Enormous expense, twenty times more wind turbines, hydrogen production, much less meat eating, carbon capture, hard ‘lifestyle changes’ and so on. Maybe travel to work on a flying pig – and all for what?

It won’t be easy, but clean energy analyst Chris Goodall believes that the UK is entirely capable of becoming carbon neutral, says BBC Science.

Belatedly, the world has realised it has to eliminate greenhouse gases within a few decades.

The UK has promised ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050. Is this is an achievable aim? How much will it cost? In what ways will our lifestyles need to change?

In summary, the answer to these questions is that reducing carbon emissions sharply is feasible but the change will be expensive and requires hard adjustments to some aspects of our lives.

It will be almost as disruptive as the first Industrial Revolution. But, at the end of the process of decarbonisation, we might reasonably expect to have built a far safer world and a society that is both more prosperous and more equal.

The UK needs to set out a programme of carbon-cutting actions across all parts of today’s society, starting with energy supply but spreading across activities as diverse as agriculture and clothing manufacture.

Many people assume that this country is already well on the route to zero emissions. But the sharp reductions in greenhouse gases that the UK has achieved thus far have almost entirely come from improving electricity supply by switching out of coal and increasing wind and solar power.

This was the easy bit. The challenge now gets far more difficult because we still use carbon-based fuels for about half our electricity supply as well as almost all our other energy needs.

Full article here.

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February 10, 2020 at 03:54AM