Climate change innovation – Page 12

September 10, 2021June 30, 2022

Do over 50s want climate change addressed even if it costs more? Err, yes!

There have been a great deal of things that have happened over the last decade or two, which would suggest that the older generation don’t care what happens to the climate because they won’t be here to tolerate the effects.

Older generations also have a significant reputation for intransigence: adoption of new technology often spreads to the older people last. The problem with global warming is that the speed required to adjust is way too high to allow more senior members of society to wait.

This is why I found the results of a recent survey so encouraging. The survey wasn’t huge, only looking at 500 people, however it found more than two-thirds of respondents want ministers in our government to move faster even if it pushes up prices for services.

The survey found that these people were highly likely to be making adjustments to mitigate future climate change. These ranged from traveling less, to changing their diet and using less energy at home.

This is in some ways particularly encouraging, as the majority of home greening efforts take a significant length of time to pay off

If you are already advanced in age the benefit felt is unlikely to be by you.

Now of course for most elderly parents or grandparents, they are greatly interested in passing down their housing stock to their descendants – so any greening of the house can last longer. Nevertheless, for older people reducing the future carbon emissions of their house is less about their own financial interests – indeed the government should bear this in mind.

The other issue is that the majority of these people live in particularly large and expensive houses. These are often the houses that young people aspire to live in if they ever make it. Due to their size and age, many of these properties will cost several tens of thousands of pounds to upgrade and as such the current inhabitants must be thinking about their descendants if they’re willing to upgrade their house for the future fight on climate change.

August 18, 2021June 30, 2022

Why does the debate continue to be pay to fight climate change or … don’t?

We continue to hear ” fighting climate change is to expensive” in one form or another.

Problem is that this looks at this issue wrong. Sure, right now it is pay to fight or not, but if we don’t in a couple of decades our children will have to pay terms of times more to undo or damage.

In other words, the decision is pay a little now, or make our children pay huge amounts.

What parent makes that decision? What will future generations make of our collective ambivalence?

July 19, 2021June 30, 2022

A hydrogen powered world?

Hydrogen is an incredibly energy rich fuel. When Hydrogen is mixed with oxygen, a large amount of energy is released and the only waste is pure water.

The problem for many years has been that virtually all the hydrogen on earth is locked up as water. For a long time, it has been known that by running a current through water you can split the oxygen and hydrogen. Unfortunately, this process is incredibly energy intensive. Indeed it takes more energy than it gives.

July 15, 2021June 30, 2022

Lightyear one

The lightyear one is an incredible car. It is a highly efficient electric car, and gets over 440 miles from a battery smaller than the one in the long range tesla 3 which only has a range of 353.

This is partly because it is an incredibly efficient car – each wheel has its own, in wheel, motor. However, even more exciting, the car is covered in high efficiency solar panels – it has 5 square meters of solar panels, which is allow between 25 and 45 miles on solar power alone.

June 22, 2021July 1, 2022

Re-emergence of sails?

Freight shipping has a huge carbon footprint. It is true that the carbon footprint is far lower than freight carried by air, however this does not help.

However, it is also true that these ships do not travel particularly fast. With the new kite sails designs where a kite with roughly 100 square meters area, and the ability to be flown above 100m – an area where the wind speeds and directions are far more reliable.

Kite freight ships are becoming a reality quick

June 22, 2021July 1, 2022

Students have protested at the Science museum in London over shell funding a climate crisis exhibition

It does seem to be rather self-serving, if you are putting together a exhibition on the threat that the climate crisis is producing, and you allow one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world to fund it.

Much of the exhibition talks about carbon capture and storage (something that has not been demonstrated at significant scale, and yet would have to be catching billions of tonnes of carbon per year if it is to have a chance of helping) as well as nature based solutions.

The police cleared the building at the end of the day, ending what had been intended to be an overnight occupation.

It certainly seems that shell is trying to whitewash their company (should that be greenwash) and this should not be allowed. Rather, shell should be spending thousands of times more money on actually solving the climate crisis. Furthermore, ideas like carbon capture should not be allowed to be touted, until it has been demonstrated at scale. Finally, there is another problem. As far as the climate crisis is concerned, any captured carbon should be locked away for millions of years, yet at the moment the majority is either used to help with oil and gas extraction, or is turned into synthetic fuels – neither of these help in any way with forestalling the continued move towards run-away climate change.

SHELL MUST DO BETTER.

June 18, 2021June 30, 2022

Indigenous people of Peru have been living sustainably for 5000 years

There are often arguments, that indigenous people need to be removed in order to balance nature back out. It is true that in some wilderness areas, so called indigenous people have moved into wilderness areas within the last 50 years. These people should not be called indigenous or be given rights over the land that their parents seized.

As you can see, this village is deep in the forest, with little land cleared around it. Furthermore, the village is made from renewable resources, and if the village was abandoned, within a few years these houses would have disappeared for good,

On the other hand, there are tribes in the Amazonian rainforest (as in the Congo and other rainforests) that have lived largely identical lives for 5000 years. Whats more, there is little evidence of damage to the ecosystem throughout the fossil record.

We need to be careful, as we try to protect these wild areas, There is a big difference between modern humans moving into the forest and clearing land for crops, and indigenous people who have lived in harmony with the forest for millenia.

June 17, 2021June 30, 2022

Solving the Climate crisis and biodiversity loss together

Yesterday I was writing about a series of dams that have collapsed in Brazil. We need to remember that there are two imminent threats that we are facing in the natural world.

The world is warming. This is going to make life far harder for our children
We are loosing much of the wilderness on the planet. Unfortunately we rely on this to survive in the long-term

We need to cut carbon emissions dramatically, we know as the human race that if we do not cut emissions dramatically and very fast, our planet will go through horrific change from the loss of the ice caps (and the resulting sea level rise) to the desertificion of large parts of the planet – some of this previously being rainforest.

If we cannot halt the loss of areas such as rainforests, the problem becomes even larger as we destroy one of our largest carbon sinks.

In the west, we have a responsibility to not only cut our own emissions to net zero in the space of a few decades, we must also help developing countries grow their own economies and increase the standard of living for their citizens without destroying what remains of the ecosystems that still exist.

May 23, 2021July 1, 2022

Is bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies too energy intensive to be used?

Elon Musk has just announced that Tesla will no longer allow buyers to pay in bitcoin. Why is this relevant to a wildlife and environment blog?

Tesla is there to transition the world to sustainable transport, as a goal. of the roughly 4.1 trillion kwh of electricity used in the USA last year roughly 500 went on bitcoin (roughly 1 in 8) or 13%.

May 19, 2021July 1, 2022

Silvopasture

Silvopasture is the idea of integrating food crops that grow high such as orchards and grapevines, but allowing grazers to graze underneath on grass. Is also often known as Agriforestry

In theory many farm areas would be capable of producing large quantities of grape vines (or other fruit) without reducing the amount of sheep that they feed on their land.