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?

@Oblomov21

I too have big problems with this.

Government arranged a consultancy, which will have cost a fortune, on how to reduce farming emissions. Eat less red meat. This is fine.

But farming only accounts for 10%. Said this consultancy.
I don't even know what the other 90% is according to the this program, but presumably it's ......gas and oil production, huge companies, hs2 and trident. Etc.

So focusing on this 10% where we all use the stems of broccoli to make soup, is fine.

But no one wants to talk about the 90%.

On a personal level, if one person went meat free, they would save around 0.8 tonnes of CO2 per year. If that person instead decided not to have an annual transatlantic return flight they would save 1.6 tonnes. If instead they gave up their car, they'd save 2.4 tonnes.

All of this focus on meat production is a distraction from the bigger polluters. Fossil fuels remain the big problems, at every stage from the oil rig/coal mine to the car exhaust pipe/power station chimney. The world's biggest polluters are oil and coal producers, think about that when you're next queuing for petrol - they wouldn't be producing it if we weren't buying it.

The world's biggest polluters (China, the US and India) need to get their act together. The felling of an entire football field of trees every day in the Amazon needs to stop. I would have more respect for the climate change protesters if they spoke about that. But no, it's the rest of us who are supposed to spend money we don't have on things that won't make a massive difference while all that's still going on.

And some people are making a lot of money out of this. Virtue signalling while raking in the cash, nice for them.

The biggest thing most people can easily do is just to keep stuff for a long time and in fact not change or renew it. Yes, even your car. It's all very well saying build new houses, change your car, your boiler etc but all the replacements have to be made, using vast amounts of power and resources. Much better to keep things going as long as possible, fix, mend, re-use, buy second hand, retrofit old buildings rather than tear down and build new.

@MelissaDances

The world's biggest polluters (China, the US and India) need to get their act together. The felling of an entire football field of trees every day in the Amazon needs to stop. I would have more respect for the climate change protesters if they spoke about that. But no, it's the rest of us who are supposed to spend money we don't have on things that won't make a massive difference while all that's still going on.

And some people are making a lot of money out of this. Virtue signalling while raking in the cash, nice for them.

Who buys all of that crap made in China?

We do. We're responsible for a chunk of their pollution.

I've just had an EPC done for our house and the recommendations for improving its efficiency rating would be well over £23K, to save about £1200 per year, while barely altering the rating. The payback is too long to make the changes economically viable. So, we shall leave that decision for anyone who buys the house to make.

I’m a bit suspicious of the EPC system, we were given one when we were buying this house but looking online there was a more recent one registered with a better rating that I had no idea existed. However, some of the items listed, including increased loft insulation, do not actually exist .

@EvilRingahBitch it is unlikely that the current gas infrastructure could be upgraded to cope with 100% H2. Hydrogen embrittlement, leaks, and volumetric energy density at sensible pressures make it very challenging to implement.

@Theteapotsbrokenspout putting Solar PV on domestic roofs is not as simple as many people think, the "grid tie" equipment is a much higher proportion of the cost compared to large commercial arrays, maintenance is also harder.

Air source heat pumps are relatively expensive to install but are 3x more efficient standard electric heating. High levels of insulation and air tightness require careful consideration of ventilation, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) is the usual route and is legal requirement in Canada and some States in America.

The government could, and should, update building regulations that could massively reduce home energy requirements for both new build and extensions.

@MelissaDances China per capita emissions are about 1.5x the UK, India is 1/3, USA is 3x. China has committed to net zero by 2060.

@Thevoiceofreason2021 there are indeed a national body of engineers working towards a more sustainable future they are just really useless at PR check out catapult.org.uk/

It's probably most useful to look at suggestions like these as a work in progress, and as something that happens over time. Oil furnaces have to be replaced every so often, and when they are, people often contemplate a switch to another type of heating, for example.

Some of the suggestions will be really useful and widely adopted. Quite a lot will work for some but not others, but it will be enough to make a difference. Some will be useless and fall out of favour.

I would really hate to see a widescale destruction of older homes in order to facilitate this stuff and I am not convinced it would be widely accepted.

The thing all of these groups don't emphasis enough is change in lifestyle and expectations. City/community planning is going to have to be a huge one. If people can find housing near their employment, not only could we reduce car use altogether, we wouldn't need the same amount of public transport infrastructure. Yes, that reduced "choice" but we all live within a set of defined choices anyway. When the choices available don't include easy access to a car, it will change what we consider normative. But we need to get away from the planning decisions that mean it's reasonable to expect people to commute an hour to a low paying job to be able to afford housing.

On a personal level, if one person went meat free, they would save around 0.8 tonnes of CO2 per year. If that person instead decided not to have an annual transatlantic return flight they would save 1.6 tonnes. If instead they gave up their car, they'd save 2.4 tonnes.

The other thing that drives me crazy about this is that while most westerners eat an unsustainable amount of meat, meat free agriculture isn't actually a great agricultural choice. Animal husbandry plays an important role in sustainable agriculture. So you get people buying their lab-made fake meatbased on products grown in an industrial agriculture setting, and thinking that makes it better than any kind of animal-based products.

It's style over substance again.

@LobsterNapkin you make some really important points, local conditions are really important. The difference between a piece of beef imported from Brazil fed on rainforest soy, compared to an Argentine pampas prairie fed meat, compared to a Scott's Highland longhorn will be vastly different.

But more people probably eat meat than do long haul flights

Infrastructure for electric vehicles is developing all the time, in my area there's a pilot trying ways of charging cars where there is no private off street parking. There is already technology to install chargers in lampposts. At the moment EVs are quite new so they are pricey, but prices will come down as there are more second hand. You can already get a Nissan leaf quite reasonable price. Though I agree if your mileage is lowish it's better to wait for your current car to conk out.

[quote Daftasabroom]@LobsterNapkin you make some really important points, local conditions are really important. The difference between a piece of beef imported from Brazil fed on rainforest soy, compared to an Argentine pampas prairie fed meat, compared to a Scott's Highland longhorn will be vastly different.[/quote]
And not all "meat" is equal either. Welsh lamb, grazing on grass, year round on the Welsh hills is a very sustainable meat source. The land can't be used for anything else, so why not for a good high quality, low carbon, protein source.

As it's a wet and rainy afternoon, if anyone wants to get into the data on climate change this is a great site: ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

There is a lot of science here: skepticalscience.com/

And some genuine experts on green building here: www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/

@LobsterNapkin yes good points re living nearer to where you work but there are always going to be people, like myself, who were born, grew up and still live in a rural village. I would hate to be forced to live in a built up town or city and we have built our lives around this, my career in community nursing isn’t going to change either and will always be covering a wide rural area