Our grim future

[cromwell]

There are quite a few straws in the wind at the moment, and none of them cheerful ones.

The latest miserable news is that beef is set to become a luxury item. Leaving aside that it is already a luxury for some, why is this?
Because of the "climate impact" of producing it, apparently.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steaks-c ... 22224.html

The BBC is well advanced down this particular road, printing gleeful stories about the "everyday foods that could become luxuries". These include coffee, meat and spices.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steaks-c ... 22224.html

Then we have our energy costs, which I can't see coming down.
Road pricing is on the menu too. Charging by the mile for your road usage.

It is looking like the fight against climate change is going to have one definite result - a drastic lowering of the quality of life for the ordinary people of this country.
Suff has talked of the cost of the climate crisis and I think we are going to see more evidence of this going forward.

Will any politician actually admit to this? To say "Yes, we are going to deliberately lower your standard of living. You are going to have to have a worse life"?

Probably not.

[Workingman]

The beef one looks like and adverticle for the Danish pork producer..

The BBC one, which is here is full of ifs, coulds and in the futures. The timing of the future being unclear. It is a magazine piece passing itself off as scientific, intellectual. and academic.

However the BBC does have a proper story from the Chicken King of the 2 Sisters Food Group, Ranjit Boparan, telling us that "The days of a £3 chicken feeding a family of four" are over.

When it comes to the climate thing we are all going to see a drastic lowering of the quality of life, that's every single person on the planet. Governments, businesses and we as individuals have not done enough to prevent it. Mind you the economic model hinders us greatly. All of us have "played the game" tinkering at the edges and pretending that technological solutions or twee initiatives will save us whilst at the same time we carried on carrying on.

This is going to hit us a lot earlier than 2050 - all 9.9 billion of us by then, 2.1 billion more than today!

Enjoy your steak.

[Suff]

Yes the agenda is firmly on making us "pay" and lowering our standard of living.

It didn't need to be like that. The problem with the IF's and the Maybe's is that the scientists who study this work on a 40-50 year sliding window. Only that has an absolute level of certainty. Right now that is dominated with the first 20-30 years when it was still looking like things were moving slowly. That means it will take another 20-30 years to reveal the whole sorry story.

20-30 years from now we need to be in full emergency mitigation mode, not cross checking sliding 50 year models to see just "how" screwed we are.

I have my own issues about the whole meat and goods thing. Heat, power and transport are killing us, meat is just the last straw on the back of the camel. If we fix the first three, meat won't really matter that much.

And, yes, the 9.9bn is the elephant in the room. Not only are we going to hell with CO2 emissions, we are rocket propelling the journey by growing so many more humans. Pretty soon we'll move from rocket propelled to rail gun and then slingshot round the planet speeds. Finally gravity assisted dive into the sun......

[Workingman]

Yes the agenda is firmly on making us "pay" and lowering our standard of living.

It didn't need to be like that.

Didn't, but it does now. Our dithering, inaction and side-stepping have seen to that. We once had 70 years, then 50 and now it is, maybe, 20, or 30. I actually do not even think it is that. We have been at the tipping point for a while now and all it will need is a few more nudges and over we go.

It drives me mad when I hear 'eco friendly' or 'net zero' when there are no such things. It drives me even more insane when I see ordinary people jumping on these bandwagons thinking they are saving the planet.

Go watch the smug Prince William's Earthshot thing - it will be on iPlayer - for examples of what I am talking about. Or better still tonight's BBC offering 'Shop Well for the Planet?' Utter rubbish, but the hard of thinking will love it - 9.0 rating.

[Suff]

It has become a buzzword without context or content. It will be used to justify everything.

For those of us who have been interested, educated ourselves and watched this slow moving, but accelerating, disaster unfold; the commercialisation of getting off our CO2 diet is, at best, dismaying and often infuriating.

[Workingman]

Nobody wants to tackle those issues.

We have got to a point where we are trapped between the Devil and the deep blue sea. It has never been just about the climate....

We cannot do away with fossil fuels and rely on renewables to continue to live the way we do - yet we pretend that we can - it is what we want to do. Something has to give.

If we do away with FF in the short term (the Johnson wants it by 2035) the only way to go is nuclear - it really is the only option. That is unacceptable to the woke - but renewables cannot pick up the slack. We need to be practical and not emotional about these things.

Every home in the UK being totally electric for cooking, heating and charging their EV's by 2035 is not remotely possible with windmills. Get real.

The US, China, India, Russia and the major oil / gas producers know this, so they play us.

[cromwell]

We cannot do away with fossil fuels and rely on renewables to continue to live the way we do - yet we pretend that we can - it is what we want to do.

It is certainly something that the gentlemen and ladies sitting in Westminster pretend can be done.

So far no real adjustments to our way of life have been made. We have done away with coal but replaced its input into the grid. We have outsourced much of our heavy industry overseas.

But our standard of living hasn't taken a big hit. Politicians pretend that it never will, that somehow the sacrifices needed to achieve their target of net zero are going to be painless. They aren't. How long can this deception last, even with the support of the mass media?

I wonder what will happen when / if the penny drops with the general population?
Will the old pattern of just voting Labout / Conservative continue? Will a new populist party emerge?
Or will people just grumble and carry on?

Probably the latter, with the proviso that reality doesn't dawn in a shocking and surprising manner.
Namely, will the lights stay on and the houses stay warm?

I remember the power cuts and three day week of the 70's as I'm sure most of us do. The difference being that back then gas only heated 45% of our homes. Now it's 84%. I grew up in a pit village; every home had a fireplace. Even if the lights went out, the fire stayed lit. You were warm.
If the gas goes off over Christmas people won't be warm. That would be an absolutely seismic shock.
The government must be praying very, very hard for a mild winter.

[Suff]

Worse WM, it is not that we can't do this with renewables, yes we can. But not at a price remotely close to FF.

We would need to over build 1,000%, create a storage infra that doesn't exist. And invest in grid upgrades for 3 decades.

After all Johnsons picture is carbon neutral by 2050, not by 2035. 2035 is the hard stop on new FF transport, not, on full carbon neutral.

Even carbon neutral does not mean no CO2 just a balance between emissions and absorption.

So down to brass tacks.

Everything mentioned is possible by 2050. However the cost is more than the general public are willing to fund. Nobody really wants to change their lives and comforts as an alternative.

Politicians are unwilling to go out on a limb and make the case because the general public look out of the window and say "prove it, I can't see any change or any threat".

Reality is that. When the general public are able to look out of the window and see the change and the threat, it is 100 years too late to fix it and 35,000 years for the planet to heal itself.

The general public can't deal with numbers like that so they ignore it and challenge any action to fix it.

Think this is without precedent? In the 1930's the people and the government challenged any army spending as a waste. We'd won the war to end all wars and they looked out the window and Hitler was still in Germany. There was a depression on and there were far more important things to spend money on.

WW2 was 1 million times easier to "fix" than global warming. They were, after all, just humans and the war was on a human scale. We have interfered with planetary mechanics and the consequences are on a planetary scale.

What are we left with? Small steps, fast and good and comfortable electric cars to prove to the man in the street that leaving your fossil burner behind is not that much of a stretch. Forcing small, but growing, change to heating and power generation.

It all adds up, but, in the end, it won't be enough. You can't cure an unreasonable doubt with facts and that is the problem.

[Workingman]

It was the Johnson who told the Connivers' conference that power generation would be fossil fuel free by 2035, the year not her time on the 24hr clock, the gas would be turned off. The news was greeted by rapturous applause. However, there were no details about how or what would happen when 25 million homes and an unknown number of businesses go all electric by that year. It was a popular move, though, both at conference and in the media.

When it happens I will lose my central heating and my cooking facilities. They will have to be replaced by much more expensive electrical versions; ay my expense. Once I am all electric I will be at the mercy of the electricity generators and their suppliers and their price rises - there will be price rises. Comparison sites will be useless as there will effectively be a cartel - one supplier. My case will be the norm for tens of millions of us.

It will be interesting to learn how much this will cost, how much the current infrastructure will need to change, who will pay, and how. At present the average minute by minute demand for electricity is about 30GW and roughly 45% comes from gas. It is a massive hole to fill. It is probably why China, the US, Russia and India are not joining in.

The carbon cost embedded in scrapping perfectly working appliances and systems and replacing them with brand new is also phenomenal, yet nobody considers that. Every new thing that will have to be made to achieve this dreamscape, from the windmills and solar panels to the cookers and kettles, will have a carbon footprint which in total will take decades if not centuries to wash out of the system.

https://gridwatch.co.uk

[Suff]

Good sound bytes. But he won't be in power by 2035. Even the grid doesn't plan on turning the gas off much before 2050.

Even then, electrical generation by 2035 does not mean gas to the homes turned off by 2035.

I shall await confirmation that what was said dos actually mean what was not said. I can see no more gas appliances sold by 2030 or even earlier. They've started with the CH boilers. But even that doesn't mean all gas boilers turned off by 2035.

Natural gas off by 2050 I can see. Grid without gas 2035? Depends on how many billions they want to spend and if they re-start 3 new nuclear plants in the next year or two. I also tend to ignore the press "interpretations" of what was said.

Elon Musk alluded to this when he dismantled Tesla's PR department. "We say something and the press get it wrong and report it wrong. We correct the incorrect news and they get that wrong too. If we say nothing it just goes away that much faster".

I'm happy to know that the Cons have a different plan though.