Tuesday, 6 July 2021

Peter: No to no meat, please. We're British!

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In "Ministers 'Should Urge Public to Eat Less Meat'", Roger Harrabin (2021) reports that while Climate Change Committee (CCC) has support, the United Kingdom’s government rejects the claims made in its recent report that its response to climate change  "is undermined by inadequate policies and poor implementation in many [policy] areas," which CCC sees as driven by unwillingness to budget funds or to upset voters. According to Harrabin, a spokesperson for Boris Johnson’s government has insisted that they are implementing promised plans that exceed international standards of responses to reduce harmful climate change, citing a 44% reduction in carbon emissions over three decades and the provision of £5.2 billion to enable polluting industries to adopt lower carbon footprints before 2050. Harrabin points out, however, that the CCC argues that greater action is needed to implement change in: home heating, where financial assistance should support requirements to phase out boilers to heat homes; electricity, where tax incentives for clean energy could complement disincentives for environmentally dirty electricity production; and frequent flying, where even if that industry can become more carbon neutral, frequent flying should be restrained. Harrabin notes that environmentalists suspect the Treasury of blocking funds needed for carbon reduction programs. A major indicator of CCC’s dissatisfaction with government action is, Harrabin emphasizes, its disinclination to urge “the UK public … to protect the climate by eating less meat and dairy produce,” which would also bring health benefits from eating less cattle, major emitters of global warming gases. 

Reference 

Harrabin, R. (2021).  Ministers 'should urge public to eat less meat'. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57580254 


Final word count (v3) = 249 words. v1 = 270 words – way over the 250 limit.  
I copied and pasted the above from the Google Doc I wrote in. You can also see the planning I did, which took much longer than I had anticipated, but I was very thorough. It took me a total of 121 minutes to write this summary, most of which was spent in planning – 75 minutes. I think 90 minutes could have been enough, but the two hours taken to write this short paragraph certainly practiced a range of academic writing skills.  

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