[Panic]Where’s Laura?[/Panic]
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Channel 4’s dispatches programme last night fairly effectively dismantled many of the government’s claims at being a world leader on fighting climate change.
One of the most interesting parts was about the Drax power station burning bio-mass and how green (or not) burning wood actually is. I was also quite surprised to learn that the hardware for carrying wind turbines is largely shipped in from China
and that the government isn’t funding renewables such as tidal power or ground source heat but is funding fossil fuel companies to produce ‘Blue’ rather than ‘Green’ Hydrogen.
Anyhow, well worth a look.
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Private Eye, among others, have been banging on about that for years. It’s verging on the scandalous.
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I hadn’t grasped how dodgy that bit of carbon ‘accounting’ actually was or what a large part of the overall mix Drax represented.
The Blue Hydrogen issue is pretty depressing too, production fuelled by burning gas.
It’s so frustrating that the UK is blessed with such a lot of potential for wind and tidal power. We could build huge quantities and then have facilities for creating green hydrogen. This could then power transport and smooth demand for electricity.
This would create vast numbers of jobs, and we could export this expertise (and the manufactured products) all over the world.
Yes, it would be expensive, really expensive, but it would actually work, and I’m not convinced that it would be much more expensive than the nuclear power stations that we are building.
Our government is just shit.
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Greta has been pretty accurate in her recent appraisal of our government’s ‘world beating’ efforts.
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About 6% of overall production according to the Western Power stats.
The principle of burning wood efficiently isn’t necessarily a bad one, but Drax is so large that it needs whole forests grown to feed it.
I worked with a German company and they had a small wood incinerator that took scrap wood - the machine to pelletise it and remove nails was really cool. But it was fairly small, as supply can’t be guaranteed.
In order to get Drax funded they will have a supply contract that lasts the length of the funding - possibly over 20 years - with a number of (probably European) timber companies. The scale of it is such that it almost certainly isn’t just the unusable branches and twigs, it’ll be whole trees. Fucking millions of them!
12% of the ‘renewable’ energy according to Drax.
15M tons of carbon per year pumped out.
Worth watching the Dispatches episode linked to above. The Drax segment starts at 13 minutes but the whole thing is worth looking at.
So the headline this morning was: governments pledge to end de-forestation by 2030. And that’s supposed to be impressive? How about just ending it now? I mean, rainforest is being felled at some horrific rate along the lines of a football pitch every 6 seconds, and they think kind of ambling along to stop that by 2030, is in some way confronting the issue. Will there even BE any forest left to not cut down, by 2030?! FFS, it’s a joke.
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Even betterer: Brazil has stated that it will put more effort into reducing “illegal” deforestation.
But no change to the government sanctioned/sponsored clearing.
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Back in 1989/90 there was lots of talk about deforestation in lessons at school. Videos, etc. The school (via sponsorship or something) “bought” an area of Tropical Rainforest somewhere in Brazil, I think. I wonder what happened to it…
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A lot of younger people are deciding not to have kids for ecological reasons, it’s a growing trend and population growth in developed countries is slowing dramatically, and in some cases shrinking.
The problem with this, and its a big fucking problem, is the mouth breathing, S*n reading, lowbrow twunts on your cull list, breed like fucking rabbits.
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It’s not all doom and gloom of course.
The UK is currently running, as an average, on about 65% renewable energy and in the summer we have weeks in which we run on 100% renewables.
The growth of wind farms, solar, and a huge corporate move to have the greenest ESG / CSR story in town feels like an unstoppable tide to people like me selling Green Tech.
I’ve just come out of a meeting where we discussed 4 major clients ( a bank, a large “we work” type organisation, a university and a property management company), all with a very serious and determined desire to reduce their energy consumption by over 50% in the next 3 years. The total estate across those 4 clients is ~ 5000 large buildings (office blocks, University halls etc).
I get marketing companies approach me all the time promising to get me leads… I laugh at them. I can’t cope with the demand I already have. We could double our engineering team tomorrow if there were engineers to employ… They are all very very employed.
I had some meetings with a large (well respected) university recently, they said: “we have to be the greenest around or the students won’t come here” I was told not to arrive in my diesel car in 2022 as it (or any other ice vehicle) will not be allowed on campus. More over if we want to supply them we have to agree to only travel to sites by public transport or EV. They cannot let their ESG story slip one inch.
These businesses don’t just see being green as a moral imperative, it’s their most pressing commercial one too!
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Hear - fucking - hear!
This is excellent and heartening news. Only this will actually drive lasting change.
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it is so true - we all have to report annually on our carbon emissions, sustainability etc…
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If you want thaf automating, I can help 
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If only the test of the public sector were the same. Our lot are holding numerous conferences and writing papers, producing graphs etc. All of it boils down to spending nothing, accounting for what we already do, reducing the estate and selling off land for others to plant trees. Couldn’t even get them to agree to a simple target such as use of electric hire cars, let alone attempt to multiply effects through procurement contacts, ie recycled or reused steel and other raw materials.