UK told it must double low carbon investment to meet net zero targets Great Britain needs to at least double its low carbon investment if it is to reach the ambition of achieving net zero by 2050. According to a report by the National Audit Office (NAO), the government estimates that new low carbon investment in 2022 in the UK was £23 billion. But this will need to swell two to three times by …
I’d argue that it isn’t just about investing in low carbon energy, it’s also about not being so profligate in our use of energy.
‘Sleeping’ devices use a surprising amount of power. Games consoles particularly so. So don’t let the device sleep. If you aren’t using it, turn it off altogether. I’ve put a switch in each room that turns off all the sockets (because I’m too lazy to do them individually!)
‘Smart’ devices are generally wasteful and don’t add significantly to quality of life. There are exceptions like smart thermostats, which can actually save energy, but in most cases think before buying. Is it really going to improve your quality of life so significantly?
Electric cars are great, but not necessarily environmentally friendly. Use a bike for short journeys, and when buying a car don’t buy an SUV when a smaller car will meet your needs.
Bitcoin is a catastrophic waste of power. Let’s ditch it.
Do all of that (and I’m sure that there are lots of other ideas which could save power too), and we won’t need as much energy generating capacity of any kind. And if we don’t need it then we can’t be held to ransom over it - whether through energy prices or through enemy states threatening to turn off the oil / gas or blowing up the generating infrastructure.
Reduce is always the first element of the mantra...
Sleeping isn't the biggest issue in the world, though it is a constant draw - take the idle power draw and multiply it by 8.5 as a good approximation for the units used in a year (that allows for 260 hours of active use, five hours a week).
That kind of calculation means I'm not worried by the watt each of my smart thermostats and plugs take - they definitely help me understand and limit energy usage.
EVs are good compared with ICE, though walking is better, and a pedal cycle is the most efficient form of transport by a long way.
And we can all do something about that, can't we?
Lord Muck can mothball a Jag, and turn the swimming pool down a degree or two.
Mrs Bloggs will have to keep the windows shut in her badly insulated flat until the mould gets to the kiddies' lungs.
Reduce is going to mean reduce living standards - the devil in this detail is how that reduction is going to be distributed. I'm not convinced that's been thought about very carefully. (Actually I'm not convinced that thought is a part of Government processes at all these days.)
"Reduce is going to mean reduce living standards"
Not necessarily.
Reduce could mean restarting the government insulation programme - specifically targeted at those who couldn't otherwise afford to add insulation.
It can mean replacing old/failed gas boilers with heat pumps instead of new gas boilers.
It can mean, as in the post above, choosing to walk to the local shop, or to school.
There are plenty of ways to reduce consumption and improve living standards as a result.
-Reduce could mean restarting the government insulation programme
Which will be subcontracted to local private cowboy builders cold-calling pensioners, as these schemes always are.
-It can mean replacing old/failed gas boilers with heat pumps instead of new gas boilers.
Meet my concrete. Lots of it. Have fun digging through it and finding space for a heat pump. But don't worry, I won't be getting a new gas boiler as builders' regs would require new gas pipes and that would mean ripping out my fitted kitchen. Thankfully, the old one, unlike an iThing, is built to last decades.
-It can mean, as in the post above, choosing to walk to the local shop, or to school.
In rain, snow or 40 degrees. But many people cannot carry their shopping home in any weather and would rather not pay the 25% extra to buy from their local shop. Bus services are being reduced, albeit not by as much as the trains. And just wait for the 57 varieties of traffic reduction schemes to come on stream. Expect serious unhappiness as traffic gridlocks around closed roads and property values are hit.
Brexit has beggared the UK by about one third. 25% reduction in Sterling, the rest in extra border costs. Deglobalisation ends access to low-cost Chinese solar tech. Many Britons can no longer afford the basics, never mind the luxury of spending the extra to transition to green. That ship sailed with Brexit. The government are now having to fund a UK EV industry out of public funds. Ditto for silicon. And what else? The UK can no longer afford any of this. The UKG are hoping that private industry will innovate a magical fix (faery dust perhaps) that ensures we can have a net zero economy. But it won't, because it isn't possible.
We can, at best, shave a few percent off our impact. So we should be building solar farms, wind farms, desalination plants, and more reservoirs as fast as we can.
"-It can mean, as in the post above, choosing to walk to the local shop, or to school.
In rain, snow or 40 degrees."
The "but sometimes" defense...
40 degrees is far too hot to be walking to the shops (yes, I know you're clearly using an archaic temperature scale), but that's not the temperature all year round.
It's remarkable how many days of the year it's perfectly possible to walk to the shops.
For those who can't carry much that's fine, you don't need to buy a month's worth of food at a time - and that newfangled invention, I think they're calling it "wheel" can be used to carry a significant amount of goods for very little effort.
Yes there will be those who can't walk to the shops, but that's a very small proportion and we're talking about reducing excess use, not preventing all use of anything.
"...not being so profligate in our use of energy."
Absolutely!!
‘Sleeping’ devices / ‘Smart’ devices - Wasteful, yes, although quite far down on the list of large power wasters (I believe around 5% of household consumption). But that's still completely wasted energy and every little counts. (Got to note that here on the continent, and AFAIK most of the rest of the world, you can't "switch it off at the plug" because there's no switches on the plugs)
AFAIK no.1 waste (particularly in UK) is heating because housing standards generally suck. People still talk of installing double glazing while in the colder parts of Europe triple glazing is standard. Home insulation generally sucks. Force every new building to insulate to very high standards, and also switch from gas heating to heat pumps which are much more efficient.
"Electric cars are great, but not necessarily environmentally friendly"
Anyway much more environmentally friendly than an ICE car. Even if electric car is powered by electricity from an oil-burning station, the power station is getting 50%+ efficiency while the car engine is below 40%. (Also waste gases and particles can be captured at a single point at the power station while cars are spewing theirs all over including over pedestrians). In any case ICE cars are very mature technology, while electric ones still have further to develop in terms of battery capacity, longevity and charging times. As battery technology advances and matures, we'll arrive at a point where electric cars are the same price or cheaper than an equivalent ICE car, then the only limitation will be how quickly we can add charging capacity. But yes, bike for short journeys (or e-bike if you're in particularly hilly area), it's also much healthier for you!!!
"Do all of that ... and we won’t need as much energy generating capacity of any kind"
The best ways we have of reducing overall energy consumption involves centralising the power generation, because even if we replace every boiler and ICE car with equivalents that are twice as efficient, we still need to generate that electricity somewhere (and upgrade the distribution grid to handle that). So we still will need to build a huge amount of electrical generation capacity. Did I hear the word 'nuclear'??
Can someone quantify these "huge economic benefits" !?
Perhaps I'm just a bit slow, but when you mention "investment" so many times in an article, you kind of expect to get something back at the end of it.
Or has The Register just turned into the tech arm of The Guardian?
The whole of europe could simply cease to exist tomorrow, and it would just be a rounding error on global emissions compared to increases India, China and the US. And anyway Net Zero by 2050 is just an arbitrary target, it's not an investment.
Investment requires returns. Financial investment must produce financial returns.
I'm not putting my pension fund into anything that doesn't benefit me. I won't be around in 2050, I'll be lucky to be here in two or three years. So I'm a selfish bastard, but in my old age I want to be warm and comfortable. I haven't left any children to die when this world overheats.
I look at the Amazon being destroyed, I served in the jungles of southeast Asia hoping that the peace we restored would benefit the peoples and the jungle, but that all turned out to be a total failure. At this moment I'm looking out on a wildflower meadow that I created and the 400 trees that I planted 25 years ago - that's my environmental contribution.
I've got three children and they aren't likely to die when this world overheats. More people die of cold than heat. Many many more people.
The climate models which are quoted by The Guardian are SSP5-8.5 which are extremely unlikely. Somehow you only see the very worst possible news in the summary of the AR6 report from the IPCC, but if you dig into the actual detail it's really not that bad.
If we carry on the way we are for the next few decades things will get slightly warmer and the sea will get slightly higher (around 1cm per decade). I think we can put in mitigations to deal with the possible 8cm rise by the end of the century, and we're not going to see most of Manhattan under water. Probably by that time we'll have developed energy technologies so we won't need fossil fuels.
All this talk of "the world is on fire" and "we've almost reached tipping point" is utter utter bollocks, designed to scare people.
-> I look at the Amazon being destroyed
I agree but for one thing. We in Europe, for example, can't point a finger and say "don't cut down those forests" when we have cut down ours. If we collectively want the Amazon to remain as jungle, then we collectively should pay for it. Pay the people of Amazonia not to log. Near to where I am there is a park with some large trees, some of which were cut down last year for "safety reasons". They had apparently become diseased and may fall down. Fair enough, I accept that. But no replacements have been planted. numberOfTrees--
-> I served in the jungles of southeast Asia hoping that the peace we restored would benefit the peoples and the jungle
I'm not sure which campaign(s) you were in, but wars never have such lofty goals. They are about beating an enemy or stealing land and resources (often from an enemy who rightfully owns them). Next up spreading democracy at the point of a gun.
| The whole of europe could simply cease to exist tomorrow, and it would just be a rounding error on global emissions compared to increases India, China and the US
Precisely. Its just virtue signalling by the politicians. The rest of the world will be delighted to see us cut our own throats whilst declining to join us. The eventual outcome will be exactly the same.
The mantra from the top is that we're going to be world leaders in Green Tech and the rest of the world will beat a path to our doors to buy our stuff. Glasgow just switched their bus fleet to largely electric. What brand name is written on the back of the new buses? BYD of course. World leader in ... borrowing from other people to buy their tech.
I could rant forever about this. Electric everything? Forget it. Not enough generation, not enough transmission (at any level of the network), not enough storage for long periods of still, cold conditions. It just goes on and on. It'll take a generation to build out the infrastructure.
Then the complete and utter inappropriateness of heat pumps for the vast majority of our buildings. Frosting up in winter (air source), low flow temperatures, just plain ugly to look at. Do you want our built environment to look like Hong Kong or Shanghai with a metal box under very window?
Assuming heat pumps actually lived up to the manufacturer's claims of COP (efficiency) and that we could heat our hones with a 40' flow temperature (neither vaguely realistic, but lets assume), then the broken wholesale energy market still makes electricity retail prices nearly 5 times gas, so a heat pump will cost MORE to run as well as a LOT MORE to buy. When did I sign up for this for this death march?
There is one simple and glaringly obvious solution -- figure out green hydrogen, put it in the existing pipelines, distribution network, storage facilities, to be burned by existing gas boilers (most boilers manufactured in the last few years are hydrogen ready, because some governments get it). No large scale shift to a new and unworkable energy infrastructure required. Its pretty much rule 101 when you are trying to migrate a large user base, MAKE IT BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE.
"I could rant forever about this. Electric everything? Forget it. Not enough generation, not enough transmission (at any level of the network), not enough storage for long periods of still, cold conditions. It just goes on and on. It'll take a generation to build out the infrastructure."
So there is, in your mind, no way to increase generation capacity or distribution?
No concept of distributed generation and load balancing...
You must still run on a 286 with a 9600 baud modem, because no upgrades are ever possible...
Get a grip on reality and look at what is actually happening... generation is increasing continuously, and storage options are improving as well. Of course we don't have enough storage yet - for the same reason we didn't have "enough" petrol stations 130 years ago.
"Then the complete and utter inappropriateness of heat pumps for the vast majority of our buildings. Frosting up in winter (air source), low flow temperatures, just plain ugly to look at. Do you want our built environment to look like Hong Kong or Shanghai with a metal box under very window?"
Why are heat pumps unsuitable? Our air is certainly not colder than that in Norway. Our buildings might be relatively poorly insulated, but that only *increases* the benefit from using an efficient heat source. We're not talking about window box air conditioning units here, but ASHP units, which are not situated "one under every window".
It's almost as if you've decided without actually looking into it that you just don't want to know.
"Assuming heat pumps actually lived up to the manufacturer's claims of COP (efficiency) and that we could heat our hones with a 40' flow temperature (neither vaguely realistic, but lets assume), then the broken wholesale energy market still makes electricity retail prices nearly 5 times gas, so a heat pump will cost MORE to run as well as a LOT MORE to buy. When did I sign up for this for this death march?"
Well, SCOP figures are published by a variety of individuals, and a SCOP of 4 is not unreasonable - 3.5 is pretty easy to get.
I've run my gas heating over the winter with a flow temp of 40 degrees, so yes it is realistic... It's actually really nice as well, the temperature doesn't swing wildly as the boiler short cycles.
Electricity is generally 4 times the price of gas, not 5.
The death march is the one you're on, not those advocating for sensible technologies.
"There is one simple and glaringly obvious solution -- figure out green hydrogen, put it in the existing pipelines, distribution network, storage facilities, to be burned by existing gas boilers (most boilers manufactured in the last few years are hydrogen ready, because some governments get it). No large scale shift to a new and unworkable energy infrastructure required. Its pretty much rule 101 when you are trying to migrate a large user base, MAKE IT BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE."
Hydrogen is not backwards compatible with our gas network - it has a role to play, but that role is in long term storage (alongside flow batteries) where it is not transported significant distances.
It leaks out of anything, it is odourless (and will leak without the odour leaking), it's explosive in reasonable concentrations, it will embrittle copper pipes (making leaks more likely)
This is possibly your most laughable claim.
There is one simple and glaringly obvious solution -- figure out green hydrogen
Ah yes, hydrogen. So we are going to dedicate electricity production that we don't have spare to producing hydrogen for heating. Masterful idea.
When some educated idiot deploys this on scale and then inevitably runs out of hydrogen then i'll tell you exactly how the hydrogen will be produced; existing natural gas is Methane; ie CH4 which is one carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms. All that's going to happen is that the methane will be cracked to produce hydrogen; and there appears to be more research being done on that than generating "green" hydrogen in the first place. So natural gas will be burned to generate the energy to convert more natural gas to hydrogen with a net increase of CO2 emissions. As I say, as an idea I think that it's completely masterful given that we'll have to import the gas at the going rate as well. It's a very well disguised way of saying "remain with gas indefinitely".
Alternately, build several dozen nuclear reactors enmasse to a single design to force production costs down through serial production. This massive increase in the supply of electricity reduces costs to the customer, at which point you can deploy technology that was boring decades ago like immersion heaters for hot water, and storage heaters backed with fan heaters for heating.
Obviously this won't happen because it is simply a matter of doing boring building work now rather than kicking the problem down the road by developing bleeding edge technology that doesn't exist (and if it did exist, v0.1A almost certainly wouldn't actually work properly) to address the problem.
"Alternately, build several dozen nuclear reactors enmasse to a single design to force production costs down through serial production. This massive increase in the supply of electricity reduces costs to the customer"
Why limit yourself to dozens... We should be building hundreds of micro plants. Many of them can stack into existing power plant sites to replace the boilers currently fuelled by burning stuff, a couple of them at virtually every motorway service station*, stack a few at steel plants to power induction heating systems...
* Service stations are ideal... spread enough to be useful, high power connections already exist, even more power is needed, far enough away from nimbys...
Given that the only prospective design for a UK Small Modular Reactor is ~500MW (about the capacity of one of Sizewell B's two turbines) and the security and compliance concerns about having reactors scattered around the place then it's difficult to see much prospect of them being installed in any manner other than in clusters of half a dozen at existing sites to make use of the existing security, and so that they are all monitored by engineers etc.
One point of the micro reactors (which are shipping container sized) is to reduce the security risks (since there isn't a huge amount of material anywhere) and massively reduce the need for human control of the power generation. They're looking at 10MWe sized units.
Design the reactors to fail safe - being small they don't generate hundreds of megawatts of decay heat for days after being "shut down", which is what makes conventional reactors relatively difficult to deal with. If your decay heating is small enough that the core can passively shed that heat at a reasonable temperature... then huge swathes of failure modes simply go away.
That means you can actually have a pretty simple control system, with the ability to turn up or down the proverbial wick at the request of the grid.
Are these things going to be popping up completely unguarded in the next five years, no.
But we could reasonably design secure facilities at service stations (which tend to have quite alot of land around them) to house a couple of micro reactors - that's probably 20MW (or 80 ultra rapid charge points) of local generation, with free heat for the service station itself. With a 20MW grid connection... at times of low local demand you can push 20MW into the grid, at times of high demand you could use 40MW locally (or 160 chargers at 250kW - probably more than are needed).
Replace (and refuel) a unit every couple of weeks and you've got a two year cycle across all service stations and 2GW of distributed generation (6-10% of usage today).
Mind you - how many service stations have four hectares available around them? My guess is quite a few... and an SMR on those sites would be quite reasonable. Doesn't need to be road access to the service station itself, they're just useful position indicators.
"The rest of the world will be delighted to see us cut our own throats whilst declining to join us. The eventual outcome will be exactly the same."
So, just because everyone else is trashing the place we should just join in??? And with regards to "cut our own throats", that's bullshit based on fear of change. But even if you don't believe in climate change or don't give a shit about the environment, there are still solid reasons to go to 'electric everything'. British and Norwegian gas fields aren't running forever and even in the present have limited capacity, which leaves UK and Europe highly dependent on energy sources who you really don't want as your trusted partners - Russia, the middle East and some of the most corrupt regimes in Africa. Even if you're burning stuff, overall efficiency is much greater if you burn stuff in one place and send the electricity, not to mention the savings in particulate emissions. And if you build up nuclear capacity now (ie plants will come online in the next 10-20 years), you're at least covered for generation for a further 40-50 years after that. (We might even have gotten fusion to work by that time!!!)
As you yourself mention, the cost of electricity has more to do with broken markets than any technical reason that electricity is much more expensive than gas. So fix the markets.
"It'll take a generation to build out the infrastructure."
Yes it will, which is all the more reason to start now!
"green hydrogen, put it in the existing pipelines, distribution network, storage facilities"
AFAIK H2 will leak out of existing pipelines, distribution networks and storage facilities. Not sure if by a very significant amount, but if you have to upgrade the whole gas distribution network, might as well upgrade the electrical grid instead and ditch the piping.
Can someone quantify these "huge economic benefits" !?
Yep. Your going to have to buy a new car as petrol/diesel are eliminated, and a new heating system for your house as gas heating goes away, plus new appliances for cooking as gas cooking goes away.
If your a manufacturer then this is a huge economic benefit to you as consumers will be forced into buying things they otherwise wouldn't have bought. I say "wouldn't otherwise have bought" because electric costs 3x the cost of gas, and who's going to willingly triple their heating and cooking bills?
A back of the envelope calculation would suggest that we are going to need several multiples of our existing electricity output to deal with electric cars, electric heating and electric cooking.
Put it this way; that huge new nuclear plant at Hinkley C? it's 3.2GW. We used ~35GW of power daily before the current energy prices forced consumption down slightly so doubling our output would require building another 11 of them. How much discussion of this do you see?
It appears rather elementary that a failure to build infrastructure on that level means that either we aren't doing electrification after all, or following basic economics electricity prices will rise until astronomical prices force reduced demand to the point that only the richest in the population can afford to drive, heat their houses, eat warm food and enjoy hot showers.
"who's going to willingly triple their heating and cooking bills?"
You appear to have forgotten that the energy needed to cook by electricity isn't the same as by gas.
For instance - an induction hob puts ~85% of the energy consumed into the food, compared with ~40% for a gas burner (~75% for a conventional electric hotplate or in an oven).
So for one kWh of heat you need 1.18kWh of electricity or 2.5kWh of gas. If you take the typical gas price as 3 times electricity then that's only 40% more expensive, for a fairly small load each day.
For that you eliminate the risk of explosion, reduce the pollution in your house, which includes such lovely things as benzene, and save the standing charge for gas.
Even accounting for 55% losses in the power station and transmission you burn no more gas (and some of your power won't be coming from gas, so it's going to be a net drop in gas burnt).
For heating (water and space) you'd use a heat pump - why limit yourself to a mere 100% efficiency? Again running with your 3x price differential (I usually use 4x) and assuming 90% efficiency for the gas boiler you only need a SCOP of 2.7 (3.6 for 4x) to come out even in running costs - and that's readily achievable.
"following basic economics electricity prices will rise until astronomical prices force reduced demand to the point that only the richest in the population can afford to..."
No, following basic economics, as demand increases and prices rise, generating electricity will be more profitable, so more investors will build more and more electric generation capacity, which will match supply to the demand and bring prices back down.
@jmch
"No, following basic economics, as demand increases and prices rise, generating electricity will be more profitable, so more investors will build more and more electric generation capacity, which will match supply to the demand and bring prices back down."
Only if they are allowed to. Unfortunately generation is pushed towards technology that doesnt work instead of even using our existing capacity. We have working coal plants which keep being switched on in winter because reality doesnt care about the green madness. Germany pushed hard on green and falls back to coal. France has a wonderful supply of nukes which keep everyones lights on but they are ageing out.
Supply would rise if we would be allowed to increase supply. Constrain the supply and prices rise.
No, following basic economics, as demand increases and prices rise, generating electricity will be more profitable, so more investors will build more and more electric generation capacity, which will match supply to the demand and bring prices back down.
Great news. On behalf of everybody living in the UK, how long until all of the additional supply reduces prices back to what it was before the Ukraine war?
Well, to get enough supply, we're basically talking nuclear power, so there's 5 years talking about it, 5 years to even get all the permits to start, 10 years to build to plan, quite possibly with a few years overrun and a couple of years until it's commissioned and providing power....
Does 2050 work for you??
Oh, what am I saying, we'll have fusion in less than that, then electricity will be too cheap to meter!!
Great news. On behalf of everybody living in the UK, how long until all of the additional supply reduces prices back to what it was before the Ukraine war?
Where is the incentive to do this? So electricity prices rocketed, not due to the £200bn+ already 'invested' in 'renewables'. They rocketed because of the rising price of gas, because windmills rely on gas. But then-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cxwdwz5d8gxt/natural-gas
Gas is back to 2021 levels. Energy bills... are not. The price cap may be reduced, our bills may fall, or our 'regulators' will decide based on PR stunts like the one reported here that private funding needs to be increased to fund 'Net Zero'. The 'renewables' lobby/cartel certainly doesn't want to kiss good bye to their extremely large windfall profits, so will be arguing that our energy prices need to stay high to 'attract investment'.
Reality of course is that due to the energy cartel, there is no real private funding, and the money we've already wasted on 'renewables' has come from energy consumers forced to pay collossal subsidies for worthless products. Naturally the scum-sucking parasites in the 'renewables' lobby demand we give them even more cash instead of doing the sensible thing and building new nuclear.
Or being government, they could just repeal the Climate Change Act, because that's only 'legally binding' for as long as government wants it to be. The recent G7 jolly was quite amusing if you look at the approval ratings of the world's 'Leaders'. Sunak's shambling along at around 35%, doing slightly better than Macron's 25%. Sadly, the UK are less effective at protesting than the French.. So far. And Starmer's an even bigger idiot than Sunak. Sadly, we don't seem to have any leaders willing or able to take on energy reform and restore UK competitiveness. Then again, we do still have Germany as the shining example of what happens when you let the ecofreaks drive energy policy.
Given that Europe is a huge consumer of goods that are produced in the countries that you imply are the main cause, reducing consumption in rich countries is relatively easy.
If it also reduced the monumental amount of waste that we produce then that is also a huge win,
The endless arguments that the UK (or in the case Europe) contribute so little that it has no impact are completely wrong.
Can someone quantify these "huge economic benefits" !?
Chris Skidmore MP published his Net Zero Review in January (press release here). It's a long and detailed 340-page report, but here's just one paragraph:
446.The UK can take a share of the global economic prize from the transition, but it must act now. The UN’s Net Zero Asset Managers initiative recently announced that nearly a third of the $66 trillion of assets managed by their members globally are committed to net zero with tangible decarbonisation goals. Additionally, McKinsey have estimated that supplying the goods and services to enable the global net zero transition could be worth over £1 trillion to UK businesses between 2021 and 2030.
Of course, the former Party of Business (now the F*k Business Party) stuck their fingers in their ears.
"The government expects research and innovation to play a crucial part in the UK achieving net zero."
Considering we dont have the know-how nor technology to reach the target without inflicting significant harm on ourselves the above is an understatement. And of course its going to keep costing more, this whole boondoggle is for a country that contributes almost nothing to the theoretical problem to reduce its tiny contribution.
But of course we will all be happy praying to our monuments to a sky god as we go hungry and shiver in the dark.
We’re 95% the way to total ecological collapse anyway, so any further lacklustre half-arsed attempt to do anything about it (which is actually just a plot to avoid the issue completely) isn’t going to make any difference.
And yes - I AM that pessimistic - I’m very frightened for my 6 year old son!
I felt quite sad reading that. It shows just how much the current catastrophe-mongering has messed with so many people's minds. Don't worry about a global climate catastrophe, it's just not going to happen. The world may get a bit warmer, the seas may rise a bit more than otherwise, and the extra CO2 will (and has already) significantly increase vegetation growth, including all those crops we need. The thing that is more likely to screw up your son's life is the insane 'net zero' policy currently favoured by our technically illiterate and unnumerate governments, and the consequent catastrophic economic damage.
I agree that some of the natural world seems to be coping better than we are with climate change. A lot will vanish though, as ecosystems under pressure trim the fat of species diversity and dig in. We need to build more reservoirs, deal with flooding better, build desalination plants, and construct more solar and wind farms. There are plenty of ways for government to syphon public money to its mates while doing this, so once the penny drops, they will hopefully get cracking. The whole net zero and carbon trading thing just comes over as a con. Politicians never expect to hit distant targets. They will just move the goalposts somewhere down the line, or fiddle the figures. Unfortunately, Brexit has moved the UK to [badly] 'managed decline', so there is limited cash, limited labour and few resources to get anything done. Without Brexit, Germany losing so much Russian energy, the UK would now be running the EU. 51/49. Fine margins or what?
Nothing to do with catastrophe-mongering as you put it.
Species extinction is racing to the finish line - that’s not hyperbole, it’s real.
We continue to poison the air we breath and the water we drink - that’s not hyperbole, it’s real.
Sealife (to take just one ecosystem) is in desperate trouble in so many ways.
While I’m pleased if you optimism keeps you happy and save, I feel it is unfounded
I'm quite happy, even with loss of species. Even a cursory study of palaeontology would tell you that species extinctions in the past were great opportunities for new species to develop. We can't preserve our world in aspic, it changes with or without our agency. The smart species take advantage of new opportunities, and we are pretty much up there with the smartest ones so I'm not really concerned about the continuance of Homo Sapiens.
friends of the earth said
"If we hadn't opposed nuclear power for so long, we'd be well on our way to net zero for electrical generation and only maybe firing up the odd gas turbine for peak load demands"
Well actually he didn't say it, but the idea of net zero in power generation is laughable using just solar ,wind and hydro
Could you imagine the announcer on the eurostar train.
"Sorry but due to a high pressure system over the UK we are restricted to 40mph* from London to Calais. from there we'll be able to go at our usual 180mph"
Along with 'load balancing' IE lets cut off anyone using over 500watts of power and this country will carry on heading downhill
*thats 10mph faster than south west trains manages around here on a normal day
"The Climate Change Act 2008 sets the UK's legally binding targets to reduce emissions. "
I have never understood this idea of a government having a legally binding target. What happens if the target is not met? Does someone get charged with an offence, fined, or put in prison? Or is it just a bit of a show-off 'for the masses' to pretend HMG is really serious about this while not doing enough?
Any lawyers out there with an answer, please advise.
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