Guest essay by Eric Worrall
In a move which will have dire consequences for poor people, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Government has announced a ban in household coal supplies.
House coal and wet wood to be phased out by 2023 to cut pollution
…
Plans to phase out the sale of house coal and wet wood have been confirmed as part of efforts to tackle tiny particle pollutants known as PM2.5, which can penetrate deep into lungs and the blood and cause serious health problems.
…
Sales of two of the most polluting fuels, wet wood and house coal, will be phased out from 2021 to 2023, to give householders and suppliers time to move to cleaner alternatives such as dry wood and manufactured solid fuels.
These produce less smoke and pollution, and are cheaper and more efficient to burn, officials said.
The environment secretary, George Eustice, said: “Cosy open fires and wood-burning stoves are at the heart of many homes up and down the country, but the use of certain fuels means that they are also the biggest source of the most harmful pollutant that is affecting people in the UK.
“By moving towards the use of cleaner fuels such as dry wood we can all play a part in improving the health of millions of people. This is the latest step in delivering on the challenge we set ourselves in our world-leading clean air strategy.
“We will continue to be ambitious and innovative in tackling air pollution from all sources as we work towards our goal to halve the harm to human health from air pollution by 2030.”
Sales of all bagged traditional house coal will be phased out by February 2021, and the sale of loose coal direct to customers via approved coal merchants will end by February 2023.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/21/house-coal-and-wet-wood-to-be-phased-out-by-2023-to-cut-pollution
PM2.5 might or might not be bad for your health, but hypothermia will kill you faster.
The reason British people burn nasty, smokey green wood and coal is they can’t afford anything else.
This new law is Boris Johnson’s “let them eat cake” moment. I doubt Boris and his elitist friends have ever experienced the stress of struggling to pay for home heating; it doesn’t occur to him that some people might not be able to afford those neat but expensive little plastic packets of processed wood. Or maybe he doesn’t care.
Some people might be able to solve their home heating affordability problem by leaving Britain. But for people who stay in the UK, and the many people already struggling with soaring fuel poverty, I have no doubt that for some of them this insensitive new law will be a death sentence.
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Personally I don’t have an issue they have banned it, the issue to me is they haven’t provided assistance and alternatives to the poor. That side it seems to be typical of green policies we just ban X but not deal with the consequences on the people it impacts. These groups keep claiming they are fair and just but there actions are anything but that.
Coal was banned and replaced with smokeless coal back in the 70s when air quality was an actual problem. Then gas came along. Gas is being phased out in favour of wood burnt generated electricity WAAAAYYYY north of London. Battersea power station was closed in the 1980’s in favour of Londoners importing power from other shires. Sounds a bit like New York.
The UK Clean Air Act was first introduced in 1956, after London Smog did kill thousands.
This is an anti Country dwellers action. Those in the country have been loyal Tory voters since they got the vote, killing them off by fuel poverty doesn’t seem like a good plan
Battersea would not have specifically powered the local (London) area. All UK main generators are connected to the National Grid and consumers draw from it anywhere in the country. It is true that historically the bulk of UK generation was supplied from the Midlands and the North because that is where the coal mines were. It was essential to boost 400kv voltage to cater for long line losses as the power headed south. Gas is not being phased out as yet (?) and remains the core back-up to unreliable wind energy. The only real wood burning power station is the former coal-burner Drax (Yorkshire) which receives the pelleted fuel from North America. Madness
No one with any sense burn “wet wood”, you don’t even get half the calorific value out of burning it. I’m guessing that what “wet wood” means here is real wood as opposed to kiln dried, processed wood pellets. ( Electrically dried wood would be a better term ).
If they want to stop people being sold green “wet wood” they should introduce standards so that customers know what they are buying. Much wood is burnt before being thoroughly dried because it requires years of storage and most consumer buy to burn.
Ensuring people got sold dry wood would increase the yield considerably.
It would also increase the cost considerably.
I agree. People don’t willingly burn wet wood as it burns poorly and creosotes chimneys. The marketplace solves this problem as, in Canada at least, people are very wary of burning green wood. I think the “wet wood” terminology is another example of preemptive marketing to create the illusion that there is a problem where none exists. For example, if your agenda is to destroy livestock farming, you publicise methane emissions from cattle, without regard for the approximately equal numbers of visent/bison/aurochs that existed prior to agriculture. Shaping the language is a common tool of the green deep state.
BCBILL says “I agree. People don’t willingly burn wet wood as it burns poorly and creosotes chimneys. ” That was proven wrong years ago. creosotes build up by incomplete burning which is cause most of the time not enough air. Of course most old stoves control how much heat they put out via controlling the air. Most stoves sold in the US no longer allow you to change how much air they draw, so they burn cleanly no matter what the fuel(you control what they put our by what you put in, they will burn a single piece completely as well as a phone book. Haven burn green wood out of need years ago I did not have a creosote build up because I burned it with lots of air. I need the heat the house I owned was build in the 1890 and did have much insulation in it if any, a 250,000 BTU gas furnace would run continually in -10 F and below temperatures.
I wouldn’t say that was true considering in addition to Battersea there were power stations at Wandsworth, Bankside and Croydon with LUL also having a plant at Lots Road. All of these have been closed.
Patrick MJD
Unfortunately the terms are misleading. “Coal” is not a single things and “smokeless coal” is a lie, from the point of view that coal does not contain any smoke in the first place. Good grief what a mess of misinformation we must sift through these days.
First: Eric W, that is not a photo of coal burning, it is charcoal briquettes made from infinitely renewable and sustainable wood. Here is the original photo from which the site you linked got it, and misrepresented it:
https://pixabay.com/de/photos/grillen-holzkohle-grill-glut-hei%C3%9F-386602/
Next, smoke is unburned fuel. If you burn the fuel properly, there is no smoke. A smoky diesel engine is one that is not completely burning the fuel. There is no smoke in diesel either.
When it comes to home heating with coal, there are a few things worth noting. It is far more efficient to burn coal in the home than in a power station and send electricity or even pump district heating water. Modern appliances (apparently rate in the UK) are available from Poland. This one is about 90% efficient https://www.zebiec.pl/kotly-co/szafir-kociol-na-wegiel/?lang=en It is a is a Zebiec product apparently made from public domain drawings on my website. The original low pressure boiler from which it is copied is described here https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/31282
As for the impact on health of a modern low emissions stove, in the home and out, a paper is available here
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-019-0144-8.epdf It is an independent look at the social and health impacts of the heating units in the World Bank article.
What we should be talking about is a smokeless stove, not “smokeless coal”. The City of Ulaanbaatar introduced since last May, by force, “smokeless coal” made from high ash coal from Alag Tolgoi mine – basically unwanted middlings briquetted and semi-coked. The result from September was an disaster with dozens dead from CO poisoning and well over a thousands admitted to hospital with non-fatal exposures. The domestic stoves were simply not suited to the new fuel, particularly when conencted to “high efficiency” high mass heating walls.
It is akin to putting diesel into a gasoline engine. What results do you expect? Terrible combustion with high CO, that’s what. If policy makers are not even aware of what smoke is and where it comes from, they should not be policy makers! Surely that much should be obvious to everyone. If policy makers are unaware of advances in coal combustion at the domestic scale, they should ask producers in developing countries what they are up to.
More than 500m people in Asia are dependent on the direct burning of coal as their primary heating and cooking fuel. Do you think they are waiting around hoping someone in Europe will life a finger to help them, when Europe thinks there are such things as “smoky coal” and “smokeless coal”? Europe is not lifting a finger, they are giving them the finger: “Hey poor people! Ban coal; freeze and starve in the dark.”
Boris de Pfeffel is in his somewhat modest 115-room ‘grace-and-favour home’
https://www.derekhayward.co.uk/Chevening-House/Chevening-House-1/i-pMvXCZZ/A
which is oil heated. Few years ago some wise-crack drilled into the supplying pipeline to siphon the oil.
No. Boris is PM. His grace and favour home is Chequers. Chevenings user is nominated by the PM.
Well, he must have nominated himself and Carrie Symonds then 🙂
Despite flooding grief in the parts of the country, corona virus threats He has not been seen in public for 9 days since the huge row with Dom Cummings over the ‘superforecaster’ Sabisky. I voted for Boris personally twice in the past, a bit puzzled by his absence. It’s time Stanley had a word or two with Boris.
Environmentalists and green groups previously encouraged wood burning stoves as ‘renewable energy’. I actually agree with Boris on this one. Since the advent of the electric and gas grids, polluting household coal and wood burning stoves should be consigned to history.
If they really wanted to reduce both pollution and CO2 emissions, they would embrace nuclear and Fracked natural gas. However, the green troughers on the ‘climate change committee’; the same people who wasted £billions of taxpayers money, while pocketing from green interests, by converting Drax power station to wood pellets; have proposed banning gas supply to homes.
Boris Johnson, at certain Brexit moments, appeared to be fairly rational but now he has obviously drunken the Kool-Aid and is intent on condemning millions of poor or elderly people to death by hypothermia. Fortunately for these victimised people, Australia is still welcoming newcomers and the good news is that those who settle in Sydney or anywhere north of that is that they will not need any significant heating at home and will also enjoy much superior weather year-round. Say goodbye to Climate Alarmism and embrace the ideal climate now.
Boris and his elitist collaborators have no idea how poor people live and what they need to survive. They eat their cake and deny the poor their bread.
They will certainly get the opportunity to enjoy open wood fires..
That is off-colour, but very funny 🙂
funny how this is bad but importing pelletised wood from the other side of the Atlantic to burn at Drax is “good”
Trying to reduce CO2 production may have caused more crazy ideas to be proposed and imposed than any other scientific subject matter. It’s just one dire prediction after another and one crazy solution after another, day after day, week after week, year after year. And none of these dire predictions ever come to pass. WUWT?
I sure am enjoying this nice winter weather. This is what you CAGW doomsters are worried about? I say give me more!
It would be funny if it wasn’t for all the millions of people who have been duped into believing this unsubstantiated fearmongering over CO2, and are prepared to take counterproductive actions in an effort to control Earth’s weather. Delusional.
Wood mining in the forests of BC has the potential to be a major environmental/ productivity issue. Currently considerable “waste” wood is left on site after timber harvesting in BC. It is more economical for wood miners (primarily the wood pellet industry but also wood powered electric) to pick a site clean if they collect wood after timber harvesting (which isn’t the only source of wood for pellets) . In some parts of the world, ash is returned to the site to replace calcium, magnesium, potassium and other nutrients removed as a result of intensive wood harvesting. Also there is a large category of forest organisms that are dependent on wood at some point in their life cycle. In BC we practise an extensive kind of forestry (I am being polite) where the government takes revenue from the forests and engages in minimal management either of soil productivity or forest biodiversity. They have never and are unlikely to ever to engage in the kind of intensive management that is required to sustain wood mining on sensitive soils. So we are causing environmental degradation in BC to support a wood pellet industry that was developed to solve a nonsensical global warming scare. Environmentalists work in mysterious ways.
BCBill
The waste wood can be charcoaled and turned into high quality fuel – even for boilers now using coal. There us a project being run on First Nations land in Washington State (maybe it is Oregon?) trying to accomplish this with technical advice from one of the best (he is based on Portland).
There are large scale charcoaling methods (including the “curtain”) which can process larges amount of biomass waste daily. The waste heat could be used for things like kiln-drying wood or other process heat.
Sydney is still too cold. Quite a lot of heating is required in the winter, and most houses are not good at it (eg insulation etc).
I eventually moved up to the tropics from Sydney, having moved there from the bitterly cold uk (and the south, the north is abominable).
I still use heating in the winter, if I’m unfortunate enough not to have arranged my trip to my climate refuge in southern Europe.
‘the north is abominable’
That, sir, is clearly a northophobic statement. Any northophobism should be punished by long periods of re-education at a suitable facility. Northophobia is an example of not treating people, or areas, equally. All people, and areas, must be treated equally, And don’t give me any of that biological, meterological stuff. In this day and age equality trumps facts any day of the week. Moreover, in this day and age we should celebrate diversity so your comment about the north is not celebrating diversity. If the north wants to be different from the south we should accept that. If the north, despite all the evidence to the contrary, wishes to regard itself as being as warm as the south we shoud accept that, otherwise we might hurt its feelings. We don’t want to be hateful or offensive do we? At the moment being northophobic is not a crime but you need to be aware that the police are logging instances of “non-criminal hate incidents”. That’s because there is so little actual crime they have nothing else to do.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/14/police-record-120000-non-crime-incidents-may-stop-accused-getting/
Nonsense, nicholas tesdorf. This is a very rational move. Wet wood and coal for fire places should not be allowed in modern neighbourhoods – it causes choking pollution. This has nothing to do with climate change.
As regards particulate pollution, We already have smoke control areas where it is illegal to burn ordinary coal, dating from the 1950’s. Nowadays though it does get ignored and people just burn house coal. Coal really is best burned in power stations or processed into smokeless fuel, which as already pointed out here, allows retrieval of all sorts of useful chemicals.
“Plans to phase out the sale of house coal and wet wood have been confirmed as part of efforts to tackle tiny particle pollutants known as PM2.5, which can penetrate deep into lungs and the blood and cause serious health problems.”
Yes, I think we need some perspective. The lump coal is undoubtedly polluting and in an urbanised country like the UK harmful to health. Wet wood burns very badly. Dry wood burns cleaner and warmer. There are no less than 6 types of smokeless coal available in bags from my small local garage.
Ironically-like diesel cars-the govt was encouraging the burning of wood in stoves a few years ago and Drax imports and burns more wood pellets than all the householders of Britain combined although it is burned dry and has emission controls. Of course we do know that this is crazy.
So not a bad move as regards the tiny harmful particles. Agreed there are a very few householders who will be affected who burn the cheaper more polluting coal and may need help, but there is nothing to stop householders getting their own wet wood and burning it, just not from a recognised contractor.
tonyb
“PM2.5, which can penetrate deep into lungs and the blood and cause serious health problems” pure BS if it was a problem a smoke would not last ten years, and the minute prehuman starting fire they would have gone extinct.
“These produce less smoke and pollution, and are cheaper and more efficient to burn, officials said.”
So long as that’s actually true, fuel poverty is not an issue.
They ain’t cheaper than coal, they don’t burn as well and they make a hell of a lot of ash. Why would anyone burn wet wood, except on a bonfire? Seasoned is much better, but there is no need for the utter insanity of kiln drying firewood.
If it were actually cheaper to burn, people would have switched over to it voluntarily.
“Wet wood and coal for fire places should not be allowed in modern neighbourhoods – it causes choking pollution. ”
It matters not a twit iffen you are burning wet wood, dry wood, peat, soft coal or hard coal …… if you “fire” is not getting sufficient O2 (oxygen), then you are producing dangerous “air pollution”.
A <a href=http://www.firecatcombustors.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIs6Gmzcbl5wIVZCCtBh1obwIuEAAYASAAEgK_vvD_BwE “catalytic converter” will remedy your “polluting” problem.
Real air pollution? Like in the 50 s? Where? We have lots of healthy lichens all around our coal and wood heated home.
Andy
Did you notice how easily people lame the fuel for the performance of the combustor? It is a poor workman who blames his tools.
Wet wood combustors are well known and so are very clean-burning coal combustors. To burn wet wood cleanly, you have to preheat the primary air. To burn coal cleanly, you have to use cross-draft or down-draft combustion. Both the original downdraft stove (1688) and the Franklin stove (1742) were cleaner burning than supposedly modern English boxes with chimneys.
And just what do you mean by “down-draft combustion”?
“down-draft combustion” is probably about “retort burners” , retort from latin ‘retor’ menaing “twist”, but in that context “turn around”.
In retort burner fuel burns from top to bottom. Gases produced by pyrolisation must go through hot zone being burned much more efficient.
Example: http://goldenpanel.eu/index.php?id_cms=98&controller=cms&id_lang=1
Your example does not look like a downdraft boiler, sometimes called gasification boiler. In this the wood is burnt in a box but the gasses are drawn, usually by fan downwards where the mix with air and burn downwards into a second chamber below the first. Very efficient, even more so with a lambda sensor.
E.g. here https://woodboilers.com/tarm-biomass-wood-boilers-distributor-intelligently-engineered-wood-boiler-systems/tarm-biomass-products/indoor-wood-boiler/froling-s3-turbo-wood-boiler/
To understand Boris’s green madness you only need to look from the waist downwards. His new lady has clearly drafted all these new rules and one can only speculate that conjugal rights are part of the deal. What was that he was banging on about recently? We don’t want to be governed by unelected officials in Brussels?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Symonds
Seems to me we’re being governed by a whole more powerful instinct now…
Horses are jealous of her teeth.
I wonder what the companies down there would be willing to pay a multi- talented and heavily experienced miner?
And how will these ”Welcome to Australia” poor and elderly people attain the 100 points necessary to be allowed into Australia? The air fare alone would keep them supplied with dry wood pellets in the UK for years.
This is nonsense. Coal and wood fires in the UK are not used by the poor but by the wealthy. Its 2020, not 1930.
I don’t know if they have such a thing as “junk mail” in the UK, but here’s a thought.
Back in the 1970s, in the depths of our self-imposed “energy crisis,” people in the US came up with a variety of solutions to home heating. One made national news. A guy in Colorado made sure to get on every junk mail list in existence at the time, and heated his home with the tons of paper that arrived every month.
Despite the rise of the internet, that solution would probably still be viable in the US today.
oh well , he cant get everything right
if he (the govt/the taxpayer) helps people with alternatives its probably postive from a basic pollution point of view, as these burners would be pretty inefficient and probably not well maintained.
I guess the smell of burning peat is also gone across Ireland then? the seem to be at least as rabid as the UK
So… No more barbecues? They give off more smoke than any fireplace, even though most barbecues in the uk are outright laughable after living in Oz.
oh I dunno
the trend is for the 1000$ u beaut gas bbq with hotrocks maybe
not a proper barbie at all.
if its not got wood under it it isnt a barbie!
that said I gather cleancoal is briquettes? they pong and are expensive in aus and rare
wetwood?
what????
totally stupid as it smoulders clags the flue and generates stuff all heat,
if you get sold greenwood(under 12mths splitn dried) here youd be abused at least and sure wouldnt have a repeat sale , and word gets round.
how and why would anyone buy it willingly beats me. unless its half price and you could buy and store it for a yr or two for later use?
ozspeak, ……. I thought the same when I read “burning wet wood”.
Only ‘newbies’ would be stupid enough to try that.
“they pong”
They what?
They have an unpleasant nose.
Hey Zig Zag!
That photo is of a BBQ that is already lit. And they are talking about it as if it is a pile of smouldering coal. Oh well…what can one do.
The article states “[t]hese produce less smoke and pollution, and are cheaper and more efficient to burn, officials said.” Are the recommended alternative fuels not cheaper?
Complete MADNESS ……… Boris need a swift kick in the rear !!! ……Sadly GB is becoming the Green Nanny State driven by the Eco Loons ……. No house gas heating , no petrol cars , no log fires ……. WHER WILL IT END …….. watch out for the thought police !!!!!
I thought that it was an ok rule unto i read the zig zag wanderer comment.
Until
Philadelphia banned burning of coal for home and building heating about 50 years ago to decrease air pollution. That effort was successful. More recently than that, replacement of coal by natural gas was the greatest factor in US decreasing its greenhouse gas emissions since the US peak of greenhouse gas emissions in 2005, and increase of energy efficiency is the #2 reason.
One thing I oppose: Forcing people to use electricity in place of natural gas for heating applications before an increase in electricity demand gets supplied by non-fossil-fuel sources, because that increases burning of natural gas (or fossil fuels in general) in the name of decreasing that. Electricity from natural gas has combined generation, transmission and distribution efficiency around 40%. (This number is less for other fossil fuels, and coal produces more greenhouse gas emissions per BTU of fossil fuel energy than natural gas does.)
Donald L. Klipstein – at 11:03 pm
You were going good until:
…coal produces more greenhouse gas…
In 1985-1987, when I was young USAF officer stationed at RAF Greenham Common (sitting ready to nuke the Warsaw Pact back to the Stone Age), I distinctly remember the smell of coal on a winter nights walking in southern English towns.
The home I rented in Kingsclere was all electric then. My girlfriend’s home in Andover was also all-electric heat too.
Times change.
It probably is time to move on from heating a home with raw coal.
Some progress is good. Coal has it’s usefulness in the big electric generating stations where big scale exhaust scrubbers can remove the sulfur and the particulates my nose remembers from all those decades ago.
The absolute irony here is I now live in Tucson Arizona. A quite warm climate by anyone’s measure.
Yet I have classic wood burning fireplace in my single family home. A fireplace that I use in the winter on a dozen or so cold nights every year. Many of my neighbors as well do too. There’s something about a crackling wood fire on a cold winter’s night.
Maybe it reminds us of where we were not that long ago. And this coming summer (4 months hence), I’ve already planned out my mesquite wood cutting safari on my family’s Texas ranch to have plenty o’wood for the next winter’s fire.
So I suppose in the context of the climate scam, coal is bad. A sin. It’s supposedly “bad” because that carbon was sequestered millions of years ago deep underground. And the wood I’ll burn next winter was just a decade or so ago CO2 floating in the air. Still… does Nature care where that CO2 comes from? And is it even measurable in the vast natural flows? I doubt it.
As for Jolly Old England, BoJo is probably correct for the home owner… it’s time to move-on from coal for the home.
Joel,
Open fires are still legal. You just can’t buy green wood to burn on them and nor would anybody
want to if there were other options. Green wood and coal cause way more air pollution and more deaths
than would be caused by burning solid fuel alternatives. Solid fuel is currently slightly more expensive
but not significantly.
“Green wood and coal cause way more air pollution and more deaths”
More deaths, ….. “HUH”, …… says who, …. the same ones that claim cigarette smoke “causes more deaths”.
Just how many of those “more deaths” were ever autopsied to prove those blatant accusations?
Why is it, …… that they know for a FACT that diesel exhaust is extremely harmful to the lungs of young children and senior citizens ……… but the “mouthy” do-gooders and government employees really don’t give a damn. School children are still packed into diesel burning buses for 9 months out of every year.
It’s obvious that “cigarette smoke” ….. and “biomass smoke” …. are the only two “Cash Cows” they need at the moment.
Joel
I worked at USAF Grenham common in the early 70’s at American Express as my first job. The Green Berets would fly in very late on a Friday in order to cash their pay cheques and we would try to pretend we were shut as the last thing we wanted was to be at the bank until 10pm. Mind you when a pile of green berets start hammering on the doors and peering in the windows you tend to have to do what they want.
I remember the cruise missiles arriving as we lived nearby and remember the women protestors.
I think coal is fine in carefully controlled power stations but the raw stuff is highly polluting and just as we moved on from its general use in the 60’s to combat the awful smogs, its time to move on from the raw coal in domestic use. There are plenty of smokeless alternatives
tonyb
I live in a village in England where very few open fires are used, as evidenced by smoke; nearly everyone has gas central heating. Like Joel, I still like an open fire, but coal in my case and fewer than 10 nights per winter, and I am very miffed that it is being phased out in “virtue signalling”. I’ll be stockpiling this autumn…
Rich.
Exactly. The poor don’t use coal and wood, it’s the better off using wood burners and having the luxury of big fireplaces in big houses.
Your wrong, come to my rural area il show you the poor using wood stoves, the old with open hearth fires ,they cant afford alternatives, you seem to think it’s just the middle class who use wood burners for their jollys, you could not be more wrong.
Nonsense every house built before the 1970s has a open hearth fire place,be it a cottage ,terrace, farmhouse or a mansion, the vast majority of houses in the UK are the formers, they have the majority of woodburners if fitted,
No one is denying big houses dont have woodburners , to imply every one is wealthy living in a big house is wrong,to imply these people use woodburners as a status symbol is wrong,burning wood and coal is not a status symbol it’s a necessity for hundreds of thousands of people particularly in rural areas ,the cost of alternative fuels is prohibited for the poor ,
Eric,
&f=1&nofb=1
Your picture shows an egg shaped smokeless fuel ( like ‘Coalite’) being burned.
Read all about it – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalite
It is not banned.
This is a real coal fire –
&f=1&nofb=1
It will be banned (quite rightly; NO coal should be be burned without being processed to recover all the wonderful chemicals it contains first ).
Gas heating for new houses will be banned by 2025, even though it’s clean, reliable & ~95% efficient. The homes will keep warm with devices such as heat pumps…powered by ELECTRIC.
ICE cars will be banned & we will have to use ELECTRIC.
All trains will be ELECTRIC.
All we need in the UK is some method of reliable low-cost ELECTRIC ~ 5x the dispatchable capacity we have now.
I’m sure ‘our glorious leader Boris’ & his Extinction Rebellion friends & family will save us.
Before long ICE car makers will be unable to sell new ICE cars. If petrol is banned, the New ICE cars will be binned well before the last payment is made.
Who would be willing to put out hard earned money for a product they won’t be able to use after 3 or 4 years and won’t be able to resell
Reminds me of the song “Red Barchetta” by Rush (although they pronounce it wrong if it’s an Italian car)
https://youtu.be/PjjNvjURS-s
dunno bout that
whos going to buy an electric car for double the price and half the lifespan due to the cost of replacer batteries and most likely a huge disposal fee for the ones removed as well?
naff all resale value for the same reason
doubt any of the leccy cars would go to 30yrs and still run if even roadworty by then.
plain english we have about 10yrs to sort the bastards out !
EV current poor sales figures relative to ICE cars speaks volumes as to who wants one for the very reasons you put forward
“leccy cars”
Plain English doesn’t seem to be your forte. 😉
Maybe you could take the iffen outa Sam Cogar while you’re at it?
Mayhap he could try iffen you asked him nicely
“Before long ICE car makers will be unable to sell new ICE cars. ”
“YUP”, ….. ‘before long’, …… like maybe 40+ years from now “long”.
It can’t be any sooner because the car makers have to replace the current 263.6 million vehicles in the US of A …… with an EV that the poor people can afford to buy.
And iffen you take the ICE cars away from the poor people, the economy collapses and ya can’t manufacture EVs or much anything else.
Coal burns hot. Nothing is cold as ones love for a whore once you come.
I thought that coal for domestic heating In the UK was banned in the 1950s after the ‘Great Smog’, and replaced by ‘smokeless fuel’, I.e. coke. Did the law change since then to permit coal, or is this just shoddy reporting? bTW I lived there through that period, not very pleasant.
@ur momisugly Boy
“I thought that coal for domestic heating In the UK was banned in the 1950s”
only in smoke control areas;
The Clean Air Act 1956 allowed the introduction of ‘smoke control areas’ in towns and cities
The 1956 and 1968 Clean Air Acts were repealed by the Clean Air Act 1993
that states –
under section 4 of the Clean Air Act 1993. Section 14(2) of the Act requires that an occupier of a building shall not knowingly cause or permit a furnace to be used in a building: (a) to burn pulverised fuel (b) to burn any other solid matter at a rate of 45.4 kilograms or more an hour
http://adlib.everysite.co.uk/adlib/defra/content.aspx?id=18193
So we can still burn up to 45.4 kilograms an hour !!!!!….in each furnace !!!!
Smokeless zones were set up, I suspect that the fashion for log burners may have lead people to ignore these, as they’d buy plastic bags of coal from a local garage or shop.
The Clean Air legislation covers those areas designated when introduced by Local Authorities in the 1950s and 1960s. Not across the nation.
So, in the city I live, coal is banned in the city as it was in the 1960s, but not in all the suburbs (which didn’t even come under the City Council in those days.)
Thanks to the ‘demographics’, the city has ‘grown’.
I wouldn’t burn raw coal. Too dirty. But seasoned wood in a proper wood-burning stove is another matter. Kiln dried wood is ridiculously expensive. And following the deliberate destruction of the coal industry, smokeless fuel is also expensive.
Of course the key word is ‘seasoned’. By splitting and air drying over a Summer (and storing under cover), moisture content well under 20% is easily achieved. But will this be allowed? We shall see.
As for pm2.5 particulates, the evidence of harm to health is very weak. This has been well debated here in the past.
I produce my own wood, which I dry in ventilated stores for at least 3 years (probably 5years – I don’t keep a check on it) before I burn it in my wood-burning stove. It burns very cleanly and very hot.
This made me really laugh, the effort you put in to share this non-sense is mind boggling. You clearly have no idea what is actually happening and more interested in the fact this may have a knock on effect for the US and others.
There are many coal alternatives in the UK that are priced the same or in some case cheaper that are cleaner and burn more efficiently, personally I’m friendly with the local starbucks and take their used coffee grinds and press them into log type shapes and they burn brilliantly well and cost me nothing except a very small amount of time.
There is nothing like a roaring coal fire. My nan in Ireland used to receive coal deliveries as she was a pensioner.
Excess winter deaths in UK 2017/18 highest since 1975/76 at 50,100.
Coeur de Lion
The 50,000 deaths were in England and Wales according to the ONS. 0.1% of population.
2017 deaths in the Indian heatwave, 2,500.
From a population of 1.3bn ~0.000003% (give or take a zero)
70m people in India live below the internationally recognised poverty level of $1.95 per day. That’s more than the entire UK population.
NOX comes off the fields. Particulates and NOX come from vehicle exhausts. Raw coal and wood contribute tiny amounts of both. There is a solution to the vehicle pollution — convert HGVs to LPG or CNG. This latter is cheaper and very efficient — if only we had fifty years supply of natural gas readily accessible under Lancashire… Oh, hang on… https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/05/the-only-way-is-shale/
JF
This will eventually go down in history as The Silly Government.
I have serious doubts about that. I think “silly” is now the norm. A government will have to be sensible to be remarked upon in uk history for the last 40 years. I’m not holding my breath for that.
“King Edward I of England banned the burning of sea-coal by proclamation in London in 1272, after its smoke became a problem.” link
Next thing you hear is that they ban beards or, even better, tax them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beard_tax
…cleaner alternatives such as dry wood and manufactured solid fuels. These produce less smoke and pollution, and are cheaper and more efficient to burn, officials said.
This contradicts this statement:
The reason British people burn nasty, smokey green wood and coal is they can’t afford anything else
Which is correct? Can someone explain?
Easy.
“Cheaper”, once you add a huge amount of money to the thing you are banning, to allow for the entirely imaginary “cost” of Glowbull Warming.
Hi Stinkerp, I heat my home/water completely with an efficient wood boiler. So I’m aware of the water content of wood. Green wood has the same calorific value as seasoned wood (<20% moisture). However, some of that heat will be required to drive off the moisture and depending on stove/boiler will make the device less efficient and require more maintenance. Depending on the wood you can lose more than half the heat on these inefficiencies. It is therefore a false economy to buy cheap green wood. Even so called seasoned wood can often be above this 20% content as I have found with my suppliers. A moisture content reader is a must if you buy seasoned wood.
Also the cost of wood took a big jump in the last couple of years due to the UK RHI scheme… but that’s another story.
How will Dickens still be able to write novels ?
We have had the Ban for about 20-30 years here in Christchurch NZ,
Even a ban on open fires.
Air much cleaner.
You can use wood burners or heat pumps.
Heat pumps cheaper to run.
What happened to the 13.9 trees cut down in Scotland to make way for wind turbines?
They are burnt in unused farm sheds for which they receive a huge subsidy (paid by consumers) known as the Renewable Heat Incentive. This helps to meet EU renewable energy targets and helps to increase fuel poverty.
They’ll just switch over to wood pellet products like he wants so he can profit off it.
I go bushwalking in Tasmania from time to time. Until 15 about years ago most of the huts I came across were heated by very nice sweet smelling black coal. A bit hard to set on fire, but I could show off and demonstrate my outdoor skills to others by starting and getting the heater glowing red hot.
These days most huts are heated by locked and controlled gas heaters, or the pissweak Gippsland brown coal brickettes that replaced the black coal. (Exception, the hydro heated Lake Tahune Hut)
At home I live in a modern house, heated by a heat pump.
Hi why was my comment removed after is was posted?.