Madam,

Dorothy Wilson is right to be dismayed about the Rali Bae Ceredigion (‘Dismayed that first closed rally being held in county’).

Just about every day brings a new news item about the speed with which the climate is warming, whether it be forest fires in Siberia, the melting icecap in Greenland, or record high temperatures in Alaska - to name three recent examples. The suspicion is that the climate is changing much faster than was ever imagined.

Yet north Ceredigion will soon be the venue for this new car rally; possibly the most frivolous waste of fossil fuels that it is possible to imagine. The Rali Bae Ceredigion, due to take place in early September, will see 120 cars covering a total race length of 44 miles in four stages. Roads in the Bontgoch, Pendam/Ponterwyd, Ystumtuen and Nant-y-moch areas will be closed for the day. Cars will slowly proceed from stage to stage on public roads.

As well as the carbon emissions from the competition cars themselves, those from an estimated 1,500 marshals, officials and mechanics required on the day need to be added. On top of that will be the emissions involved from their journeys to north Ceredigion from their homes, plus an unknown (but probably considerable) number of spectators. Rally organisers claim that the use of shuttle buses to take spectators to vantage points on the rally route will “boost the event’s environmental credentials”. As if it had any!

No-one who has given their endorsement to this rally can possibly have considered its environmental impact. If they had it would have been a nonstarter. And yet rally organisers hope that this rally will become an annual event, “developing and expanding” in future years.

Campaigners will be pressurising those who backed this rally to drop their support for it in the coming months. These include Visit Wales, part of the Welsh Assembly Government, which has recently declared a Climate Emergency. Ben Lake MP (Plaid Cymru spokesman on the environment, among other things) backs the rally, despite his party strongly supporting the Climate Emergency.

Campaigners will also be pressurising those who stand to benefit financially from the rally. Those who seem likely to gain the most are Ceredigion County Council – who narrowly failed to declare a Climate Emergency themselves earlier this year – and Aberystwyth University.

The university will be making a tidy profit from hosting the rally. Rooms in its halls of residence will be rented to drivers and officials. Space for parking, vehicle movements and servicing, office activity, presentation areas, and catering facilities will be available.

The university needs to examine its conscience on the Climate Emergency. Rally organisers have been quite open about the university’s support – without it the rally just would not happen.

When we are all being urged to leave the car at home and use public transport to save carbon emissions, this new rally is close to being an obscenity. It should not be repeated.

Yours etc, Jeremy Moore, Penrhyncoch.

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