Bob Berzins' latest smoke blowing exercise
Bob Berzins’ latest blog opens by admitting that 2026 brought “a huge number of wildfires”, then spends the rest of the piece pretending those fires never happened. That tells you most of what you need to know about it. This is a familiar Berzins formula: a selective reading of the evidence, an emotive headline figure, and a conclusion that was written before the research began.
Readers should remember how Mr Berzins has handled facts before. In a single presentation to the Sheffield Green Party, he made claim after claim that bore no resemblance to reality.
He told his audience that peat is “almost pure carbon”. The best analysis puts it at around 25%.
He claimed adders are locally extinct on Peak District grouse moors. Derbyshire’s adder population is considered stable, and walkers in the National Park are regularly warned to keep their dogs away from them.
He said medicated grit is used with no regulation or oversight. It can only be used with a veterinary prescription, and vets are fully regulated.
He estimated that grouse shooting around Sheffield employs about ten gamekeepers. The real number across South Yorkshire and the Peak District is far higher, before you count the jobs that depend on them.
He spoke of a “huge problem” with birds of prey in grouse shooting areas. In his own patch of South Yorkshire, the BTO survey recorded major increases across birds of prey, including merlins, peregrines and a 1,250% rise in buzzards, while hen harrier numbers nationally have reached their highest level in 30 years under a Defra recovery plan that gamekeepers support.
Someone with this record does not get the benefit of the doubt. Read his latest effort with that in mind and you see the flaws in his argument.
The blog is supposedly about smoke and public health. Yet the largest smoke events on our moors in 2026 came from uncontrolled summer wildfires, which burn hotter, deeper and for longer than any managed burn and do real damage to peat. Mr Berzins says nothing about the smoke from those fires, or about the fuel load that fed them.
He has, in fact, already told us what happens without managed burning. In that same presentation he acknowledged that there had been no controlled burning on the land run by the Sheffield Moors Partnership for “donkeys years”. Those 56 square kilometres have suffered some of the most devastating wildfires in recent memory, including the loss of 200 years of stored carbon in a single night. A blog genuinely concerned with smoke and carbon would weigh that against the managed burns he objects to. His does not, because the answer would not suit him.
The section is titled “Burning on Moscar Estate, October 2026”. It contains no evidence of any burning on Moscar in October 2026. Instead, readers get a 2023 study and photographs from a different estate a mile away. Recycling a three-year-old incident under a current-sounding headline is not reporting.
Mr Berzins quotes the national estimate of 29,000 to 43,000 deaths a year from air pollution and the £1.5 billion cost to the NHS, then sets them beside moorland burning as though one explains the other. Those figures cover all sources of air pollution: road traffic, industry, domestic heating and more. Nowhere does he show what share, if any, is attributable to managed moorland burning.
Placing the numbers side by side and letting readers draw the wrong conclusion is exactly the kind of misdirection his record should lead us to expect.
The same goes for his comparison with a third of UK transport emissions. He tells us there is no safe level of air pollution. If he truly believed that, he would be campaigning against wildfires, wood burners and barbecues on the moors with the same energy. He isn’t, because his target was never smoke. It was grouse shooting.
He claims the shooting industry has “fooled Natural England” and that there is “no enforcement”. He offers no evidence for either. Natural England is the statutory regulator; suggesting it has been duped across decades of management plans is a serious allegation, and he makes it in a single sentence with nothing to back it up. The same is true of his claim that burning increases flood risk, and of his sneer that gamekeepers have been “convinced” particulates are good for them. These are wild insinuations that again don't have any basis in reality.
Mr Berzins complains that “we don’t hear anything” about mowing from land managers, then publishes photographs of mown moorland and a tractor he says “all estates seem to have”. Estates are clearly mowing. They also burn because mowing is not possible everywhere and does not remove the cut material from the moor. His own pictures show land managers using a mix of tools, which is precisely what responsible management looks like.
Strip away the borrowed statistics, the recycled 2023 incident and the insinuations, and there is very little left. What remains is a man who is ranting to audiences that peat is almost pure carbon, that adders have vanished from grouse moors and that birds of prey are in trouble where they are thriving.
The people who live and work on our moors, and the communities downwind of the wildfires he ignores, deserve better than Berzins' incoherent rantings.
