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There is a serious problem in Borneo, that appears to be largely flying under the radar.
A survey of villages found that 30% of villages had evidence of orangutan killiing in the last 5-10 years. This is despite a taboo on killing the species.
The number of Borneo Orangutans is falling, and it is thought that the wild population will have fallen below 100,000 in recent years.
The study that the article is based on comes from the university of Michigan, and is frankly badly, badly made. It is the quintessential study, where this is the answer, now how do we get there, sort of study.
So, what did they do? Well, they put gardens into 3 different categories
Your backyard garden has about as small a carbon footprint as it is possible to have, it is possible that fruit or veg from here actually has zero carbon footprint. Community gardens can be a bit different – you have a small area, so you might use more compost or fertilizer, and it is possibly further from where you live, so you might drive to it. However, this kind of place also has a low carbon footprint.
It is essentially just the Urban farms which are a problem here: growlights and watering and temperature controls all add up to large quantities of energy.
This video shows this is an easy way to understand.
Do not be put off! If you have an allotment or a vegetable patch in your garden, this is almost completely carbon free food, it does bring down your carbon footprint.
It is unfortunately the kind of study you can find in a newspaper like the Telegraph; I do not think it would be a surprise for any readers to hear, that this is not the place readers go to find out about the new scientific studies of this kind.
Exxon is like many other oil companies – they have buried their head in the sand, and have continued to deny the science.
What astounds me, is that, over the last 3 years, the price of Exxon shares has gone up 3 times over. This means that the majority of people who are investing in the market, believes either that there is a killing to be made from Exxon before it goes out of business, or climate change is wrong (it is true that investment in Exxon 3 years ago would have tripled, but a long-term investment is unlikely to be successful, as Exxon has to completely change its business model.
So, why is Exxon buying a shale giant?
Clearly, it thinks that there is money to be made, before the world transitions. The problem is that should Exxon be right, the world will suffer more global warming.
We already need to leave much of our known reserves of fossil fuels in the ground, Shale gas, is just more,
We need to be moving away from fossil fuels as fast as we can.
How is your family doing? As for us, we have bought a second had electric car, we have just installed our solar and thermal solar, and will in a couple of weeks, have a heat pump installed that will remove our last reliance on gas (these two moves, will have removed carbon from our travel and from our house running and heating – we also have zero carbon electricity). Obviously we still have a way to go, but we are making progress. Of course, from a finance point of view, it is a good move – it is true that our car was more expensive than anything we’ve had before, however, the purchase cost will only take 6-7 years to save back , and our house greening has a payback time of around 4 years- after that we should be several hundred pounds better off each month.
Exxon is still betting that there is more money to be made before the good times are over, however they are betting on our future.
It is foolish to invest in them, either they are right, and will make a fortune while the world suffers, or they are wrong, and this business venture will collapse.
For a variety of reasons, over the last few months, I have not written as often as I would like. As such, I have accumulated quite a few articles that I wish to mention. While the animal articles require their own space, others do not. As such, this post will include electric car news from all over the world. Dates are a little muddled (and may be relatively out of date), and it is possible that with some of these, changes have been made. We are working hard on improving the website, which is taking much of our time, we hope to have a breakthrough soon. Below is a list of articles written, click on read more to read each of the articles listed.
-The Tesla s P100D has a 0-60 time of 2.28 seconds
–Department of Transport in the UK has a new scheme which will help with the cost of installing charging points in places like schools and similar
–China wants us to buy its electric cars
–2023 best selling car was the Tesla model Y
–A new possible battery breakthrough would both cut the cost of batteries, and bring down the length of time it would take to charge to something similar to that of filling up a petrol or diesel tank
–when will all UK cars be pure electric
–Volkswagen is loosing the electric car race to China and Tesla
–EU has set a target of 30 million electric cars on its roads by 2030
–The Chinese government is promising to rein in the number of electric cars its companies are making, so as to not flood the west
–Freezing temperature are known for reducing electric car range, caused long queues for charging
–Autocar published an article looking at how green electric cars actually are
–Paris Mayor plans to triple SUV parking tariffs to cut air pollution
Is this news to anyone? It is known that the car industry is in a race to move to electric. Given the vast saving for the end line consumer, the huge reduction in pollution, and the fact that many countries have already set dates where combustion engine car sales will be banned, surely the response to this news is ” why have you not made this move before?
What is clear, is that ford is developing a smaller and cheaper EV platform. Well this is great, but everyone is trying to create small affordable electric cars.
Now, how many of these small cars is ford aiming to sell? Currently, ford makes a $28,000 loss on each electric cars. Which means that they need to bring this down, or 2 million electric cars sold my ford would cause a huge loss.
Tesla is making progress on their own cheap model – the so called tesla model 2. This is aimed to hit the target of $25,000, or around £18,000, and they are expecting to make millions of this model, which does not seem unreasonable.
We need to remember, that while we look on ford as an old car company (and they are) at the current moment, they are not bigger than tesla. So in 2023 tesla sold 1.81 million vehicles, all electric, while ford sold 1.99 million, however only 72,000 of these were electric. If in the future, only electric cars count, then perhaps we should already be looking at ford as the minnow in a pond with a huge shark that is tesla. If we look at profit, this might make this clearer, Ford made profits of $4.3 billion, while Tesla made profits of 15 billion.
So, is Ford a tiny electric car maker, or not? Is it going to become one of the most profitable electric car makers, or is it going to become a small car maker? Time will tell, however, the problem is that the 2 million small electric cars that ford says its is targeting, is also the same number that Tesla is going to be targeting. Can the world demand sustain 2 million from each? Possibly, in the future, but Ford may well find that diving into the pond of small Electric cars is a hard place to make money, and finding enough demand for 2 million electric cars may well prove to be the harder part of the transition.
Time will tell, but they certainly have their work cut out for them.
So Hertz is downsizing its electric car fleet, just a few years after buying them. Should this put off electric car buyers? Well, I would argue no, and I suspect that Hertz will live to regret this day.
So have Hertz abandoned electric cars? Nope, it is true that in the current climate, they have scaled back their electric buying car program from 100,000 cars to just 50,000 cars, but this is still a significant number.
Given that in the USA they own around 500,000 cars (elsewhere it is mostly franchise so they do not own the cars) suggesting that at the current time, Hertz will have around 10% of its fleet as electric.
What has prompted this? Well, largely a higher cost of repair cost.
The problem for Hertz is simple. They get paid a rate, to rent the car, they save nothing by it being electric, on the other hand, the renter, might save plenty of money, as refueling can be far cheaper (though admittedly, with currently high electric prices on this side of the Atlantic, public chargers are often just as expensive as petrol.
So, no, this does not (as business insider suggests) mean the end of the electric car. In fact, given that they are selling around 20,000 electric cars, it is quite likely that it will boost the number of electric cars in public hands.
It is true, that some fixes are far more than they should be (we have found that) but it is also clear that overall, electric car owners save money. Whether this will accelerate the change or slow it down, time will tell. It is often the case that once experienced few want to go back to a fossil fuel car, so renting them is useful. Unfortunately, given the price, Hertz treated them as premium, which meant this had less affect than might otherwise have been the case.
I think they will come to regret this, the world is going electric, and the transition is accelerating around the world. It seems likely that they will have to reverse this change within a decade.
In 2021, the year after Donald Trump left the white house, the USA emitted roughly 13.49% of the world emissions. To put that in context, it is over twice the emissions from the 27 members of the EU and the UK combined (this is despite the USA having a population of 330 million vs almost 500 million across these 28 countries). So, how could Donald Trump make that worse?
Well, in the first Trump term, he was largely finding his way, and by shunning anyone with experience, it took quite some time. This will not be the case during a second time.
So what has happened since he left the white house, and what can he do.
During the last 4 years, major climate legislation did a number of things. These include reversing a move to end a crackdown on governmental climate scientists (because you dont want expert advisors working for the government?) a frenzy of oil and gas drilling permets, and making sure that the Paris climate accords were not only dead, but buried.
So what is expected of Donald Trumps second term if he gets in?
Just to start:
He is also likely to undo all the good moves that have occurred under president Biden (perhaps of highest priority, getting rid of the Inflation reduction act, which cost 370 billion dollars and was there to support clean energy and electric cars – without a single republican vote, and looked on as the biggest defeat republicans have had.
The American first Policy Institute (pro trump) critisized Bidens “apocalyptic green fantasies” and said “Our nation needs a level regulatory playing field for all forms of energy to compete, Achieving this level playing field will require the repeal of the energy and environment provisions withint the Inflation Reduction Act”. The act has already been gutted by the house, which is currently controlled by the Republicans (this as republicans continue to turn up for ribbon cutting occasions paid for by the act in question). Thankfully, though, these projects are so popular, it would appear impossible to fully get rid of them.
The stupidity of this move – aiming to undo what little progress has been made, should mean Trump being elected would be impossible, though whether it will is another matter. Global warming will hit America hard, furthermore, Americans could each save thousands through taking on these new ideas.
It is also not true that there is a war on oil and gas production, with record levels reached under Biden last year.
It would be a clear shot in the foot, and would likely lead to the USA returning to being a Pariah on the world stage. Whether the American population will be able to hear and understand this is a different question.
One of the ways in which warming oceans are accelerating the worries of sea-level rise, is through warmer sea water lapping at the underside of glaciers, helping this to melt faster. Furthermore, the glacier moves faster when its base is wetter.
There is much work around the world, which is going into measuring temperatures as accurately as possible and watching for change. While the British empire routinely took temperature readings on certain trips, and there are various other long records, there is no human record which goes back more than a few centuries. While this is irrelevant for human caused climate change, as we only started releasing large quantities of warmth trapping carbon dioxide in the last few centuries (largely started by the industrial revolution in the UK), we want to be able to both have more records from the last few centuries, and records that go far further back.
A variety of natural methods have been found, but this new ancient sea sponge method is interesting. This is because, lying 30-90m below the surface of the Mediterranean. In the Mediterranean even in the shallows with the water only changing by around 10 degrees, however, below 12-40 feet (depending on churn etc) the temperature is incredibly constant year round. That is not to say that there is no change in temperature, but it is very small.
So in this instance, these sponges have been recording changing temperature over the years, and according to their tempearture records, the planet has alread warmed by 1.7° C, which is half a degree more than the United Nations climate panel has seen elsewhere.
A number of climate scientists have questioned how wide-ranging a conclusion, you can draw from readings taken from one sponge species in just one location in the world. However, the lead researcher stated “Taking a precautionary principle, our findings show taht global warming is more advanced than we thought and therefore it’s a wake-up call that we have to get on with reducing CO2. He went on to add “We will experience more serious impacts from global warming sooner than we had anticipated”.
6 different speciamins of this sponge species were collected. The sponge can take hundreds of years to grow (to a size only 10cm-15cm). As it grows, it stores strontium and calcium in a ratio which relates directly to the temperature of the water around them. The team reconstructed global water temperatures going back 300 years through this method, and then combined them with land-based temperatures, in order to arrive at global temperatures. Because of the depth, the water temperature changes little from winter to summer, which means that the water tends to match the global average with surprising accuracy.
Incidence like the volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815 show up clearly in the record. However, unfortunately, it also confirms that manmade warming started in 1860, and given that global temperature changes are benchmarked against averages of the temperature between 1850 and 1900, it shows that this cannot be considered pre impact by humans.
However, responses are rather more encouraging. Essentially, the point is, that regardless of the sense in taking readings from a moving point, given that both our current position and the warming that we have targeted are against the same wrong number, it is irrelevant – if the start temperature was higher, but all our readings are out by the same quantity, it does not mean we will hit dangerous levels any sooner – these were worked out using the same incorrect measurements.
However, whatever is true, what is clear is that we still need to cut emissions alarmingly fast if we want to escape changes that are likely to kill many people, and displace hundreds of millions more – if not billions.
These kelp forests have an essential little helper for its survival. It has become clear that sea otters are essential members of communities of the kelp forests off the coast of California. Sea weed, which includes Kelp, locks away around 200 million tonnes of carbon each year and so are an essential part of the fight against global warming.
Continue reading “A new study from Monteray Bay Aquarium has once again highlighted the importance of sea otters for the health of the Kelp forests”