Holidays abroad

[cromwell]

Will we still be allowed them in future?
Just asking because both Grant Shapps and Dominic Raab have made references to vaccines and therefore vaccine passports being needed "indefinitely". Even when the pandemic is over.

Theresa May signed us up to be carbon neutral by 2050. Aeroplanes pump out a lot of emissions. So fewer UK flights = fewer UK emissions which to politicians is a very good thing.

But we as a country have got used to our two weeks in Spain or wherever, and why not?

This is where the government's efforts to fight climate change are going to start affecting people's lives for the worse.
No jab? No Benidorm for you. Not even Florida, where they have banned vaccine passports. I've had my jabs. But it is imo massively unfair to ban covid free people who haven't from traveling anywhere - this is coercion.

There are people who regard Covid as a dry run for restricting our freedom to travel and imo they are right. Add on the cost of PCR test and the government chopping and changing which countries you can go to (often at the last minute) and it's pretty easy to see what they are doing.

But politicians are flying everywhere. The rules don't apply to them. Raab has been to France; didn't isolate on his return. Gove went to Purtugal for the Euros, ditto.
Alok Sharma has flown all over the world "fighting climate change".

We seem to be heading into a very elitist world. Politicians and the rich do what they want whilst everybody else has to toe the line.

[TheOstrich]

I think we are going to have to accept that the world around us has changed dramatically over the last two years. We have had the world pandemic, here and now - not conjectured like SARS and MERS - and similarly we now have ample evidence of climate change, be it the wild-fires in Greece and California or the storms in Germany, and to a lesser extent the UK.
As much as we might crave for the nostalgic past of steam engines, coal fires and Vera Lynn, things have moved on. And it may well be that leisure aircraft flights become an endangered species. I appreciate that this means "restrictions" and "directives" but, if you believe change needs to happen and happen now, we may have to accept them. And they could be very drastic - a world-wide, simpler Post-industrial society may have to emerge.
Basically, welcome to the "New Normal". We can fiddle while Rome burns, or we can accept a diminution of personal freedoms for the greater good.
Easy for me to say, I know, as I'm of the generation that bye-and-large won't be affected by any of this, so if a large tranche of the population in this country, or any other, wants to embark on Gilet Jaunes style anti-authoritarian protests, feel free, but I'll merely be an interested bystander.

[cruiser2]

I have got a cruise booked for next August sailing from Southampton to Spain and Portugal. Will have to wait and see what happens next year before paying
the balance. I may book a river cruise next year. Will wait and see what develops concerning cruising.

[cromwell]

As much as we might crave for the nostalgic past of steam engines, coal fires and Vera Lynn, things have moved on.

I don't have the slightest craving for any of that.

a world-wide, simpler Post-industrial society may have to emerge.

That's certainly what XR want. A return to the year 1600, probably.

Basically, welcome to the "New Normal". We can fiddle while Rome burns, or we can accept a diminution of personal freedoms for the greater good.

Oh I think we will be having a diminution of personal freedoms OK, no worries about that.

It will be interesting how it's sold to the world at large though. Governments so far have worked to increase the standard of living of their people; now ours and others will be setting out to deliberately worsen their own people's standard of living. Not an easy sell, especially when it will not change the behaviour of billionaires who will still have their private jets, or politicians like Alok Sharma who has flown to 30 countries to discuss climate change.

And maybe especially a difficult sell when China, India and Russia show no inclination to join in. We produce 1% of the world's emissions. China 27%. And the Chinese are still building coal fired power stations and opening open cast coal mines in Mongolia.

Anyway, using the same tactics that worked so well in the pandemic (terrify the population on purpose) I expect Honest Boris's climate report released at 12 noon today to be similarly apocalyptic. Half an hour to save the world! (Again).

[Suff]

Right now we are in a situation where anyone who books a holiday abroad does it at their own risk. The virus flares, country goes on the amber list or the red list, holiday trashed. But nobody wants to listen to that they just seem to feel that there is some need to go "somewhere" in order to have a holiday. I've never seen that myself.

Flying is something that will come under more and more scrutiny as time goes on. The UK plan is to push heavily into green hydrogen and synthetic fuels for planes. I can't see either taking off myself but they're not planning on some huge moratorium on flights, very valuable source of [slush] erm Tax funds.

XR are idiots. They're not entirely wrong, we are screwing up the viable liveable biosphere of the planet. NO, we are not "destroying" the planet. We are just destroying the ability of it to feed us. Which, of course, means we are destroying ourselves. Unfortunately we are taking about 75% of the flora and fauna with us. But the rest will adjust faster than we will.

Something needs to be done. The problem is nobody really wants to pay for it.

So the wheel turns and we are where we are.

[Workingman]

We have already gone too far...

I was reading an article claiming that the generation born in the 2010's will be the first to feel the changes. Total nonsense.

As we come to our end of days my generation is already feeling and seeing the changes, certainly climate wise. By the time they get to 50 or so our children will be living lives turned upside down compared to those of us who lived through the good times. And their children, our grandchildren, will be in a living hell on Earth by the time they are 50 as nature fights back. Food and clean fresh water will be two of their main problems.

We have already had a few dry-runs with Flu, Marburg, Ebola, SARS, MERS and now Covid. One day we will get one that is highly deadly, super infectious and easily transmissible then we are done for. The elements are already there in the ones mentioned above.

[Suff]

I was just replying to someone who thinks "olivine" is the next magic bullet for handling climate change.

So I did a bit of looking and crunched some numbers.

Olivine absorbs around 1 ton of CO2 per ton of Olivine. We push 43 BILLION tons of CO2 into the atmosphere ever year. The (slightly), good news is that the flora sucks out about 50% of that. So we _only_ need to deal with about 21.5 billion tons of CO2 Every Single Year.

Easy right?

Then of course, we need to get back to pre industrial levels of CO2 if we want to manage long term. Pre industrial is around 285ppm. That is peak of interglacial so about as warm as it should get without totally destroying the ice caps. Which sort of ruins your whole decade.

How much CO2 to get back there from 409ppm? Around 2.4 TRILLION tons of CO2.

So around 20 billion tons of CO2 every year to stand still and 2.4 trillion tons to stand a chance of our progeny having even close to the existence we have had.

Here's the problem. If we push the figures to make people think they become apathetic and say it is hopeless. Which it is not. But if we don't push the figures they deny it is a problem and some technical wizardry will just fix it. Which it will not.

It is our own nature which is killing us. We are determined to keep doing what we do, we don't want to hear the problems and even if we do we throw our hands up and say "so what can I do about it" at which point we revert to being determined to keep doing what we do.

Anyone remember 350.org? That is an organisation dedicated to trying to get politicians to commit to not exceeding 350ppm, which they believe is the cusp of the slope down into chaos. We can live with 350ppm. It won't be easy but it will be possible. I remember it well all the bright eyed bushy tailed 350 proponents with the "just one more push and we'll be there". Even though we had already blown past 350 and were heading hell for leather for 450.

In the 2000's our average CO2 growth was around 1.9ppm. In the 2010's it was 2.2 ppm. But in 2022 we will have had our first full decade where every single year was over 2ppm growth and it is unlikely that anything will stop it going higher still. At this rate by 2030 we will have managed around 435ppm. By 2040 we will be well over 450ppm. For those not acquainted with these figures, 450 is considered the gateway to uncontrollable CO2 levels. By this time we simply won't have the resources to bring it down before cataclysmic impacts start to hit us.

It all starts now. But now keeps getting kicked down the road.

Back in the 1990' I used to liken it to pushing a massive rock up a huge saddle between two hills. Once you get it to the top, it will go over the top and down the other side. It is far, far, easier to stop it on the way up than it is to stop it on the way down again. We pushed it over the top around 1998. We have been arguing about what to do ever since. All it does is gather speed momentum and kinetic energy.

Eventually we'll get hit by it!

[Workingman]

More tinkering at the edges stuff, and nobody has yet mentioned population - well there's a thing.

Meanwhile we have denuded the soil so that we cannot grow enough food so we cut out out lungs - chop down forests - to 'create' more land then we over fertilise the soil. Unfortunately their chemical bonds are now so weak they cannot hold the fertilisers which then leech out into our streams, rivers, lakes and the sea. Once there they cause algal blooms which cut out the light and suck up the available oxygen. This kills the fish and those that can migrate get gobbled up by factory ships at a rate unimaginable to my father who sailed out of Fleetwood in the family trawler in the 1920s and 30s.

We now have the problem that about 23% of the world's population do not have access to clean fresh water. So, rather than just boiling it and a bit of filtering to make it safe to drink or cook with it has to be 'processed' or desalinated.

Then there are the billions of tons of plastic bags, bottles and boxes littering our hedgerows, parks, rivers, beaches and seas. Every oceanic gyre has millions of tons of the stuff swirling around in them. and they are not big bits like bottles and takeaway trays they are small flakes constantly broken down by actinic degradation till they get in the food chain.

Throw in floods, droughts, famines, landslides, wildfires, wars (more and more of them in the future) and sea rises into the mix and you get the perfect storm.

But don't worry, the Earth has about 3 to 4 billion years left till the Sun becomes a red giant and gobbles it up. We, on the other hand, are the masters of our own decline. Maybe flying off to lie on a beach drinking Pina Colada from a plastic 'glass' and sending YouTube vids to our mates will help.

[Suff]

Help ignore the problem perhaps...

[Workingman]

I just read a comment complaining that 59% of CO2 emissions are from about 100 companies and berating those companies.... what they forgot to mention is that those companies are making stuff for the 2.6 billion, no, make that 5.2 billion, no, make that 7.8 billion of us to consume.

Since the year of my birth the world's population has trebled. Yes, trebled in under 70 years!

The pandemic has brought in restrictions and controls, and governments love them, but they are as nothing compared to what is coming down the tracks.