government’s Clean Energy Sector Council but as Leigh Jones at the Teesside Lead reports, the true situation was rather different.
🗳️ Thanks to those of you who voted in last week’s poll about the frequency of email newsletters from us. The majority of you by far (79%) voted to remain as we are now. That’s an email newsletter rounding everything up on a Tuesday with additional reports being published direct to the website, app and social media as they happen.
If you’re looking for some interesting things to do this month, our list of eco events for February is shaping up nicely - but there’s still room to share plenty more.
See you next Tuesday!
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