Apply fuel duty on air travel in the same way as on petrol/diesel. Force customers to pick up business travel expenses: you want me onsite tomorrow? Fine, here’s the bill. oh you’d now prefer a teams meeting? funny that.
Install heat recovery in shower trays. How hard can this be?
Work out and publicise the actual cost in carbon of storing things in the cloud and on a server. Force people to think before archiving data. Dispense with the “email is a journal” mindset and get mail to self delete after 30 days unless flagged.
Include 'cost of dumping waste' into every product sale.
If someone buys a new washing machine for £400 and then dumps their old washing machine by the side of the road there is the cost of collection, recycling and disposal associated with it, say £100 compared to £20 for proper disposal.
now they pay £500 for the washing machine at time of purchase. If they dispose of it properly at the end of life they will get a rebate of £80.
I'd rather see a milage allowance for flights per year (that can be carried over to the next year) than a restricted ban to one flight. A flight to the Maldives has significantly more impact Vs a flight to Paris etc.....
New homes built to better standards, with better insulation, solar, wind, water reclamation etc. Mandatory percentages of profits for improvements by landlords to insulate homes to a curtain level etc.
Taxes on unnecessary packaging of all products - much like the sugar tax.
More communal heating and hot water.
A big geothermal plant in a playing field/park in the middle of your housing area could provide heat and hot water for a few hundred houses. With an added bonus of having a big green space near your housing. Could even bury the pipes under the communal garden spaces (depending on how it's laid out)
The actual plant rooms are about the size of a big double garage and need virtually no maintenance.
It's what the exes place has.
Install heat recovery in shower trays. How hard can this be?
Moderately.
Pulling the heat out of the waste water means that all the semi solid gunk that you've just washed off (soap etc) can gunk up your pipes.
They need semi regular cleaning and can block without much notice.
I even get blockages from shaving foam when it goes from inside the downstairs bathroom into the much colder concrete raft that the house is built on. Unfortunately needs a kettle of water once a month to push it into the larger pipes and then the septic tank.
Include 'cost of dumping waste' into every product sale.
If someone buys a new washing machine for £400 and then dumps their old washing machine by the side of the road there is the cost of collection, recycling and disposal associated with it, say £100 compared to £20 for proper disposal.
now they pay £500 for the washing machine at time of purchase. If they dispose of it properly at the end of life they will get a rebate of £80.
Insulated kettles with a adjustable boil control.
Sensor / button activated street lighting.
Cars in street lit areas to use sidelights only.
Those things would all be tiny. Turning your headlights off might save something like 50W, but your car could be using 5kW or so to drive along at 50mph. That's 100x more.
No personal vehicle allowed to use more than a given amount of fuel/energy per mile travelled.
The topic is 'simple to implement' not 'simple to dream up'. That kind of measure would NOT be simple to implement because we live in a democracy. Unless you have plans to change that, or to somehow effectively re-educate millions of people, it's not happening.
I think the best things would be:
1. Mass insulation, and government provided plumbers to come and tune up your heating.
2. Invest in renewables AND hugely in battery storage tech. Stuff like flow batteries and the like.
3. Subsidise EVs and invest in EV production.
4. Really good public transport that's not run for profit. That includes things like centrally planned ride-sharing minibus services.
5. Public campaign to get people to use the now excellent PT and cycling facilities.
6. Incentivise WFH at a corporate level now we all know it can be done. Sure, bosses will whinge, but they whinge at providing maternity leave too and we still have that (for now).
All those things could be done tomorrow (ok so fluid batteries might not be there yet, but their development could be invested in right now) if our government pulled its finger out. And it wouldn't even be that hard of a sell IMO.
It’s important not to fall into the trap of believing that something you do is absolutely essential or even ‘normal’ and therefore can be excluded from any sustainability aims.
I'm happy for flights to be rationed. The point I was making is that if you limited it to 1 flight a year, it's probably not going far enough to make a big difference over how it is now. You'd probably have to double or even treble the restriction (1 flight every other year or every 3rd year)
Molgrips for PM!
We've got 5 hours to find another 99 of us!
Bit of investment in city based car clubs wouldn't go amiss either.
Why own a car in the city and deal with all the related and ongoing costs and hassle when you should be catching a bus/cycling when you can pay xx a month to have access to a fleet of *someone else's cars*.
Needs long term joined up thinking though, not something governments are traditionally very good at.
Jesus wept, a lot of people hard of reading in this one.
And FWIW the home counties aren't representative of even a significant amount of the UK land mass, the village Matt refers to isn't even particularly remote but is typical for anything a couple of dozen miles outside of the higher density population centres.
4. Really good public transport that’s not run for profit.
Interconnected and frequent and cheap (if not free)
FWIW i haven't flown for nearly 5 years. Unlikely to this year either. Might do one return flight next year, possibly.
Unless they get the overnight train Stockholm/London sorted. Then i'll have my bank balance abused by the UK train companies.
That rather knackers a lot of land use. Cemeteries are very inefficient uses of (often very high value) land and they end up buggering up all manner of planning for decades, sometimes centuries. Plus they generate quite a lot of traffic themselves as people drive to visit and lay flowers (which are themselves a very inefficient and carbon heavy resource, most are flown over from the Netherlands, wrapped in plastic and sold). Incredibly wasteful.
It'd be simple to create an app where you tell it your commute and how far you can walk to be picked up, and software gets everyone's commute together and it plans busses based on where people want to go to and from. It'd select the appropriate vehicle e.g. car/minibus/bus.
Why are we still running bus services like it's the 50s? Big vehicles driving around all day with only a few people on? And they have to drive long circuitous routes in case anyone wants picking up from the suburbs when in most cases they don't?
Kind of a bus/taxi hybrid, I'm going to call them buxis.
Carbon tax
Grants for insulation of homes that actually work and mean people can afford to do it.
Electronics manufacturers (mainly phones and tablets) to standardise charge cables. One type for all.
Education and keep the climate crisis in the news at all times. Front and centre as the leading story all day, every day. There is nothing more important happening in the world.
Meat sales to be more heavily taxed and plant based diets to be encouraged with ingredients for plant based meals to be discounted.
Limit air travel.
Have street lighting in built up areas on sensors.
Install heat recovery in shower trays. How hard can this be?
Very, consider how difficult it is just to have a plug strainer fine enough to catch a wedding ring, but not so fine that it clogs with soap and hair. To get any sort of efficient heat exchange from the 30C water to cold water or air would need a large surface area, which means small pipes or lots of plates, which means lots of blockages.
And FWIW the home counties aren’t representative of even a significant amount of the UK land mass, the village Matt refers to isn’t even particularly remote but is typical for anything a couple of dozen miles outside of the higher density population centres.
And there lies the problem, if the question is "Simple to implement eco solutions for society", then discouraging living in nice remote bits of Scotland but making it as convenient as a city by driving everywhere is definitely an answer.
I'm fairly sure a large proportion of the "home counties" would quite like to live somewhere more rural too!
It's the opposite of moving near to a music venue and complaining it's noisy. Moving somewhere and complaining that there's no public transport.
Interesting that the 'simple to implement' bit was almost immediately ignored by almost everyone....
Like Molgrips - My biggest thing would be to have the government borrow heavily and invest in wind, solar and battery storage RIGHT NOW. Forget nuclear - It's a stupid idea.
VERY simple to implement.
EDIT - Also - A flight tax is easy to implement. As is forcing automotive suppliers who want to sell a car here to place an energy regulator on it.
How many years till fusion power is viable?
It's ALWAYS 10 years.
Tax deductible renewable energy loans through your workplace.
People need to give up on the idea of not living near where they work.
Oh hell no.
People need to give up on the idea that they must structure their entire life around their current employer.
Servers consume far more power than personal workstations. Mine with monitor is 130W. Our small pair of servers is 4-5kW when not under load. Triple or quadruple that for max load.
if only some clever person could invent some kind of software that allows multiple servers to run on one piece of hardware, therefore making the whole datacenter world more efficient…….
All the heat and insulation stuff - though I’m not sure it’s necessarily ease on retrofit.
Drop urban speed limits to 20mph and raise e-bike limits to 20mph. If a car is always slower…
Motorway limit to 60-65mph. A lot more efficient than 70 (be honest 75).
All cars to have trackers with automatic fine issuing. Start with new cars to make it easy.
Change to km/h at the same time so folk think their getting to drive at 100.
No private car ownership or solo driving until age 25 (you’d start adult life making choices based on public transport, it would be habit forming and influence policy).
Sadly guess what every 24 year old would suddenly be desperate to do? I agree with forming habits early, but preventing something just makes it more desirable. Try and make the car more hassle and less desirable in some way.
No cars within 300m of a school at start/end of school day (ie school streets at every school).
Residents permits for those whose house is 300m up a cul-de-sac past the school? EV gets charged off the PV at home.
All public Transport free at point of use.
All the costs/tax associated with driving gets put on fuel duty. Pay to drive.
Mandate that ALL new builds, resi, commercial and industrial, must have solar on the and roof grey+rain water collection/recycling.
Actually what about, change all speed limits to km/h?
We wouldn’t even need new speed limit signs!
PS - Olly +1
Add contraceptives to all energy drinks. Can't stop them chucking the cans in the bushes, but we can stop them breeding.
No private car ownership or solo driving until age 25 (you’d start adult life making choices based on public transport, it would be habit forming and influence policy).
You can actually solve a lot of that with proper cycle / walking infra and decent public transport.
Kids want a car cos it's their first independence from the Mum & Dad Taxi and because they're used to being driven everywhere. If you can give those kids easy independence via safe cycling and walking, they grow up not needing or wanting a car and not expecting to drive everywhere.
Influence right from the "school run" days where you can safely pack them off on a bike along safe segregated infra - look at the average school run in Denmark, The Netherlands, even "winter" countries like Finland.
Interesting that the ‘simple to implement’ bit was almost immediately ignored by almost everyone….
To be fair, a lot of them ARE technically easy to actually implement, but some are also expensive and would require people to work together instead of working for profit/self interest/bribes.
This is an interesting read
Agriculture and Residential are the main areas flat lining.
Tax dairy products?
And ban the sale of Gas and Oil boilers immediately.
Add contraceptives to all energy drinks. Can’t stop them chucking the cans in the bushes, but we can stop them breeding.
Might as well lump in MacDonalds and KFC too. Then you'll get 100% market penetration.
Having ovens (and other cooking devices) with temperature probes (or a stand alone thermometer) so that they are only used until the item is cooked. If you've ever cooked a chicken according to the package instructions you'll probably have had the oven on for 30 minutes longer than you really needed.
Again - simple to implement also means politically acceptable to the electorate. If you don't take that into account you are just fantasising.
Re servers - my colleague in Finland is shortly to be getting his house heated by the Microsoft Azure datacentre across the road.
Force toothpaste manufacturers to show the *actual* amount of toothpaste needed in their adverts.
All public Transport free at point of use.
It needs to be there before it's free. It needs to be safe, frequent, reliable and convenient - if not it doesn't matter how much it does or doesn't cost, no-one will use it.
Cost is not the main driver when it comes to the decision of "do I use P/T or do I go by car?"
Also, having at least a nominal charge means the service is seen as more valuable. There's a fair amount of psychology involved. Plus tickets/smart cards etc are an excellent way of tracking usage, journey times and so on, it's very valuable data.
All the costs/tax associated with driving gets put on fuel duty. Pay to drive.
What about EVs?
There's an argument for a tiered system - ICE cars pay via fuel duty, EVs pay via a "road tax" equivalent but coming up with a workable option isn't easy.
One possibility is more toll roads and if you pay over a certain amount in tolls per year then your road tax gets refunded so you're still paying but not being hit twice.
A ban on bottled water
A ban on single use plastics
Like most people I have Lots of opinions, a few ideas, no real power or influence beyond who I vote for... So pretty much zero chance of precipitating change.
It's no accident that the currently available measures with the potential to both reduce (direct and indirect) household fossil fuel consumption are expensive and have been made harder to access, it would be 12-20K to put useful solar on our roof with Battery storage in the garage and would be worth it if we didn't have a Mortgage & energy bills to pay and children to feed. At the same time the landed gentry round our way have displaced some of their Horsies to turn fields into solar farms. The wealthy are already capitalising on Solar PV as a business opportunity while us plebs are trapped paying a premium for gas and rotted down dinosaurs...
Properly Subsidised residential rooftop solar would be one of the first things I'd look at, and if businesses want some tax relief they can claim against solar installations on their rooftops, sold back to the grid, rather than relying on Tory PMs to commit career suicide on their behalf.
Oh And insulation, lots of it, everywhere the one thing we could do today to drive down energy demand rapidly, if we can throw tax breaks at bankers we can throw some money at kingspan...
...because it needs a complete rejig of taxation.
Long overdue generally, the uneven distribution of wealth, in a convoluted system that helps those with more money hide it from the tax man fits hand in glove with environmental damage.
One of the biggest barriers to government implementing Environmental policies seems to be funding, does it cut off a revenue stream does it take time to create a new one? if we were getting the taxes we're really owed by Non-Doms and Big US firms we might actually be able to bridge those funding gaps. Economics and the environment are intrinsically linked, we keep doing things which we know are bad for the environment because we're unable to ignore the economic benefits...
I'd also like us to pull our finger out and get some new nuclear up and running, Don't care if its bought in AP1000s or whatever SMR Rolls Royce reckon they've got ready to go, but if the goal is to cut carbon, energy costs and build energy security new Nuclear is going to be necessary for the next 100 odd years...
I'd also quite like to see more old ICE cars being EV converted rather than people throwing £40k at a tesla. IIRC there's a French company already doing that and has some support from their government (???). Over here EV conversions seem to be almost exclusively for rich buggers to spruce up a classic Porsche. We were a nation that loved small, cheap hatchbacks not so long ago, obviously all those old Yaris/Fiesta/Corsa are seeing their engines go pop and just being replaced with a ICE powered "crossover", I'd like to see them used as feedstock Chassis' for a cheap EV runabout industry, more jobs, fewer emissions.
Of course we do need to invest in public transport across the board, both to service towns/cites and in rural areas. and I'd like to see more done on "active transport", the default should be to exclude motor vehicles from town/city centres and make the streets semi-pedestrianised with primacy given to cycling and bus routes leading in, not making sure you can park a car within 150m of the shops.
oooh
im not sure on the insulation. I would bet theres a lot of people with damp houses after that...
I would have all public transport electrified or on hydrogen. Its all return to base stuff so entirely possible. make this essentially free.
limit cars to 150bhp. bikes to 100bhp
no stopping outside of schools (one way drop off only)
Universities to ban students from having cars.
I don't think insulating houses is practical. Its mainly a problem of dishonesty, but also because its just messy to implement and impractical. What you could do though is subsidise the actual insulation products themselves substantially, meaning that it becomes more affordable. Some things mentioned on here:
Green VAT rate for certain product groups and certified products
Free Public Transport
Incentives for land based solar and wind including increasing the feed in tariff
Eat the rich
Stop buying shite
Solar and solar thermal (solar thermal is less resource intensive in production than pv so I think it's still worth it) on all new builds and all roof replacements (over a preset potential - no point wanging it on a building where it won't produce) as a planning condition.
I don’t think insulating houses is practical. Its mainly a problem of dishonesty, but also because its just messy to implement and impractical.
It's actually relatively cheap and easy plus it gives near instant results in terms of lower energy bills.
Problem is that for homeowners, it's not really top of the list (against say, a new kitchen) and for landlords, well they don't care cos they're not paying the bills.
So you mandate it, similar to the Smart Meter rollout. Government backed scheme, trained and accredited workforce, and maybe a tiered pricing structure based on (say) the council tax banding. It's actually a remarkably easy scheme to do once the initial work is in place. The population gets home improvements for free/cheap, energy usage and costs (and therefore emissions) dramatically decrease.
Kind of a long term thing but 10 years of that would still end up being cheaper than the money lost in tax breaks to the rich or 5p/l fuel duty cut.
It would have cost less to make all buses free at point of use than it has to cut the fuel duty rate.
50m zero development/cultivation corridor either side of watercourses
All steaks in restaurants must only be served rare or very rare.
And compulsory portion size.
Had a starter last week that would have been a main course 10 years ago and a lasagne that would feed 3.
Both served with a huge salad.
Proper fat lad starter kit.
No one needs that much.
