CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 16years 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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Can the insurance industry save the planet? With the nod from insurance companies a must for everything from coal mines to new homes, is the industry ready and willing to wield its power?
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002hbkc
Presenter concluded his optimism of a few years ago has turned more to cynicism…
This from STV News is typical. Are the people 'nimbys' or do they have some justification?
I can't speak to all of them but the ones I've seen are on brownfield sites. Usually ex-industrial that had HV power access which is obviously a pre-requisite for grid scale batteries.
Stationary batteries are almost always lithium iron phosphate which is stable and not prone to thermal runaway so safe, safer than the oil filled transformers at the end of your street.
In most cases, yes, NIMBYS.
I've mentioned it before, MS had a plan to put a data centre in Scandinavia some where rural and cold but were advised they'd only planning permission if they sited in a town so it could be used for local heating.
Tynecastle used to be heated by the waste heat from the distillery.
There are plans to put GS heatpumps in london to extract heat from the Underground. Isn't there one planned for old mine workings in the South of Edinburgh?
Loads of good ideas just need gas to be more expensive, drop the green levy from electricity and put it onto domestic gas, that might help.
“Tynecastle used to be heated by the waste heat from the distillery.“
Didn’t know that.
Used to get water from Union Canal near where it crossed South Sub.
“drop the green levy from electricity and put it onto domestic gas, that might help”
That seems ‘obvious’ - no doubt why it doesn’t happen!
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The EU aims to phase out Russian oil and gas entirely by the end of 2027 but Budapest and Bratislava oppose such a move, arguing that Russian energy supplies are vital to their national economies
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More trouble in an energy intensive industry.
Highlights many interrelated factors - energy, industrial ‘policy’ - whether to abandon such things domestically and let ‘others’ deal with emissions, employment, ‘left behind communities’, ‘need for specialist steels for defence reasons’.
Etc.
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A disparate collection of steelworks in Australia, the UK, Romania and the Czech Republic at the start of the year had two things in common: they were part of the metals empire of Sanjeev Gupta, and they had fallen silent.
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The boss of the firm behind ChatGPT and the UK technology secretary discussed a multibillion-pound deal to give the entire country premium access to the AI tool, the Guardian has learned.
Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, talked to Peter Kyle about a potential agreement to give UK residents access to its advanced product.
According to two sources with direct knowledge of the meeting, the idea was floated as part of a broader discussion in San Francisco about opportunities for collaboration between OpenAI and the UK.
Those close to the discussion say Kyle never really took the idea seriously, not least because it could have cost as much as £2bn. But the talks show the enthusiasm with which the technology secretary has embraced the artificial intelligence sector, despite concerns over the accuracy of some chatbot responses and implications for privacy and copyright.
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We already know 'AI' is a dead end. Like Bitcoin it's main function is to consume insatiable amounts of energy as its 'intelligence' can never answer where it comes from and who pays. Cue a race between rival 'AI' systems with a winner judged by 'AI'.
Back on 'nimby' contradictions...
In Scotland's central belt many live in a post industrial zone. From 1860 onwards we had the shale oil industry to add onto coal mining. Grangemouth appeared later in 1924 and has now closed although will still be an industrial site.
Of course if anyone applied to build mines or refinery infrastructure now then environmental audits would happen.
We could say the renewable industry represents a re-industrialisation? The difference now is that housing has now spread wider with car commuting. People choose rural locations for natural assets and don't like the pylons, battery storage and wind farms they need to keep lights on (less without 'AI' of course!).
Unlike the past residents in the mining towns they don't get employed by these intrusions (although with tied housing people in 1900 didn't have choices). The modern ideal world is where all 'sacrifice zones' are out of sight and out of mind. (Cal Flyn's Islands of Abondonment is worth a read.)
(Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment is worth a read.)
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Jackson failed to win over ministers after a long and controversial campaign, which ignited an industry feud, in part because it would have meant higher energy prices in the south-east of England and lower prices in Scotland.
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Jane Ann Liston, secretary of the think tank said: "For the sake of the economy and well-being of the south-west, restoration of the Galloway line is long overdue and is the only rational way to deal with the excessive traffic on the A75. Anything else would be flying in the face of all current thinking on how to tackle climate change."
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War is never good for ‘climate’, nature or people.
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Russia prides itself on being an energy superpower, but some of its citizens are suddenly struggling to fill their fuel tanks after weeks of Ukrainian drone strikes crippled refining capacity across the country.
Petrol stations in several regions have run dry while prices have surged to record highs and motorists queue for hours.
Over the summer, Kyiv has stepped up its drone campaign against Russia’s energy infrastructure, a strategy designed to put pressure on Moscow and to signal that Ukraine still holds leverage in the peace talks led by the US president, Donald Trump.
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The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, a study has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact.
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.
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The financial watchdog’s decision to investigate the sustainability claims made by the owners of the Drax power plant came as little surprise to Britain’s energy industry. For years the former coal generator has faced a torrent of criticism for collecting billions of pounds in renewable energy subsidies in exchange for burning wood pellets – shipped thousands of miles from North America – at its vast power station in North Yorkshire.
Drax faces allegations that it may have misled investors and the government over the sustainability of its wood sources. In its investigation, the Financial Conduct Authority will in effect follow in the footsteps of the industry regulator, Ofgem, as well as the National Audit Office and the public accounts committee in scrutinising whether the company’s green claims stack up.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/28/drax-inquiry-fca-questions-billions-subsidies
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Meanwhile, at Nottinghamshire county council, climate change was being discussed. Bert Bingham is the Reform councillor now responsible for the council’s environmental policies. He does not believe human-made climate change exists, saying it is a “hoax” and that declaring a climate emergency is “ridiculous and nonsensical”. The media had brainwashed the public about the whole subject, he said.
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She will announce the Tories plan to overhaul the North Sea Transition Authority, which oversees the issuing of licences, dropping the word transition and replacing its 12-page mandate with a simple order to extract the maximum possible amount of fossil fuel.
Badenoch said Britain “cannot afford not to be doing everything to get hydrocarbons out the ground” to boost growth
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They claim the UK has eradicated the beetle from at risk areas in the east and south east. But climate change could make the job even harder in the future.
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As mentioned above
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Humans have left a vast legacy of waste charting various stages of technological development. In West Lothian, Scotland, Flyn climbs enormous slag heaps of spent shale dating to Scotland’s 1860s–1920s heydays of oil production.
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Drivers in 60-mile detour after 11 landslides along A83
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/02/zack-polanski-wins-green-party-leadership-election
Will be ‘interesting’
My bold
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Such lengths of profligate perfectionism extend to every detail. The bathrooms in the junior suites are entirely smothered in green Indian marble (“We used up the world’s last remaining marble of that type,” they tell me proudly), which they say took one mason in Carrara, Italy, six years to cut. Another marble apparently comes from the same quarry as the Pantheon. “We have 100 types of stone from all across the world,” the rep continues, “and we are slated to be the first five-star hotel to be rated Breeam Outstanding for sustainability”. That will be some feat, if the embodied carbon footprint of crushing an existing concrete building and shipping countless tonnes of stone across the globe are factored in to the assessment.
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Mmm
Even if true, doesn’t exactly factor in use/users.
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Efforts to reduce our carbon emissions are falling far short of what’s necessary to keep our temperature rise below 2 degrees centigrade. Is it time to seriously consider another option- using technology to cool the planet? Tom Heap and Helen Czerski explore the controversial field of geoengineering.
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The Highland Wind Farm Revolt - interesting film by Lesley Riddoch.
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Google’s huge new Essex datacentre to emit 570,000 tonnes of CO2 a year
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/15/google-datacentre-kent-co2-thurrock-uk-ai
We won't need computers where we're heading...
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