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

I think the point the reporter was making was that the climate changing to a flood / drought one resets the calculations that farmers make - if lack of water threatens the harvest then improving soil quality becomes more important than previously. It’s cheaper & easier than other irrigation methods such as boreholes.

The same with pipe leaks - they’ve been talked about for years but the water companies have managed with them because Britain is a country where water shortages are rare but that is now changing.

The Guardian had a report today about golf courses and private schools still being able water lawns despite hosepipe bans - lots of complaints from the people interviewed who live near them.

At least with railways there is / was a direct connection / benefit to the local area in that residents tend to like them as they are a convenient way to travel.

Data centres are rather nebulous - you don’t know if you use / benefit from them or not.

Would you mind providing a citation for that?

The government says that 19% of mains water is used for non-household consumers (which will include industry and farming).
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/water-resources-2024-2025-analysis-of-the-water-industrys-annual-water-resources-performance/water-resources-2024-to-2025-analysis-of-the-water-industrys-annual-water-resources-performance

According to this government survey, 85% of farms use mains water, 31% abstract from rivers, and 25% use boreholes (there's obviously some overlap)
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/587296/fbs-wateruse-statsnotice-31jan16.pdf

Even if we assumed worst case scenarios, I'm struggling to come up with circumstances that got agricultural water use to 50% of freshwater resources, let alone 70%. Rainwater that just happens to fall on a piece of land that crops grow on doesn't count, it would have been consumed by whatever was growing there regardless.

So where do your figures come from?

This is bollocks, who do you think is buying all the stuff from China (who are, btw, miles ahead of us in terms of sustainability)

What jobs are created by data centres? A handful of security guards, usually. It's not a labour-intensive industry.

It is however very energy-intensive.

I hadn't realised how much sustainability China does but the point still stands. We are paying millions for net zero but using other countries carbon etc for our stuff so we're not actually making a difference to climate change.

Yes, it’s provided by WWF.

https://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/thirstycrops.pdf

Smoking was considered good for the health and help woman not be neurotic, but that idea would be tough of as crazy now.

Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong - as I said up thread cars are killing 40,000 a year with their pollution just like cigarets were

Air quality in Beijing is great am I right? Coal power is so substantial as well.

The tobacco companies realised quite early on that smoking was bad. Since 1953 they knew but launched their own campaign to essentially cover up/obfuscate the health dangers. This included paying researchers to provide alternative narratives and undermine growing research showing the links between cancer and smoking.
What is really interesting is that the same "researchers" and the same PR firms would then be employed by fossil fuel companies in the 90s onwards to counteract the growing scientific consensus about carbon dioxide and global warming. And here we are.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-industries-used-same-researchers-to-sway-public1/

So it's a worldwide statistic? It will include the use of irrigation in places like Arizona (a state well-known for being mostly desert) to grow alfalfa on behalf of the Saudis, draining the aquifers there. It's certainly a big issue there, a lot of people rely on groundwater to drink but corporations get away with draining them. If you have a look at satelite images of many parts of the southern US you'll see a lot of funny green circles - this is irrigation. You don't see that on satelite images of the UK, it usually rains enough that we don't need to irrigate our crops.

UK agriculture doesn't use anything like that amount of abstraction. It's not really relevant when considering the potential impact of data centres in the UK (energy costs are more worrying anyway).

@MandingoAteMyBaby I've just found some country-by-country usage breakdowns on https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/water-consumption-by-country

In the UK, 14.05% of water is used in agriculture. This compares with 39.66% in the US (who are huge users of water in general) and 66.89% in Australia.

In terms of total usage, we're very frugal for a developed nation, consuming 123 cubic metres per capita. Germany 307, Netherlands 460, USA 1,301 - and that's per capita, remember, multiply by the massive population in the US to see how much water they waste in total.

Give that the UK is surrounded by sea, perhaps data centres should desalinate water using renewable energy, leaving drinking water for humans.

Desalination plants use huge amounts of power. How are you going to power them when there's no wind nor sun? Then we ALSO need huge amounts of power to actually power the data centres too. I think we'd be back to needing nuclear to power BOTH the salination plant AND the data centre at the same time! If we go down that road, we'd need to find ways of using sea water without desalinating it which is probably possible. Or build data centres somewhere near fresh water supplies, i.e. run off streams from hills/mountains etc which may work when there's rain, but obviously limited use in droughts. Or expand hydro electric generations using tidal barrages etc.

Why would you want to use enormous amounts of electricity desalinating the sea water.
Data centres use large amounts of water for cooling purposes, they don't drink the stuff! You can simply take in cold seawater for cooling and return it as warm seawater in just the same way as power stations do.

Most data centres use evaporative cooling which isn't compatible with salt water. They absolutely could switch to systems that work with salt water but this will cost a bit more so I think instead you will just see extensive lobbying from the AI bros to please just be allowed to use all the drinking water because AI is the future and will figure out how to get free water and power for all blah blah blah.
Personally I think a rule for building the new types of large AI data centres in this country is that they use cooling systems that don't waste fresh water. But without being made to they won't spend more than they have to.

On the subject of nuclear power Rolls Royce are building small/medium nuclear reactors** as we speak. They could be used by data centres but could also be used by the grid as well to cover for times when the wind isn't blowing, the sun isnt shining etc. I don't think it will ever be cheaper than wind/solar but having a system in place that has mixed forms of energy creation is probably best.

**Technically they have been building reactors for years for submarines already. But this is a new type. And it's good because it's British manufacturing, British jobs etc.

Data centres also provide waste heat that can be used for district heating