Category: Emission reduction

Posted on

5 of the worlds biggest agribusinesses sought to weaken EU deforestation just 8 days after voting to accelerate action

Can this have possibly been the same people? Is there really anyone stupid enough to try to weaken EU forest protection 1 week after saying they would accelerate protection?

This sort of behaviour should be punished hard. Agriculture is responsible for about 25% of the worlds greenhouse emissions and so they must make progress if the world is to succeed in cutting emissions. The 5 firms in question include ADM Bunge Cargill LDC and Viterra.

They tried to explain away this discrepancy, but what is clear is that we must force these companies to be honest about how they are performing. Furthermore, we the consumers, must be willing to leave products behind if the manufacturer is behaving so badly.

Posted on

Tesla has been cut from the S&P 500 Environmental Social and Governance Index, what have they done (SARCASM)

So in theory an Environmental Social and Governance Index is important. This allows customers and investors to look at a company, and by looking at the size of one number they can tell if the company is doing well in these ways or badly. At least that is the theory.

Clearly it is not working in practice. The reason given for Tesla’s removal was claims of racial discrimination and crashes that are supposedly linked to its autopilot system. In the same rewriting, Twitter will be added to the list, alongside Oil refiner Phillips 66. Chevron and and delta airlines are also being dropped.

One of the main factors for Tesla’s dropping is the fact that it does not publish details related to its low carbon strategy or business conduct code.

Now, if you were being generous you could suggest that the company is following its rules without using its head, but this I believe is wrong.

It is true that an electric car has a higher carbon footprint in manufacture – batteries are energy intensive to create. What is also true, is that at the moment, even while giving fossil fuel cars every advantage possible (most calculations of their emissions treats petrol as though it appears on the side of the road, and ignores the extraction refining and transport which can as much as triple the carbon emissions for a tank of fuel) an electric car saves more carbon than the extra that it emits in manufacturing within the first 5000-10000 miles.

Now to put this in context, Exxon is listed in the top 10 on this list! Apparently, having concrete ideas on how to reduce your carbon footprint gets recognized but having already lowered it (and indeed the impact of your products reducing emissions by hundreds of tonnes over their lifetime is ignored).

Now, just to push the point home, Ark invest founder Cathie Woods slammed this removal. Cathie Woods is not only seen as incredibly effective an investment manager, but has been very clever in investing in clean companies. Indeed when asked for a quote she said “Ridiculous, not worthy of any other response”

Some commentators have suggested that this is just the Index protecting itself – several oil companies and similar are high on the list; Tesla creates an existential risk to companies like this.

Posted on

200 “Carbon bombs” are in the planning. What are they and can we survive them?

A carbon bomb is defined as a project (mine, oil well or similar) which if allowed to go ahead will emit 1 billion tonnes of carbon over its lifetime. A guardian analysis suggests that there are around 200 of these so called carbon bomb mega projects around the world. This is the equivalent of 18 years of total global emissions.

Despite what we know about the effects, there are still 200 “carbon bomb” plans in the pipeline
Continue reading “200 “Carbon bombs” are in the planning. What are they and can we survive them?”
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

We have bought a used electric car: does it make financial sense? Why should you consider doing the same.

So we have recently bought an electric car!

This is what a tesla looks like

For any regular readers, you would have seen my article from a few days ago. When people are writing articles comparing the emissions from generating electricity to the tailpipe emissions of the combustion engine – any one with a brain is asking why? Given you are not comparing like for like. We estimate that our carbon emissions reductions from replacing our car may reach 10 tonnes a year. Each fill up of our petrol car meant about 40kg of petrol, which took 110kg of emissions to dig it out of the ground and transport it (often around the world).

So from an environmental position, yes it certainly makes sense.

But what about from a financial position?

Continue reading “We have bought a used electric car: does it make financial sense? Why should you consider doing the same.”
Posted on

Fossil fuel cars make ‘hundreds of times’ more waste than electric cars – according to a Guardian article, despite what most media tries to claim

This should not be news to people, but because of the rubbish that is spread by many with vested interests in the current situation, it needs to be dealt with again.

So the argument is that because electric cars battery does not last forever, but every part of the combustion engine car does, the electric car is going to make more waste.

Continue reading “Fossil fuel cars make ‘hundreds of times’ more waste than electric cars – according to a Guardian article, despite what most media tries to claim”
Posted on

Glass is capable of being endlessly recycled – but some countries are better than others

Making new glass from cutlet (small glass pieces) saves significant energy. This is partly because it needs a lower temperature to melt. While it is true that much of the materials that go into glass are not in short supply, it is still more sensible to reuse, particularly if your energy requirements are lower. Apart from energy uses, other benefits of recycling include 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution. It also means that glass does not have to go into landfill – we need to reduce rubbish going to landfill down to as close to zero as possible.

Glass can be endlessly recycled so why is a country like the USA so far behind many others in this important field
Continue reading “Glass is capable of being endlessly recycled – but some countries are better than others”
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?

See Animals Wild

Read more news

Join as a wild member
to list your wild place & log in

Join as an ambassador supporter to
support this site, help save wildlife
and make friends & log in

Join as an Associate member
to assist as a writer, creator, lister etc & to log in

List a wild destination

List a destination in
the shadow of man

List a hide for animals more easily seen this way

Highlight some news
missed, or submit a
one-off article

Browse destinations for fun or future travel

Temporary membership
start here if in a hurry

Casual readers and watchers