UKH

in 2018 were directly attributable to burning fossil fuels.

and we are apparently happy to wait until 2050 to even reach carbon neutrality, while still allowing some industries to continue burning fossil fuels beyond that date. 

I've been trying to learn a bit more about this debate. This document has a lot of well-explained info about what is required:

https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Letter-from-Lord-Deben...

Then they're about to open a coal mine in Cumbria. WTF??

However it seems that nothing in CC is quite that simple. We need lots of coking coal to make steel for the windfarms and such, and there are 2,500 jobs on offer.

Can you add a link to the source of the info?

Dave

The whole Whitehaven coal mine story has been running for a long time now. It doesn't seem to matter how many times it's pointed out that the coal is to be used for coke, to produce steel in the UK, in turn that steel will be used in the UK rather than a now global supply chain with higher CO2 emissions a load of environmentalists kick off about it.

Steel is still required for many industries. It will be produced somewhere and will have an environmental impact. Having higher environmental standards and a shorter supply chain can only be a good thing. 

Yes, the jobs are a bonus to a fairly marginalised part of the country.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/fossil-fuel-air-pollution-responsible-1...

Thanks

Dave

Yes, probably because not burining them at the moment would result in far higher deaths.

The short answer to this is "because that's the soonest we think we can get it done". I think it has to be borne in mind that while individually humans vary as to how good we are at suffering through the short term for a longer term goal, as soon as you begin to take groups of people, we rapidly become terrible at it. And when you are talking about everyone on earth, we are incredibly terrible at it.

Let's consider for a second going carbon neutral 20 years early. Assuming it is even possible, it would need massive, massive lifestyle changes for everyone. If the government tomorrow announced that for the next 10 years flights for pleasure were forbidden, food would no longer be imported (we would feed ourselves and only eat things like fruit on a seasonal basis), all fossil fuel vehicles were to be scrapped next year and anyone who can't afford an electric one has to make do with public transport and income tax and corporation tax were to rise to 80%. What do you think would happen at the next election?

In fact, I'd be interested in what would happen within the first couple of months!

Just take a look at the ongoing cladding issues after Grenfell: All we are talking about is a few bits of insulation stuck on the outside of a few tower blocks and it's taking years and years and billions and billions of pounds to fix the problem. Yet it's as to a single grain of sand on the entire beach of going Carbon neutral in terms of complexity and cost.

Going carbon neutral is hard. Like really REALLY HARD! This isn't to say that I don't believe we could be getting there quicker, I do think the populace and business could stand a bit more strain. If nothing else the COVID pandemic is showing that as a population, we can actually take a hell of a lot of strain when we buy into the reason why. It's a shame we dented our economy so badly with Brexit for no good reason.

yes, it is hard, but given that sobering statistics how can international governments justify the $1,9 Trillion of planned investment in fossil fuel burning and extraction enterprises in Government Owned enterprises. 

I can see no argument for making the situation worse than it is now.

But the most significant take away is, every reverse or hesitation in acting to remove fossil fuels from our energy mix costs literally 5. 7 Million lives for every year delayed. Presumably the reluctance comes from the mistaken belief that our nation is somehow protected from this, and other Climate change damage.

I would argue that this is the scale of the damage that we inflict on ourselves to serve the interests of a tiny minority (i.e. of those who live beyond the ability of the earth to support). And if the predictions of the IPCC are correct then we are on course for even greater damage. In time, 5.7 million early deaths will likely seem insignificant in comparison to .

So its interesting, and important because this is the first time a number has been put on the damage inflicted directly to humans. To date the  numbers have been in degrees C warming and numbers of species pushed to extinction., which are both very difficult to relate to. I hope it focuses minds.

2.3 million deaths globally in the last year from Covid and we've made massive changes to the way we live, but 8.7 million deaths globally in 2018 and no-one blinks a f@#king eyelid.

James Hansen appears to think differently, and I for one think he's probably has a better understanding than you.  And now it seems that cumbria council leaders are reconsidering their consent. Hopefully they will see sense and follow the science. 

This isn't a valid comparison because we are probably talking about 12 to 18 months of serious changes to our lives (at least in Europe and China and USA) before we are likely to be able to go back to mostly normal again (I know, still a prediction and some changes that we have come to like will stay, but all the signs are there). This is approximately a lost year.

Massive life changes for global warming will have to last for a decade at the absolute minimum (for changes where we already have a new solution, e.g. electric cars) and more realistically a generation (for changes where we don't have a solution, e.g. air transport) or a lifetime. It's a completely different proposition. You can't "solve" global warming and then go back to normal again.

Speaking personally, if someone tells me I can't eat ice cream for a year I'll be angry and grumpy as hell. If they tell me I can never eat ice cream again, I'm going to raise a f****** revolution!

It's a good point but changes have been made and I feel that the main driver behind Covid change is fear. Unfortunately the damage caused by pollution is unquantifiable to most people therefore they are not scared of it. If a real effort was made to scare people about the effects of pollution then we might see changes, but Covid's quick and traceable whereas deaths attributable to pollution aren't.

I disagree with your point about ice cream, if someone told you that it was likely that by eating ice cream you'd contribute to a loved ones death, you could probably give it up without taking to the streets. If you look at smokers many will now not smoke inside with non-smoking family as it's become socially unacceptable. And I'm guessing that they probably like their cigarettes more than you like your ice cream.

I'd have to do a lot more research to find out how I view this fact and I'm a bit too busy today (and lack motivation). On the one side that seems like a lot to be investing in a damaging technology that we are trying to get away from. On the other side, isn't $1.9 trillion actually quite a small amount of money if we are talking about global numbers? And on the yet another side (who doesn't like triangles?!), "extraction" doesn't mean "burning" and if it's being used to make plastics, fertilisers and pharmaceuticals, it isn't contributing directly to global warming.

Yes. Everybody thinks that way to some extent. "It won't happen to me because xyz", for example, why do you think you won't fall and die on a climb when other people have? One of the ways psychology lets us do things despite there being risks, it has it's downsides though.

If you want to be a real cynic you can argue that 5.7 million people is 5.7 million less CO2 producers so if we don't take any action the problem will eventually solve itself!

I don't think it's a tiny minority, I think it's the majority (or even almost everyone) who lives in an unsustainable way.

I would like to hope too but I'm pessimistic. People view "x million people dead" as a statistic like any other, our brains can't comprehend it. If you want it to hit home, your best chance would probably be to go through a major city New York for example, murder every single person there, then force everyone left in the world to spend a week walking the streets and seeing the carnage and understanding what millions of deaths actually looks like, seeing the individual lives people were living in their homes before they were snuffed out.

As it is, our best method of change is still to focus on a single person's story. This is why charities use adverts personalising a tragedy by focussing on a single mother or child or family. This is why equal rights movements focus on a single person who was murdered by police. We can empathise with 1 person, we can't empathise with a statistic, it's just not human nature ("the death of 1 man is a tragedy, the death a million is a statistic" if you like.).

Well the reality of this statistic is that its those who live close to the coal powered power stations and the congested roads that are dying 20years early, and those are almost universally the poor. These are not the people who produce the CO2. It does require a degree of compassion to see that we can help. We could support foreign governments green their economies. 

However more specifically it is rich europeans and rich amercans who live at 8 times their sustainable footprint

there are about 8 Billion people in the world. 1 Billion are Europeans and North Americans. in the USA there are 29 million air passengers each year according to the the FAA. but actually those that do fly take multiple flights so we can say that somewhere around 3 % of US citizens and probably only 2% or Europeans are responsible for the vast majority of aviation emissions. that's about 1/320th of the worlds population. There are of course other offences but to be a unsustainable you have to be rich enough. Nobody in the global south lives unsustainably in terms of carbon emissions. 1.38 Billion Indians for instance live on $2000 annually. That doesn't buy many SUV's or flights, or even concrete houses. 

Not only that, we're opening up a new coal mine!! Yay!!

So we should continue to import coal or coke from far flung destinations for steel that was going to be made here regardless? That's none sensical. 

The mine offers a chance to reduce the carbon footprint in producing coal locally but because it's not reducing it by 100% a load of people have thrown their toys out the pram. The council are bending to political pressure rather than anything else.

Good luck producing almost anything large without steel. The steel is going to be made here, or China or somewhere else. Makes sense to reduce the impact where possible.

that is exceptionalism of the worst sort. but I'm not going to debate with you. Clearly you don't value the opinions of those whom are very much better place than you to comment. I'm not going to claim I know more than you on this particular issue but I am prepared to follow the science.

Hmm... I'm worrying that we are conflating two different things here. Because it isn't the CO2 or global warming that is adversely affecting people who live next to busy roads or power stations (also I'd be surprised if there is a strong correlation between how rich you are and how near the nearest busy road is). It's particulates and NOx gases and so on. And while those are sources of pollution, they are not to do with global warming and climate change and I don't think it's right to put deaths related to that under the same heading.

I completely agree with supporting less well-developed countries to green their economy. I think this already goes on as aid money from the UK is, I assume, not granted to environmentally unfriendly projects. It might be the case that focussing on ourselves first actually results in a greater reduction in overall CO2 emissions as we are emitting a lot now whereas underdeveloped economies are emitting a lot less so there is less to cut. But it's got to be a balance of reductions at home and help for abroad, neither one is the whole solution.

That's an interesting stat. Where did it come from? What is defined as sustainable in carbon footprint terms?

Do you have a link for that? It seems low. There are 1.1 billion passenger flights by the FAA so that would mean that the average person in the USA who flies, flies 35 times a year or so. Also less than 1 in 10 people in the USA taking a flight each year does seem surprisingly low.

I guess the underlying difficulty here is what we would say counts as "sustainable". For me you need to be getting towards net 0 before you are being sustainable and I don't know of any significant populations that are getting anywhere close to that as of 2020 except very underdeveloped countries (much poorer than india) and those countries are going to have their CO2 emissions spike as soon as they become more developed economically.

I don't think that looking at median income shows the whole picture because for any given person, some of their emmissions are very personal (e.g. household heating, car exhaust) but many more are not really personal (e.g. share of CO2 emissions generated by constructing new roads or running public transport) and generated by the country as a whole but are nevertheless the result of the populace in general living above a sustainable level.

Steel production has an environmental cost (X), so does coke production (Y) and international transport of coke (Z).

Option A: current production  = X + Y + Z 

Option B: UK mined coal = X + Y 

Option B clearly has a lesser environmental impact, but you still think it's a bad idea. No pleasing some people. 

There are conflicting arguments about whether this new mine will be better than the current situation in terms of co2 production, for a given amount of steel production in the UK.  Some people make arguments like yours. There are also valid arguments in favour for security of supply and local employment. However I have seen others point out that 85% of the production of this coke mine is predicted to be exported (I don't have a source to hand, various news articles last week.) On a global scale it is clearly going to increase co2 production even if locally that's not the case. Further, it might damage the positive influence we can have on other countries in this respect.

Whatever the right answer, what I do know is that Jenrick's argument about leaving it to the local planning authority is absolute BS. This is a decision of national importance - self evidently given the level of attention it has received - and should not be left to local planners. He is just trying to get the decision he wants without being accountable for it.

85% of the coke is for export because the quality isn’t suitable for the uk market. We will still be importing most of our coking coal.

There’s currently a glut of steel in the world market, the changing to recycling more steel makes much more sense than producing more from ore and uses substantially less energy.

He obviously hasn't received a bulging brown envelope for him to make a decision either way.

Have you got a link for that? It might be correct but I've not been able to find it anywhere other than social media.

I’ll try my best to find one. I found something on the council planning website which actually said 87% but I’m not sure whose figures they were!

Steel is required in some applications, technically the best solution in many but in many more it is simply the cheapest option for a number of reasons, failure to price in the carbon cost of production being one of them among many.

jk

Found it in the planning meeting minutes -https://councilportal.cumbria.gov.uk/mgAi.aspx?ID=58900

It looks like it’s their own figures. The mine will replace 11% of UK coke imports from the states which amounts to 13% of the output of the mine, the rest going for export.

I just don’t get this anyway, those mines in the US will still be producing the coal, it’ll just be exported elsewhere, maybe somewhere closer than the UK, maybe not, but digging up more coal just means cheaper coal in the global market and more coal burnt. All the coal that gets dug up is going to get burnt, better to stop digging it up if we are in anyway serious about burning less of it.

Thanks, very much appreciated.

Actually the minutes make interesting reading. There’s an estimated saving of 107,000 tonnes of CO2 from shipping less coal, which is great except that the mining operations themselves (just getting it out of the ground) will be 366,000 tonnes of CO2.

So in fact not a net CO2saving but a huge loss.

I hate to break it to you but you don't NEED coke to make steel, it's used because that's what we used to us and coal, and then coke is cheap. But it's not essential.

A process called direct reduced iron uses natural gas to concentrate iron ore into pellets within a furnace that requires less, or in some cases, no coke, says steel expert Peter Warrian of the University of Toronto. The process is less expensive and about 21 million tonnes of steel in the world is made this way now, says Warrian.

Indeed.  Problem is the easiest alternatives are processed biofuels which tend to be bad news for biodiversity.

Electrolysis plants are starting to happen for steel which is very exciting.

As mememe says, if we leave it in the ground it’s carbon isn’t in the atmosphere.  Change starts at home.

I assume wherever it gets dug there'll be the 366,000 tonnes of CO2 produced anyway, so it is a net saving (minus the costs of apparently exporting 85% of it anyway).

It's certainly not as 'green' as originally made out in the planning application 

Only if you assume that the mine in the states that currently supplies that coal decides to stop producing it, which seems unlikely. Also there are likely to be CO2 costs that don’t scale directly with volume of coal. One mine producing X tonnes of coal is likely to produce less CO2 than two mines producing X tonnes of coal between them. Also a mine producing the coal already exists, the CO2 involved in setup costs of building the infrastructure has already been spent, why incite those CO2 costs again for a new mine?

Hold your pit ponies:

https://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/19077274.west-cumbrian-politic...

I agree it is not a clear picture and we ned to ensure we don't just "offshore" our pollution. We need steel, and if we are to have a green revolution, steel will be required to build it. Maybe the move to EAF and the direct reduced iron method driven by government funding is the answer? Nucor in the states seem to be using this method to achieve grades that used to the reserve of blast and basic oxygen furnace steelmaking.

However, regarding your points:

This doesn't sound like it'll be used for UK steel making?

This puts the "carbon neutral" claims of West Cumbria Mining under a little stress......

How is it that this thread got hijacked by the west cumbrian coal mine debate? Really what has that got to do with the startling statistic that 2 in 10 people on this planet die by fossil fuel? 

You probably need to read up on linear growth versus unrestrained exponential growth before posting this sort of bollocks.

Don't worry numnuts I understand the difference , and I'm no Covid denier. But the point still stands, fossil fuels have killed more people than Covid and we've made massive changes to our lifestyle but done nothing about fossil fuels. It seems stupid that we're so worried about one thing but unconcerned about the other. Besides which if you count predicted global warming deaths, death rates are not predicted to be a linear function of temperature rise, but will rise exponentially due to complex feedback loops, and the breakdown of natural systems. You could also argue that  pollution deaths would rise at an exponential rate, as there are pollution levels above which mortality is almost assured. On the other hand if Covid was left unchecked, although it would be a massive tragedy, it would not kill everyone it infected by a long margin.

Because it's a microcosm of the bigger debate and shows the reluctance to change and embrace new technologies, the issues you have with opportunities for employment and the debate over jobs, the push back against the fact we need to change how we live etc.

Have deaths so far from fossil fuel use been high enough to imminetly threaten the functioning of the NHS or wider society? There's one answer why Covid is a higher priority.

The other is 'willingness to pay'. If little Bobby falls down a mineshaft then as a society we'd happily spend a couple of million quid digging him out to save him, because it's an immediate threat to life.

Spending a tiny fraction of that money to improve a road junction so little Bobby doesn't die in a future car crash? Nope, it just doesn't have the same impact on the collective conscience.

I agree and I did make a similar point higher up. However, if the NHS hadn't been burdened with excess illness and deaths caused by pollution for many years then it might be better placed to cope with the strains being placed upon it now. One major difference which really should concern people about this new study though, is that an estimated 13.6% of all deaths in children aged under 5 in Europe are attributable to fossil fuels. Imagine the panic if Covid was killing that many children. One's seen as an immediate and therefore scary threat, while the other is viewed existentially and with greater skepticism than even Covid.

except that that is the roll of government. Infact they do regularly pay money to improve raod layout to protect vulnerable users. £2Billion for active travel is in the offing for example. Large amounts will go to segregated cycle lanes. The congestion charging zone in London is another example of government investment to prevent damage from fossil fuels.

This metric will hopefully galvanise more governmental responses and counteract the conservative voices that object to foreign aid. We are all damaged by emissions of CO2, and hopefully most of us are compassionate enough to let our government pay into foreign aid when it improves NOx by also addressing CO2 where the national governments can't. 

There really is an overwhelming case to increase foreign aid when these numbers (8.7M deaths / yr) will only get worse. How can we expect the rest of the worlds populations to stay put in these toxic environments when we have high environmental standards here? 

I think you're conflating issues here. The deaths cited in the study are due to particulate emissions, not CO2 emissions. They're very different things. CO2 in itself is not harmful, but obviously the increase in GHGs in the atmosphere is damaging. 

That is certainly true, but there is also a significant question of environmental justice in which developing countries must not be disadvantaged by the exercising of higher environmental standards. 

Ok, but I think the metric of 8.7M deaths/year is actually the microcosm of the wider issue. Climate heating will kill more, whole populations will be in free fall when equatorial countries become uninhabitable. It is the canary in the mine. But that aside, a failure to address this NOW is inhumane. 

That does change the balance of argument and materially changes how the facts behind the coal mine decision should be interpreted. So I'd say that now we need to factor this metric into all future decisions. 

I am well aware of the difference. However the root cause of both is the same. if we can't bring ourselves to the NOx deaths from burning fossil fuels how can we hold ourselves up as an example to follow in addressing climate heating d/t CO2 d/t fossil fuel burning.

The reasons held up by some to not act are the same. i..e it doesn't effect us at home, our economy will suffer if we act and our population just isn't particularly interested etc.

but the righteous course of action is obvious. And addressing this issue will help address CC, so actually it does help us.