CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
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Green experts and campaigners were “astounded” at the rebranding of what had been widely trailed as “green day”, and by the plans to unveil it in Aberdeen, the centre of the UK’s oil and gas industry.
Tom Burke, a co-founder of the E3G thinktank, said: “This is Fawlty Towers politics – don’t mention the environment! It’s a sop to the right wing. It’s clear this is not a strategy, just an assembly of lobby interests.”
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Has anyone else noticed how few cars there are driving arround Edinburgh streets since folks returned to (hybrid) work compared to pre pandemic (at least on the two days I am in there seems to be)?
Be intertesting to see if this is the same for all cities, and if so, what impact that will have on emmissions longer term.
Don’t know where you get that idea? Traffic is worse than it’s ever been!
Just that when I walk up from Haymarket, you can now more or less walk over Lothian road without waiting for lights at 9am.
Also when nipping over to Sainsbury's for a sandwich at lunch time at West port, the lights cycle is now longer than the number of cars passing. You can mostly just walk over without lights now. Couldn't do that before.
Guess it might not seem like it if you are riding a bike 'in' the traffic, but if you are a pedestrian there seems to be less going by.
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The UK government should rethink its subsidies for burning wood for fuel, former Conservative ministers and the net zero tsar have said.
The energy company Drax, which burns forest biomass, made £893m in direct government subsidies in 2021. The level of support fell to £617m in 2022 as electricity prices exceeded an agreed “strike price” agreed to encourage renewable investment.
Now senior Tories have asked the government to rethink its subsidies for Drax, which are paid for the supposed environmental benefits of burning wood. Ed Miliband, the shadow climate change and net zero secretary, also said a Labour government would review the subsidy scheme.
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The UK is “strikingly unprepared” for the impacts of the climate crisis, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which said there had been a “lost decade” in efforts to adapt for the impacts of global heating.
The CCC, the government’s official climate adviser, said climate damages will inevitably intensify for decades to come. It has warned repeatedly of poor preparation in the past and said government action was now urgently needed to protect people and their homes and livelihoods.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/29/uk-strikingly-unprepared-impacts-climate-crisis
Unclear if Scotland does/could do different/better.
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The UK government will defy scientific doubts to place a massive bet on technology to capture and store carbon dioxide in undersea caverns, to enable an expansion of oil and gas in the North Sea.
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£3.5m of Tory donations linked to pollution and climate denial, says report
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only a few days before, the plan was to hold the launch in Aberdeen, the oil and gas capital of the UK. Local businesses had been primed, oil and gas specialists were ready, shoving their minor interests in green alternatives – such as hydrogen – hastily to the fore, for an event to be hailed as “energy security day”. Fossil fuels would be a necessary part of that energy security, they had been assured.
And, only a few days before that, the plan was not to foreground energy security at all – the event was to be called “green day”, and the focus would be clearly on renewable energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and tackling the climate crisis, as well as bringing down household bills through supporting clean power.
Tom Burke, co-founder of the thinktank E3G, and a veteran government adviser, said the whirl of changes in the run-up to the launch were both bewildering and revealing. “This is a level of chaos that reveals the extent of the internal unresolved disputes within the party on these issues,” he said. “There is an anti-green faction in the Tory party, and this chaos has been all about them.”
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Money for the criminals, prison for the heroes: this, in brief, is the government’s climate policy. If something is damaging to the public interest, it’s likely to be rewarded and subsidised. If it’s beneficial, it will find itself in a hostile environment.
This government represents the denouement of the Pollution Paradox: as dirty money has the greatest incentive to invest in politics, it comes to run the whole system. Across these 13 years of misrule, we have seen the perversities of Conservative government multiply and intensify.
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The Synthesis Report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) earlier this month makes for grim reading. It concludes that limiting global warming to between 1.5 and two degrees involves rapid, deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emission reductions. Limiting the global rise to 1.5 degrees is still possible, but only just and only if we act urgently to reduce emissions.
The challenges of reaching net zero demand a laser-like focus on reducing emissions fast. The other side of the net-zero calculus is capturing carbon from the atmosphere using natural methods such as afforestation or restoring wetlands and peatlands, and technological methods such as carbon capture and storage. The risk for policy makers is being seduced by apparent solutions that, ultimately, do little or nothing to reduce emissions. These include unproven technical fixes and also the current boom in carbon offsetting.
Carbon offsetting involves emitters acquiring credits from carbon sequestration projects to offset their own emissions. Not only will this have virtually no impact in the short and medium term, it is a huge distraction from doing what is effective in the immediate term – deep, rapid and immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
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we should be supporting and rapidly expanding the industrial use of Scottish timber such as through the technology developed by Swedish company Modvion, which is working with the Finnish timber industry to manufacture engineered timber wind turbines and end the carbon-intensive use of steel. Those will be tonnes of carbon captured by trees and then stored as wind turbines producing green energy – a far better use of financial investment than carbon offsets.
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being in the trade bloc means that we’re going to have more influence on sustainability. Palm oil is actually a great product. It’s in so many of the things we use. This is not some illegal substance we’re talking about.
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Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Climate science tells us there will be catastrophic implications for current and future generations if we do not address this challenge in the current decade. The physical effects of climate change, and the policy and technological measures introduced to mitigate climate-related damages, are likely to have financial consequences for investors. On behalf of our members, we recognise and seek to address the financial risks posed by climate change, while also acknowledging our responsibilities towards the world into which our members retire.
Railways Pension Trustee Company Limited (RPTCL), the corporate Trustee of the railways pension schemes, is focussed on our mission to pay pensions securely, affordably, and sustainably. When it comes to climate-related risks, we have a duty to ensure good governance of climate risks and to monitor the potential impacts on investment returns, liabilities, and employer covenant.
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Last night, the government announced that Britain has joined a trade deal so contentious that it united Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in opposition to US membership.
While hardcore Brexiters would like to pretend this is the ultimate payoff of our decision to leave the EU and write our own rules, the reality is somewhat different. In signing the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), Britain has ditched environmental standards, signed up to terms that will undermine British farmers, and left us open to being sued by multinational corporations in secretive courts. And all for no real economic benefit.
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The most pressing issue reported from the talks is that Britain has been forced to lower environmental standards as a condition for entry to the deal. Palm oil plantations in Malaysia are a driver of deforestation, threatening biodiversity including the survival of orangutan populations. European tariffs on palm oil aim to stop deforestation, but the UK is understood to have agreed to scrap the tariffs as a condition for entry into the Pacific deal, in effect reneging on deforestation pledges made at the UN climate conference in Glasgow.
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Today the Scottish Co-operative Party launch our new paper on Scotland’s Green Energy Future. The new paper aims to provide a blueprint on how a Scottish Labour & Co-operative Government can work towards net zero while transforming the energy system.
The transition to decarbonisation will not be easy. It will require a seismic shift in our economy and society to achieve net zero. In Scotland, this will mean a long-term move away from the extraction and usage of fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
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https://party.coop/2023/03/29/a-new-blueprint-for-scotlands-energy-system/
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A single new oil and gas field in the North Sea would be enough to exceed the UK’s carbon budgets from its operations alone, analysis has shown, as the government considers fossil fuel expansion despite the legally binding commitment to net zero.
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Our oil and gas industry brings enormous economic benefits to the UK, adding £17bn annually to the UK economy, supporting 120,000 highly skilled, well-paid jobs in Scotland and the wider UK, while expected to contribute up to £50bn in tax over the next six years. Failing to support new licences for UK oil and gas will not reduce our usage but may increase our consumption of imported liquified natural gas which can have twice the production emissions of the gas we produce here.
The development of carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS), offshore wind and hydrogen power, as set out in the North Sea Transition Deal, are at the heart of our plans to support, transition and anchor the expert supply chain and workforce that has built up here in Scotland and across the UK.
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As a producer of green energy, the plant has been eligible for significant government subsidies. These are worth more than £4m a year to JV Energen.
Since its launch in 2012, the company has received more than £28m in state subsidies, according to data analysed by the Guardian. In addition to the four improvement notices issued over the gas leak, there have been numerous warning notices and improvement requests made by the Environment Agency after other incidents.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/09/king-charles-jv-energen-green-firm-38-day-gas-leak
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Unalloyed facts, truthful evidence and balanced reporting on everything from guns to climate change tended to support liberals and their worldview. But if all facts could be framed as the contingent result of opinions, the right could fight on level terms. Indeed, because the right is richer, it could even so dominantly frame facts from its well-funded media that truth and misinformation would become so jumbled no one could tell the difference.
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Pools and well-watered gardens at least as damaging as climate emergency or population growth
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/10/swimming-pools-rich-driving-city-water-crises
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A growing number of conservation and environmental organisations have voiced significant concerns over plans to build one of the world's largest offshore wind farms in the North Sea.
The Scottish Seabird Centre (SSC) in North Berwick has become the latest to formally object to the development of Berwick Bank amid fears it will be "highly damaging" to seabird populations.
Boasting as many as 307 wind turbines, the SSE Renewables wind farm is expected to create enough energy to power Scotland’s homes twice over.
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It's like the easiest thing we can do to help the climate - stop building new roads, stop expanding junctions, and stop subsidising fossil fuels (eg no VAT on airline tickets or fuel).
Yet we can't even manage that
So depressing
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