Which is fine as long as you don't mind the destruction of millions of acres of pristine rain forest, displacement of native communities and widescale destruction of wildlife and river health. We'll never know how many species were lost for Brazil to get to the stage they have. People complain about 'unsightly' wind farms here but if only they knew about the scale of destruction in other countries to achieve 'green' energy...
Deforestation is very largely the result of agriculture and logging rather than their energy strategy.
There is no form of energy that has no environmental impact. Wind turbines harm flying creatures, especially night flyers like bats. Hydro can require construction of large (usually concrete) structures and flooding of river valleys. Solar relies heavily on lithium batteries and other precious and finite metals. Wood chip destroys woodland and forests. Other forms of biomass displace food production on agricultural land. All fossil fuels are massively polluting both to the air and the land/sea, locally and globally. Geothermal is low pressure fracking (unless you have a hot spring, or live on a volcano, which has its own issues). Nuclear requires massive amounts of process energy to make the fuel and we still have no answer to how to deal with the spent fuel waste. Incineration of waste causes local air pollution, noise and leaves a frequently toxic waste.
If you just wander round the woods and pick up dead-fall wood to burn, you are depriving insects and soil bacteria of a home as well as depleting the soil that would otherwise benefit from the return of the nutrients. And then when you burn it you release carbon dioxide and various poisonous gases as well as particulates into the air.
We either throw our hands up and say we'll just keep burning oil because there is no perfect alternative, or we try to do something that is less bad, even though no one can call it good.
All forms of energy production are less harmful if done locally on a small scale to serve the local needs. Industrialisation always increases the local penalty so the wider population can benefit. I still say that flooding a valley, whilst hard for those that live there is less damaging in the long run than burning the equivalent of coal.
Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
Clair Field in the North Sea comes on line and oil came ashore for the first time from this field expected to last for four decades. More discoveries have been made though yet to be drilled.
A Company wants to convert thousands of homes in Middlesbrough to Hydrogen Heating.
No one is saying we don't still rely on oil but most of the North sea discoveries have been small and costly to extract. £4.5 billion to get Clair field set up? I won't hold my breath for petrol prices dropping any time soon...
"The Clair field - 47 miles (75km) west of Shetland - was discovered in
1977 and is estimated to contain seven billion barrels of oil and gas."
"In 2013 the UK consumed 1.508 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil and 2.735 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas,"
So less than 15 years worth of oil in reality unless they're expecting consumption to drop significantly or they just can't get it out fast enough. Great news though if we can use home grown oil while we transision to more renewable tech. It also makes you wonder why we're bothering to allow fracking when it isn't necessary at the moment.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
All true Wild Edges apart from the fact most will go to export or to the chemical plants to be cracked into higher grade products. The Oil Works at ICI North Tees produced everything from Ethylene to the noble gasses, petrol was a waste product. North Sea Oil is what we called light oil as against the Tar Oil imported for the heavier products we use. The huge Crackers at Oil Works produced a multitude of ever finer products until they hit gold dust at the top. The internal Billingham oil works made petrol from coal then products from the heavy crude usually imported. This N.E. area have many men working on the rigs they tell us that they already know what is down there but they only start production when the price is right and that covers the building of rigs and pipelines. The other local news is that Construction men are on strike, they are building yet another wood burning Electricity plant, they kept that quiet and yet more trees will be on the long trail from Canada, they call them green fuel plants? "Really" not in my book. Will they stop I ask when they get to the Giant Redwoods, having seen them in their natural habitat I would consider that disaster. Frank.
Technology has already moved on helped to improve the recycling of "spent" Nuclear fuel waste. I think there are also reactors being built and using this too. I can't be bothered to look for or find more links, but, though the problem is not fixed it is getting there with improvements. Apologies if the links are not by trusted organizations, who can trust who these days. And a little out of date/old Just it is not as bad as it might seem.
Oops sorry question was green gas supply, we need to eat more beans, those old gas lights are brilliant , I never knew about that. Thanks, I learned something new today
What I'd like to know is what will happen when we stop using fossil fuels to run cars in terms of tax revenues? At current levels £28 billion comes from fuel revenue. Will all cars just be fitted with journey trackers and we pay tax per mile? That seems like something that would easily be open to fraud and unfairly penalises people who generate their own electricity. If the UK can actually get near to 100% renewable electricity what would you actually be paying the tax for? Taxing people just for driving doesn't make much sense in that context.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
I went out to lunch yesterday, we turn out of my road onto a Country lane and away passing the Cleveland Hills, the Hamilton Hills come into sight as we turn into a small village with a very popular restaurant, Family owned locally produced food and service to die for. Vegans look away. Home made steak pie, local mixed vegetables, crushed potato's a puree of carrot and turnip plus proper gravy, pleasant window seat looking out on fields bathed in sunshine and the new crops showing well, an Eden on Earth, I felt like singing Jerusalem? well maybe not. We then turned for home Seven large wind turbines spoiling our view and not one turning, there was no wind. A bit further along towards home four fields of large Solar Panels only the warm sun was lifting a mist off the fields around, I know they still wok but surely at a reduced rate. Passing field after field of rape plants which will be followed by Oats, one for oil one for animal feeds in what was once the bread basket of the South Durham North Yorks area plus the large market gardens that fed the industrial area of Middlesbrough and Stockton from Roman times. As we turn on to my back lane another batch of wind turbines none of them turning, luckily the leafy lane hides the view. I foresaw the day when the land would be covered by them all you would hear would be the whack of the blades and having stood under them know they are noisy beasts, what a sad thought could it possibly be the future? I did enjoy my lunch though. Frank.
It's all subjective, Frank. You see a paradise of green where some would see a degraded landscape of industrial farming gradually dying from soil degradation and over-use of pesticides. Energy generation can offer much needed farm diversification to take pressure off farmers and reduce their costs. Land around solar panels and turbines can often be rich in diversity as farming pressure is taken away and wildlife is given a space to recover slightly. Hopefully the future has space for both though. I'm sure Brexit will fix farming just like the NFU have promised
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
I'm sure Brexit will fix farming just like the NFU have promised
**snort**
At least with a wind turbine or a solar panel, when you take it away the residual footprint is fairly small and, in soil health or agricultural terms, reasonably inert. The same can't be said of coal mines or oil wells. Or nuclear power stations.
Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
A hug amount of resorces go into making those giant wind turbines. Where we live in East Sussex, there are a lot of the old fashioned windmills. Looked into solar, would (if we were lucky) take 13 years to pay for itself, put my curmodegon in on the appropriate page as my energy company has just gone bust, because of owing £15 mill in green taxes.
Posts
There is no form of energy that has no environmental impact. Wind turbines harm flying creatures, especially night flyers like bats. Hydro can require construction of large (usually concrete) structures and flooding of river valleys. Solar relies heavily on lithium batteries and other precious and finite metals. Wood chip destroys woodland and forests. Other forms of biomass displace food production on agricultural land. All fossil fuels are massively polluting both to the air and the land/sea, locally and globally. Geothermal is low pressure fracking (unless you have a hot spring, or live on a volcano, which has its own issues). Nuclear requires massive amounts of process energy to make the fuel and we still have no answer to how to deal with the spent fuel waste. Incineration of waste causes local air pollution, noise and leaves a frequently toxic waste.
If you just wander round the woods and pick up dead-fall wood to burn, you are depriving insects and soil bacteria of a home as well as depleting the soil that would otherwise benefit from the return of the nutrients. And then when you burn it you release carbon dioxide and various poisonous gases as well as particulates into the air.
We either throw our hands up and say we'll just keep burning oil because there is no perfect alternative, or we try to do something that is less bad, even though no one can call it good.
All forms of energy production are less harmful if done locally on a small scale to serve the local needs. Industrialisation always increases the local penalty so the wider population can benefit. I still say that flooding a valley, whilst hard for those that live there is less damaging in the long run than burning the equivalent of coal.
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
Clair Field in the North Sea comes on line and oil came ashore for the first time from this field expected to last for four decades. More discoveries have been made though yet to be drilled.
A Company wants to convert thousands of homes in Middlesbrough to Hydrogen Heating.
I think that says it all about renewables.
Frank.
So less than 15 years worth of oil in reality unless they're expecting consumption to drop significantly or they just can't get it out fast enough. Great news though if we can use home grown oil while we transision to more renewable tech. It also makes you wonder why we're bothering to allow fracking when it isn't necessary at the moment.
The Oil Works at ICI North Tees produced everything from Ethylene to the noble gasses, petrol was a waste product. North Sea Oil is what we called light oil as against the Tar Oil imported for the heavier products we use. The huge Crackers at Oil Works produced a multitude of ever finer products until they hit gold dust at the top. The internal Billingham oil works made petrol from coal then products from the heavy crude usually imported.
This N.E. area have many men working on the rigs they tell us that they already know what is down there but they only start production when the price is right and that covers the building of rigs and pipelines.
The other local news is that Construction men are on strike, they are building yet another wood burning Electricity plant, they kept that quiet and yet more trees will be on the long trail from Canada, they call them green fuel plants? "Really" not in my book. Will they stop I ask when they get to the Giant Redwoods, having seen them in their natural habitat I would consider that disaster.
Frank.
Sorry, but France has been recycling and reprocessing for many years. We also have some technology in place here and other countries too.
here is a short potted link, there are other sites with information out there.
https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nuclear-fuel-the-french-do-it-why-cant-oui
https://phys.org/news/2011-02-spent-nuclear-fuel.html
Technology has already moved on helped to improve the recycling of "spent" Nuclear fuel waste.
I think there are also reactors being built and using this too.
I can't be bothered to look for or find more links, but, though the problem is not fixed it is getting there with improvements.
Apologies if the links are not by trusted organizations, who can trust who these days. And a little out of date/old
Just it is not as bad as it might seem.
Oops sorry question was green gas supply, we need to eat more beans, those old gas lights are brilliant , I never knew about that. Thanks, I learned something new today
Vegans look away. Home made steak pie, local mixed vegetables, crushed potato's a puree of carrot and turnip plus proper gravy, pleasant window seat looking out on fields bathed in sunshine and the new crops showing well, an Eden on Earth, I felt like singing Jerusalem? well maybe not.
We then turned for home Seven large wind turbines spoiling our view and not one turning, there was no wind. A bit further along towards home four fields of large Solar Panels only the warm sun was lifting a mist off the fields around, I know they still wok but surely at a reduced rate.
Passing field after field of rape plants which will be followed by Oats, one for oil one for animal feeds in what was once the bread basket of the South Durham North Yorks area plus the large market gardens that fed the industrial area of Middlesbrough and Stockton from Roman times.
As we turn on to my back lane another batch of wind turbines none of them turning, luckily the leafy lane hides the view. I foresaw the day when the land would be covered by them all you would hear would be the whack of the blades and having stood under them know they are noisy beasts, what a sad thought could it possibly be the future?
I did enjoy my lunch though.
Frank.
At least with a wind turbine or a solar panel, when you take it away the residual footprint is fairly small and, in soil health or agricultural terms, reasonably inert. The same can't be said of coal mines or oil wells. Or nuclear power stations.
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”