To say that the release of the IPCC’s report on climate change has caused much more of a stir than most green policy reports tend to would be a massive understatement. The headline take away of ‘code red’ for humanity in relation to the environment dominated the news in the UK on the day the report was released.
The report is fascinating, at least if you’re used to normally reading fairly dry and not very well thought out green policy reports like I am (there are good ones as well – unfortunately, there are a lot of bad ones out there too). There was the ‘stick’ in the report of ‘you need to do this now or else’, with the ‘or else’ being vividly laid out; there was also the ‘carrot’ of, ‘this can be fixed if there is the political will and way’. The report lays out a lot more than just this, being large and comprehensive in its scope, but these were my main takeaways for the lay audience.
As it happens, I have written a report on green policy that is out the very same week as the IPCC’s report. I wrote it for the Centre for Progressive Policy and its called ‘Solving the Climate Crisis’. My paper is a lot narrower in scope than the IPCC’s – I focused mainly on the UK government’s ten-point plan for green growth, detailing what is good about it and what is bad about it.
A little background: the ten-point plan is officially known as “The ten point plan for a green industrial revolution” and it was released to the public in November 2020. It marked a huge change in Tory policy on sustainability, moving beyond the strange and cheap plan the government previously had for ‘post-Covid green growth’ that had all sorts of strange little gremlins in it, like the plan to spend £10 million on a spaceship that would fire lasers into clouds.
What’s good about the new plan: it contains some decent and even ambitious targets. ‘Ensure that the public sector has reduced its direct emissions by 50% compared to a 2017 baseline’ by 2032 is one example. What’s bad about the plan: the practicalities of how the government intend to reach these targets is often confused, missing or severely underwhelming. For instance, the ‘jet zero and green ships’ section states that, “Up to 5,200 jobs supported by a domestic SAF industry” will be created. Yet the plans as detailed make it extremely difficult to understand how these jobs will actually be created and the danger is that underlying assumptions are being made that, given
the lack of success of recent green initiatives from this government, are not warranted.
In my report, I talk a lot more about what I think the government should be doing in the immediate future to fill these gaps. It is only meant as a guide to ‘quick wins’ for the government’s ten-point plan to start to work, but I think, particularly in light of the IPCC report, that these sorts of steps are urgently necessary. I think it comes down to three essential components:
- Create the jobs necessary for the ten-point plan to work
- Better incentivise the private sector to play its part
- Put in place structures to hold the government to its own promises and measure their real-world impact on the environment and the economy.
I detail how I would do all of that in the report, which is a relatively brief read that you can find here:
https://www.progressive-policy.net/downloads/files/Solving-the-climate-crisis-Nick-Tyrone.pdf
I read somewhere that the problem with retrofitting houses with heat pumps instead of boilers is not just the immense cost of doing so, but also that the design of old houses means that heat pumps simply don’t work as well in them; and there’s no way to fix this (short of knocking the houses down and rebuilding).
Is this true?
And given that ‘The government is willing to pay for this to take place’ is basically saying ‘Your taxes will rise in order to pay for this to take place’, which might not get the kind of buy-in you think it will…
… are you really going to tell people they will have to pay thousands (either directly or in increased taxes) for the massive hassle of having their heating system replaced with something that at the end of all that will not actually heat their house as well?
You might get away with it for a while, before people realise what’s going on, but the first suckers, as they sit shivering in their cold rooms during the winter, are unlikely to keep quiet and as word spreads I can foresee public sympathy evaporating rapidly (and then probably condensing on the inside of the windows).
One sort of heat pump is just like an air conditioning unit. Can blow out hot air as well as cold. That would work to heat any age building. Using heat pump tech to heat water filled central heating won’t work well.
I have yet to see how they propose to use heat pumps for hot water – I suspect a preheating to about 40 C with the 40 – 60C heating done with an immersion heater or similar.
It’s not worth doing anyway till our electircity is 100% renewable, as the marginal electricity unit will still be gas fired, and the heat created by the combination of gas fired electric + heat pump comes out about the same as just burning the gas in a local condensing boiler.
One sort of heat pump is just like an air conditioning unit. Can blow out hot air as well as cold. That would work to heat any age building.
Well, no. It will only heat a building which is designed such that the hot air blown out circulates properly throughout the whole house. Otherwise the hot air will just collect in bits of the ceiling and the rest of the house will remain cold. That, I gather, is the issue: most of the existing housing stock was designed with water filled central heating, with a separate heat source in each room, rather than a single heat pump.