When Elephants Fly: The fight for the environment is increasingly adopting similarities to a book about schizophrenia

Nearly 16 million trees have been cut down on public land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, the SNP minister admitted amid a major campaign to install more turbines, according to telegraph.co.uk. 

Mairi Goujon, Minister for Rural Affairs, has estimated that 15.7 million trees have been felled on land now administered by the Forestry and Lands Agency for Scotland (FLS) since 2000, the equivalent of more than 1,700 trees a day.

She insisted that the planning was designed to protect forest areas, and wind farm developers are expected to undertake “compensation planting elsewhere.”

But Liam Kerr, the Scottish Conservative MP, said the public would be “surprised” by the total and cited concerns over the events that had been raised by “communities across the country”.

Scotland already has turbines theoretically capable of generating 8.4 GW of electricity, more than half of the UK’s total capacity, but SNP ministers want to add another 8-12 GW.

One medium-sized tree produces 220 pounds of pure oxygen per year, which is enough for two small people to breathe in the same period of time. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the same tree during its life is generally measured in tons. 16 million trees is a huge volume of carbon dioxide, Greta should have had a tantrum. 

And although it all looks like pure schizophrenia, a recent study commissioned by the European Transport and Environment Federation found that toxic emissions of sulfur oxides from 63 cruise ships owned by Carnival Corporation were 43% higher than all combustion engine vehicles in Europe.

In other words, it would be easier to ban cruise ships, and oblige the rest of the steamers to switch to either sails, or nuclear reactors, or oars – whatever you like. One dry cargo ship throws waste into the air no less than a cruise ship, and a supertanker – this is more than five times. But instead, global bosses started a war on cars. 

Seeing such an “excesses”, one might think that all this struggle for ecology is a struggle not for ecology, but for something else.