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Couldn't agree more. Just illustrates my point that offshore wind is not really an example of how we're going to solve this thing. You could argue that the successful de-carbonisation of electricity is masking the scale of the challenges elsewhere - where we're really not making any progress.
Going back to @SwissChap's point - if we can decarbonise electricity (and heat) does this lead to all the raw materials and production process also being de-carbonised?
If an electric digger extracts the ore, and the process to refine this into steel/aluminium also uses green energy, surely the carbon footprint of the product improves along the way. I fear its this route we're going to take rather than the "stop driving around so much" option.
Over the "boom" of cycling in the last decade, and the roll out of cycle infrastructure, its thought this has only led to a reduction in car journeys of about 0.1%. I've heard we need at least a 10% reduction to get close to the net zero 2050 ambition. That's a massive shift.
On the space heating point - the issue we have in the UK is that getting people to use electric heating is really difficult - huge numbers of people have houses and heating systems designed around gas or oil.
Getting these people to change is really difficult. Electricity was easy - any house/bushiness/process designed to use electricity can use green electricity from a turbine down the same wires as from a coal power station.
If you currently use gas for anything you're going to either need green gas, of which there won't be enough, or rip it all out and install something different at considerable cost. Doing this round the whole country is hugely difficult, hence why the government still haven't published a clean heat plan that explains how we're going to meet future carbon budgets.
Scrabble-
On the space heating point - the issue we have in the UK is that getting people to use electric heating is really difficult - huge numbers of people have houses and heating systems designed around gas or oil.
We’ve done similar before - think of the switchover from town gas to natural gas in the 1960s.
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That's a massive shift.
It absolutely is. It would also absolutely be achievable, but there would need to be a fundamental attitude change along with things like big investments into carbon neutral public transport, while cars are being banned and taxed to high heaven left right and centre. I can't really see it happening realistically, but I won't give up hope we can at least vaguely move in the right direction.
As a side note:
Electricity was easy - any house/bushiness/process designed to use electricity can use green electricity from a turbine down the same wires as from a coal power station.
That part is easy, yes, but electrical / power engineers will tell you that the distribution of power in itself is a super complex thing, and getting it from many individual turbines vs one big coal power plant is not as straight forward as the slightly naive thinking of "well you 'hook it up' to the grid" that us non-electrical-engineers tend to have. Again, totally doable, but even that 'easy' bit isn't that easy when you drill down into it.
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Space heating of the national housing and commercial stock has changed fuel source twice in most of our parents life times, solid fuel to town gas and town gas to natural gas.
Switching over to electric is feasible if government and industry decide they want it to happen. Labour published thier plan to carbon neutral by 2030 yesterday which included the roll out of 8m heat pumps which is totally doable if thier is the will.
Probably easier than trying to convert the gas system to hydrogen and stopping it from leaking everywhere. (Hydrogen totally has a place for transport however and industrial heat provided it isn't a fossil fuel byproduct).
NickCJ
SwissChap
greentricky
^this. I think getting people to accept that car ownership is an obsolete relic of 20th C industrial Utopianism is one of the biggest challenges.