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The UK smashed 13 clean energy records last year in the 'greenest year ever' for electricity production in the country, according to WWF analysis of National Grid data.
The sweep of new records was powered by the rise of green energy on the system, WWF said last week, with highlights including the first full day since the Industrial Revolution with no coal power, record spikes in solar and offshore wind generation, and record low prices for offshore wind.
The year's performance continues a trend of falling power sector emissions in recent years, as wind and solar replace coal power on the grid. Since 2012 Britain has halved carbon emissions in the electricity sector, and now ranks as the seventh cleanest power system in the world.
Also reported at:
- http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/uk-clean-energy-records-green-britain-2017-climate-change-global-warming-a8130151.html
- http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42495883
The "green" mix includes nuclear power.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 08 2018, @07:52PM
Well, that's who we're speaking of here. There are two stories in the last week, the end of chocolate [soylentnews.org] (with the cacao plant "threatened" by 2050) and up to 300 million climate refugees [soylentnews.org] by 2050. Well, something big needs to happen between now and then to make those predictions likely.
Well, we see here the usual claims of ignorance and short-sightedness on my part along with absolutely no evidence given to back the claims up.
Doing what? Writing white papers? That's not evidence. Let us recall that tobacco companies wrote white papers defending their claims that tobacco smoking didn't cause cancer. Same with big pharm firms that did recent drug research that turned out in error. Most of the people above generating these reports have a vested interest in furthering the climate change narrative, true or not. Even the Pentagon would be doing their reports at the behest of someone who wants to gin up some FUD.
Speaking of doomsaying, what exactly does climate change have to do with cancer? This analogy breaks on multiple levels. First, one can deal with individual effects of climate change by the simple expedient of moving, some point in the coming decades or centuries. You can't move out of your own body (at least as of now), if you happen to have cancer. That isn't the only simple fix out there. The US can restructure its public flood insurance so that insurance premiums exceed payouts (or just get rid of an unnecessary program altogether). That alone would eliminate most current day climate change damage from "extreme weather" (a particularly deceptive bit of climate change propaganda). Farmers can switch to crops more suited to the new climate. This also applies to nature issues. For example, north-south migration corridors to new wild habitat would eliminate most species depopulation.
Moving on, the implication is that you know you have cancer, because your doctor did a bunch of tests to confirm that. That's not so for global warming. Sure, we know that we do have a degree of global warming. But as I noted, the claims of harm, particularly near future harm are grossly inflated. It's analogous to the doctor claiming you need to have a mastectomy (surgical removal of one or two breasts) right now because you have a small precancerous growth that could grow into breast cancer some time in the next thirty years. The risk to human life or the environment hasn't been established, yet we're supposed to act on it anyway. This false certainty is a huge problem in the field. There are many such big problems that humanity and the environment faces. Why should we expend more resources on this than our other big problems?
And that brings us to the last way that the analogy breaks. The mitigation remedies have a huge cost and don't do that much. The UK has incurred significant costs upon itself in this story to have so much green power. And yet, it hasn't actually slowed the rate of growth of greenhouse gases emissions (since most of that happens outside of the UK). Fixing locally doesn't fix the problem at all. It just puts the country at an economic disadvantage to those, such as the US and China, who ignore the alleged problem.Such economic sacrifice makes for great theater, but it's one of those things you'd rather your enemies do.