Letters - Wednesday, November 24, 2021

We are all witnessing a fundamental change in how we travel. Petrol and diesel are due to become redundant as a means of propelling vehicles in the next decade.

Electric batteries are seen as the new saviour of our planet, ridding us of all the obnoxious emissions of petrol and diesel fumes which have characterised our means of transport for over a century.

Fuelling vehicles with electricity derived from batteries is seen as the new eureka. But are governments, including our own, plus all the manufacturers of vehicles, backing the wrong horse?

The world conference in Glasgow was debating how to make our planet a cleaner and safer place for future generations. Ways to make our environments better for all are key to success.

Yet electric batteries, using lithium as the prime raw material, may have serious adverse consequences for environments in which they are mined.

The availability of lithium is not a problem, at least in the foreseeable future.

Countries such as Australia, China, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and the USA have abundant resources. Even Cornwall has potential supplies.

However, hydrogen is universally abundant and no digging is required. There are several processes for converting it into a motor fuel and there is also no need for an internal combustion engine because a fuel cell uses hydrogen to generate electricity.

Unlike charging a battery, which can take 30 minutes, you just fill up with hydrogen at the pump and away you go.

Good design, together with robust fuel tanks, should mean that they are as safe as cars with petrol engines.

The main emission is water. So both methods create an electric car. The processes for producing the electricity for both are expensive but costs should fall as demand increases and new infrastructures are put in place.

At the moment governments and manufacturers are going hell for leather in developing the battery option. I feel in the long term they are backing the wrong horse.

Geoffrey North

Via email

It would be better to use hydrogen rather than lithium battery electric vehicles (BEVs) to fuel our transportation future. Lithium BEVs are an ecological catastrophe. It will get worse as the problems of recycling thousands of tonnes of highly toxic and explosively flammable lithium battery cells become evident.

Patrick Chambers

Via email

CRIME

Who can right all these wrongs?

Successive governments have destroyed our faith in police and immigration law enforcement. Thousands of illegal immigrants arrive each day. Murder has become commonplace and the police only have the facilities to a detect a few of them and our major cities are literally run by criminal gangs. Discipline in many homes and schools has been lost due to ‘woke’ culture.

A leader who has the will and determination to tackle all this seems to be unavailable. Many of our politicians have become more interested in lining their pockets than trying to rights the wrongs of our once great nation.

Peter Hyde

Address supplied

POLITICS

Full-time MPs not part-time crooks

When, as a lifelong Tory and former Conservative election agent, I read of the corruption occurring within my party and I suspect a similar situation is also happening in the other political parties, I am sickened to the core.

Surely intelligent politicians of all parties realise that cheating the system to earn obscene amounts of cash on the side, in addition to their enormous official salaries, is deeply offensive to all decent folks, irrespective of their political views?

Often, only a small minority of our elected Members are present in Commons debates. This is a clear indication that many of our MPs are not devoting 100 per cent of their time to representing the views of their electorate, but are dodging off and making a few quid on the side.

The House of Commons should sit five days a week and all Members should be required to be in attendance at all times or forfeit their posts as MPs.

This would focus the minds of these arrogant people and make them realise that cheats will never win but will always be found out in the end, as we are seeing at the present time. This country needs full-time Members of Parliament and not part-time crooks.

Dick Lindley

Address supplied

HEALTH

HPV vaccine is great news

Against the daily backdrop of continuing doom and gloom over rising Covid infections, hospitalisations and deaths comes the great news that the HPV vaccine reduces cervical cancer by “almost 90 per cent”.

It is 15 years since my wife Janet died from the dreadful disease despite taking part in the screening programme.

The latest announcement I herald with grateful thanks. It will give girls and women confidence about avoiding an early death to the disease.

Edward Grainger

Via email

SOCIETY

Experience is bound to be lived

Please can we drop the word ‘lived’ from ‘lived experience’? How can experience be anything other than lived?

Mary Alexander

Via email

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