The combustion of fossil fuels adds to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels which are generally accepted to be the a cause of climate change.
A minor correction...
Not all causes of the changes in climate are man made, there are also many possible naturally occurring mechanisms for climate change which have been discussed, analysed and debated in many places. For example other influences are the Earth's elliptical motion around the Sun not being regular resulting in small long term changes in the incoming radiation levels (Milankovitch cycles) and the last ice age only ended some 10,000 years ago and we are now in an interglacial period. Scientific evidence shows that the Earth's surface temperature has varied dramatically over the last several million years without any human input from the burning of fossil fuels.
None of this should be taken as meaning that I think that man-made climate change is all malarkey - Alexander von Humboldt suggested that burning stuff would create a greenhouse effect in the early 19th century and history has proven him correct. What I do find annoying are the suggestions that it is
only man-made and therefore it is our fault - for me the holy Greta comes across as a medieval prophetess - and that wearing a hair shirt will somehow make it better.
Of course we should be emitting lower levels of carbon dioxide - but one should be clear that even if the quantity could be reduced to zero and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere reduced to pre-Industrial Revolution levels it is still entirely likely that the Earth would continue to warm up. And then cool again. It always has done so in the past.
You are of course right that man-made emissions is not the only cause. Its just that it seems to be the largest single factor by a long way. So your contention that we do not need to "wear a hair shirt" as you put it is flawed.
The cost to our economy of climate change is already immense and we have no choice but to pay that, but we have to chose to pay the money to reduce carbon which will save us (and more particularly our descendants) far more in the future.
I really am not trying to get into a slanging match but what I said was that simply wearing a hair shirt will not make the situation better. The reference meant that one should not do things which are essentially ‘virtue signalling’ without them having any significant effect whatsoever on the outcome.
Whatever measures are taken to reduce the level of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will have to be acceptable to the man in the street — since we live in a democracy. Any steps taken will have to be clear, fair and understandable
and have a global effect - simply exporting the emissions will help nobody.
What will not work, for example, is making holidays in the Canary Islands more expensive by taxing air transport heavily or banning certain types of flights —
if no compensating mechanism is put into place. Flying is convenient for the customer because less of his or her annual holiday allowance is taken up with the journey. If the alternative offered is high speed rail to Cadiz or Casablanca followed by a sea crossing then annual holiday allowances will have to be increased or there will be social unrest in the Canaries as a large part of the inhabitants' livelihoods will be taken away.
Simply cutting travel will have unintended consequences. Equally offering Paignton or Blackpool as alternatives is not acceptable — unless a lot of outdoor heating is installed and the promenades roofed over!
But the emissions caused by air travel are some way down the list of carbon dioxide sources, domestic energy demands, for example, far outweigh these. Making new buildings energy efficient is easy and over the last few decades changes in building regulations have ensured that this is the case. Treating the older housing stock is a completely different kettle of fish - with the best will in the world it will not be possible to bring them all up to modern standards - there are questions of design, materials, construction standards, sizes of rooms, heritage aspects and the ability of the owners to pay for the changes. Just look at the amounts of money that the owners of flats in tower blocks are being asked to pay where the cladding has to be changed after the Grenfell fire. Sums in the orders of tens of thousands of pounds for external work are being asked of people who are innocent of any wrongdoing. Simply demanding that house owners insulate their buildings for the sake of future generations or the wholesale replacement of the existing housing stock with new energy efficient housing will not work either.
Even if new forms of domestic heating, such as communal geo-thermal energy, are introduced there would still be a, possibly slowly decreasing, residual level of greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe we will have to live with it.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy publishes annual statistics on the country’s aggregate energy balance where all the different energy sources and consumers are standardised to thousands of tonnes of oil equivalent. The series is called DUKES, standing for Digest of
UK▸ Energy Statistics. One of the calls made both in this forum and in other places is that to meet decarbonisation and emission targets the railways should be electrified. From the current statistics it would seem that this would not be the most cost-effective method of achieving this goal: in 2019 the country’s total supply of primary energy (oil, coal, gas, electricity) amounted to 197 million tonnes of oil equivalent of which rail transport consumed just over 1 million tonnes. That is rail consumes 0.58% of the country’s total energy consumption. In comparison domestic and road transport consumption are both around 40 million tonnes per annum.
Other Government statistics show that rail contributes just over 1% of the country’s emissions. If more of the network were to be electrified then it might be assumed that the emissions might fall to just under 1% of the total, but at a multi-billion pound price tag. If you were a Treasury official trying to decide the most effective way of spending several billion to reduce emissions I suggest that electrifying more railway would be way down the list.
There are good and valid reasons for electrifying railways - lighter, faster accelerating trains requiring less maintenance than their diesel powered cousins mean a more attractive and cost effective service could be offered. But this argument has to be made on its own merits - reduction of emissions isn’t a factor because in the great scheme of things they are very low anyway.
The American journalist H L Mencken (1880 - 1956) once wrote “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” The problem of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere has been around since the first cooks and metalworkers although the increases have only become significant for the last 150 or 200 years and atmospheric CO2 been reliably continuously measured for the last 80 or so years. Reducing emissions on a global scale is an enterprise which will take decades - there is no simple, neat answer.
(H L Mencken was also a prophet! He wrote in The Baltimore Sun in 1920 “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” Boy, was he right!)
