James WD

Aging country lad. Rural life. Shooting & fishing. Beginner beekeeper. Probably spend too much time in the kitchen.

[James WD @JamesWD29]

@OJS50 @MerrynSW Sell the house...

[James WD @JamesWD29]

I. Love. Test. Cricket.
#engvnz

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[James WD @JamesWD29]

But I do have a pint of Doom Bar for £2.20.
If I'd been here yesterday I could have had a pint of Green King IPA for £1.85

[James WD @JamesWD29]

I'm inna Weatherspoons at 11:30.

It's not a cliche!

[James WD @JamesWD29]

I'm inna Weatherspoons at 11:30.

It's not a cliche!

[James WD @JamesWD29]

Can't find the ice bucket. 😠
#firstworldproblems

[Tom Harris 🇬🇧 @MrTCHarris]

"I once spent £400,000 of other people's money on jewellery, cosmetics and a campervan and my wife didn't know anything about it."

[James WD @JamesWD29]

That'll do.

[James WD @JamesWD29]

@RateMySausage Just spread it like you would a cracker. (Keep butter v. cold).
Get (or grow) the hottest and perpperiest radishes you can get!

[James WD @JamesWD29]

Radishes, butter, salt, cold white wine. No better early summer appetiser

[Sunday Sport @thesundaysport]

'Just use the graphic for an all-out thermonuclear attack - no fucker will notice'

[Duncan Bannatyne @DuncanBannatyne]

Last week I decided to throw my support behind @AndyBurnhamGM for leadership of the Labour Party and on to PM.
But I cannot do that now that I find out he says Transwomen. IE men. Should be allowed to use the ladies toilets. I can never support anyone that does this.
Biological Women must have single sex spaces.

[James WD @JamesWD29]

There is a limit to old buildings. We've reached it

[James WD @JamesWD29]

Lovely up on the moors. Curlew, lapwing, skylark. But very few grouse - nearly all the heather dead from beetle infestation.

[James WD @JamesWD29]

A Pickering gravestone telling a sad tale from a different time.

[James WD @JamesWD29]

@Bobby_D_2 Our guest who had the venison really enjoyed it. I had a Dexter tartar to start and hoggert rump for main - the lamb sauce with it was the best I've had. Wines, beers, cheeses, all top notch.

[James WD @JamesWD29]

Where was I? Tough edition.

[James WD @JamesWD29]

@Bobby_D_2 Yes we did! The purpose for the visit. Great lunch. Would highly recommend.

[James WD @JamesWD29]

And another. Dog heaven, haring around the beach

[James WD @JamesWD29]

Think this is what is called atmospheric.