The news this morning from “Climate Action in Wonderland” is as follows.
Firstly, inspired by the need to be appearing to do something in relation to the COP26 climate meeting, the ban on petrol and diesel cars is supposedly going to happen by 2035:
Demonstrating the UK’s urgent action to reduce emissions, the Government plans to bring forward an end to the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans to 2035, or earlier if a faster transition is feasible, subject to consultation, as well as including hybrids for the first time.
How is this going to be achieved? Well, David Attenborough has been drafted in to sort it out. So that’s all good, as Ian Fletcher would say. Apparently the AA have described this as “incredibly challenging”.
Here’s a video of Julia Hartley-Brewer asking Michael Gove about how much it’s going to cost. He hasn’t a clue, and makes the absurd claim that all the new electric cars, new infrastructure and extra electricity needed are going to be a net saving.
Quite apart from the cost, I don’t believe it’s even feasible. It’s not going to be possible to produce that number of electric vehicles, set up the infrastructure to provide the charging points, and generate the additional electricity that would be needed. Needless to say, none of these issues have been addressed in the Government announcement.
The second fairytale is that the UK aviation industry is going to achieve “net zero” by 2050 (Guardian, Sky News), despite increasing passenger numbers by 70%! How are they going to do this? Invent an antigravity device? Have planes towed by invisible pink unicorns? Well, maybe – the Guardian article does say that some of the technology is “yet to be invented”.
Again, this is not going to happen. The airline industry is notoriously slow to change – the planes we fly in today look and work much the same as they did 30 years ago. It seems that they are going to use two common greenwash lies: firstly, the biofuels lie, that burning stuff from plants or from waste somehow doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, and secondly the offsetting lie, that planting some trees will absorb all the CO2 that the planes emit.
Update:
Here is Boris’s speech delivered today, a masterpiece of idiocy. Half of it is rambling about electric taxis in London in 1897. He then claims that we are “swaddled in a great tea cosy” of CO2 before going on to make the usual bogus claims about hurricanes and so on. Then he says “we in the UK, will do everything we can to support our Chinese friends…” – is he aware that his Chinese friends are building 200 new airports and have recently completed a new railway to transport millions of tons of coal? Finally he claims “we are on the verge, I’m assured, within a couple of years of having viable electric passenger aircraft”. He really is, as Jaime says in the comments, madder than the proverbial hatter.
Climate Scepticism 
There is a third impossible thing – that the government (or whoever is pulling their strings) or the aviation industry expects anyone in their right mind to believe the other two unattainables.
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Has Govee got an aging portrait in his attic?
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“There is a third impossible thing – that the government (or whoever is pulling their strings) or the aviation industry expects anyone in their right mind to believe the other two unattainable”
Alan, the trouble is almost nobody IS in their right mind, especially the left minds. So expect more of this for the next 7 months as the Gov(e) lays out the way to year zero (emission). The opposition will demand MORE and SOONER! until the UK, Presiding over COP26, will be demanding 2050 Zero from the rest of the World. Who will pledge? Certainly not Japan;
or China, who will not even peak before 2030. Not even the EU, whose Green Deal will be mired in rancour.
So Boris will be able to walk away from the Green Death as the rest of the world declines the invitation to the ball. Meanwhile the message will have penetrated to us unwashed that Zero emissions mean;
We cannot drive
We cannot fly
We cannot heat our homes
or cannot have Chinese Meals – Woks only work on a gas flame!
At least someone in the buble still has their wits about them.
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The electric-car infrastructure issue can reasonably be compared to same issue as faced by the now all but defunct “hydrogen economy” lobby. Joe Romm, a Clinton-presidency energy wonk, ecocrat and warmista, wrote a surprisingly good book (“The Hype about Hydrogen”) of his time trying to implement a more-or-less rapid transition to a hydrogen economy. He shows that even in a country as rich as the USA the scheme was a fantasy mainly because of the scale of the requisite infrastructure.
(Gosh. He even points out that hydrogen is an energy carrier, not a fuel, a distinction that still eludes many who really ought to know better.)
So has anyone here any ideas about the real agenda behind the government’s obviously mad plan? Is BoJo really as dim as he seems? (Blaming legions of leftist Sir Humphrey Applebys doesn’t count.)
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Even on a fast charge, an electric car takes about an hour to fully charge. It takes a few minutes to fill up with petrol or diesel. To maintain battery life and condition, it needs to be regularly trickle charged overnight, which means millions of charging points installed at homes (unless of course, you have to park your vehicle on the street or in a communal car park). Even then, if it’s been a very calm night across the UK, you might wake up to find your battery empty because the grid has reversed charging to take energy from batteries to top up the energy shortfall from inactive wind farms. Absolutely crazy.
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‘Com on now people, just chill out.
Just remember that the ‘brains’ behind the present government is Domonic Cunnings, well known as a Trotskyite Accelerationist who, according to his blog, wants to destroy the British Government so that it can be rebuilt in his own image.
We do indeed live in interesting times.
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Maybe they think the way to outflank the green lobby is to appear even more bonkers than them, then wait for the public to rebel.
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Boris the Mad Hatter didn’t invite the sturgeon Alice Krankie, who’s now quite grumpy, to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party (COP26 opening) where the Mad Hatter and Richard Rattenborough told everyone how they’re going to ban petrol and diesel cars in the fight against the Great Tea Cosy in the Sky.
“We have had a catastrophic period in which the global addiction to hydrocarbons has got totally out of control
We’ve poured so much CO2 into the atmosphere collectively that our entire planet is swaddled in a great tea cosy of the stuff
CO2 levels today are at a level not seen since 3 million years ago when there were trees on Antarctica.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-at-cop-26-launch-4-february-2020
Sacked COP26 head Claire O’Neill says Boris Johnson “doesn’t get climate change”. I think she may be right.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/04/sacked-cop-26-chair-claire-oneill-berates-boris-johnson-over-climate-record
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Jaime, thanks, I updated the main post with the link to that mad speech.
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This is something I’ve been wondering about for some time, now. Some possibilities:
1) Politicians are stupid. We’ve all thought this, I’m sure, at some point or another. But is that strictly true? You don’t have to be a genius to see that a near-future mass rollout of EVs, a concurrent ban of petrol vehicles and gas boilers and ever more reliance on intermittent and non-dispatchable electricity generation will be a recipe for disaster and chaos. Not *all* of them surely could have taken a hard look at that prospect and been so dim as to think: nah, it’ll be all right?
2) So are they just deluded? Even ostensibly bright people, with degrees and all that, fall victim to the craziest ideas, as per Orwell’s dictum about intellectuals. However, I’m not totally convinced – these are politicians after all, and if nothing else, might not cold, hard self-interest inoculate them, to some extent? Could running the entire economy full-speed into a brick wall conceivably *not* be the sort of thing they’d want to be remembered for?
3) Could they be playing some sort of devious long game? Lying, in other words. Promote the lunacy in the short term, just to get the green zealots off their backs and steal the opposition parties’ thunder? Then start to reel it all back, once it becomes blindingly obvious even to the dimmest and least engaged members of the public that it’s not going to work? Again, I’m not entirely convinced. If this is some kind of clever 4D chess-type move, it’s also a very dangerous one, as their actions and signals *now* are doing damage, and the longer it goes on, the harder it will be to reverse. Would they really risk that?
4) Or could it just be short-termism? Look good now, hang the consequences later? Don’t think too much about what we could actually be facing in, say, 2030 or 2035. Get all the virtue-signalling and halo-polishing done now, while the country is still relatively prosperous, and leave a poisoned chalice for the opposition once the political tide has turned and everything has started to go belly-up?
Maybe one of the above? Or a combination? Or none of the above? What could it be?
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Hi Alex.. given my recent experience with the Tory party. I can guarantee the answer for you is stupid, arrogant entitled idiocy.. A fully 100% clueless.. join your local.Tory party to find out.. I did.. join.. tell them how wrong they are and why.. so they have no excuses.. much ‘fun’ than arguing with people on twitter.. i get Michael Gove next month. Annual dinner. Now Michael Gove owes me one..so what should I say to him. As productively as possible?
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Barry, maybe you could quote some of his words back to him, for example that some are getting tired of “organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best, and getting it consistently wrong”. The CCC, for instance?
Also maybe that some want to “take back control of our destiny from those organisations which are distant, unaccountable, elitist and don’t have their interests at heart”.
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“and that is why the UK is calling for us to get to net zero as soon as possible”
No, ‘the UK’ is not calling for that at all – a few mad extinction rebellion extremists and climate activists are calling for that. He is unhinged and is lying through his teeth as well. We’ve got 5 years of this buffoon in charge.
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Alex .. brilliant question.. as Michael thank me once for correcting a few journalists using that quote partially.
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Ales Cull said:
“1) Politicians are stupid. We’ve all thought this, I’m sure, at some point or another. But is that strictly true? You don’t have to be a genius to see that a near-future mass rollout of EVs, a concurrent ban of petrol vehicles and gas boilers and ever more reliance on intermittent and non-dispatchable electricity generation will be a recipe for disaster and chaos. Not *all* of them surely could have taken a hard look at that prospect and been so dim as to think: nah, it’ll be all right?”
Ah, yes the Chinese don’t believe in climate change, and yet they are making lots of electric cars, which are cheaper than BMWs.
Could there be a connection? Mmm hard question that…
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Quite apart from all of the obvious problems identified in this article and the comments on it to date, there is another rather large elephant in the room – tax. In the last financial year, according to at least one website, UK fuel duty provided the government with a whisker shy of £28Bn:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/284323/united-kingdom-hmrc-tax-receipts-fuel-duty/
That’s just for fuel duty. Every time you put petrol or diesel in your car, you also pay VAT, so if that’s included, I’d guess the government pockets significantly more than £30Bn a year from the use of diesel and petrol vehicles in the UK.
That money will have to be replaced (well, more than replaced, given the massive cost of putting in place the electric charging infrastructure), so where is the money to come from? If they add tax to electricity use, then they’ll plunge millions into fuel poverty, especially as the plan is also for us all only to cook and heat our homes with electricity. If not from electricity, then from where? Road tolls? How will they work?
Will the Climate Assembly have anything sensible or useful to say about all this? Somehow, I very much doubt it.
And all for the sake of making a marginal reduction in our 1% contribution to the world’s GHGs, while most of the world carries on regardless. Truly these people are insane. The most generous interpretation I can offer is to suggest that from Alex Cull’s list, option 4 applies, though even that reflects badly on all concerned.
I despair.
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JAIME
Boris may not get climate change, but it was a great speech though, wasn’t it? I’d never heard of Bersey and his electric taxi, nor this year’s Chinese biodiversity COP. (I’m a fan of biodiversity. Saw a stork today swooping low over the motorway, heading for the wind turbines which cover every hill round here.)
50, 100 or 200 years ago the speech would have been printed in full in the Times and the 1% or 5% of people who needed to know would have read what the British PM said to the Italian PM. The tiny minority who participated in this embryonic democratic process could do so with some knowledge of what was going on. Tomorrow, no paper will print the speech, but 50 million people will know what the BBC or their favourite newspaper thinks of it, how much it deviates from the XR orthodoxy, etc. Only Cliscep readers and a handful of Tory faithful (and the Italian PM) will know what Boris actually said. This is just one aspect of our dysfunctional world which helps to explain how we got where we are.
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Alex- another simple answer to why tories?, why Boris & climate change, now..
Carrie Symonds – https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/16/carrie-symonds-warns-politicians-of-gigantic-climate-crisis-responsibility
(Boris want an easy life)
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Alex,
“Promote the lunacy in the short term, just to get the green zealots off their backs and steal the opposition parties’ thunder?”
As Ben rightly points out, you can never please Greens, ever. They will always want more. Perhaps Johnson didn’t know this but he must surely be aware of it by now.
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We shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not like Boris didn’t give fair warning of his exact intentions, soon after the Maybot secured her ‘legacy’ by getting MPs to vote for #netzero. But the ‘hero of Brexit’ was given an unassailable majority which he obviously takes as public affirmation of his grand virtue-signaling eco-lunatic plan to save the world by example.
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And, of course, the carmakers are not playing the game…\
https://ww.electrek.co/2020/01/17/ionity-increases-electric-vehicle-charging-prices-500-percent-january-31/
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Chris Morrison writes about Gove’s car crash of an interview:
https://www.altnewsmedia.net/topical-news-general/car-crash-gove-smashes-into-the-red-brick-wall/
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long time reader first comment, as has been pointed out many times over the years, the green zealots need to be shown what the real consequences of their demands will do. Wether by accident or design the proposals will bring the spectre of the end of civilisation closer than the projections of the green doomsayers. A quick shock may be enough to wake up the silent majority, I sincerely hope. A 30 year horizon for change is outside the normal mans purview, maybe taking them to the brink of the abbys is the only answer. The alternative is a long slow death !!!
Mike
[Mike – first time comments get held in moderation. Further comments should go straight through. PM]
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In most respects I think this Government shows signs of being the least idiotic we have had for some time but they make up for that in spades by being all but insane when it comes to climate change policy. I share the bafflement of others about what their thinking really is. In particular I find Gove bewildering; he was surely right in identifying and then combating the educational blob and, given that, I find it surprising that he seems to be a fully paid up member of the green blob. Surely he must be aware of how feeble his answers to Julia Hartley-Brewer were.
At this stage I don’t really expect the Government not to mouth the usual green platitudes but the gung ho enthusiasm is worrying.
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https://www.vauxhall.co.uk/cars/new-corsa/electric.html
“Go electric and save With a 100% electric vehicle you’ll save in the long run.
Get a £3,500 government grant towards the purchase cost
Electricity is cheaper than fuel – average spend £3.90/100 miles based on £0.13/kWh
Spend less on servicing – no clutch or exhaust to maintain
No congestion charges or car tax to pay and many councils offer free parking
Vauxhall Care and Wallbox charger included free of charge
Free 6-month suscription for BP Chargemaster’s Polar Network, and then just £7.85 a month thereafter. Find out more about the Polar Network.”
https://pod-point.com/guides/driver/charging-electric-car-at-home
“Cost of installing a dedicated home charger
A home charging point, fully installed, costs from £279 with the government OLEV grant.
Electric car drivers get a £500 grant for purchasing and installing a home charger with the OLEV grant.
Once installed, you only pay for the electricity you use to charge.
The typical electricity rate in the UK is about 14p per kWh, while on Economy 7 tariffs the typical overnight electricity rate in the UK is 8p per kWh.
Visit “Cost of charging an electric car” to learn more about the cost of charging at home and “OLEV Grant” to get a deeper understanding of the grant.
Tip: The cost of driving an electric car is about 2-5p per mile, which means EV drivers can save up to up £1,000 a year when compared to driving a petrol or diesel car (which costs ~15p per mile).”
What does this Marvel of new ElecTEC cost I wondered -?
First link I found – https://www.robinsandday.co.uk/vauxhall/new/new-corsa-e
“Vauxhall All-New CORSA-E + HOME CHARGING UNIT
100kW SE Nav 50kWh 5dr Auto
Personal Contract Purchase *Based On:
£5,000 Customer Cash Deposit
£1,100 Deposit Contribution
48 Month Finance Agreement
8,000 Annual Mileage
Ts and Cs apply
From £29,990 Vehicle cash price”
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Give Boris a tea cosy which is 1 part in 2500 of material (i.e. 400 parts per million, as per CO2) and 2499 parts fresh air. Let him see how long his tea stays warm.
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A policy to install a micro sized nuclear power generator on the site of every closed pub, would resolve so many rural and urban Green Blob issues, that they might have to bury themselves in bunkers and shut up.
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Oldbrew. But in Boris’s tea cosy every CO2 molecule acts as a little Maxwellian devil, so that his tea actually is heating up. And this is super bad, even the anti-aging Govee is giving the whole thing the widest of births. Now if Labour had won, the whole mess could have been shovelled Dianne Abbot’s way.
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Cameron and Hague have turned the COP26 poisoned chalice down.
https://www.guardian-series.co.uk/news/national-news/18212050.david-cameron-turned-climate-change-role/
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Alex:
None of the above. It’s a culture.
1) Not only is intelligence no defence against cultural belief, there’s some evidence that more intelligent people who are believers, are more culturally committed. Cognitive capability and knowledge is in service to cultural belief, so can better further this belief compared to less capable / knowledgeable people.
2) This is the closest, but still not in the sense of an individual delusion, which for example cold, hard self interest would typically counter as you say. Nor a medical delusion, cultural believers are perfectly normal in all respects; this is a feature of humanity not a bug and we’re all capable of cultural belief (and in fact several at once). However, cultures do impose a kind of group delusion, which subverts at the brain architecture level, so cannot be countered within individuals by logic or rational interests or such. As the subversion is subconscious, believers *honestly* and indeed passionately (uses emotive paths) believe, so they are not lying and they are not stupid.
3) This is essentially a conspiracy theory, albeit one that proposes a conspiracy against catastrophic climate change, not for it. Would require massively coordinated conscious lies by lots of orgs and individuals at all levels including the highest. Vanishingly unlikely, especially when there’s a much simpler explanation at hand – i.e. cultural belief. The latter coordinates *subconsciously*, it’s what cultures are for, so no lying required. Many, no doubt, are not full believers yet don’t actively disbelieve either, hence one could say they are to some extent pandering to the culture. But this is not actually a double-bluff or lying in that they still think it must be true, just they are just less than fully (emotively) committed. It is these latter folks that can be swayed, and even in the elite they out-number the emotively committed; Boris is very likely one such. In the general pop (i.e. not elite) of countries such as the UK, there are ways to tell that the vast majority of folks are not committed, probably >90% in the UK.
4) Essentially a variant of 3). Requires that there is a widespread conscious conspiracy with knowledge that it’s all not true, and within the elite too (where there are far more cultural believers). Far more likely that committed cultural belief is driving and convenient belief is pulled along in its wake. After all, this has happened endlessly throughout the entire history of homo-sapiens-sapiens. All religions, for a start. Many secular cultures too. Interestingly, strong cultures interact with each other, hence one can see the ‘shape’ of catastrophic climate change culture, via its profile across a wide range of nations having different religiosity. Hope to have some pieces on that soon.
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I was not caught by surprise yesterday when, after announcing that the EV-only date had been brought forward to 2035, the newsreader began:
“The plan has been criticised by…”
Of course I already knew what was coming next. Not:
“Cliscep denizens, who claim it is unworkable, unnecessary, will bankrupt the country, cost thousands of jobs, cause the value of terraced houses with no driveways to plummet, restrict the poorest in society from benefitting from the freedom of car ownership/use…”
But instead:
“… green groups, who say it is inadequate to address the climate emergency the world faces…”
==
Side note: yesterday when walking home from the Co-op, I saw a large truck with the legend “Climate Emergency Service” emblazoned on it in large letters. What was this? Some sort of Ghostbusters-style rapid reaction force? I noticed that the truck also proclaimed: “Food Waste Recovery Team.” The company was an outfit called Olleco.
Looking it up (image search “Olleco truck livery” if you want to see one of their trucks) I discover that “Climate Emergency Service” means collecting old chip fat to convert into biodiesel (while promoting your chippy’s green credentials to unsuspecting punters).
==
One last thing, not entirely irrelevant. I have noticed over the past few days several of our elite demanding better buses. “We need better bus services,” they opine wisely.
To which I, yelling at the TV (the wise heads do not seem to hear me): “You don’t use a bus, you ****, you just think it is something poor people ought to use.”
/rant
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Jit. How very odd, yesterday I saw an oil recycling lorry heading toward Norwich (but I don’t believe it the same company as that you saw). Even odder, at more or less the same time I happened to be consulting the bus timetable at a bus-stop and discovered we have lost all Sunday connection to Norwich. Feel like shouting at someone.
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“I saw a large truck with the legend ‘Climate Emergency Service’ emblazoned on it . . . ”
About a year ago, a very decent man who, ironically, used to deliver our coal got a better job and knocked the door to say Goodbye. Turns out he was off to drive for a company that buys past-sell-by-date food from supermarkets and converts it into biofuels. Given the level of foodbank use in Scotland, the business is surely, by any sane let alone compassionate logic, verging on the criminal.
Given that our local Sainsburys has a prominent place where shoppers can leave food they’ve just bought for donation to foodbanks, the hypocrisy is, er, striking. (I’m familiar with how the UK’s Renewables Obligations scam works but not with how biofuels are funded.)
Talking of crooks, did you know that Falck Renewables UK’s Italian parent company is, or certainly was, rumoured to have Mafia links and was the subject of Italian police inquiries? Or that one of the two Climategate “inquiries” was chaired by a then-member of Falk Renewables UK’s board, Lord Oxborough?
Clicking away to check facts for this post, I came across a rather good piece by Anthony Watts from 2010 I hadn’t read before: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/25/global-warming-the-oxburgh-inquiry-was-an-offer-he-couldnt-refuse/
(That said, I’m pretty sure allegations that Falck UK was involved in criminal activity are inaccurate. All else aside, the RO scheme allows you to act the completely amoral shit perfectly legally. The scheme was pushed through by arch-Blairite Brian Wilson in 2002 – he’s the man for whom the phrase “nasty, brutish and short” was invented.)
++++
“you just think it is something poor people ought to use”
Absolutely spot on. The electric car thing is and always was an elitist shindig. Just think how quiet the roads could be were they to be uncluttered by the lower orders and their clunkers as we tootle off to our weekend retreats.
As for why Bonkers BoJo has gone all green, today’s Torygraph reports that EU has told him there won’t be a trade deal unless he tows the EU climate line, esp on carbon trading. (See also today’s GWPF press release.) Well, fancy that.
And to round off a perfect day, two Swedish MPs have just nominated St Greta for the Nobel Peace Prize for the second year running. Hmmmm. Were she to win, not only would that be two Laureates in one family in four generations but she’d be the richest teenage brat in all Scandinavia.
Time for a drink . . .
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JIT said:
“One last thing, not entirely irrelevant. I have noticed over the past few days several of our elite demanding better buses. “We need better bus services,” they opine wisely.”
Ah, yes. Would they be Boris buses that allow people in the know to travel for nothing?
The most operationally expensive buses that TfL run, because of the number of fare-dodgers they attract.
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From The Times yesterday:
No, I don’t know either. All I know is that 2035 is well after this government ends. And two months time is well before.
(Sorry if this has been mentioned above. I only just noticed it.)
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This ban on petrol and diesel cars makes no sense
Good stuff from Rob Lyons at Spiked, covering many of the same issues we’ve discussed here after saying that in principle electric cars are nice – no noise and no fumes.
He ends by saying that in the light of the snail’s pace of projects like HS2 and the Heathrow extension, what are the chances of such a major infrastructure revolution happening in 15 years?
Also, here’s a good 12-point twitter thread
https://twitter.com/MarcherLord1/status/1225365943544619009
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LOL – via twitter
Can Geoff confirm this French translation required…
– 86% of 18-35 years old, young adults, in France believe nuclear power is responsible for climate change.
– Climate change is also their number 1 priority
Click to access Les-Fran%C3%A7ais-et-le-nucl%C3%A9aire-Un-sondage-BVA-pour-Orano-1.pdf
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slide 17
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New car sales are currently 2.3 million per year according to that article Paul links to. So that means from 2035 to 2040, 11.5 million EVs will come onto the roads and will need charging on a daily, even hourly basis, if long journeys continue to happen. Where’s the extra electricity going to come from, bearing in mind also the hugely increased load from banning gas boilers in favour of electric heating? What’s going to happen to old vehicles? Will the government tax them off the roads? Will fuel become scarce and even more expensive than now? Boris plans to double offshore wind capacity. It’s unlikely fossil fuel generating capacity will be expanded. Nuclear is a non-starter. The government thinks it can meet the cost of the massive alterations to infrastructure needed to implement this scheme using taxpayers’ money and meet the challenge of actually engineering that infrastructure. I think they might as well be selling bottled unicorn farts as the cure to aging or, if you’re in the spring of youth, as a miracle zero carbon propellant for household rugs, whether you just want to nip to the shops or fly across the Atlantic.
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“we in the UK, will do everything we can to support our Chinese friends…”
And they are very grateful:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-fossil-fuel-emissions-up-zero-point-six-per-cent-in-2019-due-to-china
“The growth of global emissions in 2019 was almost entirely due to China, which increased its CO2 output by 0.26GtCO2.
Despite the rapid rise and falling costs of renewables in many parts of the world, the majority of increases in energy demand continue to be met by fossil fuels.
While more modest than in recent years, the increase in emissions in 2019 puts the world even further away from meeting its climate change goals under the Paris Agreement.
China is expected to be responsible for effectively all the increase in global CO2 emissions in 2019, with a rise of 0.26GtCO2 – larger than the global total increase of 0.24GtCO2.
This represents a 2.6% increase in Chinese emissions from 2018 – with an uncertainty of 0.7% to 4.4% – and follows a similar increase of 2.3% in 2018. [from 2017]
Chinese coal emissions are expected to increase by 0.8%, with those from oil by 6.9% and gas by 9.1%. Cement production emissions are due to rise by 6.3%.
http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/en/CO2-emissions
In 2018, UK emissions were 1.07% of global total at 379 million tonnes, (0.379Gt)
China increased its emissions last year by 260 million tonnes to 10,325,000,000 tonnes, [10.325Gt] which is 28% of global total. That is over 28 million tonnes PER DAY.
If the UK shut down tomorrow, China would replace the UK’s annual emissions in just over 13 days.
China’s per capita emissions at 7 tonnes pp, are now higher than the UK at 5.6 tonnes pp.
There will be no reduction in China’s emissions. In the famous agreement between Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping, China committed to peaking its emissions by 2030. This was their commitment under the Paris agreement but it was presented as “China is reducing its emissions”, whereas in fact they will increase year on year until that date.
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Dennis, you explain this logic to climate activists and you get the response: ‘So, you think we should do nothing just because the Chinese are not doing much, or just because they want to enjoy the benefits of using fossil fuels which we have enjoyed for so long?’ Well, actually, by doing something (wrecking our economy and immiserating our citizens by imposing harsh government mandated carbon austerity and widespread energy poverty) we ARE effectively doing next to nothing to reduce global GHG emissions and cool the planet. The Chinese will carry on regardless for at least the next decade and laugh at our suicidal folly.
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China is also funding the coal plants in Africa and elsewhere that the World Bank has been co-erced to divest from:
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/current-policy-projections/
“China’s actions abroad will also have an important impact on future global greenhouse gas emissions, also due to the financing and building both fossil-fuel and renewables infrastructure worldwide through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 126 countries that could account for as much as 66% of global carbon emissions in 2050 (Jun et al., 2019).
Since 2014, China has invested over five times more in Belt and Road countries in developing coal-fired capacity than wind and solar capacity (Reuters, 2019). From 2014-2017, 91 percent of loans from the six major Chinese banks financing the initiative were tied to fossil fuel projects (Zhou et al., 2018).
Furthermore, of all coal plants under development outside of China, one quarter, or 102 GW of capacity, have committed or proposed funding from Chinese financial institutions and companies (Shearer, Brown and Buckley, 2019).
While 2018 marked the first year in four decades coal capacity outside of China declined (by 8.1 GW) due to retiring and decommissioning, China increased its coal capacity by 42.9 GW over the same period, thus raising the global coal fleet (Shearer, Yu and Nace, 2019).
China’s continuing dedication to the fuel domestically and abroad is concerning. (but not to the Chinese).”
It’s not just China:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/indl-goods/svs/steel/carbon-emissions-by-indias-steel-sector-to-triple-by-2050/articleshow/73927391.cms
“Carbon dioxide emissions from the steel industry are projected to jump to 837 million tons over the next three decades from 242 million tons now as India’s demand for steel more than quadruples to about 490 million tons, The Energy and Resources Institute said in a report. It will also contribute more than a third of the nation’s total fossil fuel combustion emissions from 12% currently.
India currently has 977 steel plants and is one of the few bright spots for demand globally as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration rolls out a plan to spend about $1.5 trillion to upgrade and build infrastructure over the next five years. Steel is the biggest carbon dioxide emitter among Indian industries.”
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And Eastern Europe..
https://apnews.com/d121bfc580f04e73b886cc8c5a155f7e
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Boris:
“we are on the verge, I’m assured, within a couple of years of having viable electric passenger aircraft”
They will of course be re-charged in flight:
“Professor plans flying power station” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1248068.stm
Thursday, 29 March, 2001,
“His gyromill, as he calls it, is actually a flying wind turbine. It uses its rotors to climb into the sky and then lies back in the wind as those same rotors generate electricity. The plan is to send clusters of these vehicles 4.5 kilometres (14,700 feet) up into the jet stream to create a sort of flying power station.”
This was a frequent topic on John Brignell’s Numberwatch site: https://www.numberwatch.co.uk/2001%20March.htm#airhead
He demolished the idea from an engineering point of view and added this comment, very appropriate to the Boris approach: “The moral is – if you don’t have to provide numbers you can keep any silly story in the air.”
Some very interesting history on the rest of the page, including noting the arrival of “Spiked” in 2001.
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http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2020/02/05/we-dont-need-no-flaming-sparky-cars-52/
“The only reason why some people can use electric cars, is because everyone else doesn’t. If all car and truck drivers were forced to use electric vehicles, the problem of recharging them would become completely unmanageable.”
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H/t Bishop Hill on Twitter (as they say), Conservative Home has published a piece by Rachel Wolf with the headline Achieving net zero will require massive changes to our lives – when is anyone going to tell voters?
She even mentions that steel production may be a bit of a problem:
This is the bit Andrew quoted from:
Is Boris going to listen to Rachel? Well, she had co-charge of the 2019 Conservative Manifesto so there’s more chance than him listening to me, I guess. Or even Dennis and Jaime (much though he should). Earlier she was founding director of the New Schools Network so I assume she is well known to Gove and Cummings. I’m sure most of us wouldn’t agree with the catastrophism with which she frames the problem but, all the same, I sincerely hope Wolf is an influence, then opens the door to high-class engineering people like Michael Kelly at the highest levels.
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Dennis:
Not quite the same, but giant tethered gliders, about the wingspan of a 747 and flown potentially in fleets of dozens or more, are being commercially developed. They fall back on the wind, generating power by pulling on the tether, then fly autonomously back down as the tether winds in. On the outward journey, it also does figure-of-eight autonomous flying to apparently increase the pull per cycle. Apparently it’s much more efficient than turbines and also captures high-altitude winds. I think they’re up to the flight trial stage and I recall they press released about a major contract with EON, in Ireland I think, quite some time back. Search ‘Ampyx Power’.
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BARRY WOODS 06 Feb 20 11.45AM
Confirmed. 69% of French people overall think nuclear power contributes to the production of greenhouse gases and to climate disruption, rising to 79% among women and 86% among 18-34 year-olds. A majority is favourable to the continuation of nuclear, however, for reasons of energy independence and job creation. Only a minority is aware that France’s electricity is cheaper than that of its neighbours.
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Andy
I had a look, I don’t think it will take off…
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I think steel production should be moved to active volcano’s!!
not sure how health & safety regs would cope with this?
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DF would you drive across a bridge built from Cosa Nostra (Etna) or Camorra (Vesuvius) steel?
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Reading about the plans of the climate consensus to harass new power from giant gliders, and blithely talk about net zero gives aimportant insights on the thinking of those leading the consensus. Reading on how the consensus controlled media has dumbed down the population to where a majority believes nuclear power contributes to anthro ghg production, gives another indight.
The first insight is that not only is the climate consensus incompatible with civil society. The climate consensus is incompatible with reality and human life. There will never be economical power derived from giant gliders pulling vast spools of high tensile power lines. “Zero emissions”will be achieved by humans becoming effectively extinct and Western high tech prosperity and health care extinguished.
The people pushing this are, to be kind, batshit crazy delusional nihilists.
The second insight, from watching how the consensus controlled media has deceived people, is that the consensus is a core of rotten deceipt dressed up in a thin gilding of sciences and compassionate rhetoric.
Will PM Boris see through this and guide a national recovery to rational reality based policies, or has he been absorbed into the mindless climate consensus?
This really is bigger than Brexit. Corrupt media and hack academics have been at lying about climate longer than Brexit. They have created a wholly parasitic thriving subeconomy based on profiting from climate scams and fear mongering. This will be tough indeed.
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Today, Grant Shapps says the ban might start in 2032 –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51474769
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HUNTERSON7 07 Feb 7.24pm
..and whatever happened to Boris’s Rasputin, Dominic Cummings? Back in prehistoric times, about three months ago, when Hilary Benn and that Liberal woman were going to save us, the media couldn’t get enough of the Dom, with the Guardian mentioning him several times a day, usually to mock his intellectual pretensions and clothes sense, or, (in at least two articles) to accuse him of being smelly. There was a brief flurry of interest in his 2nd January blog article asking for weirdoes to work at no 10, but utterly no curiosity as to how, for the third time, he managed to win a national vote for his bosses against all the odds.
The answer is maybe in his blog article,
https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/
but what journalist is going to wade through something several pages long with links to all kinds of technical stuff that would look silly in a serious newspaper? – I mean, a link to Judah Pearl (“one of the most important scholars in the field of causal reasoning”) turns up an article called “causality, hypotheticals, and robots with free will & capacity for evil.” What could a Guardian journalist do with that? It’s positively egghead. Turn it into a stripy widget Judah and the science correspondent might give it 200 words.
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This was where you mentioned Cummings Geoff!
“utterly no curiosity as to how, for the third time, he managed to win a national vote for his bosses against all the odds”
Brexit and GE 2019 of course. And this? “Cummings was described as a “key figure” in the successful campaign against a North-East Regional Assembly in 2004, after which he moved to his father’s farm in County Durham”. Wikipedia thinks it knows. But that’s not national.
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Today’s banning news is about coal and wood (misleadingly called “wet wood”)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8026987/Ban-sale-wet-wood-house-coal-hits-2-5m-homes-Government-clamps-air-pollution.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/21/coal-wood-fires-banned-fight-cut-emissions/
Bad news for the millions of people who’ve recently bought trendy and expensive wood-burning stoves.
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Paul. Kiln-dried wood (I.e. dry wood) is still O.K. Those trendy types can still emit CO2 to their heart’s content.
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MY council is to spend TEN % percent of its budget on the ‘climate emergency !!!
(very strong Tory council Redwoods’s constituency)
WTF
https://www.wokinghampaper.co.uk/10-of-the-2020-21-council-budget-will-be-spent-tackling-climate-emergency/
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Barry:
A lot of that appears to be cleverly labelled money irrelevant to a ‘climate emergency’. Helping bees, making good cycle-ways, improving park-n-ride and greenways or tackling congestion (who wants to spend their life snarled up), will have arguable priority compared to say schools or health, but in the end would probably have good support even if the whole climate apocalypse thing had been magically erased from everyone’s memory. 18M for clean energy generation is another matter, but OTOH I presume there was a plan to spend this long before any declarations of emergency came along. I think this is essentially a form of appeasement, which usually doesn’t work out well. In the long run such ‘clever’ labelling of funds may be regretted, because it reinforces the false narrative that there is an emergency and that many millions are being spent on it already, hence pulling the door wide open for much more spend on much less useful things.
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they want a Green Bank!!!
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As some joker said on twitter, if you live in a place called “Wokingham”, what do you expect!
But I think Andy is right – a lot of the 10% figure is just repackaging of things they were already spending money on. “Tackling congestion” could even mean widening roads!
Similarly with the EU – they claim to be spending over 20% of the budget on climate-
https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/budget/mainstreaming_en
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48198646
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First they came for your gas cooker and your gas boiler, then they came for your car, then they came for your solid fuel stove. Eco-socialism showing its ugly face now. I lived in a village until recently where coal deliveries in winter were a regular weekly occurrence. A third to a half of households used coal to heat their homes and maybe heat water via a back boiler. The eco-fascists want to end that and force everyone to use expensive ‘green’ electricity, regulated and supplied by the state via complusory smart meters which will charge variable tariffs according to demand and thereby ration energy and tightly control its use, even micro-mamaging ‘smart’ appliances in the house. A hellish brave new world of state control, energy poverty and enforced austerity just so Greens can virtue signal their intent to solve a non existent climate crisis.
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“First they came for your gas cooker and your gas boiler, then they came for your car, then they came for your solid fuel stove. ”
That progression is usefully accelerating. Not long from now they’ll have come to take everything, before they have in practice actually physically taken almost anything. Which is rather helpful to those who object, in that it makes the ideology agenda and its heavy downsides well known to public while there’s still time to do something about it – of which a political voice / party ought to be first I guess.
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Jaime. I tried to “like” your excellent comment, but failed miserably – some of us aren’t good with IT. So please accept my plaudits here instead.
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Government’s Green housing plan under fire as developers claim it is ‘unworkable’
As I said in this post, the issue with net zero isn’t just the cost. More fundamentally, it’s not possible.
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Stop nitpicking Paul.
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1. Battery Electric Vehicles( BEVS) are NOT zero CO2 vehicles on an honest assessment on a life cycle basis. A lot of energy is used in making batteries – more than used to make internal combustion engines (ICE). Hence a lot of CO2 – up to 200 kg CO2 equi/1 KWh battery capacity. (Embedded CO2). So a large SUV with a 100 KWh battery will start with a deficit of 20 tons of CO2. A 35 ton lorry with a 500 mile range would be ten times worse. So you could not go to ZERO CO2 by switching to battery powered transport unless all the energy used in making the BEV and running it is CO2- free. Not likely for a long time because embedded CO2 largely originates in countries outside the U.K.
2. Battery powered aviation is fantasy. A medium range plane such as the Airbus 320 R carries about 266 MWh of fuel energy. Currently a battery pack to carry so much energy would weigh about 19 times the maximum takeoff weight of the plane and at a charging rate of 1MW, eight times faster than the Tesla supercharger, would take more than 11 days to charge fully.
3. Those interested might want to see my recent talk arranged by the GWPF at the House of Lords –
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First they came for your gas cooker and your gas boiler, then they came for your car, then they came for your solid fuel stove. Eco-socialism showing its ugly face now. I lived in a village until recently where coal deliveries in winter were a regular weekly occurrence. A third to a half of households used coal to heat their homes and maybe heat water via a back boiler. The eco-fascists want to end that and force everyone to use expensive ‘green’ electricity, regulated and supplied by the state via complusory smart meters
and to to work
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