Interesting.....

[Sol]

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/opinion/35...ust-happen

[Gryffindor]

Reminds me of a natter I had with my 13 yr old niece on a drive somewhere. She was telling me how her school had been brainwashing all the kids to 'go for electric cars' so they could pester their parents into early graves. I said electric cars are fine, but if every car was electric we'd need a great many more electric power stations, just as we were driving past some cooling towers.

[boop]

...if every car was electric we'd need a great many more electric power stations, just as we were driving past some cooling towers.

Cooling towers of nuclear plants are as green as can be.

The ones of coal plants not so much.

[Gryffindor]

The ones we saw were very black, and so was the land around them.

[RobS]

Nuclear cooling towers might well be clean but there is a load of waste nuclear fuel that will be deadly for thousands of years. Never mind not our problem is it!!!

[sciteacher]

The real answers are simple. We don't have either the generating capacity or the recharging infrastructure in the UK at his point. If electric vehicles continue to be built and sold at the present rate, one imagines that the system (roadside chargers, generating capacity, the patience of queuing drivers) will be overwhelmed soon enough. What is needed in the long term is a huge amount of money being spent on public transport, something which governments have been reluctant to do for many decades (Beeching's railway plan now looks ludicrous). But then what about rural communities and their transport links? What about the eye-watering cost of railway transport? What about public inquiries into any form of power station construction proposals? Oh dear. We seem to be in a bad place and, of course, what about the rest of the world. If the UK does all of the right things, will Biden, Macron, Putin and the rest go along with it and do their own version. I can hear the hollow laughter of the reader now. We all want the pre-industrial agrarian society that the Victorians strove so hard to improve, don't we? So Greta Thunberg, put down your MacDonalds burger in it's plastic wrapper and throw away that useless paper straw and give us all a smile. We'll give you a lift to the next protest in our Berlingos, from your airport that your aircraft arrived in. The one powered by fairy dust and wishes.

My sons are young and we have done nothing for the future world, so far, that will really help, sadly. And we knew, we always knew.

[Gryffindor]

I agree; I can only agree. Sadly. On a domestic level the big immediate problem is that we've all got used to working with cars and vans in ways which simply would not be possible any other way. For instance, we now depend on cars to commute distances our ancestors would be mind-boggled over. There is no real, practicable alternative way to carry on as we are - the only answer is to go back to the horse and cart, and to very short commuting distances - but then who would shovel all the horse poo up?

[Sol]

We just need to find solutions to the individual contributing problems, not scrap the lot and go back to cave man levels of existence. That expectation is unworkable where it exists among a section of society. We have come too far to roll back so we must make better systems to remove and reduce pollution which will take time.

Secondly, the massive investments needed to revolutionise infrastructure cannot come solely from Govt, because the money they do have, comes from you and me. The big money investors are Oil & Gas suppliers who would transition into future energy suppliers when it is viable for none of that energy not to be derived from gas but for now, it is not fully possible.

We all need heat and light. Forget going back to the middle ages and living by candle-light and horseback, because the population, systems, social structure, supply chains and so-on are too far advanced from those times and directly support human existence, so cannot be dumped or rolled all the way back. Imagine you were all given an acre of land and a bag of seeds to survive, how long would it be before you could grow enough food to live on - a year? And how many crops would you need to plant on your acre to ensure food diversity so you did not end up living solely on potatoes, or cabbage, or wheat. Diversity of food means crop rotation, or smaller yields in total from the same land mass.

We ended up here because it was the result of solving the problems we had back then. This was the road we had to take.

The things some people think we now need to do, are undoable. I think we need instead to continue solving the problems we have and continue pushing forward.

I cannot agree more that fossil fuels are bad for our health and the environment but the whole infrastructure can't be changed in under 10 years.

We've painted ourselves into a corner. We need to find a way to get out of it without dumping all of the truly necessary improvements we did make to society like medicine, manufacturing, healthcare technology, supply chain and other societal support structures now in place (communications networks etc) - since going back to a pre-industrial or pre-agricultural revolution means losing all of that.

[Gryffindor]

I just feel sorry for the next few generations of kids. This isn't what I would have liked to have left them to inherit. But at least we seem to be becoming aware of that; when I inherited this world from the generation before me, all was all fun and sun; anything 'green' was seen as very odd. Tomorrow's World told us all that we would have endless leisure time and a beautiful world to explore with it thanks to robots and computers.

I visited the Centre for Alternative Technology in west Wales when I was an art student in about 1980; back then it really did seem like a hippy encampment knee-deep in mud, peddling controversial ideas. Not at all like that now.

I feel even more sorry for elephants.

[Sol]

Here's a great article, looking at the future and what needs to happen, along with what is being done now - long read but good:

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/inside-th...n-12537246