When Ed Miliband says he’s happy about something, you know it’s bad policy

Can there be a more perverse form of environmentalism than erecting thousands of pylons across pristine countryside in order to deliver  Almost as bad as hundreds of acres of productive farm land being covered with solar panels.

In the name of ramming through legislation aimed at enforcing net zero upon us, Britons are being offered £250 a year off their heating bills if they live near one of these  But that ‘bribe’, for make no mistake, that is what it is, will barely touch the side of the likely fall in value of their houses as these metal giants march across our landscape.

As the true cost and sacrifice of decarbonising our nation becomes increasingly clear, it is time to debate the value of all this virtue-signalling nonsense. Under the guise of “saving the planet”, wants to spend billions of taxpayers’ pounds on erecting a new generation of taller 75m pylons, constructed from steel we no longer make in this country (probably imported from China where is is almost certainly made using energy from fossil fuel), and charging us all more on our energy bills to pay for it.

We already have the highest industrial electricity bills in the world, making our economy increasingly uninvestable in. The promise of lower bills from green energy has, so far, proved illusionary. No doubt the government will be tempted to artificially increase the price of gas in order to encourage us to use more electricity. And all this will not make a blind bit of difference to global carbon emissions for which the UK is responsible for less than 1%.

At the same time, the is warning us that we will all need to make significant lifestyle changes by eating less meat, travelling abroad less and ditching our reliable petrol-driven cars. Why on earth are we putting ourselves through this misery? In order to be world leaders, according to and his green zealots. World leaders in what – self-destruction?

The whole idea that carbon is some sort of atmospheric poison that we must rid our planet of is utter nonsense. If anything, a little more carbon dioxide makes the world greener and increases our growing seasons, generating more food for everyone. Farmers actually add carbon dioxide inside their greenhouses to grow better fruit and veg.

is an issue, obviously, but mankind has always been inventive at responding to changes in temperature. We’ve certainly never halted the progress of civilisation before in order to try and alter the climate. It is a wildly spurious and risky gamble.  

We need scientists to stand up and bravely say climate change is not an existential threat but one we can adapt to. It certainly doesn’t justify wrecking our countryside with thousands of pylons and solar farms.

The problem, of course, is that so many left-leaning politicians are seizing upon this as a way of attacking capitalism, deindustrialising our societies to create some centrally-planned idyll. And yet the irony is they are attacking the very people who are the custodians of our countryside.

Thanks to this week’s Planning and Infrastructure bill, farmers are likely to get only a fraction of the value of their fields if the government chooses to build new homes, schools or energy infrastructure on their land. Councils will be able to acquire farming land through compulsory purchase orders in yet another blow to their agricultural businesses.

claims he’d be very happy to live next to an electricity pylon, but I doubt if that will ever be in issue where he lives in north London. In the meantime, National Grid is advising that no one should live closer than 50m to a high voltage power line. A measly £250 off your bills seems poor compensation for this risk.

In order to meet an artificial deadline of decarbonising Britain by 2030, we are at risk of ruining our landscape in perpetuity with 370,000 miles of new power cables hanging from pylons a quarter the size of the Eiffel Tower. It’s time our political classes challenged the fad of net zero and really took care of our precious countryside by opposing this lunacy. 

There’s nothing clean about digging up our fields to fill them with metal eyesores. You cannot claim to be protecting our environment by destroying it.