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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.
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.
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.
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.
China has stated that they will peak their emissions by 2030 and hit carbon neutrality by 2060. These targets are just about acceptable in terms of meeting the human races target of holding temperature raise to 1.5 degrees C.
Continue reading “China must close 600 coal-fired power plants early to hit their own climate target – but this could save money”Conservatives estimates suggest that it takes 6kwh to reform one gallon of fuel (a gallon is roughly 4.54 litres). One gallon carries an average fossil fuel car roughly 24 miles.
How far will 6kwh carry an electric car? If you drive a porsche taycan you get around 3.6 miles per kwh, giving you a range of 21 miles, with a tesla 3 this range would increase to over 25 miles.
Continue reading “How much electricity does it take to reform fossil fuels? drive an electric instead”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%.
Studies over the last few years show that 80% of of people are open to eating meat grown in bioreactors.
Why is this good news? Well one of the important advances with this meat is that it is thought that it could be created with a similar carbon footprint to lettuce.
Continue reading “Lab grown meat saw funding increase 6 fold during 2020”The need for America to cut it’s carbon footprint by 50% in the next decade under biden’s plan has been attacked to absurd proportions.
Republicans have been arguing against doing something about climate change for decades. It should therefore be borne in mind that the speed of cuts necessary now has been made necessary by previous republican governments. Now this has to be remembered that this did not come from something Biden said, and in there more honest moments some republicans will admit this, unfortunately for the time being though it is clear that the noisy republicans are all in with this fake attack.
Humans eat between 1-2kg of food per day, so each person consumes roughly 1.2 tonnes a year. That means that one billion tonnes of food could feed half of China or India or alternatively the next 3 biggest countries – the USA Indonesia and Pakistan.
Another way of thinking about it, is that if humanity ceased wasting food tomorrow, there would be enough to feed the whole planet completely.
Continue reading “Humans throw away roughly 1 billion tonnes of waste food per year – yet 1 in 9 go hungry”The European comission is considering a rule which would essentially ban ne internal combustion engine cars from 2025, only 4 years away. The industry as obviously attacked this, in part by pointing out the rules demanding that all cars be practically clear of emissions by 2025 will rule out clean fuels such as liquid hydrogen.
Continue reading “Could the EU bring forward the end of new combustion engine cars to 2025?”