Climate change – your big easy wins?

1. Electrify your life. Heating. Cooking. Transport.
2. Reduce red meat and dairy. Don’t have to eliminate, but limit.
3. Communicate. Let your MP, Councillors, Parish, colleagues, mates, all know that CC is real and that we need to transform our whole system – electrification, circularity etc.

Lots of smaller things of course, but if you do those three it is awesome progress and everything else is diminishing returns.

If you want to go beyond that, look here: https://drawdown.org/insights/tedxboston-the-drawdown-roadmap

Robertajobb – you have totally missed my main point: Alternative electricity storage methods already exist which are expensive and/or inefficient but way better than storing electricity as hydrogen

So instead of using a silly inefficient hydrogen “battery” we should spend our money on proven more efficient methods.

Invite aliens to destroy humankind. Fingers crossed they leave.

Ban people put bikes in cars to take them somewhere else to ride. Never understood this !

Come live in Thanet for a few years.

Always amazed at threads like this

Not one idea here is either likely or feasible or will ever happen so why do folk fret and frenzy that the whole world doesn’t realise that they’re right and the world is wrong ?
Why not just try and live a good life and die knowing that you did what you felt was right ?

Hating the world won’t change it.

Yeah but we can buy stuff to save the planet.

I’m not saying go veggie but cut down and effectively ban mass produced meat. I’ve a lamb jigsaw in the freezer it came from a field 3 miles away and it’s much tastier than the cellophane wrapped supermarket stuff.  When I was young we had not much meat because it was expensive now it’s dirt cheap.

Basically ban supermarkets from selling meat make it local and through butchers.

NZ lamb is really to keep lamb on the shelves. Their season is opposite ours so when British lamb is too young/old for the shelves NZ lamb is spot on.

Always amazed at threads like this

Not one idea here is either likely or feasible or will ever happen so why do folk fret and frenzy that the whole world doesn’t realise that they’re right and the world is wrong ?
Why not just try and live a good life and die knowing that you did what you felt was right ?

Hating the world won’t change it.

Translation…..I’m old, self absorbed and entitled. I’ll keep on doing what I want and will leave the problem (that I don’t really believe is a problem) to future generations to sort.

Alternative electricity storage methods already exist which are expensive and/or inefficient but way better than storing electricity as hydrogen.

which are?  Pump storage we have a few hours worth of electrricity demand stored.  Batteries we do not have the volume of rare earths needed.    We need weeks worth of storage not hours

There has to be a way that the massive desalination plants needed in the middle east can partly or wholly go to solar. I know that for Saudi gas is probably a bi-product and so dirt cheap.

I’ll admit I know very little about desalination on a massive scale

.

Ok

I believe the phrase you were looking for was “Ok boomer”.

Hydrogen for burning in gas power stations is actually a good solution (unlike for aircraft).  You can use excess green energy to make it when that energy is available, compress slowly using that same available energy and use it right now in mixes of upto 50% in conventional gas turbines, thus reducing the UKs reliance on fossil fuels for grid balancing.  Currently around 25% of UK power emissions come from gas – LH2 could reduce that by 5% within 2 years and by 50% within 5y with suitable investment.  That’s achievable, scaleable and realistic.  Does it get you to zero?  No, but it gets you closer.

No one should be looking for total, all encompassing solutions, it’s ridiculous, we should be operating to the 80:20 rule.

Banning private jets wouldn’t really shift the needle on climate emissions, but it would send a signal.  Better would be to put such an enormous tax on landing fees for all private jets with all of that money going to the UN Green Climate Fund.  Make it so eyewateringly expensive that corporate boards and shareholders have to take note.

Ah here we go again blaming the ‘boomer’ generation (of which I am one, admittedly one of the last in that age group).

All generations/ages are to blame. My neighbours in their 40’s do not give a flying fig about anything to do with being green, environmentally friendly, helping conquer climate change and they are oblivious to all the news surrounding the problems this planet has. They’ve just come back from a long haul flight.

I do care about our planet very much and do what I can, but  there are days when it isn’t possible to do everything, so we do as much as we can in this household. It’s not hard as it’s become part of our lives and little changes do matter.

Translation…..I’m old, self absorbed and entitled. I’ll keep on doing what I want and will leave the problem (that I don’t really believe is a problem) to future generations to sort.

Translation. I’m pretending that riding my bike a bit more instead of using the car is going to solve the world’s problems. Maybe my virtue signalling will be picked up by world governments and prompt them into collective action.

Both translations are equally pointless and meaningless and neither will achieve anything.

Good question tjagain. There are a number of technologies out there, such as:

• Compressed Air storage in underground caverns with heat of compression storage
• Alternative battery chemistries such as Redox Flow and Sodium Ion
• Gravity batteries
• Vehicle to Grid central management of EV batteries to act as a decentralised nation wide battery

Not quite sure why I cannot quote when replying but anyhoo

Whats a boomer ? I know it’s an age group but what age ?

@brads “(Baby)Boomers” as i understand it basically = those of us born in the mid/late ’50s and 1960s, in the post-war baby boom period. Includes me.

JR – first 3 are either unproven or hard to scale up.  4th could be used for daily smoothing but IIRC hard to get anywhere near enough capacity for that pesky winter hi pressure event 🙁

Storage is the key to renewables.  Tidal could provide some baseload but even that needs a bit of smoothing but without significant storage fossil fuels are needed

O

@brads “(Baby)Boomers” as i understand it basically = those of us born in the mid/late ’50s and 1960s, in the post-war baby boom period. Includes me.

Was an innocuous one off term describing a social historical event, but since we are now cicadas, and arbitrarily allocated brood names (except for those lucky ones c.1970) , it has been turned into  an insult.

As for inviting aliens – if you do this don’t be Netflix and make a crepe series about it.

Ah here we go again blaming the ‘boomer’ generation (of which I am one, admittedly one of the last in that age group).

Your definition of boomer and mine must be different. Not all people born in the era are now ‘boomers’, just the self absorbed curmudgeons. Society’s air brakes.

It was a lazy trope I used anyway – it just worked rather nicely with his (now deleted) response.

And I totally agree – people of all ages (and nationalities) need to move on and question our preconcepted norms and entitlements.

if you do this don’t be Netflix and make a crepe series about it.

Haven’t watched bake off for years are netflix doing it now?

Robertajobb – you have totally missed my main point: Alternative electricity storage methods already exist which are expensive and/or inefficient but way better than storing electricity as hydrogen

So instead of using a silly inefficient hydrogen “battery” we should spend our money on proven more efficient methods. 

There’s a real risk we may end up vehemently agreeing with each other ?.   I did mention more of the ‘electric mountain’ pumped storage.   (The downside being there’s the need to build the supply power lines there and back to civilisation).

I’m not convinced about actual batteries on an industrial scale for storage  – on the grounds of a limited life, and the collossal  environmental damage to get the materials.  The areas around the copper mines in Chile are dead due to the methods of mining.  And the use of dredging to get lithium from the sea bed is appalling. Etc etc etc.

One of the points of H2 is that it can be done today because it’s localised- not 10 years to build a pumped hydro system and 100 miles of new power lines.  Maybe we actual need both !  At present we have no plans for either.

I agree we need both. There is alot of research into using sand as a battery as it’s cheap and plentiful. There is a test system being built in the north east. It works by using the spare electricity to heat up the sand and then release the heat back into electricity when needed. Clearly the container need massive amounts of insulation to maintain the heat.