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Oil, is increasingly recognized as an asset that is likely to be worth very little in the future. Does this mean it has no value now? no of course not. Still, it is likely to move in that direction soon.
It is, unfortunately, a fact, that meat eaters create a significant extra quantity of carbon released into the air. How much? Well this varies from place to place, and product to product.
There are an increasingly large number of people who are recognizing this issue. Now while some will argue that without the meat industry, much of the UK farmland would be built on, and that this would be disastrous for the environment are missing the point. We live on an island, and as such it is in our own best interests to make sure that the worlds ice sheets do not melt.
Continue reading “If the US beef industry is deploying tricks similar to fossil fuels and smoking to delay action, what should we do?”There have been many suggestions that the scientific consensus has not been reached, when it comes to climate change, either to its existence or humans effect on it,
Chevron has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030 through a carbon offset scheme. It is notable, that Chevron sells a product which is totally incompatible with carbon zero emissions.
This new research suggests that their carbon offsets are worthless, and therefore the emissions of Chevron will not change at all.
Corporate Accountability, a non-profit which did the research, found that 93% of the offsets that Chevron bought and counted are so environmentally problematic as to be worthless.
A carbon offset scheme is considered worthless, if its linked to a forest or plantation (or green energy project that does not lead to additional carbon capture. In other words, it is great to pay countries to keep their forests standing, indeed this is essential, not one new tonne of carbon is pulled out of the air by protecting the forest, so the carbon Chevron releases has not been removed from the air.
This is for a simple reason – it is not capturing new emissions. It is fantastic to not cause new emissions, but stopping new emissions is not the same as catching carbon to offset emissions that you are creating.
How did Chevron think this was acceptable.
Carbon offset is very simple: if I emit 1 million tonnes of carbon, and then pay to replant a rainforest in Tanzania that can take 1 million tonnes out of the atmosphere, this carbon remains locked as long as the rainforest continues to stand. Another idea would be to capture 1 million tonnes of carbon and bury it deep in the earth, to lock it away for millions of year.
Across France this is around 11gigawatts, or over the year almost 10 terawatt hours of electricity generation per year. This is a very sensible idea, as it is a second use of the land.
In the south of England, there are now 2000 panels placed over car parking spaces. These offer a capacity of almost 1MW hour. Each parking space covered, has a capacity of about 2kw. In the UK, the countries target of solar by 2030 is to have 40gw of solar capacity, up from 15gw currently. It is estimated, that almost half the remaining target would be met by carpark roofing – which suggests that we could hit far more than 40gw of solar.
Usually in order to increase the power generation from anything, it needs new hardware – if you wanted to increase the amount of power from a set of solar panels on your roof there is little you can do, without replacing them (this of course pre-supposes that the panels are in a good location, and are not in the shadow of a tree).
That is why this is incredibly exciting. The idea of being able to roll our new rules about how wind turbines work, and instantly make 1% more energy is incredible.
It is true that, currently, wind only accounts for about 6.5% of electricity generation. Conversely, it accounts for 24% of renewable generation – which is quite likely to be a percentage that grows as we move towards 100% renewable electricity generation.
So, with this change it will only account for 6.565% what difference is that?
Well, last year the world generated 28500 terawatt hours, which means that 0.065% increase is 18.5 terawatt hours extra created through 100% green sources.
Now, between 2020 and 2022, the average carbon emissions per kwh was around 370g. As such, were all of this energy created in the USA (it is not the most expensive or the least, so we are going to use it as representative – even though this power would be generated around the world) this much extra green energy would save 0.370 time 18.5 time 10 to the power of 9 (there are 1,000,000,000 kwh in 1 terawatt hour) which means that this little modeling trick would have saved roughly 7 million tonnes of carbon emissions. Now while this is relatively small in global terms (with 50 gigatonnes of emissions in 2020) it is still not insignificant – indeed, it is equivalent to the total emissions of Botswana, or indeed Latvia in 2021. That strikes me as an easy move, perhaps looking at this in a different way, perhaps more importantly, for wind farm companies, this energy is worth roughly £340 million ($450 million)
The world has got far smaller since the advent of the aeroplane. While many people that are writing on environment and wildlife (like me) would encourage you to avoid flying, By all means reduce it as much as possible, if your journey can be done in the car or by train do it this way. I understand the desire to fly – in just a few hours you can be on the other side of Europe.
However, most European trips can be done either on the train or in the car. Indeed, by train it is often faster than by plane – when you include the waiting time, baggage reclaim, and the time taken getting to and from the airport.
Continue reading “Will flying ever be green?”In many of the rich countries of the world, a great deal of effort is being put into reducing emissions. It is true, that these countries are responsible for a large amount of historical emissions. The problem is, that there are a number of so called carbon bombs that are being recognized around the world. Any of these could if unbalanced could emit so much carbon as to virtually eradicate the remaining carbon budget for the human race. These cover all sorts of things, but one that has been going on in the last year is very worrying.
Currently, the statistics state that the UK is emitting more carbon dioxide than all countries but 17. Turkmenistan however is far down the list with emissions at 47. Yet in 2022 methane emissions leaking from just two of their fossil fuel fields caused more global heating than the whole of the UK.
The government of the UK has been talking the talk for a significant period of time. At times they have suggested some policies that should move in the right direction, unfortunately they have often reversed these relatively quickly.
An example of this is the governments green housing grants – advertised as intending to improve the UK housing to work more efficiency. Unfortunately, it was cut too soon, had perhaps 1% of the investment needed to get the whole job done, and proved to merely be a handout to building companies.
So what has caught my eye this time?
How is Australia doing?
We need to start reducing emissions at some point – this seems self evident, if we are to meet any of our carbon reduction goals. In Australia the labour and Greens have done a deal that might actually improve policy covering Australia’s biggest polluters.
While the new ideas is complicated, it changes the safeguard mechanism to take the country closer to meeting the goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.
While Australia’s government has been talking the right talk recently, the Australian newspapers have published fear mongering by the fossil fuel companies – forcing up prices, put domestic gas supply at risk, destroy jobs and “kill foreign investment” in the coal industry, The Daily Telegraph published a story which claimed the changes to the safeguard mechanism would risk $96 billion of energy projects – and that should be seen as “coal hard facts”.
One coal boss told the Australian that the changes to the safeguard mechanism were built on a political objective to push a “base demonisation of fossil fuels” that would threaten Australias role as a “Reliable energy exporter” for the region. This is so completely illiterate of the science as to be laughable (if it was not for the fact that many people will listen).
A former editor of the Australian Chris Mitchel wrote that Environmental journalists and the “left media” were “in a frenzy” over the most recent release from the UNs climate panel – he claimed that they are missing the elephant in the room, that climate change has failed to arrive.
Despite what many in the fossil fuel industry wish to claim, it is not hard to see climate change, indeed it is all around us. Mitchell claimed that the world would not, and could not do without fossil fuels – though if you don’t believe that the climate has been effected, then this is an easier position to reach.
What is clear, is that while the voices against doing what i needed to leave a world we wish to for future generations, have not shut up, in most instances they are not winning.
A report has calculated that the reintroduction of 9 species would do so much benefit to the ecosystems that they are found in, that these reintroductions would help us to keep global warming to 1.5° C.
While some of these would require human adaption, many would have benefits far beyond climate change.
These species are
Continue reading “Another report stresses the importance of rewilding for climate change, and reintroductions”