Govt Should Target Net Zero By 2030
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler, who has been joining up the dots:
In a letter sent to Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom this week, ahead of Parliament’s dissolution for the December general election, EAC chair Mary Creagh MP summarised the key findings of the Committee’s inquiry into the creation of a net-zero Government.
The letter recommends that the Government sets a 2030 net-zero target for its operations and estate, bolstered by mandatory carbon literacy training for all staff and the alignment with all procurement decisions with net-zero emissions.
The Government notably spends around £49bn annually on contracts for goods and services, with Defra having last week admitted in a report that just one of the cloud hosting firms it uses is currently providing “accurate” emissions data.
A 2030 target, Creagh wrote, would “set a real example in changing behaviour across business and society as a whole”.
In the letter, Creagh highlighted some of the Government’s successes and failures in decarbonising its own operations and estate since the implementation of the original 2008 Climate Change Act.
The key failures mentioned by enquiry participants, Creagh stated, were a “backlog” in maintenance work and insufficient funding. The letter tells of how the EAC believes that a “substantial” estate management backlog, including £6bn in the NHS estate and almost £1bn in the prison estate, is slowing down investment in decarbonisation.
Creagh concluded the letter, also sent to former Environment Secretary Michael Gove, by writing: “I trust that you or your successor will set out a road map to align the wider government with net-zero emissions before 2050, and will write to our successor Committee outlining your intended actions.”
In a statement to press, she added: “Our future must not be left to chance.
“While the net-zero government inquiry remains incomplete, our climate emergency makes this an area that the EAC may well wish to return to in future.”
Those who gave evidence during the inquiry include Energy Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, members of the IGov Energy Policy Group, members of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research & Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation, Lord Lee of Trafford and members of The Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education.
Mandatory carbon literacy training? Sounds like re-education camps to me!
Of course, all of this nonsense will cost taxpayers money, lots of it. Shouldn’t they be asked whether they want to pay for this green virtue signalling, when there are so many other urgent priorities?
Still, I look forward to MPs and civil servants no longer flying to their junkets, or turning all of their lights off when the wind stops blowing. Heating, of course, won’t be a problem, as there will be plenty of hot air around!
The article also notes that evidence was given by the wildly alarmist Tyndall Centre, who we are well familiar with, and another outfit called the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation. The Tyndall Centre says about the latter:
The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a founding partner in a new £5 million research centre that will explore how we as a society can live differently to achieve the rapid and far-reaching emissions cuts required to address climate change.
Led by Cardiff University, the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) is a collaboration between UEA, Manchester and York Universities, and charity Climate Outreach. It will work closely with industry, local and national governments, and charities to tackle climate change.
The centre is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and will establish a programme of social science research that places people at the heart of the transformations needed to bring about a more sustainable, very low-carbon society. The funding secured will enable a long-term programme of research lasting up to 15 years, bringing together global research expertise from across the UK and internationally.
It will focus on four challenging areas of everyday life that contribute substantially to climate change, but which have proven stubbornly resistant to change: the consumption of goods and physical products; food and diet; travel; and heating/cooling in buildings.
The UEA team is drawn from its Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the School of Environmental Sciences and the Norwich Business School. Led by Prof Andy Jordan, its work will examine how politicians, businesses and the public can lead the necessary transformations by mobilising the science, political and practice communities across society.
Prof Jordan said: “So far, emission cuts have mostly been achieved by decarbonising electricity supply. But if we’re going to tackle demand, and particularly in high-impact but challenging areas like food, transport, heating, and material consumption, we can’t do this by technological change alone. We can only do this by transforming the way we live our lives, challenging norms, and reconfiguring organisations and cities.”
https://tyndall.ac.uk/news/new-%C2%A35-million-climate-change-social-science-research-centre
This has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with propaganda and engineering changes in society.
They note that one of the collaborators in this new project is the charity, Climate Outreach, who themselves are purely a propaganda outfit:
https://climateoutreach.org/our-staff-and-trustees/
One of Climate Outreach’s founders and a Director is George Marshall, a long time environmental campaigner.
Its Advisory Board includes Ed Maibach of George Mason University in Virginia, another notorious propaganda institution.
Maibach, you may recall, was at the heart of the letter to Obama a few years ago, organised by the disgraced Jagadish Shukla, which asked the President to launch a RICO investigation into climate sceptics.
Climate Outreach has the usual links to the likes of Greenpeace, WWF and FOE. It also shares the same incestual relationship with the major left wing foundations as most other climate change charities do, notably the European Climate Foundation, which was set up to channel billions from largely American far left charities.
So we have a taxpayer funded money-go-round, all designed to “persuade” us to change the way we live and justify public policy changes which act to the detriment of all of us.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
So, the UEA is now being tasked with a social engineering brief.
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.press.
‘ … just one of the cloud hosting firms it uses is currently providing “accurate” emissions data’
There is irony in there, somewhere. 🙂
“mandatory carbon literacy training”
Ooh that sounds great! Loads of money to be made here and no scientific literacy or qualifications required.
Where can I apply to be one of the teachers?
I wonder how much it has cost to reduce carbon levels to date.
Sorry, that looks a bit daft, I meant CO2 levels in the UK.
The aluminium industry bar one small smelter has gone. The troubles at British Steel are driven by expensive electricity, the car industry is struggling with falling demand and being pushed to spend on battery cars nobody wants and on top of that they are big energy users. And a common theme in a lot of industry is foreign ownership which means that they have plants elsewhere and are not wedded to the UK. And even UK companies like INEOS are looking at new plants overseas – the recent turmoil at Grangemouth had energy costs as one of the problems.
‘The letter recommends that the Government sets a 2030 net-zero target for its operations and estate, bolstered by mandatory carbon literacy training for all staff and the alignment with all procurement decisions with net-zero emissions.’
I suppose that will drive out any Extinction Rebellion ‘heritics’ from the public sector or, at least, dissuade any from seeking employment.
The target date is only ten years, one month, and a day, away! And how many gas fired power station have they built in the last TEN years, to provide backup for the unreliable energy resources?
The BBC needs to put it about loudly that the UK’s contribution to global CO2 is just over one percent and nothing we do makes any difference. And that for the UK to be ‘leading’ anything is ridiculous hubris. Also draw repeated attention to the GWPF Annual Lecture by Prof Kelly which proves that zero carbon in our society is impossible. Full stop.
The similarities between ‘Net Zero’ and, Pol Pot’s, the ‘Year Zero’, will soon be coming in to stark relief if the Khmer Tories continue down this path. Frighteningly, the government’s political opponents want to de-industrialise even faster. It doesn’t bode well for any of us.
Hence perhaps 65,000 Brits emigrated from the UK last year.
The UK’s Carbon emissions today are the same as what they were in 1860.
The politicians in Westminster are mad but they always have been!
1. Samuel Pepys 21st jan 1661
It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose-bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before here.
House Of Lords 11th jan 1662
The Fast to be observed in Westm. Abbey, and the Bp. of St. David’s to preach.
¶Whereas His Majesty hath been pleased, by Proclamation, upon the Unseasonableness of the Weather, to command a general and public Fast, to be religiously and solemnly kept, within the Cities of London and Westm. and Places adjacent: It is ORDERED, by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, in Parliament assembled.
Samuel Pepys 15 jan 1662
fast day ordered by the Parliament, to pray for more seasonable weather; it having hitherto been summer weather, that it is, both as to warmth and every other thing, just as if it were the middle of May or June, which do threaten a plague (as all men think) to follow, for so it was almost the last winter; and the whole year after hath been a very sickly time to this day
So if I read the article correctly, the proposed solution to fund the governments cost of net-zero was to steal funds earmarked for management, operation and upgrade of the national health care system and the prison system in England.
‘A 2030 target, Creagh wrote, would “set a real example in changing behaviour across business and society as a whole”.’
A target is not an action. So the ‘real example’ is green yacking. Like there isn’t enough of it.
The trouble is, even a target can do damage to investment because it will lurk there as a disincentive to build new manufacturing plants.
This has been the intention of environmentalist fascists since Maurice Strong set up the United Nations Environment Programme. The WMO and BBC have been in on this also for decades. Scientists want the funding so play along. Same with politicians who want their jobs and get elected by people who are too well-off to care about the expense, or by people who don’t know the history and don’t understand the fraud. The globalist wealthy earn out of it and are in positions of power enabling them to extract money from the rest of us to pay for and perpetuate it all. For example, the EU Commissioner for ‘Climate action and energy’ will be spending £3 TRILLION (equivalent in euros, presumably) on the EU’s ‘unilateral climate agenda.’ Wouldn’t want to be a European tax payer. And there was me thinking Britain and Europe were centres of industry and enlightenment…
Saw the film ‘Mother’ the other day. Left me perplexed. Just rubbish, sporadically crassly unpleasant (not horrific) and boring.
The meaning soared by me like the proverbial whoosh parrot – apparently it was a climate change parable, all about mother earth and man destroying the planet with fossil fuels (blew the house up at the end with oil or something), with a load of weak/clumsy God/biblical references thrown in.
The work of an eco-loon director apparently – Darren Aronofsky. No wonder it was abyssmal.
To make one wind turbine ‘carbon neutral’ consider this…
Each windmill:
Takes 3 weeks to build from excavation to operation
40 to 100 geopiers installed for stability, weight unknown
Excavate 10 feet deep 100 feet wide
Set 96,000 pounds of reinforcing steel rebar = 48 tons
53 concrete trucks pour foundations. If each truck can haul 8 cubic yards at 2538 lbs/yard * 53 = 1,076,112 pounds = 538 tons
Move 1,500 cubic yards of soil @ 2,200 lbs per cubic yard = 3.3 million pounds = 1,650 tons
3 blades : each 173 feet long and 27,000 pounds for 81,000 pounds = 40.5 tons
8 truckloads to deliver turbine components
Nacelle: weight 181,000 lbs = 90.5 tons with the generator, gearbox, and rotor shaft
Hub: weight unknown
Base tower height 53 feet 11 inches, weight 97,459 lbs = 48.7 tons
Mid tower height 84 feet 6 inches, weight 115,587 lbs = 57.8 tons
Top tower height 119 feet, weight 104,167 lbs = 52 tons
Final tower height to blade tip when fully extended 442 feet
http://energyskeptic.com/2015/900-tons-of-material-to-build-just-1-windmill/
Mining for rare earths, iron ore etc., transport thereof, transmission lines and production of steel using lots of coal: not included. And that’s not even a big turbine by today’s standards.
Npower job losses.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50598505
Electricity prices in the UK are too low to be sustainable thanks to all the costs imposed by green policies.
Another news source says “The background to these decisions is of course the unprecedented upheaval in the energy market. In the last 18 months we have seen almost one third of suppliers going bust or continuing to operate at a loss.”
It is usually the Renewables Obligations payments that are the killer blow for the small upstarts.
There have been desperate political efforts/pressure to stop the costs of decarbonising filtering trough and hurting people in the pocket. Sooner or later the floodgates will open and the pain will really start.
Back in July is was suggested that UK electricity prices will have to double JUST to bail out new wind farms that have massively underestimated their operating costs (former adviser to the World Bank Gordon Hughes, a professor of economics at Edinburgh University).