By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Even by Harrabin standards, this really is a disgracefully biased piece:
Britain’s top engineers are urging the government to stop buildings being demolished.
Making bricks and steel creates vast amounts of CO2, with cement alone causing 8% of global emissions.
They say the construction industry should where possible re-use buildings, employ more recycled material, and use machinery powered by clean fuels.
They are concerned about "embodied emissions", which is the CO2 emitted when buildings and materials are made..
They believe that unlike carbon from aircraft, vehicles and gas boilers, embodied emissions are not in people’s minds.
They suspect few people realise there’s a carbon impact from, for instance, building a home extension.
The report, steered by the Royal Academy of Engineering, said a new way of thinking is needed before planning new homes, factories, roads and bridges.
Prof Rebecca Lunn from Strathclyde University, one of the report’s authors, said: "Our biggest failure is that we build buildings, then we knock them down and throw them away. We must stop doing this."
Fellow author, Mike Cook, adjunct professor at Imperial College, challenged the government’s £27bn road-building programme because of the embodied emissions created to obtain the concrete and tarmac, as well as the use of very polluting machines to construct the highways.
Prof Cook told BBC News: "We have to radically revise the way we look at things.
"The most important thing is to maximise the use of existing road infrastructure by using smart motorways to maximise every inch of tarmac."
Speaking in a personal capacity, he added that the decision on Heathrow expansion should be re-visited following stronger warnings from climate scientists.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58667328
In fact, far from this being a serious technical report from “Britain’s top engineers”, it is nothing more than political propaganda.
The misleadingly named “Royal Academy of Engineering” is not, as you might think, the professional body for engineers, but, in its own words, a lobby group for a sustainable society and inclusive economy".
https://www.raeng.org.uk/about-us/who-we-are
What Harrabin reports as expert recommendations is no more than the political views of a few eco cranks.
In true Harrabin fashion, of course, you don’t hear the other side of the story. His only comments from non-cranks is a rather vacuous government statement that the UK was a "world leader in tackling climate change”
As for the idea that people should be forced to carry on living in old, shabby (not to mention badly insulated) blocks of flats just because it saves a few emissions, it shows just how much these extremists hate ordinary people.
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September 25, 2021 at 04:24AM
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