EU Referendum: Anti human?

Leo Hickman in The Guardian is worried about the effects of road gritting on the environment.
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Nothing about humans and broken bones though, car smashes, economic losses, etc., etc. But what does that matter compared with the welfare of trees and the little birdies?

[October '09: Florida Power and Light spends huge sums on insane attempts to make the world cooler]

President Obama's appearance yesterday at America's largest solar power plant, a Florida Power & Light (FPL) facility in DeSoto County, was of course planned to rally support for the administration's renewable energy efforts and green economy stimulus initiatives.

The President praised FPL and announced hundreds of millions of dollars in new federal matching funds for further such job-creating, eco-friendly clean energy initiatives. A good news story, but...as is so often the case in politics, the Devil is in the details.

[January '10:  In record cold, only 1,300 transformers fail]: South Florida homeowners sue FPL over cold spell outages» Naples Daily News

The complaint is over the "systemic failure of FP&L's equipment, including the wholesale failure of transformers, power lines and other equipment across FP&L's power grid in Palm Beach and Broward counties." The suit alleges that throughout the area "old, undersized, or otherwise inadequate FP&L transformers were incapable of handling the energy load," causing transformers to shut down or burn out altogether and leaving more than 25,000 homeowners in the two counties without heat and power in near-freezing conditions.
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"Out of the 800,000 transformers in our system, we had to replace about 1,300, or .2 percent. Our transformers are designed to meet normal weather conditions in Florida, but even under the record-setting cold weather we experienced, they held up well."