Last week the government decided to refuse planning permission for a solar farm in Northamptonshire. This is the same government that last month, possibly encouraged by a letter from the developers Mitsubishi to Rishi Sunak, approved 72 Upper Ground, a prominent, lumpen office block on the South Bank in London.
In the first case they decided that “visual harm” outweighed economic benefits; in the second it was the other way round. The takeaway seems to be this: the carbon-belching construction of 79,000 sq metres of office space, the demand for which is unproven, matters more to them than the production of sustainable energy with estimated carbon savings of 11,000 tonnes a year.
