Oh look....Rumours that Net Zero is dead are wrong!
Whilst everyone's attention is elsewhere, Ed has slipped out a press release and announced government support for the Climate Change Committee's (unelected quango) latest recommendations and a new target...
🚨An 87% cut in UK carbon emissions by 2040🚨
That's 14 years away.
It will mean...
• Almost total electrification of transport
• More unproven carbon capture systems (LOL)
• Reduction in livestock emissions (cutting meat)
• Almost all new cars electric
• Millions more heat pumps
• Huge expansion of the grid
• More renewable energy infrastructure
• Dramatically reduced fossil fuel use
• Major changes to agricultural land use
All requiring £BILLIONS more in public subsidy and private investment. If Parliament votes for this it will be one of the biggest economic and social experiment ever seen the UK.
Here are two other UK power records:
1. Highest industrial energy costs in the world.
2. Second highest domestic energy costs in the world.
As E Miliband says, we’re setting an example for the rest of the world. Indeed we are. Which is why nobody is following us.
Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.
When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it.
They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long.
In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it.
The flowers attract a standing army to our fields.
We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.
@macrocephalopod@Ksidiii Dare I say it, there should always be an element of insanity at play. Work isn’t something you should neatly compartmentalise into ‘do the job, go home.’ Real motivation requires attaching it to something bigger than it just being a job.
@TheEconomist I’m a long-time subscriber, and frankly it’s getting boring hearing only one side of this debate. In 10 years of reading @TheEconomist, I’ve never seen such a one-sided stance on an issue
@TheEconomist Why is every one of your articles about the Iran war so negative regarding potential outcomes?
Feels incredibly one-sided. Surely there should be voices, with presenting different perspectives too, not just a single narrative that the war is a blunder and nothing more.