OT cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050

You don?t have to avoid producing any CO2, only produce as much as is absorbed by plants to be carbon neutral.

Its carbon NEUTRAL, not carbon free.

But doesn?t have to involve gg emissions.

No, they can heat by electricity for roughly the same cost - but it'll cost many thousands when the existing gas boiler reaches end of life and you are told that you can only legally install a ground-sourced heat pump!

SteveW

Yes, but that?s much less than coal fired power stations produce. So is much easier to compensate for by growing wood etc.

That?s not necessarily true if the nukes are done right given that the fuel equivalent cost is so much lower with nukes.

Wherever you like with wood. Even easier with limestone etc.

I mean, stooging about this

Plenty that can be planted with trees. Sure, that would f*ck the environment there but we werent discussing the environment, just reducing net gg emissions.

Yes, there would still be a problem with aircraft but obviously we could just stop flying so much and telecommute etc instead.

Perhaps compulsory sterilisation as a condition of being allowed to stay might make it less attractive to come. Upset a lot of people though.

GH

Which is what is needed. There are a bunch of nukes available to assist in the endeavour.

What do you think would happen if we cut off all use of petroleum products?

My pension fund would be hit? On a serious note, the hardy would survive.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Eh?

Don't take it too seriously. It's a farewell sop from May to the likes of the greens, extinction rebellion and brainwashed school kids with pigtails. It'll never happen. They'll pretend it has of course, by fudging the calculations, carbon credit trading etc as Tim+ says. Scotland will be doing the same even sooner (like next year?).

There are just too many people in the world. Perhaps if all the medical research companies stopped investigating ways to cure diseases, and instead turned their attention to ways of creating highly infectious and incurable ones...

I suppose it is theoretically possible for the UK to cut greenhouse gas emissions to almost zero by 2050 if we built plenty of new nukes and massively upgraded the supply network and stopped wasting time and money on renewables, but it would be extremely expensive and would cripple investment in other projects needed to keep the economy going, and would only make a pin-prick on global CO2 levels anyway. So we'd cripple our economy for no benefit. Hey-ho, forward to the past!

The only thing that impacts global CO2 levels in any significant way is trees. The Keeling curve shows approximately a 1.5% drop in global CO2 between Spring and Autumn as the northern hemisphere comes into growth. No man-made attempts to reduce CO2 will achieve anything similar. Shame it's not sustainable, but goes back up again over the winter! Wrong sort of trees?

But global warming's got nothing to do with CO2 anyway, as will be blindingly obvious by 2050.

WE would all be wearing but plugs attached to methane tanks I'd imagine as would all wildlife and cattle, pigs sheep and horses. Not sure about birds.

There is an interesting article on aerosols in Nature this week, and I'm not talking about hair spray, but small particles and their effect on cloud formation etc. Brian

It's not just the boiler but the whole existing heating system has to be optimised and the house well insulated to make it efficient. There is no payback time as this expenditure just results in you paying for the heating and hot water at a similar price as currently using mains gas.

The energy industry cannot meet their existing targets to replace meters with smart meters so what chance have they of swapping one heating technology with another in the 30 year timescale, starting from virtually zero?

If the ER protestors stopped breathing it would help, they emit a lot of CO2. Ditto all the other alarmists.

No they won't. Houses will be fitted with heat pumps.

Actuyally they would reduce slightly if using nuclear electricity and heat pumps.

Surprised anyone is still spouting this nonsense ten years after David Mackay published the Simple Sums that showed it to be impossible.

Back in the late 70s the nuclear industry wanted to expand. The tree huggers objected and screamed no need, we have coal for 300 years, oil, gas etc. So we stopped investing in new designs of nuclear reactors.

Then the left wrecked our coal industry and the tree huggers invented man made global warming and we can?t use the coal etc.

See a pattern here?

Now we face energy shortages while places like Russia and China just ignore the nonsense of man made global warming, other than making money from the gullible west out of it.

You can?t say things like that! The treehuggers don?t like it!

You want to plant limestone?

All those fields which at the moment produce crops, you mean, f'rinstance?

Of course if you insist on planting up the airports.

Errr, isn't this what TNP has being saying all along?

The problem is the massively deep pockets of those who oppose nuclear power and coal.

Coupled to the gullibility of the average lefty.