To think the ambitions for Net Carbon Zero are utterly impossible for most households?

[backoffice]

I’ve been looking at some of the suggestions that are supposed to be “normalised” for consumers to adopt as we move towards lower carbon: heat pumps, solar power, electric vehicles etc.

To adopt any of these is going to cost a family thousands of pounds! Not to mention the practicalities of e.g. heat pumps in tiny houses with little gardens/small roof. It seems utterly unreasonable to expect consumers to adopt these technologies unless they have a lot of money and large properties, but it’s basically what the government seems to expect people to do. AIBU?

The important word here is gradually. I use gas central heating because my house has a three year old gas boiler installed. When that boiler becomes unserviceable, I will replace it with a ground source heat pump. I've already installed a log burner which allows me to delay putting on the central heating maybe four weeks each autumn, and to turn the heating off two weeks early each spring.

I wfh so have cut my car use from 25,000 miles a year to 6,000. When it dies I'll buy an electric one.

Yes, it will cost me, but being aware 10 years in advance, allows time to save/adapt, and for the market to invent small scale solutions.

I think it can happen with the right government support and direction. I'm just sceptical we'll get that.

Take charging for example. Streets have been dug up to run TV cable and broadband fibre, and of course street lights and signs that need replacing. Installing EV chargers is pretty much the same. One per on-street parking space, no reason it can't be done.

But of course the longer it is left, the bigger the shock when it's needed. And more wasteful. Replacing gas boilers at their end of life would have been much better than having to force their replacement all at once.

For gas no real reason we couldn't switch to renewable syngas. We made the switch before from coal gas to natural gas.

The reality is we all simply need to use less.

New estates will be built taking into account requirement to implement green energy - and it will be easier to do it on a community basis for whole estates. But electric cars arent the only answer, we need to drive less too.

The only way I can really see electric cars really working for people who do long distance or who only have on street parking is to have some sort of removable battery.
So you go into a "battery station" remove your empty battery. And pick up a fully charged one.
Bit like refillable gas bottles you buy the gas not the bottle.

But it will only work if batteries were small enough to lift in and out and all cars had the same batteries.

Lockdownbear it's a good idea but it also relies on the batteries all being of same quality/age. Imagine if you had a brand new vehicle and went to swap your battery at a station and got some knackered old one that didnt hold charge well. It would maybe work if the batteries were separately owned and you paid a subscription or fee to access them. Good in a way as the pricing for a charges battery would take into account the life of the battery.

@Lockdownbear

The only way I can really see electric cars really working for people who do long distance or who only have on street parking is to have some sort of removable battery. So you go into a "battery station" remove your empty battery. And pick up a fully charged one. Bit like refillable gas bottles you buy the gas not the bottle.

But it will only work if batteries were small enough to lift in and out and all cars had the same batteries.

There is a scooter with that and apparently the cost of the battery is extortionate. Plus as you say, the size of the battery, yeah

Self-driving electric taxis should mean it wouldn't make sense to own cars, as using taxis would be cheaper than having your own car. They could drive themselves to wherever the chargers were, and it wouldn't inconvenience anyone, because no-one is dependent on a particular vehicle.

Governments of all political persuasions need to be a lot more honest with people about the huge cost of moving to zero carbon emissions. They are all avoiding doing this.

It is going to cost us all a lot of money and our life styles will need to change pretty fundamentally. We will have to pay for the pollution we are generating through our excessive consumption. So we will all be facing much higher bills for energy and everything else, we will all be wearing more jumpers in the winter and there will be no more Majorca!

We need to be honest about what all this entails.

Government in Germany for retrofitting energy efficient measures a while back. I here will need to be something like that- this will be impossible without specific and adequate forms of financial support and some economies of scale achieved by high level purchasing and commissioning co-ordination.

We’ve had chaos locally with the rollout of fibre. You’d think it could be integrated with some sort of infrastructure rollout for EV charging as well.

I think that’s a really important point @Kosmoceratops. There’s no benefit for a government in being honest though. Eg the Tories will do nothing and then maybe labour will eventually get in and take action, and then the public will blame it on labour. Why should the tories be honest now when they’ve got no plan or intention to act?

But yes I am now starting to think not just about pensions saving but the higher cost of living in 20-30 years because of the massive costs of reducing our carbon emissions.

I think dealing with heating in London is an issue. In my street, for example, our terrace houses have tiny gardens so I don’t think there is enough room for heat pumps. Also, even if every house did somehow manage to fit a heat pump in their garden the noise would be pretty horrendous I think - it would make living here extremely unpleasant.

I think EVs will increase the number of vehicles on our roads, there will be a perception that they are easier to drive and they will be cheaper to maintain.
If commerce and industry are to be dispersed or decentralised around the country then more roads must be built and many existing ones including urban dual lane roads will have to be widened. Bulldozers to gardens and a row of houses through Chiswick for instance.

I don't feel that negative. If there was a big drive for insulation, better boilers etc then costs would come down through economies of scale, people would find cheaper ways of doing things. It would also create a huge number of jobs.

I have recently sold my one bed flat - part of a house built in 1910. We insulated under the floor and double glazed the windows I keeping with the style of property. The EPC rating was still only D . The recommendations to make it more efficient were estimated to cost £10-20k and would apparently save £75 per year and still only improve the rating to C!
I can't imagine that many people have that much money to spend on a 1 bed flat especially for so little improvement or saving. We currently recycle, buy from a zero waste shop as much as possible and I rarely use my car using the train/ tube for work and walking a lot. But these bigger changes are prohibitively expensive.

The UK is in a very precsarious position due to the aim of being the first to net zero.

Traditionally there should be 25% extra capacity in the electric generation to be considered secure.

Last year at times we had less than 2% capacity.

A lot of it a spin frpom Johnson as well. Nobody thinks closing coal power stations is a bad thing but nothing has replaced them.

The UK produces less than 1% of the World's CO2 so we are going to hurt the vulnerable and make UK lives difficult whilst other countries continue to pump out more CO2.

Oh and "environmentally friendly" Germany opened a new coal plant last year.

@StarCat2020 The UK is not on its way to being the first to achieve net zero. Sweden's target is set for five years earlier (2045), while Finland's target date is 2035 (but not enshrined in law, unlike Sweden & the UK).

I agree @Noseylittlemoo - a friend recently installed solar panels which she said were “saving a fortune” but when I pressed her on the figures, it was saving £30 a month and she had spent 9k on the panels - so it would take 25 years to see any benefit!

@backoffice I guess that is assuming energy prices don't significantly inflate which is unlikely. i mean my direct debt for gas and electricity has doubled from £80 to £160 and I am in a 2 bed flat!

@BigHeartyTruffle

How come you don’t recycle *@seaandsandcastles*? Out of interest

I’m not sorting through my rubbish. It’s unpleasant.

I 100% agree that there needs to be a coordinated government effort rather than leaving it up to individuals.

However, I do think people sometimes forget the personal cost / inconvencience of doing nothing. Sure, currently, charging an electric car is a hassle if you can't charge it on yoru drive. But once things start to shift, not only will charging facilities become more widespread, but most likely, conventional petrol pumps will start to disappear.

In Norway about 80% of all new cars sold are now electric. There are of course plenty of petrol vehicles still in use, but in 10 years there might be barely any petrol cars left. Where will they get their fuel? Will you have to drive 30 minutes just to find a petrol station? Will petrol become twice as expensive when there are no economies of scale anymore? I genuinely don't know, but I think people forget that as societies are changing, the fossil fuel based infrastructures that we are accustomed to will not necessarily remain unchanged.

@seaandsandcastles you just get a pedal bin with two compartments- 1 for normal rubbish and 1 for recycled products. Rinse glass bottles before you throw them away.

I don't know anyone who 'sorts' their rubbish...

@NotDavidTennant

They did it successfully with CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer, they need to take a similar legislative and industrial change approach to address climate change.

CFCs are a very spefic group of artificially-created chemicals that had a narrow range of uses for which less harmful alternatives were available. CO2 is a naturally occurring by-product of any process that involves the combustion of carbon-containing fuels (which covers pretty much all combustable fuels other than hydrogen). You can't simply legislate CO2 out of existence.

Agree that CO2 emissions are a much more difficult problem (by an order of magnitude or 2) but the CFC issue is a demonstrable case of government and industry working together (internationally) to resolve a global environmental issue quickly.
Agree also that legislation alone is not enough (in fact on its own its probably counterproductive) but most people can't alter their lifestyles sufficiently to become independently carbon neutral without support. They need to be given the products and services by industry to make being carbon neutral (or carbon minimal) easy and not too expensive.
This is already happening as the demand for less carbon intensive products and services has been consistent for decades. A good example of this is the green energy suppliers (e.g. Octopus) that push through the green-demand signal to energy producers (and produce their own green energy). Another is electric cars (not just Tesla now - many manufacturers producing all-electric vehicles - supported by phasing out of petrol from 2030). It is likely that more companies will offer more products and services to help individuals reduce their carbon footprint (e.g. you could imagine someone like Octopus offering an electrification or heat-pump package to replace your gas boiler). It's already happening and will accelerate.

@seaandsandcastles how is it unpleasant to put your paper and tin cans in one bin and everything else in another? It doesn't even take any more time.

I agree, these changes are beyond those on lower wages but for wealthier middle earners they are probably affordable. We have a joint income of about £50k and with gvnt subsidies have afforded solar panels and an air source heat pump in the last few years. We don’t have a second car, we don’t have expensive Foreign holidays, we tend to buy most things second hand... all things that, as well as being better environmentally have meant we have the money for the panels and the pump. It’s often about life choices.