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The clean energy transition is accelerating in some parts of the world. It is often cheaper to install solar or wind turbines, than to continue to buy coal to keep using the coal power plant, never-the-less this has not stopped developing countries from failing to make the change.
It is a well known fact that cities are often as much as 5 degrees hotter than the surrounding area. This is for a variety of reasons.
Following on from my last post, we are trying to deal with the problems which have been pushing the website offline – it is in hand, but for now the website is still fragile. When all is sorted, we will go back to trying to move forwards with fulfilling the aims of this website. For now, as much as possible I am able to post some entries.
For a long time, governments in the west have injected bonds into the market in order to get it going in times when it is struggling. Between the Covid epidemic and various other issues there are far more countries that are trying to do this.
There is a constant tug of war, between developed countries which are encouraging developing countries to continue to protect their wildernesses, and the developing countries wish to be able to develop – to lift their citizens out of poverty.
Granted, the majority of deforestation does not benefit the people on the ground, but it does not stop politicians in these countries arguing that those in the west cannot stop development by demanding conservation of ecosystems.
However, the amount of land that has been deforested in Brazil, is far in excess of what is needed for cattle pasture and experts have calculated that Brazil (the worlds number one Soy producer, and biggest beef exporter) could increase the amount of land used to grow Soy by a third without cutting one extra tree down.
We can only hope that with the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the unregulated deforestation will stop. There is a great deal of space in Brazil for intensifying agriculture, which would allow a significant increase in productivity and goods coming from the agriculture lands, without cutting down any more rainforest.
Of course, this is partly a matter of survival. While some people on the ground in Brazil may wish to cut down more rainforest in order to have more cropland, the more forest is cut down, the less rain the remaining forest produces.
This morning, I read an article in the Express. Now it is true, that the express is strongly leaning towards Conservative thinking point, but this argument is absurd. According to the article 2/3 of UK drivers want this ban pushed further into the future.
In theory, a power station that makes its electricity from burning wood could be carbon neutral. That is, if the power station owns the land that they get the wood from, and each time they cut some trees down, they immediately replace them.
Unfortunately, this is not how biomass burning power stations work.
Continue reading “Tinkering so as to meet carbon reduction goals, without doing anything?”One of the biggest arguments against electric cars is the length of time that they take to charge. This of course forgets that for virtually every journey in the year, the distance that the car can go without being charged is enough to do the return trip. For the majority of electric cars, you can drive 200-300 miles before having to stop to charge- short of a rare road trip this will do almost all drives. It of course also forgets the fact that a human driver needs to stop for refreshments, to use the toilet and to have a break.
Coral reefs are really important. While they only cover a small area (under 1% of the earths surface area) they support about 25% of all marine life, including more than 4000 species of fish.
Solar panels are now one of the cheapest way of generating electricity. This is basically a known fact, despite what is said. Now it is true that there has been some farmland that has been used for solar panels (one of the stupid things about this, is that if you make the solar panel stand longer, there are a whole range of crops that could be grown in the shadow of the panels.
After a great deal of negotiating, back in 2015 more than 200 countries signed up to targets that aim to restrict world warming to an average of 1.5°. Despite the decades between scientists positing that humans are warming the planet and this point, this is the easy part.
“Get the countries of the world to agree what is happening, and agree that we do not want to allow it to continue, so we had better do something about it”.
After this, we need the countries of the world to not only meet the targets that they set, but to exceed them and be willing to rachet up these targets until the reductions will be enough to keep warming to 1.5°.
Continue reading “0.1% chance of hitting our 1.5° according to study. Time to give up and get ready for the horrific world to come?”