Net zero is a legal obligation. The international pressure, moreover, makes repudiation all but impossible. Britain would be a pariah if it tore up the objective.
For my reaction is bugger what Johnny Foreigner thinks and let’s do what is right and sensible.
But then kicking against the pricks is a ccharacter flaw of mine, agreed.
‘Let workers clock off early when temperatures hit 25 degrees’, union says
Humans are actually pretty adaptable. These are the sorts of temperatures that “afflict” Southern Europe for most of the summer.
Daniel Shears, health and safety director at GMB Union, urged employers to introduce special measures including fans for those working from home once temperatures reach a certain level.
Twat. A fan costs £30 maybe. Having a “scheme” for employers to supply them would triple, quadruple, the cost of having them. It simply does cost tens and tens of pounds to do the paperwork to make a corporate purchase.
Jeez, let adults decide their own working conditions.
While EVs won’t solve all of the problems associated with car use – from traffic congestion through to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles – they are an essential part of tackling the climate emergency.
In its latest report, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said, with “high confidence”, that EVs have lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional cars. The IPCC said that electric vehicles not only “offer the greatest low-carbon potential for land-based transport”, but their use would save money. (Despite elevated electricity prices, EVs are still much cheaper to run than petrol cars in the UK.)
Indeed, without a widespread shift to EVs, there is no plausible route to meeting the UK’s legally binding target of net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050 – and the same is true globally.
The question is not how shall we meet net zero by 2050. It’s whether we should try to meet net zero by 2050.
To alleviate any narrative stress here the answer is “No”.
Net zero retrofit costs will be unmanageable for most homeowners, Citizens Advice has warned.
The average cost of measures such as loft insulation and heat pumps will be just under £15,000 per household, the charity has estimated, a figure it said is out of reach of most households.
OK, 23 million households, that’s £350 billion.
The problem to be soloved is emissions, UK emissions are around half a billion tonnes pa. The costs of those are some £50 a tonne (close enough to Stern’s $80 a tonne). So, the cost we’re trying to stave off is £25 billion a year.
Except household emissions are only 40% of total emissions. So we’re trying to save £10 billion a year. By spending £350 billion. That’s just under a 3% return.
That doesn’t work. Market interest rates are higher than that, or at least the investment hurdle that any sensible investment must clear is higher than that.
No, we can’t then blurt that Stern showed the social interest rate is loower. We’ve already used that in our calculation of $80 as the social cost of emissions. We don’t use that low interest rate twice. Just the once, thank you.
Things that aren’t worth doing aren’t worth doing. Spending £350 billion to stop £10 billion a year of damages isn’t worth doing. Therefore let’s not do it.
We can play with these numbers a bit. But it does always come out to the same answer. Don’t do it.
This isn’t the lesson they draw from it but it is what they say:
Wildfire smoke from Australia fueled three-year “super La Niña”
More wildfires in Oz produce more smoke which cools the Padific which produces the La Nina which cools.
Great, negative feedback!
We’re saved. Right?
UK householders face delays of up to 15 years for solar installations
No, truly – at a 20% price decline each year in 15 years this means solar will be cheap as chips.
No one will worry or ague about it. You’ll install it in the same way you have a tap on the bathtub – werl, it’s obvious, innit?
An overwhelming majority of people in the United States say they have recently experienced an extreme weather event, a new poll shows,
So, we have a normal spread of weather. Anything outside that spectrum is extreme weather. That’s just what the words mean. How often you’re going to have extreme weather depends upon how wide you’re assuming that spectrum to be. A cold day in June could be extreme, depends on how cold it is. An actual h7urricane turning up is extreme in a different sense – even though that happens to millions every year.
So, most folk have experienced extreme weather. Well, yes, they would have done.
and most of them attribute that to climate change.
Which is a lovely example of how bad the misinformation on climate change is. For, as we keep being told, climate and weather are two different things, aren’t they?
International climate diplomacy is hopeless, the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline has said, as the film adaptation of the radical environmentalist book is released.
As activists around the world take increasingly desperate actions against destructive projects, Andreas Malm told the Guardian he had not “a shred of hope” elites were prepared to take the urgent action needed to avert catastrophic climate change.
“If we let the dominant classes take care of this problem, they’re going to drive at top speed into absolute inferno,” Malm said. “Nothing suggests that they have any capacity of doing anything else of their own accord because of how enmeshed they are with the process of capital accumulation.
His publishers – amusingly – sent me a copy of his previous book. In which he demanded that War Communism be introduced to deal with climate change. No, not some analogy, not some slip of a phrase, he wanted actual Leninist war communism to be the response.
At which point the Tosser can fuck off, obviously.
Nationalization of all industries and the introduction of strict centralized management
State control of foreign trade
Strict discipline for workers, with strikes forbidden
Obligatory labor duty by non-working classes (“militarization of labor”, including an early version of the Gulag)
Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surplus (in excess of an absolute minimum) from peasants for centralized distribution among the remaining population
Rationing of food and most commodities, with centralized distribution in urban centers
Private enterprise banned
Military-style control of the railways
The results?
by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels….a famine that caused between 3 and 10 million deaths
Yes, obviously, some get a hard on by imagining themselves around that Kremlin table determining the fates of tens of millions. But then there are also those who should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
There’s the reasonable answer here which is that adopting the most inefficient form of economic management known to man probably isn’t the way to solve an economic problem.
There’s an unreasonable answer which is that we shoot those advocating War Communism.
There’s also reality.
Malm has this fantasy of himself as Wolfie. At which point the Tosser gets to fuck off.
Net Zero is trapping us in the dungeons of state control
At least some of them out there are looking for the control and any excuse will do. How many though, and how many are useful idiots, that’s the BIG Q
The Brecon Beacons are to be renamed over concerns that the word “beacon” is out of step with the fight against climate change.
The national park will now be officially referred to as the “Bannau Brycheiniog” National Park, granting the landscape a Welsh name, and steering clear of any associations with historical signal fires.
Officials said the symbol of a flaming beacon emitting carbon “does not fit with the ethos” of the national park as an eco-friendly organisation.
However, on Sunday night, a senior Conservative source attacked the decision as “pure virtue signalling” that would “do nothing to actually help the environment”.
They’re not virtue signalling, they’re being tossers. Tell ’em to fuck off.
Teenager took his own life after ‘losing hope over climate change’
Theo Khelfoune Ferreras, a film student from Walthamstow, grew increasingly despondent over the future of the environment, say his family
So, who is to blame for this?
The patriarchal capitalists who are so raping Gaia? Or those lying about the effects? Those insisting that we’ve an immediate disaster ahead of us instead of the reality, a chronic problem which is largely solved?
We’ve spent the last century and a half pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and it’s clear that we’ll have to spend the coming decades removing a significant fraction of that.
But then what do we do with it all? Some people are proposing pumping it underground. Others think we can make things from it, including liquid fuels and concrete. Problem is, those are pretty low-margin opportunities today. One startup thinks the answer is to turn carbon dioxide into protein.
That company is getting a shot to test its thesis at scale, TechCrunch+ has exclusively learned. NovoNutrients will be building a pilot-scale plant with help from a $3 million technology and investment deal from Woodside Energy, one of Australia’s largest oil and gas companies, which has begun dipping its toes into the carbon capture waters.
Umm, grow plants with it?
The proposed rule would not mandate that electric vehicles make up a certain number or percentage of sales. Instead, it would require that automakers make sure the total number of vehicles they sell each year did not exceed a certain emissions limit. That limit would be so strict that it would force carmakers to ensure that two thirds of the vehicles they sold were all-electric by 2032, according to the people familiar with the matter.
This kills every small and specialist manufacturer.
Well done there, vry well done.
Chemicals banned from air conditioners and refrigerators are making a comeback — and scientists don’t know why
English professorial type who kept a list of strange claims of things caused by climate change? Want to say John Blundell but I know it wasn’t him…..
Mr Monbiot rides again:
Sunak will also promote “sustainable aviation fuel”, though there is, and can be, no such thing.
George relies upon this paper at The Ecologist. Just the place all of us go for our dose of reality. That paper neatly missing that people are actually already making fuel which will meet – good enough at least – flight requirements. That Porsche project in Argentina.
What’s happening here is that Georgie is using something cooked up by some mates as proof – when the cooked piece hasn’t been subjected to the normal processes required to turn it into a proof. Further, even that paper says:
This may offer potential in the distant future but currently is far too expensive at £900 per tonne of CO2 and produces fuel at around four times the price of conventional fuels.
OK. So flying gets more expensive. And?
A looming British ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars was thrown into chaos on Tuesday after Brussels watered down its own restrictions amid opposition from the German auto industry.
Experts and politicians warned that British rules due to take effect in 2030 are untenable following the European climbdown, which will allow internal combustion engines as long as they burn carbon-neutral petrol alternatives.
Even as that ban on new ICE fails they’re still managing to get it wrong. Because it’s not the engine that’s the problem nor the engine that needs to be banned. It’s the fuel. Even if we accept all of the toss being bandied about it’s still the fuel. Burning archaic carbon bad. But e-fuels are possible and also at not far off current prices even at the current v early stage of the tech. So, the solution is possible, retain ICE but replace the fuel.
The easy way to do that is declare that e-fuels pay no tax for the next 20 years. Job done.
The amusement being that the solution here is less government, not more.
So a fantasy sea level rise sufficient to render a coastal nuclear station unusable will presumably have no effect on a tidal barrage?
From commenter Mark
California hit by 11th atmospheric river storm, bringing heavy rain and forcing evacuations
That’s the drought sorted for a bit then…..
The joint project with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) has achieved a radical jump in the energy density of battery cells. The typical lithium-ion battery used in the car industry today stores about 200 watt-hours per kilo (Wh/kg). Their lab experiment has already reached 675 Wh/kg with a lithium-air variant.
This is a high enough density to power trucks, trains, and arguably mid-haul aircraft, long thought to be beyond the reach of electrification. The team believes it can reach 1,200 Wh/kg. If so, almost all global transport can be decarbonised more easily than we thought, and probably at a negative net cost compared to continuation of the hydrocarbon status quo.
I don’t believe it for a moment but imagine that we do. Super.
So, climate change is solved and everyone can bugger off with their insistence on a just and equitable solution, can’t they?
TFor that’s what the negative net cost means – that this new tech is cheaper than the old tech so everyone will, quite naturally and happily, adopt it without any form of compulsion. Price will do it all for us.
So, given that no one is going to give up their plans to force everyone then they don’t believe this news either, do they?