Net zero was always a terrible idea, but I had no idea it had infiltrated medicine. But yes: Britain’s National Health Service resolved to strive for net zero, and spent £1.4 billion on the effort. The result? Zero:
The health service has ploughed millions into green initiatives, such as rolling out electric ambulances, adopting “climate-friendly pain relief” that does not contain greenhouse gases, and putting environmental credentials at the heart of decisions around medicines and supplies.
Isn’t that per se medical malpractice?
But despite these efforts, the total carbon emissions from the health service are the same as they were five years ago when the “Greener NHS” project was launched.
You might think the NHS would give up, out of sheer embarrassment. But no! “Green” initiatives will continue:
The service has now unveiled a series of new schemes it claims will reduce emissions, including making its plates and bowls blue, hiring net zero managers, and reducing the 63 million pieces of paper it prints each year.
Hiring “net zero managers” won’t accomplish anything, of course, but it will provide jobs for increasingly unemployable liberal university graduates with no useful skills. But what is the deal with blue plates and bowls?
The NHS will roll out blue plates and bowls as part of a net zero drive to trick patients into eating more hospital food. One of the initiatives to reduce the amount of food the NHS wastes each year is “improving crockery”.
The NHS’s “net zero food programme manager” has previously said 20 per cent of all food is wasted – about 100,000 meals per day, meaning the emissions produced by making the food are for nothing – but the health service now claims better crockery could reduce food waste by 15 per cent.
While exact details are not confirmed, the benefits appear to be based on simple exercises carried out at a handful of hospitals where patients are reported to have sent less food back when it was on a blue plate instead of grey or white ones.
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The theory is that foods look more appetising against a background colour, particularly for patients with dementia or visual impairments, they add.
Greenism is a dead ideology, but useless spasms of this sort will continue for years to come.
