You are right of course about petroleum but trying to get that Petroleum is not a "fossil fuel" into the heads of politicians of all flavours, campaigners, journalists and the General Public is probably akin to rolling a whole barrel of the stuff up Ben Nevis.

Indeed the one thing conspicuously lacking from all the debates / discussions / campaigns / policies / waffle, most loudly by people who seem barely to know what is energy and its relationship to power, is the question of materials.

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Sorry, I don't see your point about coal though. The aim is to "capture" not the "carbon" despite all the silly slogans and headlines, but carbon-dioxide; the main by-product of burning coal. The idea is to reduce and eventually stop using carbon and its flammable compounds as fuel.

The OPs first question is one reason why the Government will be granting more oil exploration licences in the North sea; We will still need oil, even if we don't burn it.

My opinion is that fossil fuels developed over time with population growth from say 1 Billion to 8 Bliion now giving us the life we reached about 30 years ago, and electricity & water for one of the basic building blocks to made our progress possible, is now disgarded to unproven theoretical beliefs/new Ideologies dumped on us at 7-8 Billion scale of population.

If we get rid of fossilil fuels as they want, which will be at basic level extremely expensive in the long run as well, and this fail us, it will e very costly and difficult to revert back to fossil fuels and life on earth may never be the same again unless population umbers go down to 3 Billion scale like the 50-Ties again.

The new ideologies are constructed making use of the current ideologies it wants to replace, now this is important too.

The Digital Ideology now embedded in most systems over the globe including the Internet, has any body dare to work out how much electricity this ideology alone consumes due to its activities in total, that must be gigantic over the globe.

So I think we are in for a few hard ecconomic money versus resources surprises that will wake up the human race pretty wel in near future.

Unless we found a simple safe power source to replace fossil fuels thats not expensive, not a battery as power source etc, we are done, most people wont have enough money even with increases to hae a happy life spending it all every month only on the basics sitting at home if you can afford the home.
I know for a fact that people has made some unnessary trips/wasted time money & resources all around the globe due to the digital ideology play out since around 1992+, have seen how techs driven past each other due to new managerial practices that got centralised, thats just one type of an example, but thats not talked about, it all sounded wonderfull in theory as it was presented at the time.

Edited By Chris Mate on 03/08/2023 06:38:54

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Many of the best lubricants came from that noble and little-understood beast, the Whale

… but thankfully mankind eventually came to its senses on that one.

MichaelG.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 03/08/2023 08:53:11

I'm sure we do need to find alternatives to oil and gas but not for the reasons normally stated. Simply put we have been in a deficit situation for 3-4 decades now with respect to 'new' sources of oil versus growth in it's use. We are now at the point where that ratio is about 5 to 1. In other words we are consuming (globally) five times more oil than we are discovering new deposits and this gap is increasing annually as (so called) third world countries move up the 'Wealth' index – with more industry and larger middle classes (who drive cars and 'consume' things). This growth cannot be supported forever.

The modern world is dependent on diesel. It powers heavy machinery, aircraft, ships and road frieght. Without diesel everything stops. There may be alternatives but they are far in the future. That's not just air freight/travel but also farming, mining, international trade and food distribution. There may be a problem with CO2 emmisions but a far greater threat is going to be energy – or a lack of it. The Global economy would collapse without diesel.

We are facing a crisis but it's not the "climate emergency" everyone fears. We should be building nuclear as fast as we can (as a National prioity) and doing everything we can to become self-sufficient most especially in food. We are not going to boil to death but many could freeze without affordable power.

I find my self humming "Always look on the bright side of life"

Regards,

IanT

It’s a line from another Python song that keeps playing in my mind- “pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space ‘cause there’s beggar all down here on earth”

Major embolism inducing rant:

There is no uncontrolled worldwide population growth. In fact (global) population growth is slowing and will begin to decline mid century.

Solar energy provide more than enough energy – "200,000 times the world’s total daily electric-generating capacity is received by Earth every day in the form of solar energy."

The problem is not energy its our unwillingness to embrace and make the necessary changes to how we live.

Politicians only reflect our aggregate demand as a collective. We voted for them. i.e. its not them its us.

The internet used approx 20% of the global energy budget (which by some strange coincidence mirrors the brain/body energy balance)

Everything is always ending in catastrophe. Everything is always worse that it used to be. My ideology is better than your Ideology because mine is mine – – gimme a break!

Regards.

Frank C.

Really, if it is a "climate emergency" it is because we face serious problems that were becoming evident but largely swept under the hearth-rug decades ago.

At one time people talked happily about "taming Nature" but we are now learning Nature can't be tamed, and if we bite it, it will bite back, and bite far harder.

No, "we" won't "boil to death" but if heat-waves in Southern Europe and parts of the USA become more frequent and severe, many will die from heat-stroke while many more will place enormous collective strains on their electricity supplies by trying to run air-conditioning systems flat-out.

While the loss by policy or depletion of minerals like petroleum will also mean the major loss of all those materials equally as important as Diesel fuel.

Fuel? Fine – let's see how we can use hydrogen as a fuel for ships, trains, agricultural plant (JCB is working on that), etc; but how do we generate enough electricity to produce the gas? Oh, from offshore wind-turbines and on-shore solar arrays.

Oh dear… though, no more materials readily made and effective in use for making, installing and servicing such plant; and how much food-producing land do we need lose to solar arrays (and to the bison-cuddlers and corporate tree-monoculturalists)?

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What of water?

Oh dear… no more polythene for the water-mains, assuming we can still find enough electricity for the pumps. Copper becoming rarer, too, by increasing demand and over 90% of the world's reserves all now owned by China. Best start using iron and lead pipes again. At least metals are salvageable, with some attrition, but not enough can be returned to cope with the demand.

I have yet to follow it up to establish the sources, but I have a leaflet printed with pretty-coloured ink (made from??), published by something calling itself "Weymouth Climate Hub". New to me but as far as I can tell, a group with rather more knowledge, sense and manners than "Just Stop All" , though still stuck on "energy" – only, and that as a synonym for "electricity".

The leaflet carries a map of predicted stress on water supplies by 2040, by bands of ratio of consumption to supply.

The worst-affected (averaging >40%) are unsurprisingly Iberia, most of the Middle East, North Africa and Eurasia, Australia and the entire USA including (surprisingly) Alaska. The UK and France are rated as at Medium to High Risk, 20-40%: higher than Canada, Russia – and most of Africa! The figures probably reflect not just population density, but how mains water is used, and its availability.

The WCH gives its web-site as holding the necessary citations.

Awful problems, awful quality of public debate – and no easy answers.

I'm all for returning the UK to the green and pleasant land it once was, but sadly I'm not in charge!

Tony

John Doe –

Building standards are being improved greatly, but that does not account for all the existing ones, nor for the big increase in insulating materials needed. A builder whom you might expect would find it profitable, once told me that increasing the insulation of individual homes reaches a point where it is actually less "green" than it seems. (He also frankly admitted it would be too costly and wasteful to fit his own home, a 1930s ex-Council unit, with a heat-pump, despite no labour-charges – not something you'd expect to hear from an accredited plumber!)

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Steam locomotives are indeed very inefficient but I am not sure they are relevant here. Nice to watch though!

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Solar "farms" in fields: apart from unsightly, the serious objection is taking very large areas of land that should be producing food, for relatively low output for their scale. There is also some NIMBY speculation here by the builders choosing rural areas far for their intended customers in London or other major cities. They also turn the land from agricultural to industrial use, for tax purposes, an important point for landowners to consider.

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Tidal Flow (submarine equivalent of wind-turbines) – I agree. Actually British firms are among the word's best at designing these but we've governments set on wind and sunlight, so not encouraging them. I think a tidal-flow scheme is being built by the Shetlanders?

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Re(?)-foresting. Apart from aesthetics, this is already encouraging swathes of ecologically harmful, monocultured, import-species pines in neat rows, by major companies with no interest in the countryside or the environment at large, just for "carbon-trading" and "green" posturing. A lot of the Welsh and Northern English moors are also sheep-grazing land.

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Ground-source heat-pumps next to every house? Fine until one cold day your heating all goes off because your pump has extracted heat from the ground much more rapidly than its natural replacement rate. Even worse when every home along the road has the same installation. Although not affected by cold fronts as I imagine an air heat-pump could be, this depletion, analogous to pumping a water-well dry, may be why we don't hear much about ground heat-pumps. Also, as with air ones, the maximum amount of heat energy and its temperature would be quite low, few existing homes are suited to it, and installing one could mean replacing the entire heating-system and putting in masses more insulation.

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New homes next to railways, with new stations (by your suggestion, potentially one every mile!). Hard to see how that can be achieved. Such ribbon-development, like most NIMBY (i.e. not in the speculator's back yard) estates now, would take no account of local geography, needs, services, other transport, etc. There are sprawling housing-estates being built around the country, within a few miles of existing main-line stations, but aimed mainly at London commuters, even 100 miles from the capital. A billboard I saw advertising a new estate near Banbury boasted of its 45-minute train times from there to London.

(Brimsmore Estate's 3000 houses, just outside Yeovil, was advertised by double-page spreads in the London Evening News. A friend, a local man, living in Yeovil told me there is very little local employment available for such estates, but by train it is about 100 miles from London and 50 from Bristol, the latter offering the more efficient rail route from the South-West to Wales, most of England and Scotland.)

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Re-opening branch-lines closed not by Dr. Beeching but by a government wanting to do that. He was the consultant: it was really the Ernest Marples Plan, after the Minister of Transport who held a lot of shares in a motorway-building company and thought the future lay in road transport anyway. I think Barbara Castle managed to rein the anti-rail lobby in a bit.

This is good idea where possible, and a few have been rebuilt as Network Rail, not heritage, lines. It is not practical in most cases because under the plan, British Railways rapidly sold key areas – junctions, stations and lengths of track-bed – for development of buildings and roads, precisely to prevent any future re-opening.

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"National, integrated plan." What, as if by a joined-up government?

Fortunately we are not China, even if we do give away vital assets to it. Unfortunately though we lack that nation's ability or will to make long-term, integrated plans based on governments of (in our, not its, case) all hues thinking ahead and understanding anything related to science, engineering and business. (Knowing only Annual Accounts and Dividends, is not good enough!)

Some while ago I read HS2's official web-site. I do not know if the management has improved since, but not one of its named Directors was an Engineer, let alone anyone with any stated railway building, operating or service-selling experience. They were all support staff, necessary but still support roles: legal, personnel, accounts. Oh, and some mystery magisterium called "Director of Strategic Partnerships". I rest my case.

You'd have to put a lot of energy into turning CO2 into carbon, more than you got by turning carbon (coal) into CO2, so it's a bit self defeating

Lots of houses near me don't have cavity walls, so the only way of insulating is either lining inside, which makes the rooms smaller, or cladding the outside, but then the roof isn't big enough, so it needs a new roof. Getting close to being more economical to knock them down and start again, but at least it would save the carbon footprint of all the bricks and concrete

Edited By duncan webster on 03/08/2023 12:56:46