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Electric Vehicles are not the Answer
You will see in other areas on this site that the worlds headlong rush towards electric vehicles is not as green as everyone thinks, nor is it a solution. If you are an average family of four with two children and two cars you give up a car if you really want to make a difference. Replacing the worlds eight billion cars with EVs will add billions of tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. It will destroy huge parts of the environment in Sumatra, poisoning water courses, the sea and the people with pollution from Chinese owned heavy metals mining. Of course it drives economic growth so we must rethink neo-classical economics, taking account of externalities. Here is a project making a real difference. This scheme certainly is a solution. The infrastructure is easy to sort. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-67781109
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Loss of Antarctic Sea Ice is at Crisis Point
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64649596 How much evidence do we need? This is terrifying and will take decades to even slow down never mind reverse. I wont be here to see it reversed if that is possible, but we have a succession plan at Earth and Leaf. My fingers are firmly crossed. Less obviously, but equally important, is the diminishing Arctic sea ice. Shipping companies are really excited about opening up northern shipping routes which is a pretty good indicator of how much they care about the environment. As these issues are not addressed year on year our warming problem accelerates. The amount of energy needed to melt billions of tonnes of ice is staggering. This is buffering the planet warming at this point in time. Once the ice is gone warming will accelerate dramatically and will end all mammalian and avian life on the planet. Ice cover is a good measure of our efforts to halt the warming. If we go along with maximum warming of 1.5 degrees centigrade it will be impossible to replace that ice. At…
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Wildfires are Tipping us Ever Closer to the Edge
As I write there are over 2000 current wildfires in Canada. This is on top of those in Hawaii, the USA, the Amazon, Greece, Australia and many other countries. It will take 50 years for the Canadian forest to start to recover. There will be more fires next year. Every fire adds to the CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) in the atmosphere. It is a self accelerating process. We are getting quite close to runaway global warming. If that happens, humanity at least is finished, rain forests will be completely gone, it has to rain or life cannot persist as we know it. It is estimated that the 2022 wildfires in Australia added 1% more CO2 to the total concentration in our atmosphere. Year on year, starting NOW, not 2030 or 2050, the world has to increase its forest cover and quickly. I think a minimum target should be 5% per year. Young growing native canopy absorbs CO2 and it grows faster in the tropics. We will lose more forest to wildfires in future years. This must…
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Improve Sustainability Using Economics
We need a New Economic System to improve sustainability. We need to take account of externalities. What are externalities? We need to look at new ways of measuring economic performance. Externalities are causing our planetary woes. This isn’t a political issue in any way shape or form, we deal here only in fact and science. So a little bit of history ………. A free market economy mean that consumers buy stuff at a price fixed by the market. Competition forces prices down. Except, it isn’t that simple. For example a litre of water that comes through a water meter at your address has a fixed cost per litre. However some of the costs of supply of that litre of water are not included in the price you, the consumer, pays. One such cost is cleaning up pollution. The water company charges you per litre. They make a profit and pay their shareholders. That’s fine, that’s how the world works. The UK is a worldwide absolute rarity in that water companies are private companies. There are…
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Earths History – the Anthropocene
Earths history extends back for 4.5 billion year. For the last tens of thousands of years in the Holocene era, the atmosphere has been stable with a steady content of CO2. This common gas is incredibly important for life (plants) and as a thermo-regulator for our world. If the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere rises, global temperature rises. If it falls far enough, the planet cools enough to bring about ice ages. These processes normally take millions of years. Technically we are still in the Holocene however. Plants are also incredibly important for our world. They absorb CO2 and release Oxygen. In the Anthropocene we have inadvertently taken control over the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Earths History mapped out “Graphic” How? Once human beings moved from hunter gatherers1 to farming with settled populations and communities with dwellings, life became both easier and more complex at the same time. With agriculture came trade. With trade came economics. Agricultural development brought about massive land clearance, rain forest destruction, drainage and soil degradation, all of which…