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).
Being green is all the natural resource we’ve got left in Wales pretty much.
Being green is all the natural resource we’ve got left in Wales pretty much since the rich folks and the English took our coal, tin, copper and so on.
This blog is also going to come from an Indy viewpoint. Welsh independence has gone from nothing to 40% in the last few years. Independence is worth bearing in mind whichever side you fall on. I’ve fallen foul of people who think the world revolves around Westminster on Reddit. We got annexed in 1284 and made a union in 1536, not on the same basis as Scotland.
Independence polling
40%. It’s only time.
A poll suggesting that backing for independence among Welsh citizens is at a record high should serve as a warning for the UK government and prompt it to work harder at its relationship with the devolved nations, supporters of the union have said.
We have a higher GDP per capita (£23,866 in 2018) than Spain (£22,000) and Solvenia (£20,000) and many other European countries.
GDP per head in Wales in 2018 was £23,866, an increase of 2.9% on 2017. This compares to Italy’s GDP/capita of £25,000, Spain £22,000, Slovenia £20,000 and New Zealand £30,000.
In the 1950s Wales’ GDP was twice as big as Ireland’s; by the 2020s the economy of the Irish Republic was four times the size of Wales’. Thanks EU.
Energy
We export water and electricity to England. We are not short of water here. I even have a twitter feed of our local river to tell me how deep it is. Yes, it floods.
By one calculation Wales’ present export of water to England, from the Elan Valley to Birmingham and from Lake Vyrnwy and Tryweryn to Liverpool, could be worth as much as £4.5 billion a year.
Put energy creating lagoons around the harbours. This has come and gone but apparently is back again.
“Providing low-carbon, predictable renewable energy, tidal lagoons will deliver reliable and flexible electricity whatever the wind conditions or time of day – ensuring grid security and stability. Moreover, tidal lagoons have an exceptional operating life, at over 120 years, over three times a wind farm and twice a nuclear plant, and significant co-benefits that other schemes do not bring, such as protecting communities and businesses from rising sea levels.
But the rapid disappearance of eels from the nation’s waterways – dropping by an alarming 70% in a generation – is now a major cause for concern among naturalists.
Healthy peatland and raised bogs in good condition absorb carbon from the atmosphere which means they are important in the fight against climate change. If raised bogs are not in good condition they release harmful carbon into the atmosphere.
Treble public transport in Cardiff? No brainier. Fuck all has happened with this in the seven years I’ve been in Cardiff. Allegedly some things are happening. In all that time there’s been a “Metro Plan”. Maybe we’ll move on from horse-drawn open-topped trains.
The South Wales Metro is an integrated public transport network that will make it easier for people to travel across the Cardiff Capital Region, transforming rail and bus services as well as cycling and walking.
Build energy efficient houses. I’m lucky enough to live in a B rated place. All places should be this efficient.
Seafood
Our seafood is amazing. Shame Westminster fucked that up.
Sheep
There’s 3x as many as there are people. We should probably have more, within their environmental impact.
Dead zone
Restore the Cambrian mountains. There’s a 300km2 dead zone.
In the southern Cambrian Mountains, in central Wales, there’s a Terrestrial Dead Zone of around 300 km². It’s composed of degraded blanket mires, entirely dominated by a coarse grass called Molinia, in which other lifeforms, such as birds and insects, are scarcely to be found.
Cardiff is nice and green, there’s plenty of woods, open fields and so on to just go hang in. Sadly a few green spaces are under threat. That’s not surprising in a growing city. The rivers could do with cleaning up. We used to have eels and way more fish. I’ll blog about this at another time. I’ve exported all my saved pins from Google maps.
Summary
There’s so much potential but nothing will happen while we’re under Westminster’s thumb. In EU terms, we are by no means the smallest country in Europe and our GDP is OK. I’d like to see more action. In the last year of lockdown green issues have come more to the forefront. I want a green future for Wales.
