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Dealing with Climate Change & Justice
(1312 posts)- Started 2 years ago by chdot
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Posted 1 year ago #
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Last summer, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) delivered a 600-page assessment of the United Kingdom’s journey towards net zero targets. The scathing conclusions could be summed up in a single sentence: Westminster continues to talk the talk, but a lack of follow-through means the country is failing to walk the walk.
In too many areas, the CCC found, goals were being undermined by failures in delivery programmes. There was a “shocking gap”, it reported, in policymaking to drive better insulation of homes. Progress on reducing farming emissions had been “glacial”. The bald conclusion was that the “current strategy will not deliver net zero” by 2050, as legally required.
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About 70% of emissions from UK chemical manufacturers come from burning fossil fuels on site to process chemicals such as ammonia and ethylene.
Liam Hardy, a policy analyst at Green Alliance, said: “The chemicals used in everyday products are a huge hidden source of carbon emissions. What we need now is for the government to help British manufacturers make their production processes greener.
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Posted 1 year ago # -
Or stop wrapping stuff in single-use plastic.
Laundry liquid is also an inefficient use of packaging, transport and shelf space, as a large proportion of it is water. We shouldn't be wrapping "water" in plastic bottles, then transporting it 100s of miles to put it on massive "big box supermarket" aisles. It's just madness.
Washing tablets, sheets, or powder is far better as it's in dried form
Posted 1 year ago # -
Anecdote alert:
I buy a fair bit of Dri-Pak liquid soap. Of course back in the day this used to be actual soap flakes, just like Granny used to use.
There was much pearl clutching when the soap flake machine was retired in 2016. Marvellous hulking contraption:
However, Dri-Pak themselves seemed to think that the new product is more energy efficient as the production process for dry flakes using that big machine was really quite inefficient:
Whether or not this anecdote is true for laundry powder or whatever I would imagine the differences in the energy cost of transport is negligible compared to manufacture and use of these products. A 750ml bottle of liquid soap appears to do just as many laundry loads as a bag of soap flakes did (and with fewer catastrophic foaming events). I think a bag of flakes was 1kg too.
I tend to get my other laundry products from the refill shops. They are liquid too, but less plastic involved.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Also don't wash things (including you) as often as you used to.
Insted of washing shirts after every wear, wear once put back in your wardrobe, repeat once a week for 4 weeks and wash after 4th week. Will also cut down on tumble drier use as often as well.
Also if you work in an office you really don't need a shower every day (obv you do if cycling and sweating etc), every other day or 3 times a week is fine. Just wash face etc daily.
Posted 1 year ago # -
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The company behind plans to carve out a mountain cavern large enough to house Big Ben has appointed an Italian engineering consultancy to head up the Scottish hydro power project.
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It was a decision that upended decades of environmentalist orthodoxy – by campaigners who, in many cases, cut their teeth in opposition to nuclear. And, for Tea Törmänen, it was the culmination of years of campaigning.
She and others in the Finnish Greens for Science and Technology group had argued that only through the adoption of nuclear power and other technologies could human societies decarbonise fast enough to avert climate breakdown. Writing later, the biologist, who is also chair of Finland’s Ecomodernist Society, said: “For me it was a moment that was long overdue.”
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In a video fronted by the environmental campaigner and Guardian columnist George Monbiot they have entreated the public to go vegan, calling for animal products to be replaced by fats and proteins grown in genetically modified microbial soup. In Germany they are campaigning for the government to end its phase out of nuclear power and in Finland and the Netherlands they have helped guarantee the industry’s future. At the EU level they successfully argued that nuclear should be included in its taxonomy of green energy sources, while at the same time campaigning against the bloc’s organic farming targets and longstanding ban on genetically modified crops.
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The EU is due to adopt the Critical Raw Materials Act on March 14, leveraging the power of the single market, to ensure Europe has a diverse and reliable supply of these materials, while ensuring high social and environmental standards.
Vasileios Tsianos, Director of Corporate Development, Neo Performance Materials:
"Automotive OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that make these drive train motors of electric vehicles are asking of policymakers, of government for bold policy to help with critical supply chains for electric vehicles.
"So the EU has done an incredible job with helping with the setup of battery supply chains but equivalently the lynchpin to completing this industrial policy is rare earth supply chains and if a supply chain is solely dependent on one jurisdiction, in this case China, then by single sourcing it from one jurisdiction the supply chain is at risk because of lack of diversification and if the supply chain is at risk then EU automotive jobs are at risk
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The BBB, which has won the support of far-right and populist parties internationally, claims the problem has been exaggerated and that farmers’ livelihoods are being sacrificed to the green transition.
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Governments must urgently stop subsidising the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water.
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USE of public transport including buses, trains and ferries is up to 50% down on pre-pandemic levels - leading to new concerns over the ability to meet stiff Scottish Government targets over climate change.
As the nation seeks to cut car use to decarbonise and introduces low emission zones in some Scots cities which will start to be enforced from this year, it has emerged that the number of bus passengers is down by 40.3% from 392m in 2016/17 before Covid hit to 234m in 2021/22.
And there is further concern that the Scottish Government's flagship bus partnership fund first launched in 2019 and aimed at providing bus priority measures to tackle climate change has stalled. As of August last year it had committed just £25.8m of its £500m budget.
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What will the key findings be?
There is no new science in the synthesis report, just a recap of the main findings of the previous publications. Those include warnings that the world was approaching “irreversible” levels of global heating, with catastrophic impacts rapidly becoming inevitable; and that it was “now or never” to take drastic action to avoid disaster.Much of the synthesis report is likely to focus on the future, setting out the possible policies and actions that will stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown and warning of the impacts of further heating.
If the main findings have already been published, why is this report needed?
Its purpose is to reduce the thousands of pages of science to a shorter format, which is further condensed into a “summary for policymakers”, to provide scientific underpinning for global climate action. It is written by scientists but haggled over by representatives of the UN’s nearly 200 governments, so some argue it is subject to watering down by regimes that do not like its messages.The report is supposed to inform the next UN climate summit, Cop28, which will hosted by the United Arab Emirates in Dubai from 30 November. There, nations’ progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions since the Paris climate agreement of 2015 will be assessed. It is certain to find that governments are well off track on their emissions-cutting goals.
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Posted 1 year ago # -
I have found the SNP leadership campaign to be particularly depressing on climate matters. All candidates have been keen to highlight support for the oil and gas sector and dualling the A9 and A96 - regardless of the cost (both financial and environmental).
Can anyone imagine any of these candidates arguing for road pricing, workplace parking levies, or any other traffic demand management measures? I can't. Why? While much play has been made of the candidate's religion (Muslim, Christian or other) they all truly worship "the economy". Nothing can be done which might affect it, its Prophet "the car" and holy commandments such as "thou shalt park for hee haw anywhere thou dost wish".
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Scientists have delivered a “final warning” on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, set out the final part of its mammoth sixth assessment report on Monday.
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The report’s conclusions are terrifying and wearily familiar. Every region is experiencing “widespread adverse impacts”. Almost half the world’s population is “highly vulnerable” to climate change impacts. Expected repercussions will escalate rapidly. It concludes that there is a “rapidly closing window of opportunity” to secure a livable future.
The report also details what we need to do now. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, called it a “guide to defuse the climate timebomb”. Again, the message is familiar: immediate and deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors – reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions by the early 2050s – using known “feasible and effective” solutions.
Nevertheless, what use is another report? It is, of course, a good stick with which to beat governments and corporations that are not doing enough on climate – whether at the ballot box, legally, or in the court of public opinion.
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Oil companies have come under increasing legal scrutiny and face allegations of defrauding investors, racketeering, and a wave of other lawsuits. But a new paper argues there’s another way to hold big oil accountable for climate damage: trying companies for homicide.
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Now do motor manufacturers...
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The mayor of London and a Tory MP have teamed up to fight “climate delayers” who are trying to thwart green policies.
Chris Skidmore, the Tory net zero tsar, and Labour mayor Sadiq Khan today write in the Guardian that they are putting party politics aside to defeat those politicians who are trying to delay climate action.
Skidmore, MP for Kingswood, began locking horns with his colleagues in 2021 after the Guardian exposed links between net zero-sceptic Tory MPs and a climate denying thinktank. After reading the coverage, he decided to set up a net zero support group of MPs and fight to keep climate action on the agenda.
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The pro-business Free Democratic party’s (FDP) last-minute opposition to EU plans to ban sales of new cars with internal combustion engines from 2035, which European leaders are hoping to resolve at a summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, had damaged Germany’s standing in the bloc, Habeck said. “We are losing debates, we are getting too little support for our projects.”
The German liberals’ sudden rethink has caused frustration not just in the ranks of its coalition partners but in other European capitals, where there are fears that the continent’s largest economy reneging on previously struck agreements will embolden other states to act in a similarly erratic fashion.
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Leading barristers have defied bar rules by signing a declaration saying they will not prosecute peaceful climate protesters or act for companies pursuing fossil fuel projects.
They are among more than 120 mostly English lawyers who have signed a declaration vowing to “withhold [their] services in respect of supporting new fossil fuel projects and action against climate protesters exercising their right of peaceful protest”.
Noting that climate breakdown represents “a serious risk to the rule of law”, the so-called “declaration of conscience” calls on legal professionals “to act urgently to do whatever they can to address the causes and consequences of the climate and ecological crises and to advance a just transition”.
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Posted 1 year ago #
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