A few heat pumps don’t undo the harm of putting raw sewage in our rivers…

Doing the right thing environmentally isn’t always easy and we’ve all been there.

You use the car when you could have walked. You drop a plastic pot in the rubbish bin because you can’t be bothered trying to spot the code on the bottom and it needs the right symbol for the recycling. You put paper in the ordinary bin because it’s dark and raining.

And on a particularly bad day, you secretly lobby the United Nations to play down the need to move away from the whole fossil fuels thing, as it really is such a bother, and your economy is so much is more important than that airy thing called the climate.

Or there you are about to host a climate conference in Glasgow and you reject calls to make it a legal duty for water companies not to keep pumping raw sewage discharges into rivers. Because, well, you know, the markets know better than rivers, and where there’s shit there’s money.

Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries reported to have been pushing back against the UN recommendations for action ahead of the Cop26 summit, according to leaked documents seen by the BBC.

All this just days before these foot-dragging countries will be asked at to announce what significant changes they are prepared to make to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees.

This shows the scale of the challenge faced by the world, or those part of it that will be in Glasgow to meet Boris Johnson, the “Green PM” according to a line in the Sun the other day. Perhaps that was a day when he wasn’t flying a few miles so he could be photographed coming down the steps from a borrowed private jet.

In a column-style article for the newspaper, Johnson said grants of £5,000 would be available towards the cost of expensive heat pumps to replace our boilers.

He offered this reassurance: “So while we’re going to have to make some pretty major changes to the way we heat our homes, the Greenshirts of the Boiler Police are not going to kick in your door with their sandal-clad feet and seize, at carrot-point, your trusty old combi…”

He just can’t help himself. There’s always an imagined enemy to be summoned, wielding carrots or not; there’s always an inane and attention-seeking quip.

It turned out that this scheme would pay to fund only 90,000 heat pumps over three years. Quite where that leaves the other 25 million homes with gas boilers is anyone’s guess. Perhaps we should ask that carrot.

The logic will be that this will kickstart the markets, prices will come down, and everything will be all right.

Leaving everything to the markets, a little like me betting my future on a lottery ticket, only gets you so far. And with the water companies it gets you with more shit in your rivers and seas than you might imagine was possible in a civilised country.

Witness how Southern Water would apparently rather be fined than invest in the privatised industry from which they profit greatly.

If I may for a moment quote that unreliable authority known as myself from July 19: “The privatisation of the water industry was literally a shit idea in that companies such as Southern Water now find it more profitable to pay a £90m fine for literally pumping shit into the literal sea than to invest in infrastructure.”

Assorted recommendations to the environment bill were made in the Lords, including that the water companies should be legally bound to reduce putting raw sewage in our rivers; all were ignored.

This bit of post-Brexit legislation shows again how marvellous these Brexit bonuses are: now we are free to pollute our rivers as much as we like, so it might be best to stick to those sunny uplands to avoid the smell.

Last year raw sewage was discharged into waters more than 400,000 times. The water companies do put decent water in our taps, and thanks for that, but much else they do alongside that duty is a shitty disgrace.

And yet our ‘Green PM’ doesn’t seem remotely bothered about stopping them.

If you want to keep up with the dreadful state of our water, you should follow Feargal Sharkey on Twitter. Yes, that Feargal Sharkey, a man whose anger about the water industry keeps him well informed…

 

 

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