I always hear about a “rush of tree planting” and I would love to know what people are talking about.

Have you ever tried getting woodland creation grants in England or Wales? Blood from a stone would be easier.

We’ve never hit our national targets. We’ve got 65 acres and 27 acres in Wales. Both ranked highly on the woodland scoring system (that’s why we got the land) and we submitted for woodland creation grant.

We got told we couldn’t possibly do TWO woodlands in the same year. Come back next year…

It’s frustrating to see so many Greens excitedly clapping for Conservative austerity cuts that knacker Green policy.

TR244 The Green Party supports the principle of a new north-south high speed line which would reduce the number of short-haul flights within
the U.K.

https://twitter.com/RHarrabin/status/1702937812310392867

It’s understandable @TheGreenParty support High-Speed Rail. It’s a climate solution, proven time and time again to reduce emissions by competing with flights along the routes. TR244 is a good policy. carbonbrief.org/eight-charts-s…

Seeing @HS2ltd and @WildlifeTrusts going at each other like an overserved hen party fighting over who gets to hold the inflatabe cock, and seeing all my friends pile in on either side, makes me really wish we could have a more serious conversation. I work with a few @WildlifeTrusts, I restore ancient woodlands, and I support HS2.

I'm not alone. An increasing number of us in @thegreenparty have come around to it.

This group is @Greens4HS2, and here we are presenting the environmental case.

I know the world is going to hell incredibly quickly, but I want to take a minute out of our collective doomscrolling to tell you that the ancient woodland my charity manages just got approval from the Forestry Commission to be restored to a temporate rainforest. Before, After. High Wood in Liskeard is an ancient woodland that's been repeatedly clearfelled since the 1960's, and doesn't have a single ancient tree. A lot of it looks like this thanks to these non-native conifers dumping acid into the soil and preventing anything else from growing there.

If you see rhododendrons this size you can just pull them out. Make sure you grab all the roots as they’ll regrow. They burn nicely too. Larger and you might need mattocks, or depressingly glyphosate (ecologist recommends, and yeah I know, we’re all upset about it). Get em early. This is one of 100 I’ve pulled out of the ancient woodland I manage over the last few months. I’m consistently forced to tromp through areas trying to naturally regenerate, to pull these garden leakages out before they kill all the saplings trying to rewild the woodland.

https://twitter.com/philsturgeon/status/1577774419237388289

🌳👾 Sending these rhododendrons out of the ancient woodland and straight back to hell. #BiodiversityCrisis It’s hard to show the size of that rhododendron. I’d say this monster was two single decker buses. This photo is after legend volunteers bashed about half of it.

This old thread is doing the rounds again so I’ll give a few thoughts as somebody who plants trees in the U.K, because y’all keep asking me to. A lot of good points are raised, but I’m not sure who the target audience is. Maybe politicians? Anyway.

https://twitter.com/forrestfleisch1/status/1306221445933129728

First off “it’s not just about trees” tbh most tree planting organisations are well aware of this. Even @GrowingTheTrees is planting shrubs, hedgerows, and wildflower meadows. We need to leave clearings and create woodland edges too. Different species thrive in these habitats.

🌍 If we want to get to carbon neutrality we have to emit some carbon to do it. Construction creates emissions. Solar panels, wind turbines, electric trains, all of these things have a cost/benefit analysis and lifecycle analysis needs to be considered. 🧵 The argument “we cannot build wind/solar because of the construction emissions” is clearly utter nonsense, but it’s popular nonsense. It was the main premise of the “documentary” Planet of the Humans, and its right from the fossil fuel industry handbook. ecologi.com/articles/clima…

🌍 Hell yes! Banning domestic flights that are already served by high-speed rail is exactly how you decarbonise transport. Cannot wait to do this in the UK once we’ve overhauled our train network. Roll on 2033. reuters.com/article/us-cli… Woah France also nailing it with taking literal trucks off the road. This “rail motorway” will cut some truck journeys from 36 hours by road to 20 hours by train, saving time, money, and emissions. If only the U.K. was working on a way to increase rail freight!

https://twitter.com/Ogilvie_CJ/status/1381221815725527041

🌍 The way we talk about infrastructure projects in the U.K. is utterly broken. HS2 receives nationwide coordinated attacks on the project as a whole, but the drastically more destructive road construction (#RIS2) is left to be fought separately by small local efforts.

https://twitter.com/roadtoruinshrop/status/1380851337865363462

I suspect much of this is because “cars are normal”, and partly that the cost benefit analysis of HS2 has been warped so badly by disinformation. that people think there’s barely any benefits, and the environmental costs have been presented with no context.

https://twitter.com/philsturgeon/status/1372917696543784967

🌍 There are so many scammers in the carbon offset space. Protecting woodlands that were never threatened is an incredibly common scam, along with getting paid for planting timber plantations being planted anyway, then they just cut them later. 🤬

https://twitter.com/climate/status/1379183137364664321

Then there’s this shite. Nigel Farage has nobody’s best interests at heart ever. Maybe he feels bad that Brexit trashed the UK’s reforestation efforts, but more likely he’s cashing in on the tsunami of corporate greenwashing. thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/…

🌍 Now people in my mentions are saying that because slow trains haven’t stopped people flying domestically there’s no reason to build faster trains along the routes people commonly fly because they’re quicker than trains. 🙃 #whyHS2 The fun part about this graphic is that it says domestic trains are 41g. Yeah that’s a fair average when so many are diesel (and can’t be electrified due to limitations of the surrounding environment) but HS2 advertises 8g/km. closer to Eurostar levels of emissions.

🌍 Got people in my mentions adamant we won’t need high-speed electric rail in the future because some of their office worker friends are working from home sometimes at the moment. I don’t even know where to start with that, the stupidity, or the privilege. The idea HS2 is no longer required because a pandemic has some folks WFH is based on daft assumptions. These people think 30% of Brits will WFH two days a week post pandemic forever. Let's take that as a fact (it's not), and keep in mind 55% of rail journeys are commutes.

Some real napkin maths here but in order for HS2 to take 120 years to become carbon neutral, it would have to reduce road use by 0.08% and domestic air travel by 0.06%. If it reduced air and driving by just 5% it would be carbon neutral in 1-2 years. Time to make some policy. One awesome example of policy that should be implemented as soon as HS2 is launched is the outright banning of any domestic flights that are served by high speed rail, like France. railjournal.com/passenger/high…

People are concerned about cutting down 30 hectares (ha) of ancient woodland for HS2. We have 308,000 ha of ancient woodland, so that’s 0.01%.

We need to reforest 30,000 ha/year. In 2019 the target was 5,000 ha and we only did 1,420 ha.

This is a bigger problem than 30 ha. Some of these ancient woodlands are little scraps of trees. Here’s the total phase 1 & 2a list of what’s being cut down. 0.2ha is less than 1/5th of a football pitch

It’s not nothing, we shouldn’t remove woodland for no reason, but trains are a legit way to decarbonise transport

https://twitter.com/dpeilow/status/1356543736109490181

Fuck this and everyone involved.

https://twitter.com/lohstroh/status/1358789181170941953

Running something on “natural gas” doesn’t make it any better. Methane comes from fracking, is leaky as fuck, when it escapes is x30 times more potent than CO2, is still producing CO2 when it gets to be burned, and saying “yeah but banking uses electricity anyway” is not a retort

Jaded people bang on about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods being “for rich people to have more fancy outdoor seating” but they’re more so people of all ages and incomes can get around without being turned into marinara.

https://twitter.com/citycyclists/status/1363765355164934147

Owners of £50 bikes and £5,000 bikes all enjoy not sharing tarmac with speeding tanks semi-consciously piloted by someone half paying attention to their to-go coffee and half paying attention to some algorithm based nonsense GPS route running late for a super important meeting.

This sort of thing is pretty annoying. HS2 Ltd and it’s forestry contractors can’t win. If they protect their trees with tubes to stop voles, shrews, hares and deer, eating them, they’re littering. If they don’t, the survival rate will be pathetic and they’ll be dragged.

https://twitter.com/ScientistsX/status/1360962211011846145

Not cutting anything down in the first place would be a lovely but for context: HS2 Ltd is planting 112ha (hectare) of new woodland, restoring 17ha of dying ancient woodland, and improves 12ha of other woodland. This is so much more than the 30ha it has to cut down. A hectare 👇🏼

In ye olden days you needed to write API descriptions by hand, in text, with a keyboard, which took FOREVER.

These days there are awesome GUI Editors, and an interesting new generation of OpenAPI-aware frameworks are appearing, like annotations but good. dev.to/philsturgeon/t… This cover image, which has been cropped funny and wont be removed, is a visual depiction of how useful Annotation/Comment-based tools usually are.

I got a mention in @libel_vox's awesome tinyletter.com/NetAPINotes/ for this.

tl:dr; Do not confuse proximity with accuracy