Keir Starmer flew to Azerbaijan to announce nothing new on climate change at COP 29 yesterday.
The UK will pledge to cut emissions by 81% compared with 1990 levels by 2035, a target in line with the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee.
It was added that:
The goal would be achieved by decarbonising the power sector and through a massive expansion of offshore wind, as well as through investments in carbon capture and storage and nuclear energy.
There are a number of things to note.
Firstly, the 81% target is in line with existing statutory commitments in the UK. So there is nothing new in that.
Second, there is no Green New Deal in this. The necessary insulation and retrofitting and even generation based in UK homes is not happening under this plan.
Third, nuclear power is not the answer to any known question because we still do not have the slightest clue about how to de-commission plants. It does, therefore, create another nightmare for generations to come.
Fourth, offshore wind is fine, but a policy of reduced energy consumption is also key - and Ed Miliband talked about this power being needed for new electric vehicles (EV) yesterday - which are themselves deeply polluting in many cases because the middle-class obsession with indicating status by moving around in cars that look like tanks is now reflected in EV design.
And fifth, carbon capture and storage is all about extending the opportunity to burn fossil fuels and nothing at all about tackling climate change. It also suffers the slight problem of not being shown to work at anything like the required scale.
All in all, this was a statement about nothing at all that changes things but about quite a lot that indicates no real effort is being made to achieve appropriate goals. So very Labour.
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What worried me most about his COP29 comments was the stuff about ‘treading lightly on people’s lives’. They not only harked back to Tory rhetoric about ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’ – they begged big questions about government responsibility – such as ensuring that the way one person lives does not spoil, or indeed take the lives of others.
Agreed
My heart sank when I heard him say that.
You can walk through these words rather easily.
When Starmer talks of people’s lives, he is talking about the rich and their investors, passing these off casually as Neo-libtards do – as the ‘people’s concerns’ ascribing a unity and solidarity that arguable does not exist because hard pressed and exploited people are just thinking about themselves.
COP29 from I’ve seen is carbon simply fighting back.
Labour’s objectives are just tinsel on a dying tree, adornments on a death wish.
Ironic then that Starmer flew to Azerbaijan to make his ‘no change’ statement. All part of his pathetic ‘world statesman’ act. Meanwhile at home, pensioners sit in the cold and children in family poverty.
“we still do not have the slightest clue about how to de-commission plants”.
I live very near to the former Winfrith Heath nuclear power station and, as I have mentioned before, a very close friend is a nuclear engineer. He was engaged in the decommissioning of that plant as an employee of Sellafield Ltd, so if I asked him I am sure he would vehemently disagree with you. In fact, Winfrith, formerly the site of several reactors, is now the headquarters of Dorset Police, and a few years ago I attended a road safety event there. I can assure you I am not suffering from aplastic anemia as a result of radiation sickness. It is, of course, hugely expensive to decommission nuclear plants, and probably nobody thought about that (Winfrith was estimated to have been £1 billion). I would hope nowadays that is factored into the ongoing costs of new nuclear power stations.
Removal and storage of waste fissile material is another matter, though, and as of now there is no sustainable strategy is place in the UK.
So, I think my point stands
Agreed.
How can you decommission a nuclear plant without fully dealing with the radioactive waste it contains?
You can’t which is why I have agreed that Richard’s point still stands.
I read an interesting article on the use of crushed basalt – volcanic rock, found in abundance in quarries across the country, spread on farm land. Apparently this is able to both capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help crops grow through a process known as enhanced rock weathering. This is fundamentally just a rapid acceleration of a natural process.
Check out: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/research/rock-dust The BBC also highlighted this project in an article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg3legn80xo . What are your thoughts on these efforts? Sure, this does not provide a reason to “Drill baby, Drill”! However, I think that this could contribute to genuinely positive earth friendly solutions.
“through a massive expansion of offshore wind, as well as through investments in carbon capture and storage and nuclear energy”
Nukes sit badly with renewables. A cursory glance at e.g. Spanish production data – as the year progresses they have to chop out 1GW lumps of nuclear generation (because it is not “flexible”). Agree ref EVs and the Pajeros (a Spanish slang term) that infest all roads. Still lots of wishful thinking (heat pumps will save the day.. erm Ok what about the low voltage network?).
On a related note, I was scanning community energy schemes – mostly pathetic in ambition and scale (one put PV on the roof of a shcool and …..had to ask planning permission – why?). Something is supposed to be happening via GB Energy (& there is even a HoC select committee) but, just guessing, the result will be an infestation of insulatants gobbling up the money LINO makes available. But that’s just me an old cynic.
Fact: small scale local generation can reduce a household elec bill – depending – by as much as by half.
& for the avoidance of doubt: I/we will engineer schemes for nothing – but when it gets to the procure & construction phase we bolt our fee in there – it’s called pay-for-performance a concept wholly absent in most gov dealings (or in the case of Hinkley nuke station – payment for no performance).
If Starmer were a responsible leader he would be making plans for the gradual, controlled winding down of the modern way of life and a path to a simpler, more sustainable way of living. The only problem is that way of life will be fairly primitive and will have a necessarily lithic flavour, at least in the long term. Can’t see many people voting for that…
Here’s an actual science link to back up my hyperbole:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/can-modernity-last/
It’s not that I want a stone-age lifestyle, I just recognise that we can’t expect too much more than that if we want our species’ stay on this planet to extend much beyond the end of the current century.
To be clear: even if we managed to solve global warming the modern way of life would not be sustainable. The mainstream news media has a vested interest in convincing us otherwise, as does Starmer. Both are lying.
I disagree
We do ot need that lifestyle – and most reaosnable sceinec says it is not necessary
But, we cannot consume to excess
This feels like unhelpful, even dangerous, nonsense. Are you *trying* to foster objections to addressing climate breakdown? Yes, some aspects of ‘our’ lifestyle (hashtag NotMyLifestyle) may have to change — fewer vacation trips to America, for example — but many aspects will change for the better: more working from home and less commuting, four-day working weeks, warmer homes costing less to heat, better air quality… amongst other improvements.
Yes, people’s lives will change, but for the better!
I have question marks mover Mathew’s contributions
Kim SJ: I want politicians to do more, not less.
I do appreciate what I’ve said does sound extreme but I would encourage both yourself and Richard to at least scan my posted link, which explains why the popular science laser focus on global warming causes most to miss the bigger picture.
Richard: this will be my final comment here, apologies if my posts have not been to your liking and thanks for your hard work.
Two decades ago, I was working with BRE (the Building Research Institute) on their Innovation Park, building experimental carbon-neutral homes with sustainable materials and smart energy management. We were working with BSI (the British Standards Institute) to produce new building standards to embody the knowledge gained. Since then, mostly tumbleweed. We now have a quarter of our housing stock (the dwellings built recently) which could have embodied environmentally wise designs, but which instead has been built to the outdated and inefficient standards set in the last century. And BRE has been privatised too.
It seems that the lack of political vision continues to this day.
According to World Nuclear News at Winfrith there are two remaining reactors – both of which are being decommissioned.
In March this year the last of 1068 drums of waste were moved to the Harwell storage facility.
If you read the inspection reports for Winfrith they state that there are no “issues” not that the land is “safe”.
The commercial property units at Winfrith were not built on the land used for nuclear purposes but in another part of the site.
In the list of worst contaminated sites nuclear sites are at the top by a long way.
Although you cite a source I don’t think you are correct that there are any reactors still to be decommissioned, John. You may well be correct that the current Dorset Police Headquarters was well way from the actual reactors. I’ve asked my friend who was part of the decommissioning team, but may not get an answer today.
BTW I was not trying to suggest that Richard was wrong with his original statement, but wanted to emphasise that decommissioning nuclear power plants is not in itself an issue, but disposing of the spent fissile waste is, and that’s true throughout the reactor’s lifespan. Unless Musk starts sending it to the Moon, which he may well be, there isn’t really any proper answer to that and I always thought so since I watched Hinkley Point being built in the early 1950s. We were being told that generating electricity would be so cheap that it would hardly be worth charging for it. They had not then, I am sure, taken into consideration the cost of disposing of the waste, some of which has isotopes with a half life of several million years, in some cases billions.
My contact says there have been no reactors operational at Winfrith for at least 15 years, but that he doesn’t know how far they have got with the decommissioning because he retired several years ago and hasn’t been near the place since. I suspect that it would not be possible to get a definitive answer because it may well be classified information.
Starmer’s ” nuclear energy ” has been an HMG ambition of both political persuasions for as long as I’ve been alive, but the “energy so clean, plentiful and cheap it wouldn’t be worth billing for” sales spiel of the 1950’s never materialised – It remains the most expensive means of power production bar none in British history.
If I might offer example of the crass stupidity of it’s political promoters now, I give you the latest State of a Secretary for Scotland (and Greggs the bakers on this occasion) trying to punt nuclear plants to Scots for that dead calm event across the British Isles so well known it was has no mention the Admiralty’s extensive records dating back many centuries.
The south east of England has the highest energy and water consumption and cheapest cost anywhere in the UK, ( on water consumption all of Europe ), .
Scotland already ‘suffers’ a surfeit of electrical energy production, and please don’t mess about with headline production figures, it’s embarrassing how much has had to be ‘switched off’ in Scotland due to systematic political myopia in WM – The elephant in the room for Greggs is how many other ‘windmills’ have to be shut down to accommodate just one of HMG’s mini/micro/nano ambitions for nuclear weapons…