OT Flooding/other bad weather.

Yup, that was the sort of thing I was thinking about.

I think many people don't fully understand 'away', as used wrt 'throwing stuff away'.

ITRW, there is no such place of course and places we have thought to be such, now sometimes turn out to not be (landfill that starts producing loads of toxic gas etc).

So 'away' to most people is 'out of their sight', even if that's only in a ditch or local farmers field entrance.

Or flushing stuff down the loo that doesn't breakdown in water or tipping stuff (oil / paint) down the street drain.

I don't know how much of it is ignorance, bad advice ('Flushable wipes') or just couldn't care less about the environment. ;-(

Cheers, T i m

So you dredge all the rivers deep enough to cope with the recent rain.

Their normal level now becomes many feet lower than now. The rest a stinking mass.

And that's before you consider how you dredge a sufficient amount under perhaps most existing bridges.

That would be the Five Year Plan putting farmers under pressure to grow more to feed the growing population, or face re-education? Or is that a risible argument?

Blaming the EU for the fact that dredging has large indirect costs that have to be allowed for as well as the direct ones seems to be somewhat facile to me. One fortunate side effect of Brexit is that it will be much harder to blame the EU for unpopular decisions.

Don't worry. They'll soon find something else to blame.

Indeed and that's a good thing: if we don't like what's going on we can change who is doing it, unlike with the EU.

"Away" in the context of dredged material doesn't just mean 2 miles offshore. I'd be thinking of dumping it beyond the edge of the abyssal plain, where it'll be going down 16000 feet. Or dump it into a submarine canyon, where it'll join all the other sediment already flowing down it.

Of course with people being worried about flooding we could just pile it up somewhere and build houses or airports on it instead

You grossly underestimate the dog-with-a-bone attitude.

So much that has been done in the last forty and more years will be blamed on the EU. So much that happens now and into the future will be blamed on what happened in the last forty and more years.

I wonder how blame will be apportioned when our leaving of the Early Warning and Response System (EWRS) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) is seen to have undermined at least some of our covid-19 responses?

I suspect that having to steam much further and spend much time not dredging is exactly the sort of increased cost that the EU is being blamed for. As you say, it would seem to be the obvious solution; but not cheap.

In this case however the reason that dredging has 'large indirect costs' is precisely because of EU rulings on waste.

They are doing te same with diesl cars, nucler power stations wind turbines and the like. Forcing commercial decisions to follow political whims based on emotional narratives rather than real science.

Why? because then manufacturers will support their parties and allow them to live in a style they don't deserve.

It won't because it hasn't. And we haven't.

You grossly underestimate the dog-with-a-bone attitude.

So much that has been done in the last forty and more years will be blamed on the EU. So much that happens now and into the future will be blamed on what happened in the last forty and more years.

I wonder how blame will be apportioned when our leaving of the Early Warning and Response System (EWRS) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) is seen to have undermined at least some of our covid-19 responses?

Of course. This government is still blaming so much on the previous Labour one - some 10 years down the line. How long does it take to correct something you knew at the time was wrong, given you voted against it?

Surely you'd start out with a list of everything that was done wrong and correct them one by one?

Odd that Labour didn?t with all that Maggie did that they howled about at the time.

Exactly the response I'd expect from you. Because Labour did or didn't do something it is then perfectly OK for the Tories to do the same.

Never said anything even remotely like that. Just rubbing your nose in you trademark flagrant dishonesty and one eyed bullshit.

And you succeeded in doing just that to yourself. Rather typical. Provided you can blame someone for anything makes it OK.

No one is blaming anyone let alone saying its OK.

Thats what they did on a part of a housing estate near where I live. The ground was marshy so they raised it by around 3 metres before building. Nearby they dug a large hole to extract the earth for the task, The hole is now a very large wildlife pond in an area designated as a public park and which also serves the purpose of draining the previous (seasonal) marshy area.

that is a sane way to do lowland development on a flood plain