Going electric is perhaps more damaging and less green than we are being told.
Yes folks, the rollback of Petrol and Diesel vehicle production ending from 2050 to 2030 and the switch to battery vehicles is fraught with problems - it is unlikely achievable but panders to the Green lobby and I don't see any real benefits in exploiting the planet and encouraging slave labour to obtain the batteries.
Governments like consumption, they can tax it - and as they are now realising to their cost, zero emission electric cars will rob them of £40 billion a year in revenue.... They didn't think that one through before dumping this agenda on us did they?
Don't be sucked in by the bullshit marketing of trendy eco politics. We just need to use what we already have smarter, rather than damage the planet with futile battery use. As a contributor of 1.2% of CO2, it isn't going to make much difference if Britain goes Carbon Neutral, it will only trash our economy if we go down this ridiculous road - Read on..
Covid19 has meant more people working from home, with the benefits of less commuting, more time saved on travelling and air travel slashed. This has had a knock on effect in making the air cleaner. Its proved we don't need to travel as much and don't need all the commercial office space we have.
It has cost High Street jobs, but the High Street was due to change, Covid just made the change happen sooner.
But.... the lesson here is that if we consumed less all round and travelled smarter, then we could reduce emissions and demand on the finite planet's resources too without having to waste effort on the futile battery powered Green Agenda.
We waste massive resources at times like Halloween and Christmas buying tat we don't need. Much of it made of plastic. If we cut back to essentials buying, we could save the planet too. Why spend shedloads of money on credit card, pay it off over the next 11 months only to buy a ton of shit we don't need the following year every Christmas? It's just madness.
Forget the guff about 'electricity being largely provided by wind turbines'. The fact is that the electricity generating industry uses Diesel generators to take up the slack caused by the removal of Coal powered generation from the source.
Germany still has coal power stations, it is only because we signed up to an EU agreement that we in the UK can't have them.
Powdered Coal is quite efficient and low in CO2 output, when burned as cleanly as possible it is highly clean and efficient - most power from coal is derived from turning steam turbines to generate electricity involving heating water to make steam to drive turbines in simple terms. Nuclear and Coal both do this. Heating giant kettles in effect to create steam energy for powering turbines is about the nub of it.
Cutting down American forests to make into wood pellets and then transporting them across the Atlantic ocean by ship and burning them 'green' is another big con. We would be better off burning Coal which would produce less CO2 and nasty chemicals than green wood. And why cut down trees? Madness. What idiot thinks this is Green?
We were told the expansion to Heathrow airport was 'good for business.' But the CO2 output from that would be colossally damaging, yet they introduce an ultra low emission area around Heathrow? You couldn't make it up...
Covid 19 has shown that we can do without most air travel - that is in the main, the holiday trade. Why fly less than half than empty airlines to the same place?
Zoom meetings mean meetings can be done cheaper and greener, it does mean the hotel trade suffers, but is that a price worth paying? I was told years ago that airlines were obliged to fly routes even empty, or lose the route. Madness!
An airline taking off produces the same amount of CO2 on take-off that a family car produces in 10 years of average motoring.
In the time of the Dinosaurs, the environment had many more times the CO2 than today. It was a lot warmer too which is why the vegetation was so lush and bigger then. Also, there were no polar ice caps, they came with the ice age and are a 'false construct' as such. They froze, they melt, it goes around.
Battery technology is limited - Electric cars are a dismal waste of energy and resources let alone the human cost of digging the minerals out to make into batteries often done by child salve labour.
According to Dr Steven Greer, we have had since 1954 the means to have free energy (that could power our homes, industry and airlines). (We have been denied it in fact, because we are an Oil based economy and oil is big business.) The same power source Doctor Greer mentions is we are told 'could take ET home' - as has been quoted elsewhere. So why can't we use that energy which is free? The reason is it can't be taxed.
How long will a Tractor in a field run on a battery to plough a field? Not much. If we used vehicles with very efficient petrol or diesel engines we reduce the emissions emitted in use.
In the 1980's and before, vehicles were far dirtier in their emissions. The population was less in all countries and we now have more people and less harmful emissions in respect of the advancement in technology. Vehicles are cleaner now than ever.
Jobs are being lost to automation at a big rate, as many are finding out thanks also to Covid 19. Old industries like hospitality are shrinking. Many outlets were probably feeding a demand that was false and as a result the trade is gone, in brutal terms. Perhaps a form of employment natural wastage is taking place.
I predicted 5 years ago the High Street's days were numbered as it existed in the format then which is about the same as now. We now find the perfect storm of the job losses from automation compounded by the losses from Covid - this means that the trade growth is on-line, not on the High Street.
Again, automation is taking jobs due to on-line ordering, means you don't need high-cost staff to handle sales and with Amazon automation, sometimes to pick and pack the goods. I know one company that has a fully automated warehouse where no humans work. The system handles all aspects from soup to nuts from order receipt to dispatch.
If you want a job you need transferable skills - things a robot can't do, or to have a range of skills to offer. Even the 'safe' jobs of accounting and law are in the sights of the robots and jobs are going to the robots that were once thought safe.
People in those previously mentioned trades who are 'one trick ponies' need to wake up and adapt. Those useless degrees are also as worthless now as they ever were now the non-jobs are at last vanishing.
So, a carbon neutral situation by 2050? Posturing bullshit? Gesture politics to appease the Green element? With Britain's exit from the EU we need to build industry and manufacturing for the UK. We need to reappraise education to match the future, get people who can work with their hands and train them for the future so we can fulfill the jobs like house building we are falling short in filling.
The 'sausage machine' one size fits all education model based on a 1950's world is dead. It has been for years. The world of work is changing and we need to rethink who we are as a species and where we are going.
Just exporting the emissions problem of manufacturing to the Far East where they have less consideration for waste products is not the answer. We need to consume less here, we need to change our business model - why do we need to work like we do, is this a hang over from the last industrial revolution? We need to rethink society and our needs across the board.
Using more efficient vehicles and less is the key - working from home suits many and I suggest that over 70% of those working from home want to continue indefinitely.
This saves emissions and reduces demand on overcrowded commuter systems. We haven't the space to build more commuter transport - so working local or at home is the obvious answer to overcrowding and the rush hour or staggering working times would help.
The fatuous argument against home working that 1st jobbers 'won't know what an office environment is like' is crap, it doesn't matter, its an outmoded model as we have seen recently. Cities are finding the big companies can scale down their office footprint with home working.
The way we work has been step-changed quicker than we anticipated and it needs to do so, so we can migrate to a situation where many will not work because automation will have taken their jobs and a Basic Income payment system will have to be brought in.
Retirement at 60 must come with a 55-60 years range Basic Income dividend bond paid to those retiring in that 55-60 years age range. They should then not lose out in the future. This will free up jobs too for other people.
The Furlough scheme is little more than a Basic Income Payment situation that any right thinking government is going have to embrace and sooner than planned.
The gesture politics of the green lobby are a smokescreen. A diversion. We need to have the bigger conversations about the human future and now.
CO2 is getting in the way. Eco politics is trendy. But the people who are in the mainstream media don't talk for the people in the public domain. We can't afford £30k electric cars like the media types with their £100k salaries in the media.
One thing is for sure, I do not see countries like Russia stopping production or use of fuelled vehicles, so will we still import them into the UK, even if we don't make them ourselves?
I am of the opinion that reasonable consumption is the way forward, not dramatic sweeping chapter changes done for impact and not thought through. As the loss of excise duty on fuel hasn't been realised until now? It just shows its all done for show, it seems to have little substance. No one thought it through did they?
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