As 2020 comes to a close, we're taking a look back at some of our best reporting on the environment.

A brilliant talk that punctures current discourse on climate ambition in Scotland, setting out what's really needed, by @KevinClimate for @ScotClimateCA

📽️ https://t.co/i02FtSkJT8 📽️

Well worth watching. Otherwise, here's a summary thread 👇
1/10

Want scientific assessment of what Scotland should do to achieve Paris Agreement temperature targets? Look to carbon budgets. See that a failure to rapidly reduce emissions will eat up the carbon budget in just a few years, leaving impossible burdens for future generations. 2/10

Are UK emissions down 45% in 30 years? Not when including emissions from aviation & shipping, and imports & exports – then they are only down 10%. Over three decades, we have had reductions of less than 0.5% per year. 3/10

Scotland’s average per person consumption emissions are still double the global average. Scotland’s consumption emissions have not meaningfully reduced in the last 20 years… 4/10

Principles of global equity and justice mean that Scotland’s fair slice of the global carbon budget is just a few hundred million tonnes of CO2, which is less than ten years of Scotland’s emissions at current levels. 5/10

Long thread here... from Keith, on tree guards:

I really don’t want to spread 120,000 plastic tree guards across the side of our lovely hill, the hill where I grew up and now farm, on the eastern edge of the Black Mountains. So, I’ve taken a good look at the pros,... 1/25

the cons and the alternatives, to try and decide rationally, which is the best approach for our plant on the Bryn Arw.

It has become the accepted norm in the UK that to plant a tree, you need to put your sapling in the ground and then wrap a plastic tree guard around it.

This is simply ‘how it’s done’ now. This practice uses a huge amount of plastic; worse still, it disperses plastic extremely efficiently around the countryside. In some rural places, un-retrieved tree guards are by far the biggest source of plastic pollution.

And yet the first commercial plastic tree guards only came on the market 38 years ago. There are many perfectly healthy woodlands and trees that are older than this, and which became established without plastic – which begs the question: do we really need guards?

Plastic tree guards have several uses, some of which did revolutionise tree planting when they first came out. In particular, they:
•protect your saplings from things that want to eat them;
•provide a microclimate, which enhances tree growth, according to the manufacturers;

1.Hydrocarbon extraction
2.Sterlite
3.Kudankulam
4.Chennai-Salem Expressway
5.Neutrino
6.GAIL pipeline
7.Kattupalli Port
8.Uppur Thermal
Each one of these projects stalled/delayed.
Tamil Nadu is on its way to becoming a Kerala or Bengal. Oh! Kerala allowed GAIL & Vizhinjam Port

Those who say Kerala has highest social/educational indicators need to understand theirs is a remittance economy sustained by inflows from Gulf. 36% of Kerala's GDP is Gulf money. Without this their per capita income wd be half that of TN or at best 2/3rds.

Despite Gulf money per capita income of Kerala is less than TN. With a jobs crisis in Gulf due to the pandemic and falling Oil prices Kerala will face the moment of truth sooner than later.There is almost no project that causes zero environmental damage.

No highway has ever been built without trees being cut or land being acquired. No SEZ has ever been developed without land being acquired.Of course environmental protection is important. That is why we ask for safeguards. That is why there is an NGT. If Govt officials

are corrupt & ignore rules,solution is to hold them to account not stop all projects. Everyone of us including the protesters now travel on highways built by cutting lakhs of trees&on land acquired from farmers. Lakhs of our youth work in the same SEZ that were once paddy fields