Sir, re: your front page story last week when a Scottish Civil servant went against the wishes of her employers claiming that she knows best!!

Then her employers state that she followed the civil service code! What is this amazing code that civil service can fall back on when the shit hits the fan?

As an ex-councillor, I had always asked for a copy of this code and probably wait like everybody until doomsday, it is like hands up who is a FreeMason!!

One wonders who does Liz Ditchburn answer to?

Scotland will never reach its carbon targets by reducing animal stock, as the farm stock is the whipping boy of climate equations, it is pointless to charge headlong to ruin a farming industry just on a whim. If Liz Ditchburn left office this policy would change, because others have different points of view when it comes to Carbon credits.

Take the mighty USA – 90% of all its electricity is coal power, they have massive open cast coalpits, and all that coal is dug with fossil fuel. And they do not have 'scrubbers' in their powerhouse chimneys – all the carbon goes to atmosphere!

India is another vast user of coal for its industry, all they produce themselves of coal plus the millions of tonnes they import from Russia and Australia, they produce huge amounts of steel!

China to an extent is a large user of coal for electricity and steel, but they have 'scrubbers' in the chimneys and capture a lot of the carbon before it goes to atmosphere – they are the world's foremost in renewable energy.

EU is probably the biggest block that is addressing climate change, yet its programne is full of hypocrisy – they encourage the felling of equatorial forests to provide plywood to the construction industry and then plant the footprint of the forest with soya. And palm oil trees and the raising of Zebu beef that no one can eat unless it is ground up and made into beefburgers.This is the type of beef that Tories want to feed to us, as it will be cheap.

These are the statistics that Liz Ditchburn must work to – its is pointless living in a matchbox. The world is a big place, and the UK themselves are so small minded that a pinprick can not set an example to the rest?

If all the steel that is used in Scotland and the carbon that has been released in the making of the steel be subtracted from the carbon that is released from agriculture, Scotland is carbon neutral.

Angus A Macdonald,

Balivanich,

Benbecula