PowerSwitch

Still going in a very wrong direction

According to reports from The Mauna Loa Observatory and The Keeling Curve, daily CO2 values for March 12 rocketed to a record 401.6 parts per million. Hourly values rose briefly higher, touching 402 parts per million. Levels fell back to around 400 ppm on March 13. But the overall trend will continue upward through March, April and much of May when the height of annual atmospheric CO2 readings is typically reached.

http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/20 ... -in-march/

China does not do things by halves.

A recent paper in Nature Climate Change noted that if all of the coal-to-gas plants get built, they'd produce 21 billion tons of CO2 alone. The Washington Post's Brad Plumer puts that in context: "The entire nation of China produced 7.7 billion tons of carbon-dioxide in 2011."

source

In 2005 (since then, the figures have been suppressed; how odd ) the UK oil refining industry used over five-and-a-half billion kilowatt hours of electricity, generated using coal.

Have a look.

"We'd have plenty of electricity [for electric cars] if we just stopped refining oil"

emordnilap wrote:In 2005 (since then, the figures have been suppressed; how odd ) the UK oil refining industry used over five-and-a-half billion kilowatt hours of electricity, generated using coal.

Have a look.

"We'd have plenty of electricity [for electric cars] if we just stopped refining oil"

Gah what a shame, that video is three orders of magnitude out on its mileage claim. Typical EV consumption for a full sized EV is 250Wh/mile or 4 miles per kWh. 5.5 billion kWh will therefore take you 22 billion miles rather than 22 trillion. Still, 22 billion vehicle miles is 10% of the UK's total annual vehicle miles driven each year so it's a pretty significant chunk.

It's also not true that refineries don't report their electricity demand. The Digest of UK Energy Statistics has it at 4,323GWh in 2012, down (quite substantially) from 5,034GWh in 2010.

It's an interesting point that I'd not considered before though, just a pity about that maths error.