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

Golf courses were mentioned on the Radio 5 phone-in on drought & wildfires this morning.

Apparently, golf courses are exempt from hose-pipe bans (something I wasn’t aware of before listening). The reporter didn’t think this was tenable in the long term.

There was also discussion of the pressure the fire service was under with the current wildfires & how we are moving towards a flood / drought climate what this means for farmers & for us (more expense as more water storage will be needed).

It was really interesting stuff & exactly the type of stuff politicians both local & national need to be focusing on.

Today’s report about the wildfires have been absolutely awful & it must be so frightening to be caught up in it.

Data centres are bad? Since when? Solar energy (in the right place is good)

Data centres apparently use a lot of water. Not so good in a drought.

Certainly not for the fish in the rivers and other associated wildlife.

"More data centers, more environmental problems?" https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/2025/Fall/Conservation/AI-Data-Centers

Listen to the sound from a data centre. The sound goes upwards as well as outwards.

So a handful of leisure jobs at minimum wage is better than thousands of skilled jobs in IT which those datacentres enable ?

Wait til you see how much farmers use (and pollute)

Golf courses are horrendously damaging.

Go on then, how much potable water do farmers use?

Rainwater that just happens to fall on the land doesn't count.

70% of all freshwater removals

Totally agree
Incredibly short sighted. On a scale beyond comparison

Ignorance is bliss
Wow

Data centers in the UK use a tiny fraction of the water consumed by agriculture, with total data center public water supply withdrawal in England sitting at around 1.88 billion litres (1.88 million m³) per year, compared to UK agriculture's massive annual water footprint of over 74 billion cubic meters.

data centres are using 68% less than argriculture

I think it's reasonable to be worried about the current excitement over AI and apparently the need to build enormous megadata centres to.do all the AI. They do seem to be causing issues to residents in parts of America already and the projections for future energy uses are ridiculous. Plus on a selfish level they are pushing up the price of GPUs etc which is annoying.
However, whilst they are being built in the UK I am sceptical about whether the money is still going to be there to run them in a few years time. I think Labour were wrong to go all in on them. And regular (less power hungry) data centres are and will always be needed. We should also be thinking about how they are powered as we think about how all industries are powered. But they don't use so much that it makes renewables unviable.

IF the UK doesn't build them, then other countries will and they'll benefit from the economic benefits of the jobs, supply chains etc., with the UK paying other countries for their use!

What economic benefits exactly would those be?

Jobs to build the data centre
Jobs to run it
Jobs in the supply chain to build and equip it

I'd rather we build them here and benefit from the job creation/safeguarding in the UK, then get income from "renting" the computer power to users from other countries.

Food is probably a higher priority than data.

Reports on pollution in places like the River Wye are very concerning - that’s a complex issue involving planning & regulation and is another part of managing our water supply.

I suspect the issue re data centres is similar to golf courses - if people are having their own water supply restricted & there is a data centre / golf course / other non-essential thing with unrestricted water supply then people will resent this and become more vocal about this. That is presumably why yesterday the reporter on the BBC said that he thought the golf course exemption was untenable.

What was clear from yesterday’s phone-in was that to deal with droughts, as a country we are going to have to become much better at managing water by stopping leaks etc. One of the experts on the programme was clear that there are things that farmers can do - but they were all small things that make a difference when combined. That’s the type of detailed policy making & debate that politicians should be thinking about.

Would those AI jobs be physically here though or outsourced?

would the AI centre generate toxic fumes plus more concrete as opposed to to green space which soaks up rain

are all the jobs in GC necessarily minimum wage and they build skills for catering staff and managers who are local

i think AI is quite sinister

Food growing in the UK is more important imo especially with climate change and flooding.

at least fields soak up water, concrete doesn’t and it’s an important part of our heritage.

we should support our farmers

governments can control populations with food shortages and having to import stuff which is probably more expensive

I'm all for improving self sufficiency.
But we can't get to the point where we grow all our own food without making massive changes and sacrifices (you will eat ze bugs kind). About 50% of the food we eat is grown in the UK, but if you factor in how much we could grow without importing fertiliser that number plummets. So I don't think making the UK independent in food terms is a good goal. Ironically doing more sustainable farming that improves soil health might be better if you are worried about food security 40 years from now than trying to ramp up production in the here and now. But more warehouse storage of food rather than a just in time system could also help.

And, even more ironically, if we were to face a food blockade/shortages in a few decades time then the land which had been sitting under solar panels up till then would be more productive for growing food than the land we had concentrated on extracting maximum food from up till then. It's complicated.

Improving soil condition is something that was mentioned on the Radio 5 condition as a measure for tackling water shortages. This was one of the easier measures as farmers can do it without government intervention.

Agree, but farmers aren't stupid. If it was easy to improve soil condition without affecting yields they would all have been doing it for years and there would be nothing to say. There is a bit of a trade of always between growing as many crops as possible in the short term and improving the soil in the long term. The calculations have changed a bit due to fertiliser rocketing in price thanks to wars. However, there is still a tension between grow as much food as possible now/make money/improve long term soil health. Those things don't always go together. The problem is government intervention to encourage/enable farmers to put long term soil health ahead of short term profits can easily be interpreted as "green madness paying farmers to not grow crops when we should be trying to be self sufficient". Putting part of the land aside for solar panels is one way (very) long term soil health can be prioritised while still providing an income to the farmer who owns the land. As you can see on this thread though it's interpreted as "taking land away from farming".

i think AI is quite sinister

The same was thought about the railways as they were being built

Landowners argued that locomotive smoke would poison crops, while the noise and vibration would terrify livestock, causing cows to abort pregnancies or stop producing milk

Medical and public skepticism included beliefs that rapid movement would cause brain damage, mental derangement, or asphyxiation in open or poorly ventilated carriages.

Aristocratic protestors claimed tracks would ruin fox-hunting, poets like William Wordsworth protested the noise of steam whistles scarring the Lake District, and moralists feared cheap fares would let the working classes move about too freely.

On the other hand, there were also cranks who thought X-rays were harmful when everyone else was having fun with it back in 1896. https://daily.jstor.org/the-x-ray-craze-of-1896/

And health fanatics who got it in their heads that making phosphorus matches could make the workers ill

And add to that all the technology adjacent bandwagons that people got very excited by ("science" proving ghosts were real) that weren't harmful but also weren't the life changing breakthroughs people thought at the time either.

There's a certain amount of survivorship bias going on when we look at railways. Plus, while useful, they were a massive speculation bubble that crashed.

(X-rays are interesting because they were a genuinely useful technology that had huge benefits for medicine even today. It wasn't a fad. But went they were discovered people didn't really know what they would be most useful for and went overboard as a result. We only really need X-ray machines in hospitals and laboratories.)

@TourdeCrema actually even with railways there are still people who get quite cross at the idea of them scarring the landscape and affecting farms. Hence the expense and arguments over HS2. Plus, Victorians had a point about steam trains- they are beautiful but noisy and pollute the air and all the vegetation nearby had to be kept cut down to avoid fires. They did have a negative effect as well as a positive one.