Climate protest heroes are prisoners of conscience

Phoebe Plummer (left) and Anna Holland were sentenced to two years and 20 months, respectively, for throwing soup at the glass protecting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London in 2022. Photograph: Getty

George Monbiot refers to the young women sentenced last week to two years and 20 months respectively as climate protesters (As the waters rise, a two-year sentence for throwing soup. That’s the farcical reality of British justice, 1 October). Perhaps a term we now need to use, after the disproportionate sentencing witnessed over the last year, is “prisoners of conscience”. I find it shocking that both major parties in the UK think it is acceptable to have prisoners of conscience in our jails.
Rosalind Trantor
Batheaston, Somerset

• Your excellent exposé (Most soft plastic collected for recycling is burned, campaigners say, 1 October) says incinerated plastic is “burned for energy”. While this is a technically accurate term, burning waste “for energy” is worse than coal in terms of emissions. Any energy produced as a byproduct of incineration is dirty energy. The term is a form of greenwash. You should avoid it.
Ann Jones
London

• It was pleasing to read that pine martens have been reintroduced to Dartmoor after a 150-year absence (Report, 1 October), but it’s not truly the case that this reintroduction applies across the whole of south-west England. Around the south-east area of the Lizard, below the Helford river, if you know where to look you will find them – they never left.
Ken Rees
Manaccan, Cornwall

• It seems perfectly appropriate that a comet last seen in the stone age is here again (Report, 1 October). The way we’re going, that is the age we’re heading for.
Neville Goodman
Bristol

• Bob Dylan is one of the greatest singer-songwriters ever, but surely not the greatest (Letters, 1 October). Tom Waits? Leonard Cohen? Clive James thought the latter should have won the Nobel prize and said “Dylan probably feels the same”.
Brian Smith
Berlin, Germany

• Dylan was one of the greatest songwriters of the 1960s and the worst singer of all time.
Steve Vanstone
Wolverhampton

• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.