Peter Viney's Blog

A rant? A review? Either or both.

I watched David Attenborough on Climate Change last night. A vital programme, screened at prime time on BBC1 which is all positive. It didn’t actually have much of David Attenborough in it though.  I’m writing this out to spare my family having to listen to me ranting about it again and again.

I’d argue some of the weighting. There were too many meaningless globe maps with bits going red and yellow. Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was screened THIRTEEN years ago. That from memory was much better on the historical progress of climate change.  OK, he was over-pessimistic on timescales, but broadly he made the point. I looked online for an image, and was astonished on how concerted and vituperative the denier attacks on him were. Don’t mess with Big Oil, I guess.

The deniers say it’s ”weather” not climate, quoting such as the periods in British history when the Thames froze over  and there were ice fairs.  In 1683-4 the ice fair lasted two months. Then there was the winter of 1963 when it snowed on Boxing Day, and there was still yellow snow at the edge of pavements late in April. I liked that. We had to take the bus instead of cycling to school and the girls school used the same buses.

The question: climate or just weather?

The other the deniers like to quote is the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 which darkened skies and affected crops for two years.  That was volcanic action, not weather nor climate. The important point, as Gore demonstrated, is seeing the Greenland ice cores. They drill out a long column of ice, which shows the snow addition or reduction year by year (like tree rings), taking us back through many centuries to prove that it is climate, not weather.  Did I say “long”? They have drilled cores 3,500 metres deep (11,000 feet). They are vertical timelines of the climate history. 3,000 metres of ice core covers 110,000 years. For example, 1450 AD to 1850 AD was significantly colder than before or after (which is why we still persist in the myth of white Christmases in Britain), so is known as the Little Ice Age.

Drilling ice cores in Greenland

The commentators this year admitted that some individual catastrophic events might be weather rather than climate, and that’s fair. They needed to go further back, and get into ice cores, I felt, to prove the inexorable changes.

There was a section on ruminants farting methane merrily and the huge effect that has. It goes hand in hand with deforestation to produce beef cattle. The message was beef and lamb create methane. That’s a tad simplistic. I haven’t eaten beef since 1986, so I’m not a defensive carnivore. I eat meat once or twice a week. I eat more vegetarian meals than fish too.

However, beef cattle are a by-product of dairy cattle. I guess they could find ways of making sure cows produced 95% female offspring and eliminate most bullocks. If we want to keep dairy cattle in temperate zones, beef and leather are by-products. Cattle are environmentally expensive – they need rich pasture land in Britain. That land could produce more food value in vegetation.  The problem is that they’re cutting down vast tropical forests and semi-tropical forests in Brazil and Africa to produce cattle. The climate is no good at all for dairy cattle, so it’s all done to produce beef. Paul McCartney’s meat free day works. Try five meat free days.

(ADDED: AUGUST 2019. Goldsmith’s College in the University of London has banned beef from its canteens because beef consumption contributes to global warming. Aside  from the arrogance and top down banning by an institution which is allegedly “educational” (drawing out ideas, not telling people, it is merely virtue signalling.

Beef is an inefficient and environmentally expensive way of producing protein. As is almond milk. Ban that too. The immediate global warming problem is deforestation, often by burning, to create new grazing land for beef cattle. This is happening in Brazil, South East Asia and Africa as world demand for beef increases in places where it was never popular or expensive. The Chinese consume five times as much beef per head than they did two decades ago. They consume 28% of the world’s beef, mainly. from these new areas.  In fact, the UK does not import beef from any of those areas. So a UK university banning beef only affects long established UK farms, and we don’t utilise enough of our potential farmland anyway. Simplistic solutions (let’s all ban beef) do not work.

Lamb? It’s very hard to feed lamb the equivalent of cattle cake. Mainly sheep graze on land which is not good enough for agriculture … the Welsh hills, the Dorset chalk hills. So they produce wool (which we want to keep – your cheap nylon sweater is made from fossil fuels) and they produce protein from poor land. We can forgive a little sheep flatulence then. They could have said that if we’re farming sheep for wool, then perhaps we should revert to eating mutton rather than lamb.

Sheep on Dorset’s Purbeck Hills- not much else would grow there (though there is some evidence of Medieval agricultural terracing … possibly even vineyards, explaining my old Dorset surname)

Which brings me to my next bit. The Disneyfication of animals. In discussing climate change, my grandkids are most upset by the plight of the cuddly polar bear and the waddling penguin. I fear that’s the very least of our worries. However, the late 19^thcentury and 20^thcentury led kids to think of animals as cute surrogate humans. I’ve tried in vain to explain that if we all became vegan or vegetarian tomorrow, farmers would not be able to move all their beef cattle and pigs into petting zoos. They’d kill them.

I just watched a woman walking two Great Danes in the street. How much meat do they eat? Is it justifiable to feed pet dogs high class animal protein while watching children starving in Africa on television? I think not and pet food greatly exacerbates the production of meat. Dogs joined the human campfires and became pets and guard dogs and were fed on leftovers, scraps. Cats exchanged keeping rodents down for food scraps.  Now people choose de-luxe tins of top quality meat. And they used to tin the farm animals that died in the trucks on the way to market as pet food (and a lot of them die) but they can’t any more. Several websites combine to agree. A dog’s carbon footprint for a year is about the same as not just a car, but a large SUV. Dogs only eat meat protein which has to be canned and produce waste which in cities has to be bagged in plastic. A cat’s carbon footprint is around the same as a small city car. The USA has 163 million dogs.

Food waste was rightly mentioned. A vast proportion of food ends up in bins. A recent production of Much Ado About Nothing was set in 1945 and centred around the pig swill bins. When I was a kid, left over school dinners went in the pig bin. That was banned years ago to stop spreading disease, so now pigs are fed manufactured protein. Is that ecologically as sound as feeding them scraps?  Pigs are omnivores, so used to recycle our waste food into protein and shoe leather. Goats would too.

They mentioned deforestation to create soya and palm oil. That was a good point, rarely made. Both crap food, both in vast numbers of food products, and both heavily affected by genetic modification, which might be an entirely separate ecological time bomb. Or it might be the saviour of the world. However, soya is not good for you. Textured Vegetable Protein is not good for you. A contrasting one for vegans … almond milk is bad for the planet. It takes 344 litres of water in California to produce just one litre of almond milk. It takes twice as much water to produce a litre of cows milk BUT much of that is naturally available water from rain and local to the farm. The water for almonds has to be transported, using power, to irrigate the trees, and California is seriously short of water.

My son mentions that trees could be GM modified so as to absorb even more CO2. The healthiest trees are along roadsides. Look at the trees along the A316 going into London in a permanent traffic jam.  They thrive on car exhaust gases and the particles of minerals. They suck them up, get rid of them, produce foliage and suck up more. You don’t even need the bogie “GM” – we have produced varieties of flowers in all sorts of new colours for centuries by selective crossing. We could work on trees to improve carbon absorption.

One scientist only mentioned nuclear power being free of carbon emissions, and that was one quick sentence, blink and miss it. My physicist son will tell me again and again that (a) nuclear is the only tried and tested viable solution leading up to 2040. (b) that we should be throwing all our scientific resources into nuclear fusion research, which will eliminate most of the problems with nuclear waste. I am sorry to say it, but our climate change activists in Central London would be the first people to go and protest against a nuclear power station OR the high speed electric rail link, which will take thousands of cars off the road daily. We listened to one protestor on BBC Radio Four declaring that all cars and gas boilers must be eliminated by 2025. That sort of statement is so wildly impossible as to be a waste of breath … and human breath creates CO2. You could only institute that in an extreme dictatorship, but she was calling it ‘democracy’ in the same carbon dioxide exhalation.

Democracy is the last thing that will stop climate change, unfortunately. We sit in the West saying, ‘Look, you guys in Africa in China, we’re afraid we’ve screwed the planet entirely with our industry, cars and refrigerators, so, sorry about that, but the result is you won’t be able to have fridges and cars. We’ve used it all up. Eaten the lot. So very sorry. Bad luck, you.’

Renewables, yes. The Hoover Dam’s hydroelectricity powers Arizona and Nevada and makes desert inhabitable. Hydro-electricity is a local resource in areas with the right mountains and rivers, but there’s more we could exploit. However, it will screw up areas of natural beauty. Just as wind farms and solar cells do. Looking at the rate of climate change, some of the areas of natural beauty are a luxury we can no longer afford. Lucky Southampton, UK,  has geothermal power heating and powering the huge West Quay mall area. There are hot rocks below the city. The environmental impact is tiny.

Cover the planet with solar cells, and wind farms, develop more geothermal power, but it’s not the whole solution in the time we have. My son points out that the ultimate solar cell is called a leaf. They grow on trees. New generations of solar cells will be leaf sized, he says.

Forestation … back to Shakespeare. The Forest of Arden can be seen, above Henley in Arden, stretching along the hill top. The road to Dorchester has heavily wooded hilltops in places.  They were commercial woodland originally on land too steep to farm easily.

Branksome Chine. A mile from home. 19th century introduced trees.

Where I live in BCP (the ridiculous new name from April 2019 for the conurbation of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole) was oak forest until the 13^thcentury. Deforestation reduced it to gorse and heather. In the late 19^thcentury in parts of Poole and Bournemouth, wealthy landowners planted Monterey and Scots pine everywhere, then waited 30 years, and started selling off housing plots, one of which I live on. We are surrounded by trees. I went round the area with an arboriculturist who pointed out the tiny oak and holm oak saplings everywhere. He told me that if humanity died out, the pines would eventually fall from old age and the area would revert to oak … and the intrusive later arrival species holm oak. Or possibly the 19^thcentury introduction rhododendron would cover the lot.

At some point hunter gatherers became herdsmen, and created their prehistoric earth forts along the uplands of Southern England. Then they moved down to the forest, and they deforested the valleys. I watched a film at Black Creek Pioneer Village in Ontario, and the early  Western settlers of North America hated trees, because they had to clear them to create farmland. So yes, we once did what the Brazilian and Indonesian farmers are doing now, and yes, we are saying “Don’t do what we did” as with refrigeration and fossil fuels and air travel. So we’re hypocritical, but unfortunately we’re right. You can’t deforest to produce beef and soya and palm oil. We need those tropical forests, because the tree cover is 90 to 100%. Forests in Canada and Siberia are around 30%. That’s the calculation on how effective they are at reducing CO2.

A diversion. Plant a tree. Plant twenty each every year. Let the hills and non-productive agricultural land be alive with the sound of rustling leaves. But that’s a century long solution. Not one for decades. Actually in the short term, planting wisps of trees in dry areas requires lots of water to be pumped. I watched people working on a tree planting project in Dorset. Every sapling needs a wire cage to protect it from deer. As they pointed out, these are mainly escaped miniature imported species rather than the larger venison-producing native type. Back to Disneyfication of animals. If we are going to plant tens of thousands of hectares of trees a year, then Bambi has to be rigorously culled. You can plant an abandoned field with saplings and Bambi and his pals will destroy the lot in a night.

A powerful point – they showed how much carbon emission it costs to make a washing machine, then showed piles of them rusting. Hmm. They could have shown cars but didn’t. Cars are the big focus. It doesn’t take a genius to do the maths.  The carbon footprint of manufacturing a new car greatly outweighs the carbon emissions of a ten year old gas guzzler. Ecologically, as it says of washing machines (but notably NOT cars), it’s best to keep old cars going rather than make new ones, even if new ones emit less. On the other hand, making cars creates jobs, and we need those too.

OK , how to power cars. Electric and hybrid cars help your neighbourhood, but at present, they don’t help the planet much, if at all. The electricity is generated from fossil fuels, so you just move the carbon footprint out of your town to a power station a hundred miles away. In the long term, when the electricity is from nuclear power or renewables, electric cars will make sense. Of course now, yes, they improve the air in your town and so are a good thing for local people’s breathing and health.

I checked hybrid v diesel at length before I bought my diesel car, ten years ago and still going strong. I did what the programme said about washing machines … buy quality, and keep it going. Most of my mileage is out of town … Poole to Stratford-Upon-Avon, Poole to Chichester, Poole to London. A hybrid car does its job in town, in traffic, running on battery. Once it’s on the motorway, it’s carrying the massive extra weight of batteries, so uses more fossil fuel than a modern diesel. American figures say that a hybrid only makes sense if the majority of your motoring is within a town.

Then you get the Jeep v Toyota argument of a decade ago. Jeep placed adverts (whole page) pointing out that you have to drive a large Jeep Grand Cherokee  (rated the dirtiest car environmentally) 140,000 miles at a mere 14 to 15 miles per US gallon to have the same environmental impact as manufacturing the battery for one hybrid, which involves strip mining vast areas for  rare metals in the Third World. And that’s the equation before you count the cost of manufacturing the rest of the car, or the fact that it will be using petrol at motorway speeds. There was a legal battle. I can’t find any traces online.

It’s all simplistic too. OK, if I’m driving a large SUV at 30 mpg with six people on board, and you’re driving a hybrid at 50 mpg with one or two people, then your carbon footprint is considerably higher than that of me and my five passengers. Some cities, like San Diego, have Car Pool lanes. You can’t drive in them unless you have more than one person.

The converse of this is the whole of Europe looks at American fuel prices and even though they have gone up a massive amount, they are still ridiculously low.  I stopped for gas in Death Valley, California. Two guys were berating the gas station guy for being a crook because of his high prices.  He calmly explained that the fuel tanker had to edge all the way slowly up one sode of the mountain then down the mountain road just to deliver to that one station, which increased the price. I made myself most unpopular by saying I couldn’t believe how amazingly cheap his gas was compared to the UK.

The first thing is America has to start paying as much as we do in Europe to prompt some action.

In the UK, the problem is that trains, which are mainly electric, are way more expensive than in France or Italy or than just driving yourself. We are told not to drive into London.  Two adults. Day return train fare is £54 each. So £108. My car will use £40 in diesel. Then on a weekday there’s £11.50 congestion charge. Plus from 8th April 2019, a high emission tax for pre-2015 diesels of £12.50. So far I’m on £64. If I pay £25 to park, I’m still only on £89. Add a third person to the car … or a fourth. It’s way cheaper to drive. The train says it’s faster. Not really. Bournemouth Station to Waterloo is 1 hour 50 minutes. However, factor in the time I’d leave home to park (Oops! That’s another £8 on my rail cost), the wait for the train, then the time and distance from Waterloo to my destination (add a taxi, maybe), and my two and a half to three hour drive time door to door is  faster than the train. Then I’d never take any train that involves travel on a Sunday – there are always closures for engineering works, which means getting off and travelling on a bus between stations. For public electric trains to replace cars they have to be cheaper, faster and more reliable than driving. They’re not. They’re also full of people who seem to travel for the purpose of coughing, sneezing and snotting into handkerchiefs. They have introduced five seat across carriages in place of four, and they have neither hip room nor leg room. Excruciatingly uncomfortable.

On London again … big cities are often the key … taxis emit 16% of the vehicle gases and particulates. They will be moving to electric eventually. As taxi drivers keep telling me, it won’t work because they can’t afford to stop work for an hour or two to charge the vehicle. It’s not the solution. Taxi drivers also point out the problem with our single points of view. London mayors Ken Livingstone (Labour) and Boris Johnson (Conservative) both promoted bike lanes heavily. Taxi drivers also swear they used strategic “road works” to discourage traffic by creating jams. On the surface, bike lanes? Less pollution. But actually not. We often take a cab from Islington’s Almeida or the Barbican to Tower Bridge Road (where we stay in an apartment hotel). It used to be fast, along a four lane road at night. Huge two way bike lanes with concrete barriers have reduced it to two lanes. A five minute taxi run is now a twenty minute traffic jam with engines idling and shoving out fumes. We have rarely seen even a single bike in those lanes at night. So bike lanes have created more pollution.

Similarly, Southampton is a city with high pollution levels in the centre and started planning congestion charges for cars. Then someone realized that the cause is the huge cruise ships docked there with engines running all day.

The electric charging point take up has been rapid, though already the prices have gone up if you can’t charge at home.  In cities like London or New York, where so many homes don’t have garages or off road parking, home charging isn’t possible for most people. A car magazine found that over a long journey, using motorway and fuel station chargers, a standard petrol Ford Fiesta was cheaper to run than electric. They didn’t factor in the cost of Starbucks coffee and a brownie while waiting your turn for the charger.

RV1 London bus … these have been running for eight years – just after posting this, they scrapped the route!

The eventual answer should be hydrogen power, another topic the programme skated over way too fast. In London, some bus routes are already covered by hydrogen-powered buses. We always take the RV1 bus from Waterloo to The Globe in Southwark, which is entirely hydrogen. (until they scrapped it in June 2019!  It’ll work for the taxis too. BMW used to do a demonstration on hydrogen where they had the car on stage, started it up in a closed room, spoke for an hour, then the presenter drank the glass of water which had dripped from the exhaust pipe. Kia and Hyundai have just introduced hydrogen SUVs at a reasonable price, well expensive, but not Tesla levels. The Toyota Mirai is running in the USA and Toyota is working on heavy trucks and buses fuelled by hydrogen.  So the next step would be to install hydrogen pumps across the country. That might create a few jobs too, as one fear is that hydrogen pumps could be dangerous for untrained motorists to use … which is unimportant for buses fuelled by trained people in bus depots. Bring back the fuel station attendant! They might even wipe your windows and check your tyres like they used to. Underinflated tyres causes greater fuel consumption. California is building 100 hydrogen fuelling points. Denmark has ten … but given the size of the country, it’s enough.

Days gone by: wipe the windows, check the oil may be a positive. Dollar gas is not!

There are emissions created by “cracking” the hydrogen, though considerably less than fossil fuel. Hydrogen cars have the same range as diesel vehicles, and hydrogen can also power heavy vehicles like trucks and buses, which electricity cannot do currently. A further benefit of hydrogen is that the rest of a car’s running gear … gearbox, axles etc will work in exactly the same way as on a diesel or petrol car.  It’s still a variety of internal combustion. So potentially, existing cars could be converted to hydrogen while retaining most of the working parts and the body.

Hydrogen cars will not emit particulates like diesel, but slow down the applause … the latest research shows that particulate levels in cities are partly brake dust and the wear on rubber tyres. Whether you drive diesel, electric or hydrogen, you will still be producing these.

Then there’s SF6. Sulphur hexafluoride, or SF6, is widely used in the electrical industry to prevent short circuits and accidents. It is 23,500 times more warming than carbon dioxide (CO2). Just one kilogram of SF6 warms the Earth to the same extent as 24 people flying London to New York return. It also persists in the atmosphere for a long time, warming the Earth for at least 1,000 years. The annual increase in SF6 emission as we switch to renewables with more and more electrical connections in Europe was 8.1% last year, which is equivalent to 1.3 million new cars. Wind farms result in a lot of it BUT fortunately the newest and largest North Sea wind farm is being built to be SF6 free.

One of the most frightening things, which they showed in Alaska, was the methane trapped in permafrost. They could crack open the ice, chuck in a match and watch the great column of flame erupt. As the planet warms, vast areas of Siberia and Canada and Alaska are permafrost full of methane waiting to be released.

Ulan Bator may be the most polluted city on the planet

Trouble is … it’s going to need Plato’s philosopher king, or Rousseau’s infinitely wise and benign absolute dictator. Every person on the planet has personal interests that compete against the global need. We might race around recycling, composting, waiting for cars to charge, but our effort is a miniscule drop in the ocean compared to the emissions in Ulan Bator, Mongolia,  one of the most polluted cities on the planet, or huge and deliberate forest fires in Indonesia or Brazil. Or wildfires in Australia and America. So, as above, a democratic popular movement will stall. In the end we are all totally reliant on the governments of Trump’s USA, China, Russia, India, Latin America and Africa being wiser and more future-minded … and more dictatorial …  than we in Europe ever were … place your bets …

ADDENDUM

August. Along with much of Europe, the UK had its hottest ever day recorded a week ago.
Just a few days later catastrophic rains washed away a bridge in Yorkshire and left a dam built 150 years ago on the point of collapse in Derbyshire.