In response to MP Richard Harrington’s request for primary school children to ‘save the planet’.

Since IPCC climate scientists were found to have omitted solar physicists in their 97 per cent consensus, opportunistic politicians have decided instead to boost their credibility by recruiting primary school children as climate scientists (“Calling climate change ambassadors”, August 2). As Harrington insists: “With such great minds in Watford”, local schools working “collectively as one big team” must “tackle the crisis” and “safeguard the planet”.

So far, the government has exported our excess CO2 emissions to the factories of India and China while creating a new class of grateful tax-funded corporatists drunk on government subsidies for technologies that can never supply the reliable energy we need for our survival.

When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, we shall continue to be dependent on nuclear generated electricity from France and fossil-fuels from Norway, Russia and Qatar to run our big industries, heat our homes and keep the NHS operational.

Perversely, tankers are now delivering LNG, liquified natural gas, from shale-gas reserves in America to Grangemouth in Scotland while our considerably cheaper gas remains trapped as little bubbles in shale-rock adjacent to the UK’s most industry-deprived northern towns.

The petrochemicals group Ineos has accused the government of using “politically expedient, slippery back-door manoeuvres to end shale” and claimed Britain was on course for an “energy crisis” if it shunned fracking in favour of “windmills and imported gas from countries which are potentially unstable”.

Russian energy oligarchs are much more popular with the EU’s crony-corporatists than the UK’s own Sir Jim Ratcliffe, CEO of Ineos, whose shale-gas exploration languishes while Richard Harrington and his fellow geniuses at the Climate-Change-All-Party-Parliamentary-Group seek the advice of primary school children.

Prof. Christine Wheeler McNulty

Oxhey