See Animals Wild – Page 11 – Wildlife and conservation new, wild travel information and links for booking

August 7, 2023August 3, 2023

Amazon deforestation has fallen over 60% since last July

Great progress is being made in slowing rainforest destruction in Brazil with great falls in the last year. It is true that this rate needs to fall to zero in the near future, but great progress is being.

A lot of this progress is as a result of the end of the Bolsonaro regime, and could swing back should a similar person come to power.

However, what is clear is that if the Amazon reaches a tipping point and starts to dry out, it will rapidly die, and at this point there is unlikely to be enough rain for the regions croplands to remain (the crops will no longer grow as a result of the lack of rain).

It is essential that the rest of the world invests heavily in this region, in order to give a clear alternative to soy and cattle rearing in order to earn a living.

August 6, 2023August 3, 2023

Battery powered freight ships

There are a great number of different sectors which need to be tackled if we are to move towards net zero as a world. One of the hardest is the ships that transverse the world oceans, allowing the global economy to run. Is this finally an area which cuts will be possible?

Might electric freight ships start replacing fossil fuel run ships?

Many sectors of the global economy have been fully sorted – or at least solutions exist which will take carbon to zero over time – I will include a quick overview below, but for the rest of the article look below the bullet points:

Power- it is (in most of the world) cheaper to scrap a standing coal powerplant and replace it with brand new solar and wind, than to continue to use the coal. While replacing coal with gas does lead to a reduction in emissions, it is not enough, and this too is more expensive to run long-term. Letting go of gas will be harder, as it will require very large batteries to replace gas as the base load – but economics as well as global warming are rapidly changing this too.
Agriculture- many of our current methods for agriculture have high emissions, however through a variety of methods, it is predicted that this sector can rapidly move to net zero. From additives in cattle diet (made from seaweed) which vastly reduce methane production) to less fertilizers, and spreading various rocks on the land which will lock carbon into the soil (good for climate change and the farmers yields), as well as electrical equipment, solutions exist, we simply need to use them (they are too expensive currently for parts of the world, but prices are coming down.
There are other areas, like fugitive emissions, which need to be dealt with, and industries like cement (currently emitting aound 3%) where new ways of making it can vastly drop its emissions. Also around 2% currently comes from deforestation – this needs to stop and be reversed by trillions of trees being planted worldwide (this must use local trees, both to avoid unintended side effects, and to make sure new forests support local fauna)
Transportation accounts for much of the rest, at roughly 30% of human emissions, and 72% of this (around 21% of human emissions) is road transportation. Now, while much infrastructure is needed for electric vehicles to work, electric cars lorries and buses are all incredibly successful. The industry is in its relative infancy compared to combustion engine vehicles, but its incredible simplicity, as well as its instant savings mean that in almost all the world they would already give savings over the lifetime of the vehicle.

Much of what is left is the last 9% or so which is used in transportation. Air transport accounts for around 3% currently, but is a hard place to decarbonize as it is such an energy intensive process, though many companies have passenger jets for journeys are to 500 miles coming in the next decade.

This leaves sea transportation. Much of the worlds freight goes by sea. It is far cheaper (in most instances) to make lots of a product in one location in the world and then ship it to where it is needed. Currently this is highly polluting, but progress is being made here too.

COSCO electric container ship is one of the first to hit the market. Powered by 2 900kw propulsion motors, it reduces carbon emissions by 32 tonnes every 24 hours. Powered by a battery unit (housed in 20-foot containers) which has a capacity of 50mwh or 50000kwh). These containers are easily swappable, which means in places like a river where swapping them out is relatively easy, they are ready to replace all other freight and given the huge savings are likely to relatively quickly.

These ships will be able to run on full power for around 24 hours. Given that container ships tend to travel at around 20 knots (37km per hour or 22 miles per hour) this is a rang of around 500 miles. If the swapping of this battery can be done quickly, the travel along the coast should be able to able to continue relatively quick, particularly if these battery swapping stations can be stationed as near the shipping route as possible.

Now this container ship takes around 700 containers, which suggests to me, that you could put in say 10 container batteries, barely reduce the capacity and allow this same ship to cross the Atlantic and more. Now 700 containers is a small container ships with some carrying 7 times as many. A 5000 container ship takes 1.5 -2 million gallons of oil, 1 gallon weighs about 3.3kg, so we are talking 5000 tonnes at the lower end, that means that even on our smaller shop we are talking 500 tonnes of oil, 10 batteries has to compare favourably.

If well made and competition arrives soon, it is likely that these ships will arrive surprisingly fast, as the advantage to companies using them will give them to great an advantage over competition, requiring extremely rapid adoption.

August 5, 2023August 1, 2023

A flurry of wolves born in California: are they making a comeback?

Grey wolves from Oregon now appear to be thriving in California (where they disappeared from about 100 years ago).

Wolves have never been reintroduced to California, instead they were returned to Yellowstone, re-entered Oregan back in 1999, and then entered California in 2008.

Short of a sudden sustained assault on their numbers, they are back in California and are likely to multiply over the next few decades to take back up their position as apex predators. This should not be feared in any way, with sensible management, it could end up benefiting California, with healthier ecosystems, less car crashes caused by wildlife amongst many other benefits.

August 4, 2023August 1, 2023

Lauren Boebert in the USA has spouted some fear mongering about wolves, and I thought it worth looking at this issue

It is true, Wolves are hunters. More than that, they are incredibly successful hunters. They work as a team, have incredible endurance and a very high level of intelligence. This is perhaps why in the last few centuries their numbers have been greatly depleted.

In places like western Europe and the USA, they were close to extinction as a whole and had become locally extinct in much of their range. So is this fear mongering reasonable? Of course not.

Lauren Boebert spouts rubbish about wild wolves and how dangerous they are

Here she is talking about wolves in Colorado. She quoted figures of 500 attacks from 2002- the present, and stated that 30 people died in this time – scary numbers indeed. However, she was instantly fact-checked – those were the number of attacks around the world not just in the USA, only 1 death occurred there.

Of course, every death is sad, but to put it in perspective, each year 175-200 people die as a result of their car colliding with a deer. So over the same period, there were 3500-4000 car deaths as a result of deer – and wolf presence greatly reduces this, both by reducing the deer numbers, and creating a climate of fear, which makes deer stay away from open spaces, and so cross roads far less often.

August 3, 2023September 4, 2023

NB if your going somewhere wild on our, do post your sightings

We have live sightings maps for many of the largest reserves in Africa, as well as the Alps and the Carpathians in Europe.

We are keen to slowly build this site up as a resource for wild study and are keen to operate as a place to put together sighting data. While all maps are currently live, we are keeping an eye on poaching and will remove animals that are in danger from showing up. In the future some of this information may well disappear into the members area, but for the time being – ENJOY

August 3, 2023August 1, 2023

‘Project 2025’ is a US climate policy the right wing is pushing the next Republican to take on – gutting climate and environmental policy. Should Biden declare a climate emergency while he can?

It would be insane to suggest that the USA has really gone into saving the climate. To the contrary, the USA emits 14% of the world emissions for 4.23% of the population (their constant position is that China needs to act first, China does emit 29% of the carbon dioxide with 17% of the world, but their per capita pollution of China is 7.6 tonnes, verses 13.68 tonnes in the USA (almost twice as much).

So what is on their wish list?

August 3, 2023August 30, 2023

Fire on ship carrying cars has been blamed on electric cars – is this true? While it is not clear, it is not particularly likely, and it should not make you fear electric cars

A total of 3000 cars caught fire on the ship, but where did the fire start?

The ship was 199m long and started on the ship while it was on route from Germany to Egypt. It caught fire off the coast of Holland. Of the 3000 cars, 350 of the cars are Mercedes and 25 were electric.

The fire has not been good, and one person has died as a result. However, what is clear is that a large number of media sources have blamed the electric cars before anyone has worked out what is happening.

With cars driving around at speed, the risk of a fire is never going to be zero, but as a proportion of fires in the UK you are 17 times less likely to have one in an electric car

August 1, 2023August 1, 2023

As wildfires burn across much of Southern Europe, the political party running the UK backtracks on its commitments

Last Thursday, while wildfires raged in Greece, Italy, Tunisia, Portugal, Croatia and Algeria and British tourists found themselves being rescued by locals in boats (good boats, not those bringing people fleeing for their lives).

August 1, 2023August 1, 2023

BP has returned to profits – what now

BP has made profits of £2 billion in the second quarter of the year, while global warming continues to become a more and more existential issue.

Unfortunately, it also appears that BP is not thinking of the future at all. The vast majority of this money will be returned to share holders in dividends and buybacks.

Perhaps there is something in extra tax on companies which make extra profit, simply because oil prices are high – largely as a result of the Ukraine war.

August 1, 2023August 1, 2023

The insanity of Rishi Sunak and his position – max out our oil and gas reserves

Despite all our promises, Rishi Sunak (the UK prime minister) has vowed to max out the UK fossil fuels reserves.

Now there are several stupid issues with this position.

We are an island nation – the melting of the ice caps will hit us hard, so reneging on our commitments is likely to hit us harder than most
He has at other times suggested that we can be leaders in the green transition – well not now (and there is far more money in the future than there is in oil in the north sea)
50% of carbon emissions come from road transport. It is likely that the vast majority of this will be electrified in the next couple of decades, which means that the world will need less oil by the time these fields start coming on like
He suggests that this is to allow us to drill our own oil and keep emissions down, yet our extraction emissions are actually far higher than much of the world.
He also suggested that by drilling our own oil it would bring down prices, yet only around 20% of this oil comes to the UK, and all of it is traded at the current world price so this will not relieve prices for home owners one bit.

He has also suggested that in some way, the war in Ukraine is what has required this move – only 4% of our oil came from Russia. As to Ukraine, while we may have imported some grain, we do not import any oil from there.

More insanely, Rishi Sunak suggested that this was an essential plank of our move to net zero. Unfortunately, he argues that it is cleaner because it causes less emissions to drill near the UK. This would be slightly true if our oil could be extracted with similar emissions to elsewhere, however, we cant. Once the oil is put in huge tankers, the carbon footprint per litre is so small it does not overcome the extra emissions for extraction.

There are some fears that this is signalling a swing right in politics after the loss of Boris Johnsons seat in the byelection that his resignation caused.

He has argued that this will help our move to net zero, but many Tory MP fear that this will simply lead to them loosing their seat at the next election. I think that this will lead to many problems, and shows that he really is not up to being PM at a time like this. It shows a lack of understanding of what the country needs – even suggesting that this will keep gas prices down in the 2050s is foolish – between now and then, every boiler in the country will fail, and should be replaced with a heat pump, which then wont need the oil or gas anyway.

He did pair this announcement with 2 more carbon usage and storage centres. However, it is thought that the new oil fields that he has announced will give roughly 500 million barrels of oil (about 80 billion litres). Put differently, the carbon dioxide released from a barrel of oil during its use, is roughly 426kg of carbon dioxide (for reference one litre of petrol used in your car emits around 2.3 kg of carbon dioxide directly, though these emissions would likely double if you include extraction refinement and transport of the petrol before it enters your car) which means that the carbon dioxide released by these licences is likely to be around 213000 mega (million) tonnes of carbon dioxide. For reference, our current emissions as a country is about 313 megatonnes a year, so this is huge.

This is not a positive step for the people of the UK, so I am not sure what he is doing it for – the oil and gas companies? While I recognize his reason is that he wants to make sure the UK has enough oil and gas to be fuel independent, if the transition is successful, much of this oil will have to end up as stranded assets, and it seems reasonable for oil and gas companies to demand their money back with large interest, when the government is forced to change its mind.