Zero Carbon Britain

[biffvernon]

New site launch:
http://zerocarbonbritain.org/

[Little John]

New site launch:
http://zerocarbonbritain.org/

I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to read the content of a website that has as its tag line, "Zero carbon Britain", as if that is ever a remote possibility in even the wildest imaginings of the wildest-eyed deep-greener.

Zero carbon Britain = a human population of no more than 2 or 3 million living a hunter gather lifestyle. Which , given a choice, I would personally have tomorrow.

But, it's not going to happen this side of the great die-off.

[emordnilap]

But it does mention TEQs, which at the moment need all the help they can get.

[Billhook]

I'm very sorry to see that its section on forestry is as piss poor as the last version.

Nothing about reforesting the steep uplands (much of which are being overrun with C4 bracken) with native coppice forestry (high moorland covers ~1/3rd of the UK)
- just a couple of pages about monocultured fertilizer-&-Biocide-dependent "short rotation forestry" over millions of hectares;
that requires mechanical management and thus fairly level farmland;
that won't survive the coming severe droughts;
and that has to be plowed up and replanted at least every 20 yrs, thus building no soil carbon;
- and nothing about using native coppice and other forestry yields for Carbon Recovery via agricultural biochar plus methanol co-product,
on grounds that the biochar might include urban waste wood with contaminants so it shouldn't be used on farmland (!).

Very disappointing spurious bullshit.

If the authors had any intellectual grip on the subject they'd be calling for the coppice biochar option to be adopted in place of CCS,
not as an offset for ongoing fossil fuel use (which their dumb subtitle of 'Net Zero Carbon Britain' admits)
but as the launch of Britain's formal exemplary program for the recovery of its cumulative historic carbon emissions.

This could be of seminal effect at the level of global diplomacy, which is where change has to occur for any British action to be remotely relevant.

Regards,

Lewis

[biffvernon]

I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to read the content of a website that has as its tag line, "Zero carbon Britain", as if that is ever a remote possibility in even the wildest imaginings of the wildest-eyed deep-greener.

So we must not consider anything aspirational?

I think unless we aim for a negative value carbon Britain and the rest of the world, catastrophic global warming in inevitable.

It may be difficult but the alternative is doom.

[Little John]

I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to read the content of a website that has as its tag line, "Zero carbon Britain", as if that is ever a remote possibility in even the wildest imaginings of the wildest-eyed deep-greener.

So we must not consider anything aspirational?

I think unless we aim for a negative value carbon Britain and the rest of the world, catastrophic global warming in inevitable.

It may be difficult but the alternative is doom.

There is a difference between aspirational, delusional, and dishonest.

[RenewableCandy]

W-e-e-e-ll, our city has a "Zero Waste" policy/target thingie. This doesn't mean that all of a sudden, as if by magic, none of us will be allowed to throw anything away. It exists, as a thing to work towards, and tells people that everything they(we) do to reduce waste moves us all in the right direction. Similarly, nutty scientizts all over the world are trying to reach the lowest temperature possible, while all of us nutty scientizts know that reaching absolute zero itself is a physical imposibility. Doesn't stop us seeing how low we can go...sotospeak !

[vtsnowedin]

[ero carbon Britain = a human population of no more than 2 or 3 million living a hunter gather lifestyle. Which , given a choice, I would personally have tomorrow.

.

ROF The vision of you making do as a hunter gatherer just brings so many amusing things to mind. Careful what you wish for.

[Little John]

[ero carbon Britain = a human population of no more than 2 or 3 million living a hunter gather lifestyle. Which , given a choice, I would personally have tomorrow.

.

ROF The vision of you making do as a hunter gatherer just brings so many amusing things to mind. Careful what you wish for.

I am speaking about humanity as a group. As an individual, I would likely fare better than some, no better than many and worse than some. So what?

Your point is?

[Little John]

W-e-e-e-ll, our city has a "Zero Waste" policy/target thingie. This doesn't mean that all of a sudden, as if by magic, none of us will be allowed to throw anything away. It exists, as a thing to work towards, and tells people that everything they(we) do to reduce waste moves us all in the right direction. Similarly, nutty scientizts all over the world are trying to reach the lowest temperature possible, while all of us nutty scientizts know that reaching absolute zero itself is a physical imposibility. Doesn't stop us seeing how low we can go...sotospeak !

Here's a novel thought; how's about all of us in this country taking a deep breath and re-conceptualising the difference between commitments that will be met, targets that can be met, aspirations that may be met and dreams that are unlikely to be met but which point us in the right direction.

We are all suffering in this country from a seriously silly semantic inflation in our language.

[vtsnowedin]

[ero carbon Britain = a human population of no more than 2 or 3 million living a hunter gather lifestyle. Which , given a choice, I would personally have tomorrow.

.

ROF The vision of you making do as a hunter gatherer just brings so many amusing things to mind. Careful what you wish for.

I am speaking about humanity as a group. As an individual, I would likely fare better than some, no better than many and worse than some. So what?

Your point is?

Oh nothing really but who will you rail against about not having any meat on the fire if there are no bankers or government to blame?

[Little John]

ROF The vision of you making do as a hunter gatherer just brings so many amusing things to mind. Careful what you wish for.

I am speaking about humanity as a group. As an individual, I would likely fare better than some, no better than many and worse than some. So what?

Your point is?

Oh nothing really but who will you rail against about not having any meat on the fire if there are no bankers or government to blame?

So, no point then.

[kenneal - lagger]

Zero Carbon Britain won't get anywhere unless the banking and financial systems of the UK and the world are completely overhauled and put onto a sustainable track - a no interest or "Islamic" banking system. Trying to implement ZCB with the current banking system would result in a recession to end all recessions and national and virtually total personal bankruptcy in the UK.

This is why ZCB is unacceptable politically and so will never be implemented under the current system. It is useful to have in hand, though, in case we have an economic and political collapse at some time in the near future - not entirely out of the question!

[Billhook]

So we must not consider anything aspirational?

I think unless we aim for a negative value carbon Britain and the rest of the world, catastrophic global warming in inevitable.

It may be difficult but the alternative is doom.

Aspirational is essential, as I guess all here would agree, but this report fails that test badly.
Its very title is hype, as is seen as soon as it's opened and the actual title "Net zero carbon Britain" is read,
and people are ultra-sensitive to and distrustful of hype.

Moreover it shows no interest in promoting the essential sense of common purpose -
on the contrary it shields the urban green interests in the 'preservation' of forest and of deforested heavily acidified moorlands
- which are by far the country's largest Carbon Recovery resource - from any intervention,
while hammering the rural farming culture to the point where the majority would end up trying to scrape a living from a margin
between what agri-contracters charge and what the food and energy corporation contracts will pay.

This outlook is merely pretending that the urban /rural divide can be amplified and dominated by ignorant urban interests.
Which ain't going to happen.

The focus on vegetarianism seems equally ill-considered.
Are they proposing a totalitarian govt that commands farmers what to produce ?
If farmers were crushed out of using the pastureland for livestock, would that govt then restrict imported meat supplies
(after leaving the WTO) or would it merely offshore the production for UK consumers?

OTOH, it could just ration peoples' meat purchases (until it was slung out of office), with most British meat then being exported
to booming markets abroad.

It is a damn shame that CAT have not done better, given that they could have learned something
from the total lack of traction gained by the report's previous version.
I guess that they won't provide anything really useful until they recognize that the priority
is not Little Britain getting to 'Zero' Carbon by some arbitrary date,
it is about shaping societal reform away from GHG dependence
- in a manner that maximizes the sense of common purpose within Britain and so maximizes the pace of change,
- and in a manner that maximizes our seminal influence on the early negotiation of a commensurate global climate treaty.

Getting their heads around the gravity of our climate predicament,
- that even the earliest global end to GHG emissions is not remotely sufficient to avoid intensifying global crop failures
and the geo-political destabilization now looming for the 2020s,
followed by many decades of continued warming pushing the feedbacks beyond the possibility of control -
would be the starting point for CAT to develop useful contributions to commensurate strategy for climate stabilization.

In the absence of such strategy I think we would be, as you say, doomed.

Regards,

Lewis

[kenneal - lagger]

I suspect that this report is just another way for some CAT people to earn a bit of sponsorship money. With the economic demise of CAT that must be a major consideration.