They Keep Throwing Your Money on the Fire.

I must admit I am confused about all this green stuff, the carbon cycle and buying CO2 tokens.

If we cut down and burn trees it produces CO2 now. If we plant trees to capture the CO2 produced it will be another 20-40 years before that carbon is finally captured agin, in the meantime the tree we cut down and burnt is no longer capturing carbon. Can someone explain to a simple soul like me why this is better than burning coal when we are told it is the CO2 we produce today that is the problem.

Then we have all these net zero/green companies who apparently are green as they offset their CO2 production by buying CO2 tokens from companies that plant trees that will again take 20-40 years to absorb the CO2 that the token buyer produced today.

I would support many green initiatives if someone could explain in simple accurate science how it will make a difference. I am still struggling trying to understand if it has been definitely proven that the increase in CO2 is totally man made or a result of climate change and because everyone agrees does not, to me, mean it is true otherwise the sun would still be revolving around the earth and quantum physics would  not exist.

I also struggle with Hydrogen. It is not a fuel, it is an energy transport medium. It apparently is quite energy intensive to produce with the exception I am told of recycling plastic waste. So unless we can get free energy to produce the Hydrogen it is an expensive transport mechanism. 

Then we have planing policies which allow for the building of vast estates of houses with no meaningfull public transport links so everyone has to drive to work or work from home with slow rural internet and use the car to go to the shops. And why does not every new house use grey water from rainwater capture?

I know the infrastructure in my village will not support more than a few fast car chargers, despite the recently renewed overhead lines and if heat pumps become the norm there will definitely be problems.

Am I a cynical luddite? confused? or an old simple fogey, it does not matter too much to me as being old does mean I will not be around to suffer the consequences.

I do support lots of insulation in houses, that makes sense to me as does wearing a jumper so I do not have to heat the house to enable me to wander around in shorts and tee shirt in the middle of winter. Unfortunately I have dogs who consider every closed door a challenge to try and persuade me to open a few minutes after I close it. 

I will stop there before asking about food waste, why we need strawberries in December, etc, etc. 

I guess the thing to remember about subsidies is that they're intended to be just a (relatively) short term inducement to accelerate the development of a technology, rather than a permanent 'solution' of themselves. A bit like spending huge amounts on educating children when then won't start contributing financially to society for a decade or more.

Drax for example seems to be on target for £50/MWh (https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-drax-biomass-costs-idUKKBN1HR1IG ) - which just at the moment looks pretty good compared with gas generation at the moment (even compared with pre-Ukrane prices) or nuclear (around £90/MWh for the new plants).

If we cut down and burn trees it produces CO2 now. If we plant trees to capture the CO2 produced it will be another 20-40 years before that carbon is finally captured agin, in the meantime the tree we cut down and burnt is no longer capturing carbon. Can someone explain to a simple soul like me why this is better than burning coal when we are told it is the CO2 we produce today that is the problem.

Or to turn it around, by burning a tree now, we're just releasing the CO2 that it absorbed in the previous however many years while the tree was growing. If we left the tree to die naturally it would decay (or be consumed by forest fire) and release most of the carbon eventually anyway.

Perhaps a useful analogy is putting a fountain in a pond - there are two options - the easy one is connect it to a hosepipe fed from the outside tap, the second to install a pump that draws water from the pond itself. The first option will pretty obviously flood the pond given enough time, while the second option might still cause some changes in water level as the pump starts and stops, especially if for some technical reason we had to prime the pump system with tap water, but it should be pretty safe from overtopping in general.

None of the options are ideal - renewable sources (wind, solar etc) need an investment of energy (and likely CO2 emissions) to manufacture the things in the first place, and then only gradually do they repay that investment. Likewise with most kinds of common thermal insulation. Usually there's a trade-off between immediate and medium term results.

   - Andy.

Unfortunately there is a severe lack of joined up thinking in the 'Green' movement and some people making a  lot of money from government subsidies. Jeremy Grantham who makes his money from the woodchip industry in the USA also supports the Grantham Institute for Climate Change in the UK who promote all this stuff.

Global warming is a fact the confusion is over what the cause is.  Most people now believe that it is caused by the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmospheric air we breath.

https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/ 

If the graphs of CO2 shown in the above link are correct then definitely the cause is carbon dioxide gas.  We must urgently find a way of carbon capture and secretion.  Whether power station exhaust CO2 can be captured under the sea and formed into chalk or pumped down old mine workings is still being investigated.

All our energy comes from the sun; so solar energy, wind and tidal energy should be the preferred sources for power stations of the future. 

If on still nights these are not available then we will need nuclear or hydro as a back up but if all else fails then oil, gas or even coal generation will be needed to avoid load shedding but the carbon capture could make this an expensive but necessary option.

For transportation I think the best way is to continue using petrol or diesel  as hydro-carbon gases or liquids are the cheapest and safest way to store energy in a limited space.