There's a very interesting article on the BBC website titled :
The Road To Clean Energy.
Intro: "There is unprecedented consensus that we are headed for a world of extreme weather patterns with devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of people.
Can a climate catastrophe be avoided? The government wants the UK to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2050.
Is that possible and, if yes, how?"
The article gives an insight into just how much energy we consume, where we consume it, and what can be done about it.
I found the following particluarly enlightening....
"If the UK were to close down a carbon-hungry steel plant, our emissions would go down. But we still need steel so we would import it - from China, say, where it’s made in a more carbon and energy-intensive way.
So actually while the emissions produced on UK soil go down, the UK’s carbon footprint goes up.
Dieter Helm, the author of a government cost-of-energy review argues we cannot ignore our overall consumption.
“We have to be brutally honest,” he says. “This is one of the reasons why despite everything the people in Europe and the UK have been doing, we haven't made an iota of difference to climate change.”
Helm points out that even a relatively small country such as Denmark, with a population of 5.8 million, has increased its carbon consumption. The increase in the carbon intensity of its imports has far outweighed the reduction in emissions it made through uptake of renewable energy.
Concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has continued to rise every single year since 1990 despite 30 years of low emissions targets in the West."
And whilst I'm sceptical about heating our homes with Hydrogen, I think the closing piece is a vision (possibly dystopian for some) of where we are heading......
"Imagine a world in which renewable power is used to charge a small number of shared electric cars - which double as energy storage units - while also being used to make hydrogen to supplement electric heating systems for well-insulated homes of citizens who eat very little meat and have international travel rationed, with everything managed by optimised networks powered by artificial intelligence (while the humans plant a lot of trees)."
Read the full article here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/DmZ6C9 ... ean_energy