The Dormouse That Roared

Stand by. In the year 2014 You'll all be familiar with this of course, so bear with us whilst we go over some old ground, and we'll see if we can piece a story together, starting with 154 pages of information about using North American woody biomass for electricity generation in the UK. Like all good thrillers, the real story doesn't start here, but we'll have flashbacks, when the screen goes wavy in front of your eyes, to fill in what happened before this. The key words here though are woody biomass. Let's begin. This document was written by real scientists. Now we only have three lifelines, so we're hoping that one of them is to phone a famous scientist friend as many times as we need to. Don't worry, we'll be turning the first page over next, and your patience will be rewarded.

This is a power station. It's called that because the nice people that run it are able to exert a lot of power in Europe, and in lots of countries, in order to achieve their dreams. Power. People that have power always want more of it, and despite everybody living on the same planet they don't care about the air that you and your children breathe, or the dangerous heating of our planet. We think they must have a special bit set aside where the impacts on planetary existence by climate change won't be felt. We wish them well. Perhaps they don't believe that human induced climate change is real, or not their fault. In that sense, it doesn't matter whose fault it is, because we haven't got time to make them sit on the naughty step. We have to get busy pointing out that anyone who gets a mandate to transport fossil fuels about 5,000 miles, or 8,000 km, across the world from the USA needs a bit of a good talking too. The weird thing is that the people who ...

Inspired by those who are not singing from the hymn sheets being handed out. If we start with around 70% of carbon emissions being produced from burning fossil fuels: electricity generation heating & cooling buildings vehicles. Despite what governments have done, are doing, say they are doing or say they are going to do, it is happening anyway. Electricity Generation Renewables like solar and wind, together with hydroelectric and tidal or wave where appropriate, are an obvious choice. The elements that are really needed as well though are electricity storage (for when the sun doesn't shine, or the wind doesn't blow) and a smart grid, to take power from where it is generated to where it is needed, with minimal loss. Without storage, electricity is currently not normally generated for obvious reasons, and also makes a case for a false justification for on demand fossil based electricity generation from coal, gas, nuclear and biomass. Building Heating & Co...

This is an open and ongoing question because nobody knows, but it must still be asked, and asked again. This article is a mish mash of information, mainly because by accident or design, the status and direction of travel for the UK electricity grid is bewildering. It is perfectly feasible to eliminate fossil fuel power stations, probably in the order coal, then biomass, then gas, as a combination of renewable energy, electricity storage and smart grid technologies are installed. Unfortunately this is compromised by government policies, desires to extract the very last drops of fossil fuels from around the UK's coasts, poor incentives, and all the rest of the Heath Robinson set of cranks and levers that result in time passing by with much huff and puff. Fortunately the renewable sector has realised that costs coming down, improving technology, and an expanding skills base means they can really just get on with getting on with the job. And don't worry, the government will...

Imagine. Imagine we had people that understood psychology, marketing, engineering, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, arts, geography, etc all committed to reducing the impacts of # ClimateBreakdown by talking, questioning & acting. Imagine we are all in this together. #ZeroCarbon2025

Dr Craig McClain (https://twitter.com/DrCraigMc) explains climate change in 15 graphs from 2015, and don't forget the twitter hashtag #climategraphs: http://www.deepseanews.com/2015/09/a-story-of-climate-change-told-in-15-graphs/