This analysis neglects the impact of moving heavy industry offshore -- Britain still benefits from the consumption of industrial products, historically some industrial products consumed domestically may have been manufactured in Britain where CO2 emissions from manufacturing would be counted as British emissions. Now the same products are manufactured in China, perhaps with lower environmental regulation. Both countries share a single atmosphere & so in terms of global warming it is irrelevant in which country the emissions occur. If outsourcing manufacturing without reducing emissions makes British emissions look lower by some metric then that metric is not very useful for thinking about progress in dealing with climate change.
The economist podcast [1] touched on this topic recently during an interview with Prof Dieter Helm [2] who has a series of lectures & a new book about this.
However: the UK government is also directly financing, through UK Export Finance (UKEF), a whole lot of fossil fuel developments, though.[0]
UKEF has ploughed more than £6 billion into fossil fuel companies in the last 10 years, which will produce 69 million tons of CO2 per year, or 1/6th of the UK's current output.[1]
I believe there has recently been a ban on UK government funds financing any coal mining or coal power plant projects. But yes, it's certainly a scandal that this went on for so long, and the ban has yet to be extended to other forms of fossil fuel.
> it made things worse by adding aviation and shipping...Talk about creative accounting.
I'm glad someone else recognizes it.
I'm not a massive proponent of 'local manufacturing' because there are efficiencies to be had letting others build their skills in something that you might not want to focus on. Regardless, I do think that the public's debate about this should be framed with your post (perfunctory), so that we can wrestle with all the unintended consequences and we can make those important decisions as an informed public.
P.S. This goes for any country. Not just Britain, hence I didn't mention Britain in my post. Ultimately, I'm just glad others see the shady 'facts' that deceive the public.
Moving things offshore can in some cases result in lower emissions.
For instance, it can be that the UK buying produce from warmer countries is lower emissions in total, because to grow much of it in the UK would require heated+lit greenhouses.
This may sound good, but it's only meaningful if you'd put that into a larger context. For instance, tomatoes:
"Our results show that imported tomatoes from Spain and Italy have two times lower greenhouse gas emissions than those produced in Austria in capital-intensive heated systems. On the contrary, tomatoes from Spain and Italy were found to have 3.7 to 4.7 times higher greenhouse gas emissions in comparison to less-intensive organic production systems in Austria. Therefore, greenhouse gas emissions from tomato production highly depend on the production system such as the prevalence or absence of heating." [1]
It's the second part that it's important here. It doesn't really matter where tomatoes are grown: Italy, Spain or Austria. In absolute terms, tomatoes production still results in far more carbon emissions then less-intensive produce.
Moreover, you have to compound those emission numbers with consumption numbers. Tomatoes are a basically a staple food in the Western world. Massive amounts are produced and consumed. This is why the consumer price per unit is basically pennies at the counter.
The offset of that is, in absolute terms, a massive carbon footprint. If hundreds of thousands of tons of tomatoes are shipped by airplane or freightship across the world anually, that still translates into big emissions.
In order to reduce carbon emissions in a meaningful way, the entire life cycle of the product in your shopping bag should be weaned off fossil fuel use in an absolute terms. This isn't an easy exercise:
"The results show that the largest reduction of environmental impacts can be achieved by consuming seasonal fruits and vegetables, followed by reduction of transport by airplane. Sourcing fruits and vegetables locally is only a good strategy to reduce the carbon footprint if no greenhouse heating with fossil fuels is involved. The impact of water consumption depends on the location of agricultural production. For some crops a trade-off between the carbon footprint and the induced water stress is observed." [2]
> In absolute terms, tomatoes production still results in far more carbon emissions then less-intensive produce.
That's not what your quoted article says though? Not that I doubt it but the quote talks about different methods for producing tomatoes, not how different produces have different grenhouse emissions during production.
These differences extend to every crop making crop specific numbers more an average than reality. Lettuce grown indoors for example has an extreme carbon footprint from the lighting which would make imported tomatoes a better option.
Sure but that is the problem of the growth method rather than the type of produce. The claim was (might have misread it) that the produce itself has a massive difference all things being equal
> And it would be unfair to penalise countries with large ports when much of the cargo they handle is being shipped onward to other destinations.
This takes us back to the point of the top-level comment, but I think it's also unfair to penalize countries with large factories, when much of the manufacturing output is being shipped to other destinations.
Carbon should be attributed back to the consumers that paid for it to be emitted, not the place where it was emitted. This is what a carbon tax would achieve, as companies would pass the tax on to consumers, who ultimately drive all this manufacturing activity.
The Brits don't get a free pass just because they paid people in poorer countries to emit carbon for them.
It seems fair to attribute ambitions to the country where they are physically made, because that’s the country regulating those emissions. If you don’t, you’re incentivizing a country to have lax emissions regulations by letting their choices impact someone else’s accounting.
I disagree that would be fair, and it certainly wouldn't achieve a good result.
If emissions are attributed the country where they are physically made, then it incentivizes rich countries to offshore all their manufacturing to poor countries - which is exactly what's happened here in the case of Britain.
If the choice is between poverty and low emissions, of course developing nations are going to have lax regulations.
There's always an incentive to offshore to where costs are lower. A carbon tax like you suggested at least prevents hiding the costs of CO2 emissions across national borders. This is fair to both consumers and producers but it is not going to be costless to developing nations. Developing nations will either need to match developed ones on energy supply cleanliness or see their export oriented cost competitiveness eroded. This is a good thing for all parties in the long run but it is also a real cost.
Raw materials were already being shipped in. I imagine there was more waste from industry than there were British raw materials being used. So moving industry offshore should result in a reduction in shipping.
Provided it’s being moved to source of the raw materials. Which, I imagine, is often not the case.
It could also prove prudent to not burn heavy oil and demand cleaner fuel. Not perfect, but it would certainly be better. It would have a serious impact on the economics of logistics but maybe that wouldn't be bad too.
Don’t you have to produce the heavier stuff when you produce the lighter stuff in a column? It’s my understanding that when you separate crude you end up with proportions you don’t have a lot of control over.
Most hydrocarbons are produced via cracking the molecules into the desired length. You can modify your refinery to get the right ratios that the market demands out of a barrel of crude.
Will specializing in production and optimized global supply chains would have any effect of neutering the above concern(or may be net win altogether ) ?
That's only if the dirty industry is strictly for domestic use. If they export to countries that impose carbon taxes on end users, dirtier processes will make their exports less price competitive. That encourages producers to invest in cleaner energy for energy intensive goods. It really doesn't matter whether the tax is collected at the export-producing end or the import-consuming end as long as it provides the same price signal.
You're undoubtedly correct, but the situation is extremely nuanced. I found the conclusion from this article [1] very interesting
Territorial emissions accounting might not be perfect, Mabey says, but in terms of simplicity it is the more practical approach. Lord Deben, chair of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, told the BBC the UK only has direct control over its home-grown emissions, whereas manufacturing methods and energy choices in China are outside our control.
Barrett says consumption accounting brings additional information to the table, but agrees there’s no need to abandon territorial accounting methods. Instead, he says consumption emissions highlight how hard it is to decouple emissions from economic growth.
That’s why many commentators were so surprised that carbon emissions stalled in 2014, even as the global economy expanded. For a good chance of limiting warming to below two degrees, the challenge of decoupling emissions from growth will have to be cracked.
Countries control what they can measure, which is where we are currently. However, fixing climate change requires a completely coherent and coordinated global response, which will have hugely implications for economic growth. Essentially, our economic & political models won't allow us to apply the fix we really need.
Without that, we are left with countries trying to do the best they can individually.
This has been going on for at least 20 yeara. Countries move heavy industry to other countries and then point fingers at them for not lowering their emissions.
Where to point then? You have to get manufacturing countries on board with reducing emissions but its hard because the outsourcing benefits them massively economically.
What next, point fingers at where when African nations want to build their electrical networks, roads where to burn oil with automobiles? It's a difficult situation to solve, "just install solar" won't cut it.
The tighter that regulations squeeze on free-enterprise, the more free-enterprise "fights back" by doing stuff like this. It's the path of least-resistance and the most-profit so of course it'll get exploited.
Nonsense, there is no magic in whether it's free enterprise or government led.
At this stage I'm amazed that anyone still believes that national control means universally better outcomes, considering the historical record of such government led activity.
What we have here is Goodhart's law in full effect, and it'll happen irrespective of who leds it.
But in general I think you are overstating the impact of CO2 emissions policy on UK deindustrialization. That process began well before any CO2 policies were in place, with labor costs and scale being far larger factors.
But, yes, to accurately track responsibility this adjustment should be made or else unethical people will have an incentive to shift production to lax regimes.
One mildly surprising aspect is that countries that export fossil fuels show up here, even if you count the burning on the importer side. This is because the drilling and mining has carbon impacts on top of the burning.
What a terrible comment for such a positive development. It completely ignores UK's massive efforts in switching away from coal-fired plants to other alternatives, such a huge undertaking. For reference: The current population in the UK is an estimated 66 million. The population in 1890 was 10 million. Therefore the current energy infrastructure supports 6x the population at the same carbon emissions rate. That's an amazing achievement and doesn't even take into consideration how much more electricity-dependent the average 2019 UKer is compared to the 1890 UKer.
So what if China produces goods in a dirty manner? How is this the UK's problem? This is a classic case of moving the goalposts. The UK has achieved carbon emission reductions without negatively impacting the standard of living, but of course that is not sufficient for the climate activists, is it, as it is the modern standard of living that they truly have an issue with.
Perhaps the climate activitists don't realize is that most of the population doesn't want to live "one with nature", and we are extremely loath to give up the creature comforts of modern urban living. Much of climate moralizing nowadays reminds me of the Temperance League at the turn of the century.
If the standard of living in the UK depends on imports from countries that heavily emit CO2's, then in what sense has the UK achieved a modern standard of living at a low rate of CO2 emissions?
How did you turn a comment on method of accounting into a screed against "modern standard of living" and for living "one with nature"?
Is the UK supposed to turn away from global trade and become an isolated, self-sufficient nation just to meet its climate commitments? Do you require that of every nation on the planet?
Or should the UK impose its policies and laws on other nations? Do you prefer that model?
While yours are important questions they're somewhat outside of the scope of the topic. The submission is about a measurement of Britain's carbon footprint and the post you were replying to was talking about how that measurement may or may not be particularly helpful.
I don't think it's a particularly good argument that we should accept one method of accounting or another because we like or dislike its policy implications. What is an honest and clear method of accounting in your eyes?
Sorry, I don't think so. The fine article already answers your question and I concur with the approach, originally posted by kitd, key phrase restated here:
Territorial emissions accounting might not be perfect, Mabey says, but in terms of simplicity it is the more practical approach. Lord Deben, chair of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, told the BBC the UK only has direct control over its home-grown emissions, whereas manufacturing methods and energy choices in China are outside our control.
By consequent, I disagree with your more holistic approach of measuring carbon costs as it is based on a moral judgement, and not a quantity that we can measure in any reasonable way.
While a useful metric must be implementable, not every implementable metric is meaningful. Is the metric being discussed here meaningful? What is it useful for?
Carbon taxes on imports only make sense if the emissions data from the exporting countries is readily available to make a quantified estimate. Otherwise they will be poorly quantified, resulting in over- or under- taxation.
There is an alternative. Consumers (or government) in the UK could demand more ecologically produced goods to lower their emissions. Of course that would be more expensive but no involvement in policy of other nations is required for that.
To take moral responsibility for the effects of ones own consumption on the rest of the world seems just to me.
This is not to diminish the efforts the UK has undergone to transform their energy sector.
Considering there is actual CO₂ consumption (oceans, plants, rocks weathering, synthetic fuel?..), using the full term from the article seems appropriate - consumption emissions.
If consumption emissions really decreased 11% from 1990 -> 2014, that's quite an achievement. Even though we need 10x that.
> Britain still benefits from the consumption of industrial products, historically some industrial products consumed domestically may have been manufactured in Britain where CO2 emissions from manufacturing would be counted as British emissions.
It is not that products from China are shippped to UK without any countervalue in opposite direction. If UK lowers its per-dollar emissions and other countries not, then UK necessarily imports more 'dirtier' products, but exports 'cleaner'.
If you account it by production, then you see UK is cleaner and other countries not, if you account it by consumption, then you see all countries are a bit cleaner (based on how they consume UK goods). Accounting by production makes more sense as governments have much more control about production in their countries.
Quite a lot of them have actually been demolished. Drax, the big one, did switch to biomass. Coal consumption on the UK grid is now zero most of the time.
So can we say that now that the heavy industry has been moved offshore, lowering CO2 emissions won't make as much of an impact on local British jobs?
If so the next step should be to analyze the CO2 footprint of the country and start taking steps in reducing that number instead. Eg. banning ICE vehicles would help big time I guess.
I think your point is important to understand, but I think it's kind of missing the point of measuring emissions by country. Exporting manufacturing, etc certainly does not solve the problem. But that's in part because no one country can solve the problem. Any one country that regulates carbon emissions will simply export their emitting industries to foreign countries that do not. What that means is that we have to keep playing whack a mole, until everyone is in compliance. That is, unfortunately, probably just the nature of the problem. We could try to do complex things like apply tariffs to imported goods based on their carbon footprint, but reliably measuring that is going to be next to impossible.
So I don't want to disagree with you per se, I think it's important to recognize that exporting industries is not, per se, solving climate change. But I thin it's also important to recognize that solving climate change, in the early stages, probably does look a lot like just reshuffling things by country.
What's the impact of those manufacturing emissions? Like, did they shift 10% offshore and reduce in other sectors? Or is the reduction in manufacturing the primary needle mover?
I've always argued this point that it would have been better if production had stayed in the west as it would have been cleaner by now than what happens in China.
There are also many products manufactured in the UK and exported to China, which are not counted as chinese CO2 emissions. And I don't mean just expensive cars like Bentley, Land Rover or Jaguar. British industry is quite huge.
E.g. all airplanes used in China were manufactured in Europe or the US, so you could say "China is outsourcing their industry to Europe and the US to keep their CO2 emissions low".
For those understandably cynical about this, and suggesting that it’s solely to do with offshoring emissions to China etc, this BBC economics podcast goes into the detail - a lot of it is actually a real and significant drop caused by the rapid phasing out of coal-fired power stations, which was relatively easy. The next drops are going to be much harder. And, as others have pointed out, it’s still not nearly enough. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0802553
Fair point, but that's not the only reason. Coal-fired stations have been replaced with gas ones, which aren't ideal, but are clearly better. Renewable energy has increased quite a bit, albeit from a low base and not nearly fast enough.
My quibble is that people are entirely writing this off because it's not enough, and I don't think that's helpful. We need to take some satisfaction when things are going in the right direction, even if it's not enough yet.
It's like a boss whose only method of motivating people is to constantly point out deficiencies in someone's work, rather than giving balanced feedback and praising them where it's due.
This gets brought up a lot, but what it reflects is the exhaustion of mine deposits more than anything else. The UK steel industry's locations were determined by the availability of coal and iron ore, because they are bulky and heavy and more expensive to ship than finished steel. UK iron mining ended in the 80s and the remaining steel mills work on imported ore.
> "Domestic metal extraction is currently restrict-ed to three locations: a small gold mine near Omagh in Northern Ireland; the Cavendish Mill in the Southern Pennine Orefield (SPO) in Derbyshire where about 1200 tonnes of smelter-grade lead sulfide is extracted per annum as a by-product of fluorspar mining; and a major new tungsten mine at Hemerdon near Plymouth where the first deliveries of tungsten concentrate took place in the third quarter of 2015. This mine will be one of the largest pro-ducers of tungsten in the West when it reaches full production."
It's also really sparse: "Exploration by Amax in the early 1980s identified a resource of 42 million tonnes at 0.18% WO3 (tungsten trioxide) and 0.025% Sn (tin)." (BGS)
> The only reason why coal fired plants could be phased out is that the base load from industry is gone.
Nope. The whole point of electricity is that you don't need to care. When a gas plant comes on line - producing cheaper and cleaner power - it doesn't change anything about the actual electricity used in industry or how they use it.
If Britain needed 50GW of baseline power for a North covered in manufacturing plants in 2020, it would buy more gas power plants and maybe wind farms - not coal because coal is too expensive.
Gas is cheap because there isn't demand for it, energy generation has one of the most inelastic supply curves under a decade of any industry.
If the UK was still producing steel at the level it was in 1960 it would require up to 10% of the total current electricity production to meed the demand of the sector [1] [2]. That's just one industry.
The UK's electricity demand has fallen over 20% since the peak in 2000 [3].
The other reason why coal is no longer a good deal for the UK is that Thatcher wanted to crush organized labour in the mines, managed to do it and then found that trying to import coal from Australia was a losing proposition.
Had British industry not been stabbed in the back by the Tories we'd be looking at new plants which would be a mix on coal and gas and maybe if the greens could have been kept at bay nuclear, but old plants will still be open because they could make money.
It blows my mind how much higher US/Canada's per-capita CO2 emission is compared to European industrialized countries as well as China [1].
While we lament how much of this is due to offshoring industries to China, it's also a good sign that carbon-importing countries seem to have been trending down over the past 10 years while carbon-exporting country (China) is leveling off in its emission. My naive read would be that we learned to make more efficient use of carbon while off-shoring is happening.
All countries need to do much more but SOME really need to wake up and do their part!
US energy use is very high for a number of reasons and energy use will tend to drive CO2 emissions. If you just use electricity (we'll get to that) you can maybe make an order of magnitude difference and maybe if you work very hard, which we need to, two orders of magnitude but that's all you can hope for. That's from 1kg/kWh which is roughly where coal power is, to 100g/kWh and then (very hard) to 10g/kWh with power sources that produce CO2 mainly during construction then amortized over their lifetime.
So if you start out using many times more energy than other countries per capita, you'll struggle to equal them on CO2 emissions even if that's a core policy goal.
The low population density in much of the US drives increased energy usage. I will walk to the nearby grocery store in a few minutes to buy my week's groceries, many Americans will drive, perhaps as much as an hour, to buy their groceries, it's not as though eating is optional. And this low density also forces bad energy source choices (e.g. using wood fires to keep warm seems pretty reasonable when there is no mains electricity out where you live even though of course it's very inefficient)
But to be fair consumerism does not help. Americans have been somewhat resistant to energy efficiency technologies that took off elsewhere, consumption is a sign of wealth and success and so efficiency is in that sense "bad". The entire city of Las Vegas is clearly a terrible idea from an energy efficiency point of view, why would you build a city in a desert?
The low population density in much of the US drives increased energy usage.
80% of the US lives in "urban" areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...), and that's where most of the emissions are from. It's not geography that causes the low density, it's urban sprawl and culture. Eating might not be optional, but living in a car-centric low-density neighborhood definitely is. It's one of the things our ancestors would consider a luxury, and which our ever-comparing north american minds now treat as a basic necessity.
I think it would be super interesting to look at CO2 emission per capita broken down by states (i.e. perhaps states along the coasts would show a very different picture than less populated states).
309 people per mi2 (France) vs 421 for the NY state.
Without controlling for income, it's hard to draw good conclusions here. Looking at the area I am familiar with (Boston and its inner suburbs), CO2 emissions seem to correlate pretty well with income for areas which are a similar distance from downtown Boston and similarly dense/built-up.
Of course there's the open question of whether something like Brookline or even more so Cambridge or Somerville count as "suburbs outside a city".
Also from the area, I get the sense that the Boston area is generally increasing in carbon efficiency (at least pre covid). There simply isn't space to build more/bigger highways into Boston, the only feasible way to expand capacity is increasing density and more transit/biking.
Shale oil/tar sands really are a truly disgusting and ongoing environmental catastrophe for which there can be no reasonable explanation in 2020, and about which Canadians should be ashamed. If there were any justice in the world Canada would have sanctions applied to it over this years ago.
Many are, the oil is being produced for the US market where it is refined. In any case, blaming the supplier will never solve the problem, everyone's consumption of fossil fuels is the problem as it drives a high price of oil that funds these projects. Notice US tariffs against Canada for softwood lumber, aluminum, steel, dairy, but NEVER OIL. Makes sense though, the US fund and develop the projects.
So the price of oil is the explanation (trillions of dollars), but everything about the tarsands is insane. The CO2 emissions are probably #3.
The man who invented the technology was horrified, then he died of cancer. Many dangerous chemicals in the mix are being processed and stored beside major rivers in tailing 'ponds'.
The tailing ponds that are actually very large lakes of toxic sludge kill countless birds each year. They installed scarecrows probably 10 years ago.
The natural gas (methane) being burned to extract the tar from the sand with heat is the actual emission of CO2. They were thinking about building nuclear power plants to generate heat instead. This would solve the emissions issue that everyone complains about, but then there would be nuclear waste being generated to create bitumen. This seemed a little too crazy and didn't go anywhere.
Finally, this bitumen needs to be processed, but it doesn't move in a pipeline. So yet another petroleum product is shipped in from the middle east to dissolve it, so it will flow through pipelines to the US for refining and let's face facts here, consumption.
Construction of pipelines, and the ongoing risk of a spill are all added to the list.
But people need to commute to their office job and they can't afford to do that if the price of oil is too high, and it is a hedge against a major disruption in production in the middle east which is only a few Iranian nukes away from reality.
It's all insane, but the CO2 is just lower on the list.
> blaming the supplier will never solve the problem, everyone's consumption of fossil fuels is the problem as it drives a high price of oil that funds these projects.
Up to a point - but the UK for example deliberately destroyed its own coal industry partly due to concern over carbon, so I would say it's not completely reasonable to give countries a pass for merely responding to fossil fuel usage generally. Nations can and do take the better choice sometimes.
It's the contrast between the incessant virtue signalling from the Canadian government with the wanton destruction of the environment and harm inflicted on indigenous people that is really sickening.
Because they shipped their industrial base overseas where they have much lax environmental regulations than in britain. Unless britain's quality of life sunk to 1890 level, their real contribution is far higher than 1890. After all britain's consumption has increased significantly ( on a per capita basis ) and their population has risen significantly since 1890.
So an honest article would say britain's CO2 emissions has risen significantly since 1890. But it's probably just paid PR study with an agenda like almost all of climate related news is.
Whilst Co2 emission maybe lowering, it is the other polluting emission that have seen increasing weight placed upon Co2 emission over other forms of emission is a little concerning that they will get overshadowed.
Once again, there is some actual, irrefutably good, news greeted by cynicism.
This is, after all, the goal we're trying to achieve - reduction in CO2 emissions - isn't it?. It's good news that at least one advanced economy has done this.
Can we just take a moment to celebrate some good news, please, folks?
I think the world should also start noting methane emissions . That gas is 400 times more potent than CO2 in trapping heat and is escaping rapidly from fracking sites everywhere . The United States is leading the pack in methane emissions but I think no central agency is tracking that.
Burning trees and other biomass for electricity is not CO2 neutral as much as the UK gov wants it to be. First it produces more CO2 at the stack than coal and then you have to actually replant and wait 40 years.
Climate change is being driven by people extracting carbon from deep underground and releasing it into the atmosphere.
By that measure, burning biomass is CO2 neutral. The carbon released is not carbon which was extracted from the ground. It's carbon which was extracted from the air by plants.
All plant matter releases carbon dioxide as it breaks down anyway. Those trees which we burn as biomass weren't going to magically disappear - unless someone buried them they would eventually rot, releasing most of the carbon they extracted as they grew.
There are several concerns that gets left unanswered when people describe biomass as CO2 neutral. First is that modern growing of crops involve fertilizers, pumped fresh water, tractors/machineery, and transportation (biomass can not be compressed for easier shipping). The second issue is that in order to grow crops you need to clear out existing biomass in order to replace it with the crop used for biomass. Third people like to first talk about using it for carbon capture and green compensation for coal, oil and gas, only to later burn the same biomass under a CO2 neutral label.
Combined it make for a rather risky strategy for stopping climate change.
Those are all good points. Unfortunately there's a huge amount of noise in the green technology space, which has the tendency to drown out the scientific thinking.
However, I don't think dismissing biomass (or biofuels) completely is necessarily the right approach either. It's essentially a method of using natural processes to capture energy from the sun, and has the huge benefit of producing energy which can be stored indefinitely. Storing enough energy to get through renewable lulls without resorting to fossil fuels is an unsolved problem, and biofuels may be one of our best bets right now.
It would be interesting to see a full cycle efficiency analysis of biofuels - what percentage of the energy gained is used to grow and harvest plants, how much agricultural waste is currently burned/rotting without energy extraction.
Our strategy for stopping climate change right now seems to be "do almost nothing", which also seems rather risky to me. The quickest way to deal with it would be to use the market to drive innovation by applying a high tax on all extracted carbon. If renewable or carbon neutral energy was significantly cheaper than fossil fuels, the rewards for innovation would be much higher and so we'd see all sorts of interesting solutions. Right now green technology funding mostly exists in a subsidy driven top down command economy.
Unfortunately that requires political will, something that's almost entirely absent right now. People are all for green initiatives right until it actually effects how much they pay for fuel.
There is a massive difference between controlled burning at high temperatures in a power station and a little wood burner someone might have in their home.
Well, depends on how it's done. A wood burning stove in a regular one family house, where daddy is more concerned about the cost of the firewood than its water content is terrible yes.
A power/heating plant with proper monitoring of the combustion and filtering of the smoke is definitely no worse than a coal burning plant.
In the common case, yes, agreed. But again, it depends on how it's done. A lot can be done to increase efficiency and filter the smoke properly. I'm no expert but my understanding is that the technology in this area is well-established. Coal can be burned cleanly, and it's even economic to do so since more energy is extracted per unit fuel.
The main reason for refurbishing coal plants for other fuels or shutting them down entirely is that coal is terrible regarding CO2 footprint.
I dunno. I have an airtight stove as the only source of heat. We don't have gas or oil available out in the remote parts of Canada so wood heat is much healthier than freezing to death. Cutting, splitting, and hauling the wood keeps me in remarkably good health and the design of an airtight stove and functional lined chimney stack means I don't breathe smoke or particular matter and efficiency is remarkably high.
The wood used is not fed with industrial fertilizer, it doesn't require clearing the land to grow, and it doesn't require irrigation or ongoing maintenance. 100% of the carbon it contains was sucked out of the air not mined from the foundations of the Earth. It is completely carbon neutral.
I would go as far as saying wood heat is fantastic for human health.
Wood fires around your home: yes. Wood fires in power plants, instead of coal: probably not a big deal. Power plants already have extensive measures in place to clean their smoke.
If you do the maths there is not enough UK woodland area for the power they are producing.
I cannot find the source at the moment but at least in the UK they are basically importing wood chips from US, Canada, Malaysia, etc. just to keep the existing "bio mass" incinerators burning.
Yeah the biomass thing in the UK is an absolute joke - cynical greenwashing. So much of what I hear makes me question whether Oxbridge humanities graduates should be kept far, far away from any decision making involving science:
'James Woodley, an Environmental Biologist and resident of Northampton County, North Carolina, an area severely affected by wood pellet production for Drax’s biomass burning, said: ‘Now that the forests are gone, so is the sense of community. Dust is everywhere, even people are breathing in dust and becoming sick from it. When Enviva [a Drax pellet supplier] moved to our community, and to other poor communities in the Southeastern US, the company promised to bring hope to the hopeless, to reduce poverty, but what they ended up bringing was truckloads of logs, daily, constantly barrelling through.’'
My major issue against it is that these businesses are getting massive amounts of government funding and tax incentives due to the "green" spin.
Effectively none of these business are actually profitable and would be insolvent without government help/cronyism. This money is pretty much wasted on these polluting businesses and is money that could be applied elsewhere towards the environment.
Only part of the biomass comes from waste, either from the timber mills or from tree crowns and undersize wood. The rest comes from trees which are harvested for this purpose. The areas is replanted for this purpose with a fast-growing species like Willow and Poplar. The result can not be called a forest, it is a dense plantation with a high turnaround time.
I once read a statistic that the Saturn V rocket had a higher instantaneous power than the whole of the UK electrical grid. I did a bit of googling to discover if that was true and I was surprised to discover that the UK used about 3-4 times more electricity in the 1970's than it does now. Presumably it's because there is hardly any industries like steel milling or metal forming and processing now. Most manufacturing is assembly of parts imported from the EU and the far east.
I don't know who statista are but their figures seem to be wrong. However I also must have misremembered. So it seems we were both wrong: The UK government says it is similar now (256983 GWh) compared to 1970. (214426 GWh) having peaked in 2003 (342308 GWh)
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historic...
1890, a century after Blake's complaint of the dark satanic mills? Is there a significance to that date or is someone using a murky and turgid understanding of history to score some political points?
A lot of these numbers are misleading. Things like manufacturing have fled the UK to other countries. This keeps emissions low but the UK still utilizes goods, just made elsewhere.
More legit numbers would show the total amount of consumption and trace the emissions back to source, not just look at emissions at source in country.
Also these stats only look at emissions and overlook sequestration, which can be huge in some countries. For example, the UK has long since lost most of its forests which means it sequesters a lot less carbon than more forested countries like the United States.
"Where earlier reductions were largely negated by rising imports, the past decade has seen genuine cuts in the amount of CO2 for which the UK is responsible."
This has been achieved not by buying energy from elsewhere (certainly not Russia), but from a reduction in the use of coal-fired power stations to effectively zero. They've been replaced by combined cycle gas turbine (which has far less emissions), biomass (the largest coal-fired power station now burns woodpellets), and a massive increase in offshore wind turbines.
I doubt they're saying that the UK outsourced heavy-industry specifically to reduce on local emissions, but rather that one of the secondary effects of outsourcing heavy industry was to outsource pollution.
I shared those doubts, hence asked for some clarity to avoid any subtext.
Manufacturing is and always has been a complicated one. Until there is some global emissions tax upon products that factor in full material to consumer aspects from production and shipping emission - things will never change and the ability to have a local product cost 2x more than some imported one that has 10x the emission, is still going to play out until there is a true emission tax (not just carbon). Hence the whole emission/environment and humanity impacts of industry has no true global standard and the variance of those standards is a difference that we all end up paying the difference, albeit indirectly.
Yet if the whole environmental factor of shipping/transportation and production emission standards are factored in - those cheap imports would become less cheap and negate the need to allow some local production to almost die before noticing that it's unfairly suffering due to it having to comply with a higher level of environmental and worker standards compared to some import.
Hence you get workarounds happening like the example you mention about chicken tax - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax workaround that can play both ways, yet if there was a base-level standard and measure to balance things out, then such loopholes become less harder to happen, or needed. Alas the only common standards are weights/measures and currency, everything else does vary.
As an aside, I dare say that the history of importing chickens into Europe is more fascinating than most imagined, and one that still plays on even to this day.
It's just a side effect, though I'm certain that such was a factor in the high level decision making. "We tore the heart out of our communities, for better local air quality. Also we really stuck it to all those foreign countries we polluted."
Verifying every claim you read on the internet is an impossible endeavor. It's much healthier for discourse if strong claims that aren't "general knowledge" for lack of a better term are ignored unless supplied alongside reliable sources or some sort of justification/explanation (and even then, making ridiculous claims and backing them up with heavily biased sources is a common tactic too).
This is mostly necessary in politically charged topics (energy generation (because that relates to climate change) and mentioning Russia specifically were both red flags to me) because spurious emotive bullshit and deliberate misinformation are very common.
This particular comment also didn't have enough information to be very useful - How much energy does the UK import from Russia? In what form? Has that amount changed recently? Why do you believe this is a bad thing? are all interesting questions the commenter could answer that would add to the conversation in a useful way.
Sadly, "burden of proof" has never gained traction despite its essential nature.
I really wish I were intelligent enough to systematize it, but billions of dollars have so far failed to establish procedures for sound reasoning. Or maybe just make those procedures commonplace.
This is a really interesting take I have not really thought about. Almost all internet discussions are littered with these one liner bold claims. Are they true? I have no idea but people upvote them anyway because they sound possible and important. Often they are partially true but reducing the topic to one line removes the important details.
Because it doesn't add anything except negativity to the discussion. There's no nuance, no sources, no reason why I should believe it. It's just a short, purely negative retort in the face of positive news.
Alright, these calculations aren't done at the point of consumption but instead the point of production.
The national based calculations hide the global chain of events and the interconnectedness of their economies through marketplaces.
It's a much harder calculation to figure out who's to "blame" for say, the cost of an electronics device that uses a dozen countries to manufacture or say even a food that is sourced in one country, processed in another, packaged in yet another, and then consumed in a fourth...
Do we assign everything to the point of consumption? That's not fair either. Distribute it over each?
That's what we currently do but it problematically hides the relationship. The British are still consuming textiles, they just aren't domestically manufacturing them. They may even still own the plants, they're just in, likely, Bangladesh which is seeing a ~5% annual CO2 increase.
That should matter if those things were made by the demand of British consumers but in our traditional models it doesn't go into Britain's bucket.
That makes it an accounting trick with no clear way to resolve it.
It would be like graphing the number of backyard burials for a culture that moved from the practice of backyard burials to cemeteries and mistaking it as if they somehow vanquished death and are now eternal except in a few very deadly places. We've moved towards globally centralized manufacturing.
There's lots of citations that can be made but the way things work are way different now then say in 1960.
For many reasons - primary would be the confusions of production of electricity and source of fuel to produce aforementioned electricity. Then the actually source of that Gas.
"However, in the UK, most of the natural gas imported comes by pipeline from Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium. There are no pipelines that allow Russian gas to flow to the UK from Norway (the biggest source of imports)."
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The economist podcast [1] touched on this topic recently during an interview with Prof Dieter Helm [2] who has a series of lectures & a new book about this.
[1] For the podcast, check out the last 9 minutes of https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/09/08/tech-wreck-the...
[2] http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/