Tree Planting Pledges

More or Less: Behind the Stats

BBC

Business, Mathematics, Science, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2019

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The UK General Election is fast approaching, top of the agenda are the political parties green ambitions and one particular initiative is garnering a lot of attention, tree planting. The Labour Party has the most ambitious target – a whopping 2 billion trees planted by 2040. How much land would this take, how does it stack up against other party pledges and what difference will it make? Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Lizzy McNeill

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.
0:03.8	We are weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford.
0:09.8	This week, trees.
0:11.8	Britain's general election is full of them, and Christmas is coming, so hop the heck.
0:20.8	All the major British political parties have said they'd like to plant some trees to offset carbon emissions.
0:26.6	Here is a dramatic reenactment of their announcements.
0:29.6	Welcome to the annual tree planting. Pledge auction.
0:32.4	Please get ready with your bids. We have 30 million from the Conservatives.
0:36.2	That's 30 million from the Conservatives.
0:38.2	Anyone want to go above that?
0:40.2	60 million.
0:41.2	Oh, 60 million from the SMP.
0:42.8	Oh, 60 million also from the Lib Dems.
0:45.0	Don't think they know really how auctions work.
0:47.0	Oh, the green party are in 700 million trees.
0:50.2	I have 700 million trees from the Greens.
0:52.6	Two billion.
0:53.6	And a late entry from Labour with two billion trees pledged.
0:57.4	That's two billion trees going once, going twice millions.
1:01.2	No, I'm sorry. I can't accept that bid from the Brexit party.
1:04.2	A little too vague for our purposes.
1:07.0	If that's all going a bit fast for you, here are those numbers again.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.