The public doesn't hate Net Zero as much as RW politicians insist they do

[Echobelly]

Politicians like Kemi Badenoch and right wing newspaper front pages love to talk as though everyone hates Net Zero and sustainability as concepts and wants us to get on with burning coal and drilling for oil. They seem to stake an awful lot on people not like sustainability mostly because they see it as 'woke' as far as I can tell.

I think most people don't think about it enough to hate it really and most people broadly want the outcomes of improved sustainability but would like it to happen without it needing any investment. I reckon some people don't like feeling 'nagged' about saving the environment and in many ways I don't blame them as, while we should all do our bit, really it's up to governments and big businesses to actually do the damn work to truly make a difference.

Maybe Net Zero has a bit of a PR problem as it sounds unachievable, and also maybe it sounds like you get nothing, or something will be taken away from you/society. It might do better to have a name that sounds more 'positive'. But it's a shame because ultimately, even if for some reason you don't believe in climate change it seems to me that the benefits of renewable energy (such as ending energy dependence on some not always friendly countries and less pollution) are pretty clear and I'm not sure people realise it's not just powering a few kettles, it's often around 50% of UK energy production

Yes we do

You wouldn't prefer Eurostar if everyone who flew suddenly decided to use it trust me. Eurostar couldn't cope with the volume to start with. It would become a monopoly, prices would climb. It would become an uncomfortable cattle crush. It's only an underground bridge.

Exactly no way they can handle the extra demand. The lunacy from people here

You might get it when you’re wearing medical equipment to keep you breathing. Or getting a heart consultation to tell you about cardiovascular disease.

maybe you’ll not be so glib then, or maybe you just don’t think it’ll happen to you

This thread is soooooooooo middle class and has lost a sense of proportion.

I mean how many people actually fly from Manchester to Paris on any given day...a couple of hundred max.

But Tina who's got 2 kids at 2 schools works two jobs, pays a mortgage, has to buy uniform for both this month, washing machine running constantly, 10 year old car which needs new tyres. She really doesn't want to pay a huge amount extra on energy bills to help cut the uks minimal impact on population.

Perhaps if successive governments actually taxed big companies (cough Amazon, Starbucks cough) correctly. Grew a pair and developed decent transport infrastructure irrespective of cost...and given they are currently spunking £157 million on 4 miles of track and a station in the west country....to replace a line that was closed in the 1960s so everything is there and actually isn't needed anymore....the country would be much better off

But an N95 solves the pollution issue

I agree with what you write.

Net Zero won't happen by 2050. We will be a long way short. The reasons we will fail are :

a) It will cost too much, in a time when the country does not have the money. We have a defence crisis and an age demographic crisis to deal with, as well as spiraling social care costs. Energy prices are already a serious issue, in order to achieve Net Zero we need a vast amount more money to be spent, which just isn't possible politically. Now all three of the largest parties are rolling back from it, even if they might not be saying so explicitly, such as exploiting Rosebank and Jackdaw. I am expecting soon the 20 billion promised on CCS will be reallocated to defence. It seems the natural place to get it from.

b) The upgrades we need to grid infrastructure are just too large without considering the expense. Just to replace gas domestic heating we would need to double the grid capacity. That is without doing something to address the power requirements of cars. It is not just a matter of replacing infrastructure that exists anyway. There is also an issue not only of capacity, but of getting the power from the new generation points to where it is needed. The grid upgrades require human resources and businesses to implement them. These are skilled people/businesses and we don't have anywhere near enough of them.

c) The baseload problem means the challenge to replace our current power sources will be extremely difficult. Building nuclear plants takes a long time and is very expensive. There is not much more capacity for pumped storage in the UK. Battery storage is very expensive. Interconnectors are expensive, and there is starting to be considerable pushback against some of them, examples such as permission for AQUIND and the increases in Norwegian prices caused by the North Sea Link causing political issues in Norway.

In general I think Net Zero is laudable, but doing it on the timescale proposed is completely unrealistic. Unfortunately the decisions often seem to be made by politicians who don't understand either the costs or the technical barriers to achieving it.

That the country will bankrupt itself trying to achieve it doesn't worry me. Because it is not possible to achieve it simply won't happen. We will continue to move towards net zero, it's just that the timescale to get there will be much longer than anything currently proposed.

In terms of actual humans, between 1,200 and 2,100 people fly directly from Manchester to Paris every day.

Amazon already pay a lot of tax. Starbucks pay a lot in NIC, VAT and pay a lot of people

No sadly it doesn’t

it protects your body

it doesn’t solve the problem, you still need to eat & drink produce that is grown

Ahh - but you will be accused of being a climate change denier for pointing out these hard facts and reality.

I totally agree that global temperatures are rising and there is an undeniable correlation with rising CO2 levels. But there are quicker and cheaper solutions such as globally phasing out coal fired power in favour of cleaner gas fired power. Sometimes seeking perfection is the enemy of good.

You are also bang on the money about funding for CCS being cut. It doesn't work, running a CO2 pipeline across the UK carrying a heavier than air gas that if it leaks the local village at the bottom of the hill doesn't wake up next morning will be a tad challenging to get through planning and it is budgeted to cost £21 billion (the actual will be much higher).

Everything we eat and drink is fine and healthy

Battery prices are coming down rapidly though. The overall coat of making them has gone down, the cost of lithium for lithium has plummeted and new sources have been found eg Cornwall.
There's also sodium ion batteries coming onto the commercial market. They were originally meant to be much cheaper than Lithium but because Lithium is cheaper now the difference is less significant. Generally you can't always rely on extrapolation IE just because the price of batteries has been on a steep exponential curve downwards it doesn't mean it will contin to decline. But in this case Im hopeful. The big problem with batteries is how long they store energy without wastage. A phone battery only needs to store energy a few days before it starts to lost significant charge, a home battery recharging from solar every day the same. Whereas industrial batteries to store wind/solar energy in peak times for extended periods when there's no wind or sun need to be able to hold power without wastage for months really. We weren't there before. We pretty much are now.

The Lithium mining in Cornwall is significant because that's an area that has had it's industry decimated. A couple of local lads coming back and opening up a new version of that industry (that is much kinder to the environment than South American salt flats) is a good news story. Net Zero/the push towards greener energy has the potential to create jobs and money long term. I think leaving that to China (so we can do what, reopen our coal mines?) is a bit stupid.

Once you turn something over to politics it always becomes a bun fight.

There is just as much VI in Net Zero as there is in the oil industry. People making money out of both industries in ludicrous ways. That unfortunately is what you get when politics gets involved.

I think it merits some discussion on how Net Zero policy and targets came about. They came about because the Green party was gaining traction in the polls vs Labour and the Tories. Both of them wanted to head this off at the pass, so effectively stole the policies for themselves, or made up stuff to sway voters.

The issue was though this was done during the 2000s/2010s, where the cost of living was relatively low, people were relatively well off and energy prices were not too bad. People didn't worry about the cost of Net Zero at that point for 2 reasons. One because their bills were cheap and two because it was a long way off and they hadn't started to actually pay for it. Once it actually turns into an issue of really paying for it though, coupled with the cost of living increases, it becomes a different issue.

Net Zero policies were undertaken because at the time the public wanted them, and now and in the future they will be scaled back because the public don't want them (and the consequences of them, at least in the medium term). At some point in the future they may yet again rebalance.

The TLDR is that it's easy to make an argument for aggressive Net Zero targets when everyone feels well off and a hell of a lot less easy when they don't. The science/economics of net zero itself doesn't really come in to it.

Yes very true

So if the number of cars registered in London trebled, what do you think the practical implications are?

If green energy is cheaper, cost effective, and more plentiful surely the market and the private sector and industry can build it out then? If it's so so cheap to do, then they can make and sell electricity at a profit

Congestion

There are five paths for passenger trains through the tunnel - the equivalent of 25 A320s per hour. Eurostar currently use two of those paths on average (5 A320s). There's plenty of scope for expansion.

The market opening up to competition with Virgin and Trenitalia will be very welcome, it'll stop Eurostar being so complacent.

No it isn't. RFK Jr. is right about this one (even a broken clock shows the time twice a day)

Microplastics are getting into the food chain. The biggest source of these are tyres.

Right. So cars don't fit.

Battery technology has a lot of investment at the moment and is developing rapidly. However it's unwise to pin hopes on it offering better performance and certainly not as a basis for a national energy strategy. Because if it takes 15 years to build a baseload nuclear plant and the amazing new battery technology does not turn up then you are screwed because there is little alternative.

Solid state batteries are a good example of a very interesting technology. They offer better energy density, charging rate and safety which should lead to much more practical electric cars. But the rub is they are very hard to build and that makes them expensive. A lot of manufacturers have been promising them for years and the in service times keep getting pushed back. Will they make it eventually ? Probably. Then once they can be reliably put in service there is the long process of cost engineering the build to try to make them cheap.

It's mostly the difference between building your national energy infrastructure around tried and tested technology and waving your arms in the air saying don't worry we know it's going to be expensive but we are convinced that something will turn up. Which is great right up until the point it doesn't.

I don't know much about lithium mining. I do know that if there is a commercial opportunity that can make money there is normally a huge amount of investors queuing up to "help". I'm guessing there is a lot of government support behind this. Which tells me something. Otherwise it would already be happening and at scale.

We need coking coal (which is what the mine in the NE was proposed to be for) to make steel. That helps secure our defence industry and also jobs in the NE. I think leaving our defence industry dependent on steel (probably mainly China) from our competitors is a bit stupid (especially since they probably use coal to make the steel anyway). There are opportunities to change to electric furnances which could be a good dump for excess energy from renewables in the future. Diversification is probably a better option though for the time being.

You know what. You've perked my interest. I want to read more.

For what it's worth, I also agree we need to keep making steel. Its a huge source of carbon dioxide but it is still very necessary so it makes sense to make it within this country rather than buying it all in. Decarbonising steel production is the hardest bit, it should be left till last while the easy things to fix are fixed first. For what it's worth of there is a problem with achieving Net Zero it's going to be in the final 10% of very hard to fix industries.
That's why it's good that the UK Labour government isn't trying to get rid of UK based steel production. On fact they are putting a lot of resources into keeping it open. The actual coke mine is more complicated, the fact is realistically it couldn't continue without massive government subsidies. It is cheaper, overall to buy coke from elsewhere. That's also true of steel blast furnaces to a lesser extent. Of course there is then the issue of supply security, but the main threat to the UK steel plant wasn't an unavailablitly of coke. It was the foreign owners apparently starving it. That problem has nothing to do with net zero and the government are taking a hard line on it.

Likewise the government is not closing down existing fossil fuel power stations for example in the hopes batteries will replace them. That would be stupid. They are instead supposed to be building new infrastructure and adding to the electricity grid. I suspect that consumer choice is going to add to the number of electric cars anyway. Unless we ban them or ban cheap Chinese electric cars. So then you still need to improve the grid. Net Zero aside, electrification (trains, heating etc) is generally considered a development thing and both more efficient than combustion technology and leas polluting to the local environment (not talking about global warming here. Literally just air quality). It's the kind of things countries should be investing in anyway.
The UK makes about a billion a year renting offshore seabed to wind farms by the way. Lithium mines are opening now and they are being funded by private investors not the government. Private investors are more likely to fund lithium mines or battery factories or wind farms if they think there is a market for those things rather than a government ideologically opposed to them out of spite. Whether they generate lots of money or not, new industries can be good. Being opposed to those opportunities purely because renewables=net zero= woke=bad is madness.

Most of the bad things you talk about have nothing to do with net zero. I do also agree with you that carbon capture schemes are a bit of a waste at this point.

im not sure if you are really this ignorant about the food and water we consume? Or just pretending you don’t know

surely you realise that pollution affects the soil, growth of crops and our water. That this in turn affects health long term

The water is treated and is clean and safe to drink. The food is fine as well. No issues. I'm not worried at all.