Why we do need solar systems

One of the arguments that people deploy against solar system is the cost. Because they claim “you don’t need a solar system” the cost of a solar system should be treated as the cost as an additional appliance, a bit like the Energy Savings’ Trust curious concept that solar systems are lifestyle choices.

Some people think that you might need a roof, a boiler and electricity and central heating but you don’t need a solar system. Therefore, the argument goes, because you don’t need a solar system you judge it in a different way, financially, from things that you need to have.

Of course if you do not need a solar system and you treat it as any luxury item the financial consequences are irrelevant. However, there are various ways in which you can define need.

 

• You may need a car but you don’t need a Rolls Royce.
• You may need a home but you don’t need a palace.
• You may need a bowl of rice or a loaf of bread but you don’t need a feast.
• You may need a water heating system but you don’t need a carbon dioxide emission device that pollutes particulates into the atmosphere as it burns fuel that will soon run out.

Apart from the 90,000 or so families who have thermal solar heating systems (almost all are water heating systems but  some are space and pool heating systems) in this country, everyone else creates huge amounts of carbon dioxide when they heat water. This may range from 2 tonnes of emissions a year if they use heating oil as their source of fuel, to around two thirds of a tonne a year if they use the most efficient state of the art super condensing gas boiler.

We don’t need all these millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, carbon monoxide emissions, sulphur and other particulates, nor do we need the nitrous oxide emissions and acid rain that fossil fuel burning creates. We certainly don’t need the waste radioactive material from nuclear power plants.

In other words around 22 million homes are using a malignant, unsustainable means of heating water when there is a choice of using a virtually carbon free benign means of water heating.

At the moment strange at it may seem to a casual observer the ability to emit copious unnecessary and harmful quantities of carbon dioxide and pollutants is still considered to be a matter of choice. It was, however, also considered a matter of choice several hundred years ago that people could profit from the misery of others.

Slavers could choose to enslave people for profit and slave owners to use them for profit. Employers could choose to employ children for long hours in dangerous occupations instead of society paying for their education. Employers could choose to create dangerous employment conditions for their staff with no prospect of compensation of the staff suffered injury as a result.

At one time surgeons operated on people without washing their hands and without cleaning their instruments and without taking precautions and as a result half the patients died of sepsis. Joseph Lister, a Scottish surgeon in the face of much opposition in London, showed that by using carbolic acid to clean the rate of deaths from sepsis fell tremendously; his work was “proved” by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war and eventually adopted by the London medical profession.

 

So, you don’t need a solar system any more than

• You don’t need to make slavery illegal
• You don’t need to educate children
• You don’t need to create safe working conditions.
• You don’t need clean hands and instruments to carry out operations.

For most people the most important thing is their family. People work hard, long hours in order to provide a better life for their families. Mostly each successive generation has managed to provide a better life for their children, sometimes only marginally so, sometimes tremendously so, but the motivation to improve the life of your descendants seems to be written into our genetic codes.

Most people have sacrificed their own quality of life – the Energy Savings’ Trust “lifestyle choice” and often their own health and their lives - for their children. Every soldier who has fought for his country knows this; the country for whom the soldier has fought knows this.

The future generations now face a real life threatening danger. Virtually everyone agrees on this. I do not want to overstate the danger – we can simply use the words of our political leaders, religious leaders, learned scientists and most of whom agree that climate change is the greatest long term threat that humanity faces.

Solar systems will not by themselves save future generations from the threat of climate change, nor will they by themselves prevent global warming. However, they are a critical tool which as part of an overall deployment of critical tools will make the world in future a better place for the generations to come and not a worse place for them.

So we do need to have solar systems and as many of them as possible.

 

Flooding and the need to decentralise energy supply

In all the uncertainties about climate change one thing is very clear. In the United Kingdom we are experiencing more extreme weather and we are feeling the effects of extreme weather more extremely than ever. I think that what is happening is that climate change is having an effect on our environment in ways that we have not planned for.
A great deal of brain power goes into planning the infrastructure of a developed nation. There are transport systems to build and maintain, communication links, homes to build and shops schools and offices to serve the homes. In addition we have to provide work for the population and while all this is going on plan for the increase in population and make educated guesses at how the economy will work, how much we will grow by and what will be our food requirements.
We also have to decide whether we are likely to have any enemies and then what share of our wealth we need to invest in protecting ourselves as a nation and our citizens from criminals. It is a complicated scenario.

Mr Brown’s own yardstick and climate change

Mr Gordon Brown’s recent speech was about climate change and as you would expect he tried to put a very positive emphasis on the government’s climate change policy. It is worth looking at the speech in detail so that we can fully measure the government’s climate change policy against a proper yardstick. I shall give you my views of yardsticks later in this post, but first let us look at the policy initiatives which Mr Brown claims are the right initiatives to solve climate change:-.

Uranium and being kind to Kazakhstan

Regular readers of these writing will recall that I have been critical of Business Secretary John Hutton’s call for a nuclear energy renaissance; I am sure that the nuclear industry cannot guarantee safe disposal of waste and I have also been sure that the carbon emission costs of nuclear are nowhere near as low as the industry claims.

Dr Gavin Mudd of the University of Monash in Australia is a mining expert. He has already analysed many mineral ores and is work has authority. Last October he published a study of Australian mineral ores looking at data going back to 1829 and concluded that ore grades continue to decline, solid wastes from mining are increasing exponentially and coal and iron ore mineral ores have peaked, plateaued and that gold and copper are about to peak.

Eco bullying

Everyone talks a good environmental game, but very few actually know the rules, so the standard of play is very poor indeed. In the United Kingdom we have a series of disconnected environmental “signals” and schemes and consultations.

 

We have to be dragged almost screaming by the European Union into any cogent environmental laws and when we are forced to do something we manage to distort the rules from their true purpose, using them as an excuse for raising taxation or regulating behaviour in a way that is unconnected to any environmental benefits.

Green milk and greener homes

I have already written about the effect of industrial farming on the environment. There are non-industrial ways of farming, when the farmers do not farm intensively – for example when they farm “organically” to Soil Association standards, but these ways still affect our environment.

Political debate and sorry, Mr Brown

In the real world of politics the politicians were given one of their too infrequent doses of reality on 1^st May when elections were held for many local councils and the important position of Mayor of London. I think that all the major politicians who were up for election have an sense of moral justice, but I fear that they get diverted into Realpolitik instead of having confidence that politics, as Masaryk taught, is best practised by a scrupulous reckoning with facts, moral and material.

 

A politician should be without guile, but that does not mean that he or she should be a simpleton.

Trying to capture carbon

Carbon capture or sequestration is an existing technology that works in a limited way. In the North Sea Norwegian oil has some of its carbon dioxide content sequestrated before the oil reaches the refineries, but I cannot imagine how it will be possible to remove carbon from fuel, because the carbon that is released by burning (such as when you burn a hydrocarbon) is an essential part of the fuel.

 

However it has been possible to remove carbon dioxide from the air. This is regularly done in closed environments such as submarines and space shuttles. These carbon scrubbers usually use lithium hydroxide which reacts with carbon dioxide. Some fruit shops (and home growers of the cannabis genus) use activated carbon arranged in tubes which collect carbon dioxide emitted by fruit and plants, so in several ways carbon dioxide can be extracted from the air.

Industrial farming damages your health and that of the planet

Farmers have always worked hard to improve their farm production. There has been a constant process of improving yields and productivity but often this has taken farming in places that it is better not to visit, with chemicals enhancing yields from crops and animals, sometimes with adverse effects on humans and on the animals that humans eat. We have fed cattle to cattle and found BSE arrived. We have kept chickens in battery factories and found eggs infected with salmonella, and we have farmed salmon and fed them with dyed food to make their flesh red.

We now have industrial farm production on a massive scale that feeds much of the world. A recent study in the United States by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production highlights the problems that industrial farming is creating.

Suing their wrappers off; journalists upset Tesco

You can sue the pants off someone, but you cannot sue the wrapping off.

 

Yesterday I blogged about Tesco’s noble aspiration which was to help its customers tackle climate change. The way Tesco decided to help its customers tackle climate change was to label twenty items that it sells with a carbon footprint. There, job done! Tesco can get back to its core business in many parts of the world, including Thailand, knowing that they have helped their customers tackle climate change.