Thursday, April 22, 2010

How do you cut UK emissions 80%?

Nice interactive on the guardian website that allows you to play being the PM by dragging sliders to try and cut UK emissions by 80% by 2050. It also demands that you balance the electricity demand from different sources (though it is not exhaustive: no gas/coal/biomass with ccs). Anyway, I tried to do it without limiting consumption and travel. Answer, impossible. And as for flying, I'm going to climate hell...

6 comments:

Unknown said...

It's the flights and the consumption man, reduce them and it's easy peasy. According to my twiddlings we could get rid of all the fossil fuels and nuclear, fly 875km a year(sorry man you're not coming home!), drive 1875km a year, 1500km of which in electric cars, up all the efficiencies, consume 5kg a year (whatever that means?) and still be able to use 33% more electricity at home and commercially and have 145,000 GWh surplus to export, and cut emissions by 79%.
All we have to do is cut out the driving and flying and get 65% more resourceful with our consumption! That's not so bad, surely.

Gareth said...

Yup it's consumption and travel that's killing us. Seriously, you can do everything else but if you don't address these two you're not even close. Depressing and humbling. Makes me hope that the graun messed up their figures somewhere...

Laura said...

Yep, thats a cool tool and interesting even if it is a bit depressing... A nice break from revision tho! You know the links at the top that say 'See how the LibDems, Tories and Labour would cut emissions...' - it would be good to see it on that calculator.

Unknown said...

I know, I thought that too. I clicked them expecting a nice animation into their graphics, and was met with a wopping great article. If I wanted to read stuff i'd buy a paper.

Gareth said...

Me three. At least the lib dems attempted it, and it was interesting to see that they didn't reduce consumption an iota, though they only got to 50%...

Unknown said...

Oh yeah, didn't see that. In fact I completely missed the point that the energy equation has to be balanced, apparently having a surplus of energy is a bad thing. I wouldn't mind it.
Good shout out for CCS in the lib dem article..