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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?”More than 80% of democratic voters believe that Biden has not done enough for climate change. Now it is certainly true that overall, just 15% of republicans think that Bidens plans are a good idea, while 79% of democrats approve of the direction.
What does this say? Well there are several things to bare in mind. Firstly, as Trump spent the last 4 years lying to his supporters, it is not surprising that they think that what Biden is doing is not necessary. What is perhaps more worrying, is the fact that this is roughly half the population in one of the most highly educated countries in the world – which does not believe in scientific facts, because they were lied to.
Unfortunately, Joe Manchin a democratic senator has been able to block much of the needed action. A new bill which he did support, has recently passed, which aims to cut emissions by 30% (against 1995 levels) by 2030 levels. If this happens then this is fantastic news.
Given a choice between Biden with his hands tied behind his back by Manchin, and Trump who did nothing but make it worse, any sensible person would choose Biden every time.
A quick search tells you that the developed world is responsible for roughly 79% of all historical emissions. What is worse, is that this represents under 20% of the world population.
This means that per person emissions are as much as 16 times more the result of each person living in the developed world than the developing world.
Last year was a case in point. Last year, costs for extreme weather events like droughts floods and wildfires cost an estimated $329 billion, which is approximately twice the total money given by donor nations – in other words, when you take into account the financial damage that our behaviour is causing, the developing world is actually donating hundreds of billions to the rich developed world.
We in the west have had politicians claim for decades, that stopping climate change would cost to much. If we had to pay the full amount, clearly the numbers would be quite different.
As much as half the particulate emissions from a car, come from they tyres. While electric cars are far cleaner, this particulate emissions is particularly dangerous, to health so this move to do something about it is very good.
The idea is that a device is placed behind each wheel, and is statically charged, allowing it to collect most of the waste. The waste can then be recycled into tyres of into other things. Tyre wear accounts for about 28% of oceanic micro plastics, so it is an area we need to deal with – particularly because with their heavy battery electric vehicles wear down tyres much faster.
Most drivers on petrol engine cars, wouldn’t dream of driving without a catalytic converter – hopefully in the future the same will be said for tyre dust collectors. They should be on the market in the next few years.
I wrote a short time ago about the solar area needed to power the world. As a result, I was fascinated to find this article from a few months ago.
On the vast majority of rooftops, nothing is done with this space. Covering the half of these roofs that face the right way, with solar panels, would be able to power the world.
This would have another advantage. If the whole world was solar powered, and we connected all countries around the world, then batteries could be unnecessary – Europe could power America and Australia during the night, and they could return the favour during our night.
The UK has been very foolish, but greatly increasing the price of Solar. This must be reversed to not put off the Solar roll out.
Morrisons is to have its cows given additives of seaweed in an attempt to reduce methane emissions.
This additive reduces methane emissions by as much as 80%, and given that morrisons currently has roughly 10% of the country shopping there, they have the potential of reducing cow based emissions by 8%. Now other brands need to follow Morrisons lead on this, but about 5% of the UK emissions is accounted for by the emissions of cows, which means that Morrisons move alone, should cut carbon emissions in the UK by around 0.5%, now while this is not huge, if everyone across the country chose to use this meat, 5% of emissions is a pretty substantial cut.
More to the point, with the main supermarket chains in such close competition in the UK, I find it hard to believe that others are not going to follow Morrisons lead. I for one will be happy to get our beef from Morrisons (though in our case, we have already replaced most of our beef mince with turkey mince which has a far lower carbon footprint anyway.
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