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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”
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.
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.
I have written about issues that have arisen from the delisting of wolves in America. Given their absence from a large portion of the USA, the suggestion that they have recovered is insane. Unfortunately, putting states in charge takes the decisions of what a sensible ‘harvest’ is, away from scientists and puts it in the hands of local governors.
Wisconsin has already killed 1/3 of the wolf population based in the state. The fact is, that Wisconsin stated that their aim was to have a stable wolf population, something clearly not successful.
Norway has had incredibly generous electric car subsidies. This has meant that the number of people changing to electric cars are so high that the tax from gas guzzlers is falling faster than they anticipated. Electric cars are already 77.5% of new cars sold. This compares to the UK at 15% of new cars being electric, and the USA 2.6%. I find the USA particularly strange as they are the country which has lead to the rise of Tesla- though admittedly given the rise speed that tesla has been growing, this is probably out of date. With tesla, if the numbers are just 3 years out of date the number of deliveries has trebled (if you look back to 2013, only 8 years, there is only 20,000 sales, yet in 2021 936,000 were sold 4700% growth in 8 years).
Continue reading “Is Norway having problems funding their country without combustion engine cars”Perhaps a more alarming way of looking at this, worldwide fossil fuel subsidies last year were $11 million a minute.
Just think what that amount of money could do for mitigating climate change and reversing the damage on the natural world.
Continue reading “Worldwide fossil fuel subsidies last year were $5.9 trillion!”Around the world we are in a period where there are lots of people struggling where they are. Whether due to weather or war or crime, there are significant numbers of people who are on the move. Perhaps the most famous is the border wall that Donald Trump ran on. Given that almost all of the people who are illegally in the USA arrive legally and then fail to leave, cutting off the stream of people fleeing violent crime in central America will make little difference to what is going on.
Mongabay, one of the best websites about the natural world, has had one of its writers sued. This happened after the reporter in question reported on illegal deforestation by a Peruvian cacao company.
For this company, it appears that this is a decision that they have taken, having sued several other outfits in recent times. The suit has been thrown out. The company had also sued the 4 members of the local environment ministry, including the one which lead the prosecution of the company. This suit has been lost, but the company is appealing.
This sounds like extreme wrong-doing. If you are prosecuted and found guilty, clearly those who prosecuted are right.
Increasingly, companies that are involved in illegal acts will sue anyone who uncovers it – wrongful judgements can move them forwards, and even if not, the court process can keep everyone tied up for years – if anything survives of the forest at the end of that, it is surprising. The judgement for the original crime of destroying forest, was clear and final with 3 sentenced to prison for the “crime of illegal trafficking of timber forest products and aggravated obstruction of justice”. They also had to pay fines of over $4 million.
Unfortunately, despite overwhelming evidence all of the sentences were overturned by the supreme court – freeing the way for the attack on Mongabay. Indeed, 4 days after the original publication a notarized letter arrived requesting the article be corrected – in particular, claiming false claims were made in the article. Mongabay Latam published an article refuting each point in turn. Some of the points were absurd, with the company complaining about the turn deforestation being used – as they had not been found guilty of this. More foolishly, despite forest destruction being deforestation by definition, the website had only quoted one of the officials prosecuting.
This back and forth continued, but suffice to say their arguments are stupid: talking about logging and deforestation are completely interchangeable.
Stupid moves in court must be publicized, as only ridicule and financial loss will force companies like this to behave.
Thankfully, this website is not a big enough thorn to have to face similar suits, but that may come.
Back in 2019, the conservative government passed a law banning the import of trophies from animals hunted abroad.
Despite their status, various wild species are hunted in the wild and in theory this law would stop this.
Now, you might notice that it is now almost 2022, so what happened? Well it was announced in 2019 queens speech but has not been brought forwards by the conservatives who are currently in power (and suggested the law in the first place). Worryingly, they have not actually announced a timetable of when they will try to enact this law! Given it has been 3 years before they announced it, no firm timetable being in place would suggest that this is still not a certainty. Delay is particularly concerning, as many Conservative supporters are wealthy, so it is reasonable to think that wealthy donors are the reason that this law is taking so long to come into place.
Continue reading “Is the government finally going to ban hunting trophy import”It has been recognised in many circles but fossil fuels have been a problem for a very long time. Generally the argument has gone, there is nothing that can replace them.
What should we do about companies who were pushing the idea that was nothing to replace fossil fuels, while at the same time working to stop electric cars ever coming to market?
Some people might argue that in a free market society, you can do nothing. That has to be wrong. Exxon bought the lithium ion battery patent back in 1966, and then completely suppressed it -this is why the Sony Walkman only arrived in 1991, precisely 25 years after the patent was given when it expired. Chevron Texaco did something similar in 1999, when they bought the right to certain battery chemistry, and a particular type of battery plug in the hope of stopping that technology ever coming to market in the form of a battery for a car.
Car and fossil fuel companies cannot be allowed to get away with this. Indeed it has to be illegal.
Indeed if it isn’t, the free market system must change otherwise these companies will have the ability to make the fight against climate change that much harder.
There needs to be a way to inflict significant damage on a company which intentionally fights against the long-term human interests in order to maximize short term profits. Perhaps the only way to handle this is to fine the share holders? If the share holders know that they are going to be financially liable for any bad behaviour, this will force the value of the company down when ever they misbehave.
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