The reactions to the UK government's commitment to N-ZC (net-zero carbon) by 2050 have been pretty positive both here and elsewhere, although it failed to get a mention at last week's parish council (PC) meeting where discussion was (literally and metaphorically) on more parochial matters: think overgrown rights of way and poor signage, the demise of community policing, the protection of local great-crested news, and proper scrutiny of local planning applications. \u00a0We do plant trees, however (and the PC has a good record here), but the context for this tends to be commemoratory not mitigatory.<\/p>\n
Comment on N-ZC at the national level threw up a number of caveats. \u00a0An opposition MP said \"too little, too late\" and a young person on TV said much the same thing; the young person was sticking out for all this by 2025 which is impossible without an economy car crash, and is yet another reason for more and better economics teaching in schools). \u00a0The MP's point was that this should happen before<\/em> 2050, not by<\/em> 2050. \u00a0I think they meant by 2049. \u00a0Such are the games our parliamentarians play.<\/p>\n A less easily dismissed point was made in The Times by\u00a0Michael J Kelly,\u00a0Emeritus Prince Philip Professor of Technology, at Cambridge. \u00a0He wrote:<\/p>\n \"With a net zero carbon emissions target ... the UK is going against the rest of the world for the next two decades, where the priority is the elimination of world poverty and hunger (the first two of the UN sustainable development goals) and which will include 700 new coal-fired power stations built under the Chinese \u201cBelt and Road Initiative\u201d alone. The UK emissions reductions will continue to be undone more than 100 times over, so the rhetoric of helping to eliminate climate change is plainly false.\"<\/em><\/p>\n I expect geography teachers across the country to be seizing on this as a stimulus for their next lesson.<\/p>\n More on N-ZC tomorrow ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The reactions to the UK government's commitment to N-ZC (net-zero carbon) by 2050 have been pretty positive both here and elsewhere, although it failed to get a mention at last week's parish council (PC) meeting where discussion was (literally and...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}