There has been much made of the idea that given our need to cut carbon emissions, space flight should go out of the window.
However, would you be surprised to hear that a SpaceX rocket emissions is roughly equivalent to 1 large jet crossing the Atlantic. Given that last year there was an average of roughly 1700 transatlantic flights each day in 2018, that is actually a relatively small amount.
UK has once again delayed its ban on Ivory sales
To much fanfare, the British government decided to ban the sale of Ivory 3 years ago. This is certainly a good thing. Unfortunately, they have just delayed its introduction again – and we are already 3 years after this law was supposed to come into effect. Admittedly, this time the delay is only supposed to be for 2 months, but it sends the wrong message.
Forest and Savannah elephant populations across west and east Africa have been decimated over the last decade or two.
Ministers claim that background work has not been carried out, but given they have had 3 years this is inexcusable. Someone should be fired for this.
At the moment elephants are being killed at the rate of one every 15-25 minutes or 50-100 a day. The UK is the largest exporter of Ivory. Also much ivory from recently poached animals is passed off as antique – avoiding the rules.
The EU is now considering acting on this pressing issue. Our original advance has been destroyed, and we now look like we are incompetent.
It is currently down to issues creating the technical standards for exempting legal ivory.
My proposal would be to ban all ivory sale until this system was in place. This would put pressure on people to finish it quickly (and I would be surprised if it wasn’t solved very fast).
Lord Goldsmith wrote in a letter that he committed to enacting the bill by the end of 2022, though similar things were said 3 years ago.
Was Bulb as clean as it claimed? how can we tell?
In the UK (and I am sure in plenty of other countries) as the grid has cleaned, there have been a whole host of firms that have sprung up as a middleman – buying green electricity and providing it to their customers. There is nothing particularly unusual about this – we get our electricity from Octopus on a similar scheme. With many of these firms, they supply the electricity and gas, but often have few holdings themselves.
Octopus is busily investing in all sorts of green electricity generators, but the problem exists that if you do not own any of the electricity generation, then in tough times this can be your undoing.
Now, many of these claim to be fully green, but are not necessarily. The reputable ones match each unit used to a unit of renewable generation that went into the grid (Ofgems renewable energy guarantee of origin REGO). Alongside this, the reputable ones also invest in renewable generation.
So was Bulb as green as it suggested? Well the complaint came from the fact that only 5% of its power came directly from renewable energy projects, the rest was bought on the open markets through the aforementioned REGO. The point is, the electricity grid does not consist of electricity traveling like emails to specific places – it is supplied everywhere jointly by all the producers. This means that provided a supplier is paying for enough green electricity to cover all its customers uses (and has the REGO certificates to prove it) by definition, it is fully green.
Would it be better if the company had some green generation of its own? probably, but provided the scheme works it does not have to. It allows green electrical generation to be used as it is created – by who ever needs it, exactly as our grid is designed.
This problem has arisen because the government allows green electricity and the certificate of it being green to separate people. However, provided the certificates only cover the amount of green electricity that is being created, it is not counted twice it is merely worth more to the creator.
What is wrong with this? If creators of green energy are aware that they can make more money than those burning gas, many will switch. This still does what is needed, and provided green electricity certification is accurate it wont be double counted.
Possibly, the last nail bulbs coffin, was caused by the government setting out plans to make this loophole smaller. These so called pale green energy tariffs – where green energy was not bought directly from a renewable energy project are supposed to be eliminated.
I think the British government needs to be careful here. It is quite possible that in the near future, these providers will not be necessary as all the electricity in the grid will be green. However, for the time being it is worth continuing to offer this premium to green electricity creators and the ability for suppliers to make sure they have covered their promises.
Now in the case of Octopus they are also replanting and rejuvenating a section of the Amazon rainforest to offset any gas emissions. It is currently unfortunately true that it is far cheaper to heat using gas – heat pumps are likely to greatly change this, as they are 300% or greater efficient (in terms of electricity in, and heat out) however for now gas is used. A reforestation scheme can be guaranteed to suck up the carbon it is promised to capture.
Our guaranteed green electricity and offset gas monthly cost is roughly £5 more than the best price on the market, and for us £60 a year to know that our electricity and gas use is not increasing the problems of global warming. Having said that, we are still trying to reduce our use through: Smart devices, added insulation and when we get them installed – solar panels and thermal solar panels. The other advantage with a scheme like this, is it guarantees you a price for you exported electricity – so if you have solar, and are currently not being paid for anything that you export perhaps now is the time to switch. This essentially means that you can use Octopus as a battery.
If you are interested in transferring to this or another Octopus scheme please click on the link. This will give you a £50 credit on your account, as well as on ours – thereby supporting the site, without costing you a penny
Australia is risking several of the most pristine marine environments
Australia has an incredible range of wildlife. Indeed, a great number of people visit Australia because of this. From their fascinating land mammals -kangaroos and koalas, as well as many more, to the great barrier reef and the wide array of other sea life.
They also have areas of Australia which are already almost unusable, because the temperature is too high. You would think therefore, that conservation would be a high priority. Unfortunately under the current government that is very much not the case.
From mining projects and farming, wildlife is shown to have low priority. In recent times, a firm was given permission to dump material from dredging inside a marine park (and submerging parts of a coral reef – something that will kill it.
Continue reading “Australia is risking several of the most pristine marine environments”Do not be mislead, an electric car always has lower emissions than an equivalent combustion engine car
There is a constant argument made by those who like the combustion engine car. They want to add up all the emissions that are released creating the electricity and therefore suggest that the electric car is worse.
This argument quickly runs into problems: an electric car is so much more efficient that it is irrelavent.
Continue reading “Do not be mislead, an electric car always has lower emissions than an equivalent combustion engine car”Lockdown has shown the perils of overreliance on tourism: what to do
Uganda has suffered during lockdown. As much as 7% of the countries population works in tourism, a sector which has been either totally shut down, or greatly reduced over the last few years. Several other countries like Tanzania have suffered in a similar way.
How can we expect countries to protect huge ecosystems if the income to protect them can dry up with no warning?
Continue reading “Lockdown has shown the perils of overreliance on tourism: what to do”We have made wonderful progress towards cleaning up the grid. Now to finish the job…
Incredible progress has been made over the last couple of decades towards greening our grid. Coal is now supplying a very small percentage of our power, and this is likely to fully disappear in the next few years. Gas is the only remaining fossil fuel on our grid. We mad roughly 28 gigawats of electricity from gas in 2018 (last normal year before epidemic). There are plenty of ways to get this from clean sources
As an example, 1 megawatt of solar panels takes roughly 4 acres, and costs about 1 million pounds. Therefore, 1 gigawatt would take roughly 7 square miles and cost roughly 1 billion. That means to replace 28 gigawatt hours of gas generation with solar, would cost roughly 28 billion. The batteries would cost about 2 billion for a similar quantity. In terms of area, we would need roughly 150 miles, which is roughly 2/3 of all the rooftops of the UK housing stock. If, however, all UK commercial governmental and industrial buildings have their roofs covered in solar panels, this would likely take a great deal of the capacity needed. Even if you assume we need extra for night time power, we can not be talking more than 50 billion.
I am not saying that the government needs to invest this now. However, as gas powerplants do not last more than about 25 years, we can assume that by 2050 all the current ones would be decommissioned. If as each gas powered plant goes offline it was replaced with solar and batteries, the cost would be roughly £1.8 billion a year while a huge cost to many countries, would essentially be a rounding error in the UK.
Will our fight with Covid push the human race to tackle global warming?
Can the human race use the lessons learnt during the Covid epidemic to start addressing climate change as the existential threat that we know it is? Estimates vary as to what the Covid epidemic has cost, but economists estimate roughly $28 Trillion. Now while that sounds huge, it is only about 1/3 of global output annually. Given that Covid has taken place over around 2 years, that means an output reduction of less than 20%.
Now it is true, that governments around the world have spent vast amounts money propping up economies and trying to avoid as much of the pain as possible.
Climate change is predicted to cost about $23 trillion per year by 2050!
In other words, economists are predicting that in 28 years, we will have to find almost the price of fighting Covid – every year (remember that the Covid costs have been spread out over 2 years).
CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT?
We are marching towards a future, where we pay out almost the whole cost of COVID every year, to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Bears and wolves are not good friends seen recently as bear steals a kill from wolves in Yellowstone
Most scavengers are relatively small. Animals like jackals are unable to make large kills. Furthermore, the amount left behind by lion and leopard is usually more than enough for a jackal to survive on.
In the northern hemisphere though, bears get a great deal of their calories from scavenging. They have an incredibly keen sense of smell, allowing them to find dead animals,
However unlike the jackal, they are very capable of hunting. They can be seen from time to time, mixing the two.
Bears, particularly Grizzly bears, are very strong. In peak health, a large bear is more than capable of taking on a pack of wolves. They also require huge quantities of calories, and before going into hibernation, this will often push them to take bigger and bigger risks.
This is not hugely rare behaviour, but it is far rarer that it be filmed.
Indonesias leading University has proposed classifying Palm oil as a forest crop – This is insane, read on to find more – urgent condemnation needed
This proposal would mean that Indonesia could cut down all its rainforest and replace them with Palm Oil, and would have engaged in zero deforestation.
This has to be condemned globally, There are myriad problems with this. The destruction of the rainforest would release billions of tonnes of carbon into the air. Palm oil, will be incapable of reabsorbing all this carbon. Furthermore, palm oil plantations support just a handful of species of wildlife, so this would mean the end of the orangutan Sumatran elephant, tiger leopard and rhino.
Thankfully, there are many voices within Indonesia which are already condemning this move.
At the moment, this idea is the thought of various extreme academics (and much of the government). If it were to find acceptance, we could see the wholesale destruction of the forests of Indonesia, an area of deforestation that would have a huge effect on the worlds attempts to mitigate global warming. Arguments that palm oil trees absorb carbon as well, are absurd, as they absorb a tiny proportion of the carbon that would be emitted.
Hopefully, this will remain a crackpot academic idea, and a governmental daydream and never be put into place. We must be vigilant that it isnt.
