
UK CO₂ Emissions Are Lowest Since 1888 Due to Government Intervention - mehrdadn
https://fortune.com/2019/06/06/uk-co2-emissions-reduction/
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adrianN
That is of course excellent news, but the UK still produces around five tons
of CO2 per capita, about 20% more than France, and about three times as much
as India. The effort mustn't stop now.

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dispat0r
The atmosphere doesn't care about per capita. Absolute numbers are what counts
and then India doesn't look so good.

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dTal
The atmosphere doesn't care about political boundaries either, so there's not
much utility in drawing a line around an arbitrarily large group of people and
summing their emmissions. The only reason to look at country-level stats at
all is to assess the effect of policy, and controlling for population size is
the correct approach for that comparitive analysis.

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andrewstuart
The Australian government is diametrically opposed to taking such action.

Australians, or just over 50% of them anyway, care most about their own
pocket, making sure they get money, making sure their house price remains
high.

I'm pretty sure a very large percentage of Australians care about the
environment at some level, just not more than they care about money.

The Australian government is very much opposed to renewable energy and
strongly supports the usage of more coal.

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oulu2006
I'm Australian as well and I'm ashamed of how many of my fellow countryman
prioritising their short term alcohol and other lifestyle "requirements" over
worrying about the future of the planet.

Quite a number do care and I've met some of them, but there's a lot of
opposition, especially in rural Queensland.

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f_allwein
Maybe get a few copies of Greta Thunberg's book to give to your friends. Short
and clear: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45450258-no-one-is-
too-s...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45450258-no-one-is-too-small-to-
make-a-difference)

~~~
oulu2006
Appreciate the reference, I'll read it as well.

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pjc50
The weird thing is that nobody is out there taking credit for this success.
Probably because all politics is now Brexit.

It seems to have been partly the great expansion of wind power and partly the
Large Combustion Plant Directive. Many coal power stations were uneconomic to
modernize.

A nuclear plant was commissioned in 2012 but of course won't be ready until
maybe 2025, assuming that the UK's exit from Euratom doesn't prevent it.

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tomatocracy
Yes - the main reason is that coal electricity generation is close to
disappearing completely in the UK when it used to be baseload c.10 years ago.
Change in the car fleet has also contributed a fair amount, mostly by
replacing old less carbon-efficient petrol engines with newer diesel or
smaller turbocharged petrol engines.

The move away from coal is much more driven by economics than the LCPD - once
wind is built, it will always dispatch before coal, and the UK subsidised a
lot of offshore wind build over the past 10-15 years through various
mechanisms (ROCs, CfDs, some small tax incentives, historically also state
investment through the Green Investment Bank, EIB and arguably corporate
"greenwashing" spend).

On top of that, the UK also takes a large share of private investment in green
power generation as a result of its reputation as a fair investment
destination (predictable legal environment, creditor-friendly insolvency
regime, etc) so it's been an obvious destination for private capital looking
to invest in green power generation "somewhere" with low risk.

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mathw
Progress, I just hope nobody here in the UK takes this as an excuse to get
complacent.

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tim333
Good to see progress. A lot seems down to having some sort of carbon pricing.
Currently a floor of £18 per ton of CO2 apparently.

