An excellent article in The Times by Tom Whipple, “Whipple on the Care of the Climate”, raised a few points.
First, zero carbon emissions is impossible; “agriculture produces even more greenhouse gases (than concrete) – how do you make a burp-free cow?” He answers his own question a few pages previously. A dash of seaweed, think of it as the Tabasco in a Bloody Mary, in its diet cuts methane emissions by 70%. He does not extrapolate the benefits to humans prone to ethane emissions. I’m thinking of adding seaweed to my cranberry juice diet.
Secondly, while there is a shift from petrol and diesel to electric cars, most urban homes in the UK have boilers fired up with piped natural gas. You may remember the “dash for gas” that seemed so clean and dandy. What will become of an about to be redundant pipeline network? Whipple’s colleague, Emily Gosden, furnishes the answer; “gas pipelines could switch to hydrogen in ‘green’ plans”. Forget dash for gas, now brace your hydrogen backbone, though it’s not as catchy a slogan.
It’s good news that Team UK (for now) punches above its weight in soft power and climate change. The former matters more than the latter as the population of the UK is 0.87% of the world’s pop. Our interventions to go green will be wholly ineffective unless adopted by bigger and, sadly, poorer countries that simply cannot afford to go green, except on their national flags.
“Never trust a country with green in its flag” has always seemed to work quite well. !