Category: Climate change innovation

Posted on

Apparently Democrat voters are not impressed with what Biden is doing for climate change

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.

Posted on

As funding for climate disasters has risen 800% in 20 years, only half of the funds are coming from the developed world

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.

Posted on

Some time, I wrote about the the collective, they might finally be ready to launch

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.

Posted on

Nature communications has calculated that half of world rooftops would supply all the electricity we need

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.

Posted on

I have written in the past about the discovery that seaweed added to a cows diet greatly reduces methane emissions, now Morrisons wants to act

Morrisons is to have its cows given additives of seaweed in an attempt to reduce methane emissions.

Cows that can graze along the sea shore will happily eat seaweed, but adding it to all cow diets will greatly reduce 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.

Posted on

Looking at the capability of the world being powered from solar or wind

The sun sends 470 exajoules of energy to the earth every 88 minutes. This is how much energy the earth uses each year. If we captured just 1% of the sun’s energy this would still give a 6 times more electricity than we need. 

In a similar vein, if wind turbines collected just 20% of the wind energy on earth this would be 8 times what the entire world uses each year.

In terms of area, to generate all the power that the earth needs (using current efficiency) we would need roughly 1 million square km or about 11% of the Sahara desert. Obviously, this is an oversimplification, but it shows that the world is more than capable of running on clean energy.

The energy is there to be used, we just need to undertake it at speed. Vested interests in fossil fuel companies have fought aggressively against this move for decades. Their time must be over, the world can and must clean up its act.

Posted on

Tesla has made more sales than Audi BMW and Mercedes combined in their home market

In September Tesla sold more cars in Germany than Audi A4 BMW 3 series and Mercedes c class combined.

Why is this important? Well firstly the Tesla cars are more expensive. As a result they naturally compete against similarly priced cars with a combustion engine. This is why this news is so exciting – it is clearly taking an enormous part of this well established market.

What is particularly concerning, is that these are the people which car companies make their most profit from. Those people with less money, will tend to either buy used cars – no extra money for the established players (though with supercharging and various other things like data, Tesla can profit), or buy small runabout cars – these tend her very small profit margins, and anyway even if you managed to make 20% profit when you’re only talking about to the car that costs £5,000, you still have to sell an awful lot of them to make substantial rewards.

Indeed the next few years are perhaps their last chance to fight back. This is because with the Tesla gigafactory in Berlin, the number of cheaper Tesla cars will explode in the next few years. 5 to 10 years after this many of those will join the used car market at prices that could quickly reduce cheaper cars demand as well.

Where are we (my family and I)? We have been liking the idea of going electric for some time. Unfortunately someone wrote our car a few years ago – too soon for us to go electric. However (as I wrote about a few weeks ago), we have just jumped in having found an old tesla s for far less than normal in the UK. Indeed with the current price of petrol, we think that it will only be about 7 years before we save the purchase price in reduced cost of travel

Continue reading “Tesla has made more sales than Audi BMW and Mercedes combined in their home market”
Posted on

When was human caused climate change first noticed?

There are still a large number of people with vested interests, who are arguing that climate change science is not settled and we need to wait a bit more.

How long should we wait?

Guy Callendar released a paper in 1938 – considered revolutionary at the time, which linked fossil fuel burning to the warming of the earths atmosphere. Indeed in 1896 Svante Arrhenius a Swedish scientist first predicted that increasing carbon emissions could significantly increase surface temperatures.

In other words it is now 126 years since a scientist predicted that global warming would be likely if we continued to release carbon emissions, and a paper was released 84 years ago confirming that Scvante Arrhenius prediction was correct.

So why are we still arguing about it? Does the free market truly allow profit to be prioritised over a scientific fact that was proposed more than a century ago, and confirmed nearly a century ago? Had the world dealt with carbon emissions back then we would be looking at a very different situation.

Posted on

The British government has promised to go carbon neutral by 2050 how much to generate all electricity from wind?

How can we produce all our electricity through wind and solar? These are the two most wide-spread possibilities in terms of green electricity generation. It has been calculated, that in order to power all UK homes from wind, we need funding of 50 billion.

Now while this number is huge, the British government spent over a trillion pounds last year. This means that the investment required to generate 100% of our power from wind is about 5% of one years spending. This strikes me as incredibly cheap. This investment, would allow about 4 times as many turbines to be added as there currently are.

There would obviously be other costs, such as storing electricity for when the wind is not blowing. The important take away, is that this is negligible. Indeed with debts of over 3000 billion, adding 50 more is not a big step.

More importantly, it is calculated that doing nothing could cost the UK alone trillions of pounds. If we invested this money over the next say 8 years (so that all the money was available by 2030 and all the turbines were up and running by 2035) it becomes quite a small investment in government spending terms (though it is still a large amount of money).

It is estimated that by 2050 climate change could cost the UK up to £20 billion a year. Of course other countries around the world will likely have to pay far more. The UK has the 12th highest electricity use in the world as a country, this means that while each country will need a lot of money to go fully green electricity, it is not necessary to break the bank.

Different countries will have different ways to reach net zero, and we should help and encourage this move – but why dont we start planning the necessary investment, make sure that the UK leads the way in eliminating our electrical carbon footprint?

Posted on

The UK has 11 billion climate fund:60 ngo are calling for some of it to be used for family planning

Across much of the world where species are at risk of extinction there is an exploding human population. From Africa with rapidly growing populations in the east west and south, to Asia with growing populations in almost all countries, the biggest threat to the continued survival of wild species is the loss of habitat.

The thing is, that a rapidly growing population is generally an issue in countries which are poor. The reason for this is that they have lower standards of healthcare, and therefore less family planning.

As such, if the government were to set up a project which spend a couple of million educating educators in 50 countries across the third world, and supported the resulting work, the growth of the populations in these countries could slow or even stop and go into reverse. This would allow the standard of living to increase again.

Alongside these benefits, would be lower pressures on the wealth of biodiversity which so much of these countries economy is based around.

Importantly, this would be likely to have far more impact than it would cost.

See Animals Wild