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Cop29 live: calls grow to ban fossil fuel lobbyists at summit as numbers soar UK
Greens say climate measures ‘being derailed by the fossil fuel lobby’ and that Trump’s victory underlines the need to reform Cop
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CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » This site
Dealing with Climate Change & Justice
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Posted 4 months ago #
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When plastic bottles are mixed with cardboard in recycling bins, in the wet winter months the sodden cardboard wraps around the plastic bottles and trays, causing havoc at recycling plants.
New figures now suggest that plastic contamination in paper and card jumps by 40% between November and March and as a result the UK sends an extra 5,000 tonnes of plastic waste to landfill or incineration.
The government is expected to signal in the next few weeks whether it will continue a Conservative policy which planned to allow councils to collect “co-mingled” recycling or if it will insist that paper, plastic, glass, metal, food and garden waste should be separated at source.
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Posted 4 months ago # -
Time to reduce the problem at source and stop overconsuming everything.
Plastic cannot be viably recycled, it can only be down-cycled.
And most of what’s in it is overpriced, health damaging, sugary junk. Or else, fruit (which comes with nature’s own wrapper), unnecessarily wrapped in plastic for “marketing BS”
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World’s 1.5C climate target ‘deader than a doornail’, experts say
Scientists say goal to keep world’s temperature rise below 1.5C is not going to happen despite talks at Cop29 in Baku
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/18/climate-crisis-world-temperature-target
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The UN’s climate chief Simon Steele also rallied ministers to action:
“There is still a ton of work to do to ensure Cop29 delivers and [countries] to be moving much faster towards landing zones, particularly on the [climate finance goal]. I’ve been very blunt. Climate finance is not charity. It is 100% in every nation’s interest to protect their economies and people from rampant climate impacts.
Ministers who have just arrived need to roll up their sleeves and dive into the hardest issues. Bluffing, brinkmanship and premeditated playbooks are burning up precious time. So let’s cut the theatrics and get down to the real business this week.
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Posted 4 months ago # -
BBC1 8:00
Can Scientists Save the World?
Panorama
Some of the world’s leading scientists say technology can help in the fight against climate change. If global temperatures continue to rise, we might need their solutions. They include mechanical trees that absorb carbon, machines that brighten clouds and a solar reactor that makes fuel from fresh air. The scientists say their inventions have been shown to work at small scale but would need massive investment to reduce the effect of our greenhouse gas emissions. Richard Bilton meets the scientists trying to save the world and investigates whether they can really make a difference.
Release date: 18 November 2024
11 months left to watch“
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The Green party is siding with the farmers. This is from Emily O’Brien, a councillor on Lewes district council and the Greens’ agricultural and rural welfare spokesperson.Farmers are feeling abandoned. They have suffered badly from Brexit, both via detrimental trade conditions and reduced subsidies. And tax breaks for agricultural land have inflated land values, making it harder for both new entrants and existing farmers. It is right to clamp down on those who buy farmland to avoid tax and the Green party strongly supports wealth taxes.
But we also need the government to take action to ensure that hard working farmers can earn a decent income.
In particular, in the face of our climate and nature crises, we need subsidies to focus on encouraging farmers to shift to nature-friendly farming. This will protect our food security and support the rural economy while allowing wildlife to recover.
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The exponential rise in large intensive poultry units (IPUs) in the valleys is a key driver of river pollution. Chicken dropping contains more phosphates – which starve fish and river plants of oxygen – than any other animal manure.
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Cop29: Climate finance deal agreed but talks remain deeply divided
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Forecasters and politicians have come in for strong criticism after hundreds of homes and business across the UK suffered devastating flooding in Storm Bert.
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Picard’s beloved sea is being destroyed, he believes, by something uncomfortably close to home: cruise ships. Fifteen years ago they were a rare sight in Marseille. Now, France’s second city is one of Europe’s busiest cruise ports. Last year, 2.5 million passengers stopped off, according to the port authority, a million more than the year before.
Faced with this new reality, Picard has decided to become the sea’s protector, swapping his captain’s whites for the all-black of a non-violent protester. His new crew is a growing group of activists known as Stop Croisières, or Stop Cruises. “At some point we will have to make a choice for our children, for our grandchildren,” he says. “Do we continue to make bigger and more energy-consuming ships with more and more people on board? Are we really going to be able to continue to live on this Earth like this?”
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Suriname and its neighbor Guyana, both former Dutch colonies, expect to make billions in the years to come from rich offshore crude deposits. Earlier this month, Guyana announced all adult citizens living at home and abroad would received a payout of around £370 as part of an effort to redistribute its oil wealth.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/25/suriname-president-oil-wealth
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“The M11 link road was effectively the Cinderella of the three,” says veteran cycling campaigner Roger Geffen. Unlike Twyford Down and Oxleas Wood, the M11 scheme went through a poor urban neighbourhood, rather than an area of natural beauty, “but in a way, that’s what made it interesting,” he says. It was destroying the environment by uprooting trees and prioritising cars, but it was also destroying a community. This was the era of the Criminal Justice Act, targeting illegal raves, squatters and Travellers, which also passed in November 1994. The poll tax riots of 1990 had been another landmark. The Claremont Road protests were a “a joined-up mix of social and environmental motivations”.
At the time, Geffen had just moved to London. “I didn’t have a green brain cell in my head,” he says, but he had just taken up cycling. Weaving through the traffic-clogged streets, he says, he realised: “What I was doing wasn’t crazy. I was overtaking a lot of people in little boxes, and that was far crazier than what I was doing.” He joined the London Cycling Campaign, which led him into anti-car activism.
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As the inevitable showdown approached, preparations became more rushed. “We had to just throw everything at it,” says Geffen. Some protesters built wooden observation towers on top of their houses. “So we thought, OK, what happens if we build an absolutely huge tower?” This became “Dolly”, a scaffolding structure 30 metres (100ft) high, rising out of the rooftops. It was named after Dolly Watson, a 92-year-old former actor who had lived on Claremont Road her entire life, and was among the last of the residents to leave. She once told a reporter: “They’re not dirty hippy squatters, they’re the grandchildren I never had.”
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In the end, the police spent more than £1m evicting the protesters. The M11 link road still got built, of course. Nobody believed the campaign would stop it. “But what it did do,” says Drury, “was it turned the roads programme into a political thing. So, we won the moral argument, even if we didn’t win that battle.”
When Labour came into power in 1997, it cut the major road schemes inherited from the Tories from 150 to 37, and pledged to focus on public transport. It felt like a victory for the anti-car campaigners, but it did not last. By 2000, New Labour was committing at least £30bn to building and improving roads, and forecasting that another 2,500 miles of road would need to be built.
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The climate crisis will cause dramatic, life-threatening events, but also a general, broad-brush worsening of everything
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Posted 4 months ago # -
17 hours isn't really that bad From Cologne to London.
Often takes around 4 hours to get from rural Perthshire to Edinburgh! :-)
Bridge of Cally now repaired and ready for the next big flood. This allows the bus to avoid detour to turn at Persie. So things are getting better. Was outrage in the glen that driving was taking longer with temporary traffic lights very unwelcome.
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Earlier this year, the National Audit Office reported that 203,000 properties are at greater risk of flooding due to under-investment. This figure is likely to increase as climate breakdown triggers more unpredictable heavy rainfall. “These periods of extreme weather are really hard to predict – we’re seeing floods in areas where we didn’t previously see them,” Helena says, highlighting that many existing flood defences were designed for traditionally flood-prone regions.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/27/wednesday-briefing-first-edition-storm-bert-flooding
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But farmers didn’t march on London only for inheritance tax. This policy was more like the last straw. Farmers’ incomes and standard of living have been falling rapidly since Brexit. We’re paid the same now for a tonne of wheat as we were 10 years ago. Crop yields have been devastated by flooding and climate breakdown over the past three winters. The last government failed to implement the new environmental subsidy schemes before stopping the old direct payments. Now we’re faced with a fertiliser tax running into the thousands every year, yet food from abroad using the same fertilisers doesn’t get taxed at all. How much more can we take?
Don’t get me wrong: the government should be taxing wealthy landowners. But there’s a huge difference between working people who never want to sell their farms, and a cash rich non-farmer looking for a hideaway for their profits. On paper, my land is worth about £3.5m. But I’ll never see that cash unless I fail miserably at the only job I want to do, and the only job I’ve ever trained for. This is also the job that the country really needs me to do: as a highly skilled food producer with decades of experience, I can’t easily be replaced. Instead, I want to invest in my farm, and for my farming business to grow and thrive. I want fairness. And I want to be able to afford school shoes
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/27/britain-farming-family-farm-inheritance-tax
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A Green MSP has told The Herald there has been a 'dereliction of duty' at Holyrood when it comes to the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery.
MSP Gillian Mackay, who grew up beside Grangemouth, said action to save the oil refinery from closing should have happened long before she entered parliament.
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The Carbon Trust says an artificial tree used over seven to 20 years (depending on the weight and materials used) results in fewer emissions than buying a new, commercially grown tree every year.
The manufacture of the plastic from oil creates most – about two-thirds – of artificial trees’ carbon emissions, according to the Carbon Trust. But if other environmental impacts, such as ecotoxicity – biological, chemical or physical stressors that affect ecosystems – are considered, says the University of Sheffield’s Walker, they fall behind real trees.
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https://www.theguardian.com/thefilter/2024/nov/28/best-christmas-tree-guide
Posted 4 months ago # -
Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP:
The dualling of roads like the A96 and the A9 is imperative not only to boost the economies of our Northern towns and cities but to reduce the fatalities that take place.
Those who try to make it a frontier of the climate emergency are missing the point.
Posted 4 months ago # -
@Stickman - Interesting. I have had a dig through the reams of A96 appraisal documentation and can't find a simple cost-benefit figure. However, it does include monetised figures for all benefits at 2010 prices and costs for an undisclosed recent period. For the full A96 dualling these figures are:
Cost: £2,501m - £5,000m
Benefits: £770m - £890m (I have chosen the highest figure given - which includes an element for 'driver frustration')Assuming the costs are for financial year 2024-25, and applying October 2024 HM Treasury GDP deflator figures to the 2010 benefits, the benefits at 2024-25 prices would be worth between £1,098m and £1,269m.
Using these figures, the cost benefit ratio for A96 dualling would be between 0.22 and 0.51. Which is a long way of saying that A96 dualling would struggle to produce benefits amounting to half its cost.
Rather than boosting the economy, the Scottish Government would effectively be flushing a couple of billion pounds down the khazi.
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At £5,000 million, the cost of the full A96 dualling represents the equivalent of 200 years of the Scottish Government’s budget for all road safety interventions nationwide.
It is grotesque that we’re still considering spending that amount of cash on one road scheme when many more lives can be saved all round Scotland by focussing on low-cost road safety measures.
Given the success of average speed cameras in quickly reducing fatalities on the A9, the Scottish Government would be irresponsible not to take forward the installation of safety cameras on the A96.
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https://transform.scot/2024/11/28/putting-safety-first-our-response-to-a96-announcement/
Posted 4 months ago # -
The A96 trunk road is almost exactly 100 miles long, from Craibstone to Raigmore.
It has had, at my quick glance, 22 fatal collisions in the last 10 years of data.
For comparison, the A90 between Dunnottar and North Queensferry is dualled and also about 100 miles. It has had 30 fatal collisions in the same time period.
The A96 will probably have more fatalities per kilometre driven. But dualling the road will mean more people drive on it and it is certainly not obvious that dualling the road will reduce the number of people who die.
Posted 4 months ago # -
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Essential as ecological carbon stores are, trading them against fossil fuel emissions, which is how these markets operate, cannot possibly work. The carbon that current ecosystems can absorb in one year is pitched against the burning of fossil carbon accumulated by ancient ecosystems over many years.
Nowhere is this magical thinking more apparent than in soil carbon markets, a great new adventure for commodity traders selling both kinds of carbon market products: official “credits” and voluntary carbon offsets. Every form of wishful thinking, over-claiming and outright fraud that has blighted the carbon market so far is magnified when it comes to soil.
We should do all we can to protect and restore soil carbon. About 80% of the organic carbon on the land surface of the planet is held in soil. It’s essential for soil health. There should be strong rules and incentives for good soil management. But there is no realistic way in which carbon trading can help. Here are the reasons why.
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In the south-west of Morocco, a sprawl of wind and solar farms stretching across an area the size of Greater London could soon generate the green electricity powering more than 9m British homes.
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Global carbon emissions would be 6% lower than today if not for the “inaccurate narrative” against nuclear power since the Chornobyl disaster that has created “unfounded public concern”, according to Tony Blair’s thinktank.“
Posted 4 months ago #
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