Climate Certificates

I recently spent a few hours getting these climate certificates. Man, that was depressing. By about 2100 we’re totally screwed. Global temperatures may well have risen by 4C and we’ll have run out of resources like fossil fuels for plastics and rare earth metals for our phones. Never mind the billion or more people who will be displaced by uninhabitable land. See Gaia Vince’s “Nomad Century” for the details in detail. And yet governments are still subsidising oil and gas exploration. It’s like they don’t want us to live.

Oil takes 5x the energy to extract than it used to and we have of it 50 years left. We only have 200 years of Uranium left.

TBH it’s really depressing and makes one want to go off the grid. Or get a job building huge numbers of wind turbines, planting trees or regrowing coral reefs. Wind, solar and water (for now) are renewable resources. We should start using them as much as possible immediately and start rationing the use of expendable resources like oil and gas. I have a Facebook group into which I drop links about climate-related stuff. Denmark is, I believe, almost net zero today. Now let’s get the USA and China to follow. If the money spent on militaries and war was spent on carbon emissions, we’d be golden.

The recent kerfuffle about 15 minute cities is a good one. I’d like to be able to walk, cycle or tram to what I need.

So remember the five Rs: Refuse (don’t buy it), Reduce (do less of it), Reuse, Recycle, Rot (make compost).

2021 – Climate change and Welsh independence.

Cefn Onn

2021 has been an odd year.

Despite the supermarkets staying open during the lockdown, we’ve been getting far more food delivered; not just supermarket food but heat-at-home restaurant meals and fruit and veg from Wellocks, suppliers to Michelin-starred restaurants.

That said, two things have been standout in the last 12 months: climate change and Welsh independence.

Climate change podcasts

I don’t know whether it’s that I’ve been listening to many more podcasts and been adding scientists to my Twitter feed (thanks @robinince), such as Helen Czerski, Brian Cox, Alice Roberts, Katie Mack, Mya Rose Craig, Hugh Warwick and podcasts from the likes of 5×15, The Science and Media Museum and many more. It seems to me that scientists and amateurs are getting much noisier about climate change. Of course, it’s turned out that Greta Thunberg was right all along. Also maybe it’s just awareness but there seems to be so MANY more podcasts too.

Living in a country that contributed hugely to the increase of CO2 into the atmosphere helps concentrate the mind. Because of the lockdown, we’ve been taking that car out only once or twice a week and I see an electric car in our future. As it is, we live in a wood-clad “green” flat and are surrounded by trees in a borderline countryside area. Wales is 3rd in the world for recycling. I’m not sure what more we could do for the environment.

Welsh Independence

On the subject of Wales, in the last year, the subject of Welsh independence has started to gain traction. The non-political group yes.cymru have gone from nothing to nearly 20,000 paying members and 50,000 Twitter followers. Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru supporters are behind the idea too. The electorate polls at 25%-40% in favour.

As I’ve said before, Wales has a GDP per head which puts it on a par with Spain. We’re shy between £5-£10 billion pounds a year but hey, with European support we can claw our way back as Ireland did. I’ve blogged about Wales’ potential before. Also, accounting properly for water, electricity and HS2 would help by a few billion in our favour. Oh, and we pay a disproportionate amount for defence, another £1.9 billion. It doesn’t help their case that we appear to have a bunch of incompetents in Westminster.

So there you have it. These are two things that are now occupying much more news space, internet space and headspace.