Category: Climate change

The BBC today features a supposedly factual article in its Science & Environment section entitled “Climate change: how is my country doing on tackling it?”. It is dangerously misleading.

The article consists mainly of an interactive chart: the user types in the country of interest and up pops a graph showing the historical GHG emissions and future trends based on government pledges, current policies, and what’s needed to limit temperature rise to 1.5 deg C. The UK is one of the best performers, showing a historical trend nicely in line with what’s needed.

This is nonsense, and needs to be called out as such. It is disappointing that the BBC doesn’t allow comment on this article, presenting it as objective fact instead.

There are various aspects. Let’s start with history. The unstated implication of the analysis is that we’ve made good progress on decarbonisation since 1990. In the real world, emissions have come down mainly for two reasons. First, we closed a lot of industry and outsourced our emissions to other countries. Second, we switched from coal to gas-fired power stations in the 1990s and 2000s “dash for gas” – or rather, the competitive market did, because gas was cheap and CCGTs a profitable investment. Nothing to do with concern about global warming, despite the government’s desire to take credit. (Another factor has been the growth of renewable electricity, but while this is undoubtedly important going forward, its impact to 2021 on the GHG emissions trajectory has been less than the factors above. Renewables are discussed further at the bottom of this post.)

One could say that an unintended benefit is still a benefit – even if future schoolchildren are brainwashed about the world-beating efforts of UK governments between 1990 and 2023. But let’s consider what’s missing. Net imports, aviation and shipping. On a ‘carbon footprint’ basis, taking account of these missing items, a detailed analysis suggests the UK’s emissions were 774 MtCO2e in 2019, the last year calculated (source: Defra November 2022). Emissions take longer to calculate on this carbon footprint basis, in part because it is a low priority, which is a great pity. The standard figure for the same year 2019, as reported by the BBC, was 450 MtCO2e. So – the latest reported evidence suggests that on a carbon footprint basis, UK emissions are roughly 70% higher than the figures widely quoted by the government (unsurprisingly) and the BBC (disappointingly).

The standard figures suggest that we emit about 6.5 tCO2e per capita per annum. The more sensible carbon footprint basis suggests the figure is more like 11.2 tCO2e. The standard analysis suggests we’re greener than the Chinese on an average per capita basis. Carbon footprint analysis suggests the opposite.

This matters, because unless climate scientists are collectively wrong (a possibility, but not perhaps one we should rely on), our way of life is unsustainable as things stand. Technology might save us, or it might not. Until we have convincing evidence that it will, we should address our way of life in all its carbon-emitting aspects: material consumption, diet, heating, travel, electricity use.

We need to be honest about this, and treat climate change with the seriousness it deserves. A set of graphs that suggests we’re nicely on track – unlike other nations – does us all a national disservice.

(Note on renewables: the combined output from wind, solar, biomass and hydro is about one third of our electricity generation now in the UK. Growth in percentage terms has been broadly comparable with some other parts of the world such as the EU. This is great but is often overstated, partly due to the mix-up between electricity and total energy. Renewables now account for about a tenth of the UK’s energy usage. We don’t use renewables for our heating or our transport and then there are emissions associated with agriculture, steel, cement, … not to mention all the embodied emissions in our imported goods.)

Yesterday’s Financial Times contained an article about slowing demand for diesel, the “lifeblood of the industrial economy”. According to the FT, the “warning signs” and “investor fears” indicate a “looming recession” in the US. For all its professed sympathy for renewable energy and decarbonisation, the FT can’t help thinking that a healthy economy is one that burns a lot of oil.

We are living in the dark ages as long as a reduction in fossil fuel consumption is represented as a bad thing.

According to the Pew Research Centre, a non-partisan American think-tank based in Washington, in a study undertaken in September 2021, most people in the US, Canada, the UK and European countries say they are willing to make “a lot of or some” changes to the way they live and work in order to reduce the global impact of climate change. Great! The most obvious change is to use less oil. So if, as the FT suggests, American demand for diesel is lower, isn’t that a cause for celebration rather than concern?

Alas, it seems unlikely that we’re witnessing voluntary demand-side efforts to reduce carbon emissions on a large scale. When push comes to shove, most of us are very reluctant to address our fossil fuel addiction – our addiction, that is, to travelling lots of miles and buying lots of stuff. This is partly because we don’t like change or find it easy. But I wonder whether there’s a deeper cause than mere habit, or short-term necessity, to explain our insatiable appetite for energy and resources.

Fear of death?

In one of his travelogues, the presenter Simon Reeve follows the river Ganges to the Indian city of Varanasi, where people go to die. According to Hindu tradition, to die in Varanasi is to be released from the entrapment of reincarnation. Reeve opens up by saying that he frequently wakes in the middle of the night in cold sweats at the prospect of his own end.

Maybe I’m showing my ignorance, but I can bring to mind very few instances from books that I’ve read, or programmes that I’ve watched, where the fear of death is so explicitly acknowledged as a part of everyday life. It is likely to be mentioned when people are in mortal danger, due to frailty or illness, or a dangerous adventure, or conflict situation; but it is hardly ever admitted to in normal circumstances when people are fit and unthreatened. Apart from Reeve’s admission, I can only think of one other: in a book by Alain de Botton where he claims that we live in a constant state of mortal terror.

Especially, perhaps, because it goes unacknowledged, the fear of death fuels our restlessness, our urge to travel, and our acquisitiveness. Maybe if we could recognize it, talk about it, even bring it into our education system, we could learn to live with it more easily, and discover and foster a Zen-like capacity for stillness in ourselves.

Not that psychological stillness is synonymous with sitting still all the time. Some of us at least could do with being more physically active, not less … but in ways that don’t involve cars, planes, demolishing and rebuilding, or acquiring lots of stuff. Being alive doesn’t need to be confounded with excessive consumption of energy and resources.

Fear of death may also indirectly affect our attitudes to food and diet. To many of us, whilst we might not have articulated it as such, being strong and virile – robustly resilient to death – means eating plenty of meat. I was reminded of this a week ago when an elderly member of the family reported that the canteen at an old people’s home was largely meat-based: “man’s food”, she called it.

Our food and our energy. In each case, the unacknowledged fear of death warps our judgement – so we don’t notice the unbalanced (and unsustainable) relationship we have with them. So we devote ever more – now nearly half – of the planet’s entire land surface to livestock farming; and we continue to correlate diesel consumption with a “healthy” economy.