Renewable energy sources - the good, the bad and the ugly

Very sorry to read this @gks, if I lived closer I would come and buy. I am at the stage of basically giving up on shop bought incinerated rubbish, oh sorry compost!
Next year I am going to just use my own pretty weedy compost plus leaf mould and horse manure. I will microwave some of the mixture and put that on the top 2 inches of pots in the hope the weed seeds will have been killed.
This Peat ban is a political farce. In Scotland over half the wind farms have been built on Peat bogs causing massive amounts of damage but of course it’s seen as a way of saving the planet. More likely putting vast profits into the owners of this otherwise commercially fairly useless land.
I live relatively close to where enhanced power lines are being upgraded to be able to generate more electricity to England. Think it’s called the Easterngreen link 2. Green my arse the amount of forestry destruction going on around these parts is horrific not to mention access roads and god knows all what else. All in the name of…. Profit!

 

I've just moved house from a similar area @hailbopp. I'd been considering downsizing my garden in a quiet rural area near Beauly. The nail in the coffin was the proposal by SSEN to build a substation over 860 acres of farmland just three quarters of a mile away, on the single track road I lived on. The disruption and construction of the site is estimated to take four years but you can guarantee that time will run over by at least a year. After attending local meetings by SSEN and other meetings fighting it, it was clear this would go ahead no matter how the residents felt. It was due to go to planning at the end of September but I won't have news on that until tomorrow. The government is keeping quiet of course with no chance of support for residents from them. I made the move earlier rather than later to avoid losing out with the devaluation of my home and the difficulty in selling it.

 

Of the 456 windfarms that have been built and are operational in Scotland 218 are on peatland. There are plans to construct another 73, of which 61% will be built on peatland.

Professor Jo Smith, of the University of Aberdeen, and colleagues have calculated that where turbines are sited on pristine peat with high drainage and where no effort is made to minimise carbon losses, “greenhouse gas emissions from the soil and plants could amount to 77% of the wind farm’s gross carbon savings.”

It's like these incinerators, more rubbish is getting burnt where the recycling rates have plateaued. When plastic is incinerated instead of going to landfill, the c02 emissions are 175 times greater. My lad has got a new job now, he has been taking big bales of plastic waste from England to an incinerator in Scotland, all this plastic can be recycled but it's not. With high cost's of recycling and the landfill tax of £103 per tonne, then it's no big surprise that the volume of waste being incinerated has increased sharply, more so in the future. Sixteen new incinerators are under construction, another 45 have been granted planning permission and there is another 40 more in the planning stages.

The UN only today said that the world is miles away from reducing global warning, I wonder why.

 

The consultation of phasing out peat for the horticulture sector in Scotland is still on going. They reckon of the 2 million hectares of peatland in Scotland, just under 2000 hectares are being extracted from for the horticulture sector, burning for heat and the malting process. So 0.1% of Scotland's peatland has rights for extraction, now that information was easily found. Trying to find out how many hectares of peatland has been disturb for the construction of windfarms does not seem to be made public, probably because the percentage is greater and they don't want people knowing that these windfarms on peatlands is not a green as they make out to be.

 

Apparently, £31 billion has been given out by the World Bank for green initiatives ... but, astonishly, they have not kept records on who has received it. It has just disappeared, to all intents and purposes. I wonder where it could have gone? The whole thing has "money making scam for the unaccountable elite" written all over it.

Starmer may spout that we need to accept the harsh light of fiscal reality, but that reality has come to pass while the wealthiest have got wealthier. The harsh reality is everyone is being made poorer to enable this transfer to the few.

 

@gks "The UN only today said that the world is miles away from reducing global warning, I wonder why."
The points you raise about what's happening in the UK are valid, but the major reason the world is miles away from reducing global warming is countries like the USA, China, India who continue to build coal powered power stations and support other fossil fuel activities for political reasons. We in the UK could go totally renewable tomorrow and the difference it would make the global climate would be minute.

 

I would say we should include the UK in that list, maybe we don't have the coal power stations like other nations but we certainly have increased our dependence on imports. We close the furnaces to produce steel, yet we are now more likely going to have import more steel.

Sweden has suppose to have the lowest carbon footprint per capita in Europe, yet the carbon footprint embedded in imports is the largest in Europe, the country with the next biggest carbon footprint embedded in imports in Europe, is the UK, that's something we should be very concerned about. So we shut down fossil fuel industries in the UK only for those goods that would of been manufactured in the UK are now imported back in to the UK from the likes of China, India etc etc.

Each nation produces CO2 and as usual China, India and the USA are seen as the main source. Yet we hardly talk about consumption of CO2, so does China produce and consume more C02 per capita than the UK, I think you will be surprised to know the answer is, no. We are basically cheating to meet net zero targets and then blaming the rest of the world

 

Here is a link of CO2 emissions per capita based on consumption. You will see that the Arab nations are the largest contributors of CO2 per capita, then western countries are very high on the list. So for an example, in India the CO2 emissions per capita based on consumption in 2020 is 1.7 tonnes per person, yet in the UK it is 6.9 tonnes per person, countries like Luxembourg it is 12.7 tonnes per person. What is clever about reducing CO2 emissions with in your borders only for CO2 to be imported into your country through consumption?.

countries carbon footprint per capita on consumption - Search

 

Apparently they are also doing more to reforestation than any other country. In the last 2 decades they have planted billions of trees that covers 425,000 sq km

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020...rests-deforestation-worldwide-climate-change/

 

If you want a perfect example of the crass stupidity of governments seen to be tackling climate change look no further than the Scottish morons.
The yet to be completed 2 most expensive ferries known to man ( costing approximately £300 million and counting) are duel fuelled making them about as complicated as a space ship to build. They are fuelled by diesel and LNG gas….I’m not an expert on the subject and doubt by the length of time to build them,6 years late and again still counting) those building them aren’t experts either, appearing to be learning on the job.
The gas has to be imported from Qatar by ship, using god knows how much diesel and then, this is the best bit of all, driven from I think it is Southampton or Portsmouth up to Scotland again using diesel as a harbour facility capable of taking the gas in Scotland has yet to be constructed. There are no storage facilities for the gas, the gas has to be pumped from lorries into the ferries which evidently takes hours and hours, more use of diesel in the process I presume, and on top of that is a dangerous operation.Could you actually make this up? All in the name of being seen to be green, a complete farce. I am beginning to think these ferries will never be commissioned and instead might mysteriously sink, I wonder if the ferries’ insurers are keeping a beady eye on them.

 

The gas will be imported from numerous sources worldwide into the Isle of Grain which is where it is blended and stored. They have no intentions to build a storage facility in Scotland, its not cost effective, so as you say, it will come via road in tankers.

 

Here are two links that backup what I was saying about the UK's recycling rate in decline and incineration rates on the rise.

England's recycling rate falls as waste volumes down 6.6% - letsrecycle.com

https://ukwin.org.uk/facts/

So waste sent for incineration has gone from 9% to nearly 50% in 2 decades and in the process the recycling rate has decreased. If the truth was to be told, my guess is the recycling rates are probably lower and incineration rates higher, must be otherwise why the need to build more incinerators.