Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

[Woodchopper]

That task is enormous; if we were to meet emissions targets by 2050, we would need to retrofit two homes every minute, the UK Green Building Council estimate. Just looking at heat pumps — the green alternative to gas-fired boilers — the UK has about 412 per 100,000 people, compared with a European average of 3,068. The government is targeting 600,000 yearly heat pump installations by 2028; we are currently hitting only one-ninth of that.

One industry estimate says 87,000 new recruits will be needed to meet this rollout target (there were 3,000 heat pump engineers in Britain last year). Today more than half of heating system installers are over 55 years old. Very few are willing to retrain.

“There is a dire need to bring young people into the industry,” says Linda Clarke, professor of European Industrial Relations at Westminster Business School, who thinks construction training infrastructure needs to be completely overhauled given the scale of reskilling needed. The workforce is made up of mostly small firms. Half are self-employed, often ill-equipped to provide for apprenticeship training. Many talk about the “administrative burden” involved. Given tradespeople are overwhelmingly male and white, there is a huge talent pool yet to be fully explored.

Knocked by an exodus of EU-born workers, in general the UK construction industry needs to plug a skills gap of 937,000 over the next decade to “meet demand”, according to the 2023 Trade Skills Index. Of those, 244,000 need to be qualified apprentices — the equivalent of 24,400 completing training every year. But the figures for England (light blue bars) [see graphic in link] suggest we are far off. 

More at the link: https://www.ft.com/content/1e66d2c0-d8b ... 613876a1f3

[IvanV]

That task is enormous; if we were to meet emissions targets by 2050, we would need to retrofit two homes every minute, the UK Green Building Council estimate. Just looking at heat pumps — the green alternative to gas-fired boilers — the UK has about 412 per 100,000 people, compared with a European average of 3,068. The government is targeting 600,000 yearly heat pump installations by 2028; we are currently hitting only one-ninth of that.

One industry estimate says 87,000 new recruits will be needed to meet this rollout target (there were 3,000 heat pump engineers in Britain last year). Today more than half of heating system installers are over 55 years old. Very few are willing to retrain.

“There is a dire need to bring young people into the industry,” says Linda Clarke, professor of European Industrial Relations at Westminster Business School, who thinks construction training infrastructure needs to be completely overhauled given the scale of reskilling needed. The workforce is made up of mostly small firms. Half are self-employed, often ill-equipped to provide for apprenticeship training. Many talk about the “administrative burden” involved. Given tradespeople are overwhelmingly male and white, there is a huge talent pool yet to be fully explored.

Knocked by an exodus of EU-born workers, in general the UK construction industry needs to plug a skills gap of 937,000 over the next decade to “meet demand”, according to the 2023 Trade Skills Index. Of those, 244,000 need to be qualified apprentices — the equivalent of 24,400 completing training every year. But the figures for England (light blue bars) [see graphic in link] suggest we are far off. 

More at the link: https://www.ft.com/content/1e66d2c0-d8b ... 613876a1f3

The government has long been talking the talk without walking the walk. The Climate Change Commission politely points this out with every updated report, that we fall further and further behind the curve to get to 2050.

Achieving the massive conversions required to meet the 2030 target for no new petrol/diesel light vehicles, and 2035 target for no new gas boilers, etc, depend hugely on confidence that those will actually happen. Because lots of people have to take risks with their money and their life skills to gear up for them. The government still says they will happen. But they no longer look like a government that won't blink, having gone all "this is expensive, we don't want to make people pay". And Labour continues the stay-quiet-let-them-lose-give-them-nothing-to-attack, so they add no confidence to what will happen in future. So if they are to happen, they need even more massive government support to make them happen, to de-risk the decisions of all those people and businesses that have to invest in them to make them happen on a suitable scale. And they need government support to accelerate the implementations, so that there is demand for capacity as it is generated, inevitably gradually.

Meanwhile, Justin Rowlatt, the BBC's climate editor, just did a programme on heat pumps repeating the myth that many people believe, that many experts state, that I long believed, but which Grumble pointed out is quite wrong. That is that old houses need massive insulation modernisations for heat pumps. Having made the same mistake, I can't really blame him. He must have read all the reports that I read, seemingly reliable as written by the eminent. The real message is nowhere out there, that higher temperature heat pumps are available, and are the economic solution for many older houses, when gas central heating is no longer permissible. It costs more than GCH, so why would you do it now unless you were supported to do it? And it will use more energy than lower temperature heat pumps and insulation modernisation. But its probably the cheapest alternative for you when GCH is no longer permissible, better and more practical than the massive modernisation job. Certainly better than electrical storage heaters in most cases. And probably a lot better than hydrogen, until we land in that future of milk and honey very cheap PV where green hydrogen can be produced for peanuts.

[Sciolus]

Achieving the massive conversions required to meet the 2030 target for no new petrol/diesel light vehicles, and 2035 target for no new gas boilers, etc, depend hugely on confidence that those will actually happen. Because lots of people have to take risks with their money and their life skills to gear up for them. The government still says they will happen. But they no longer look like a government that won't blink, having gone all "this is expensive, we don't want to make people pay".

And people may also remember the Cameron government, which introduced generous feed-in tariffs, built up the domestic solar installation industry, and then after about two years abruptly pulled the rug from under them by slashing the FIT, and trashed a swathe of businesses that it had just laboriously created.

On the other hand, I've just been in discussions with a developer building a new housing estate, and it will be all-electric to the point that they aren't piping in gas at all. It struck me that this is a paradigm shift in residential development in this country. Developments in London have mostly been all-electric for a few years now, but it's happening in the rest of the country too, and even on large-scale developments.

[IvanV]

On the other hand, I've just been in discussions with a developer building a new housing estate, and it will be all-electric to the point that they aren't piping in gas at all. It struck me that this is a paradigm shift in residential development in this country. Developments in London have mostly been all-electric for a few years now, but it's happening in the rest of the country too, and even on large-scale developments.

Well electric only isn't a panacea if it means electric storage heating or other form of resistive heating.

I know that a housing association recently built an estate in a village near here, that is off gas grid, was unwilling to pay for heat pumps. I don't know whether they went for tanked gas or storage heating in the end, but I know my friend who works as a manager for them was seriously peed off about it.

[dyqik]

On the other hand, I've just been in discussions with a developer building a new housing estate, and it will be all-electric to the point that they aren't piping in gas at all. It struck me that this is a paradigm shift in residential development in this country. Developments in London have mostly been all-electric for a few years now, but it's happening in the rest of the country too, and even on large-scale developments.

Well electric only isn't a panacea if it means electric storage heating or other form of resistive heating.

Why not?

If the electricity comes from wind, solar, hydro, biomass, or even carbon captured fossil fuels, it's better than burning gas.

Electric only means that the CO2 emissions are moved to centralized power stations, which are easier to replace with clean sources, or capture carbon from.

[bjn]

The electricity’s fungibility is a brilliant, but if you can get 3x as much heating via a heat pump as opposed to old school resistive heating it’s much nicer all round.

[dyqik]

The electricity’s fungibility is a brilliant, but if you can get 3x as much heating via a heat pump as opposed to old school resistive heating it’s much nicer all round.

Absolutely. But even resistive heating is better than gas when there are wind turbines making the current flow.

And there's no carbon emissions from pointless gas pipe installation either.

[IvanV]

On the other hand, I've just been in discussions with a developer building a new housing estate, and it will be all-electric to the point that they aren't piping in gas at all. It struck me that this is a paradigm shift in residential development in this country. Developments in London have mostly been all-electric for a few years now, but it's happening in the rest of the country too, and even on large-scale developments.

Well electric only isn't a panacea if it means electric storage heating or other form of resistive heating.

Why not?

If the electricity comes from wind, solar, hydro, biomass, or even carbon captured fossil fuels, it's better than burning gas.

Electric only means that the CO2 emissions are moved to centralized power stations, which are easier to replace with clean sources, or capture carbon from.

I was mentioning it among possible electric-only heating mechanisms the developer might have installed, not as an alternative to GCH. But actually, it poor in comparison to GCH, at least for now.

Resistive heating is very expensive for the owners. So it is a very nasty and cheap trick to play on them. Oh look, it's (potentially) green (when nearly all electricity is green), but it will cost you 3 times as much to run as the heat pumps we were too cheap to install, and which were perfectly feasible and economical in this new build house built to proper modern insulation standards. And retrofitting will cost you a huge heap, because retrofitting in a house that has no plumbing for radiators will be a nightmare.

It's not even very green, even compared with GCH, because currently 55% of our electricity is "renewable", and that includes 13% from biomass which everyone now agrees is actually worse than burning gas, at least the way most of it is being done at places like Drax. After losses in electricity generation and distribution, you really would have emitted less CO2 with gas central heating, at present time, especially taking into account seasonality that more stuff is burned in winter. That should improve, but your resistive heating won't be very green for some time yet, and will always be unnecessarily expensive to run.

There is also the national impact if resistive heating becomes common, and hence substantially increases the amount of electricity we have to generate. That's going to double even if people use efficient technologies. Using inefficient technologies to increase the requirement will make that a lot more painful and difficult.

Carbon capture at the kind of 80%+ kind of fraction that would make it seriously green, after deducting the large amount of energy it takes to operate it, remains a bit of a fantasy.

[dyqik]

It's more than just installing electric heat though. Electric only developments mean that the houses and development are built with electric systems capable of handling the load from even the most inefficient electric heating, electric hot water, electric stoves, etc. This makes it much cheaper for homeowners to upgrade to heat pumps etc., as they don't need their wiring replacing to upgrade it.

Heat pumps are pretty cheap to upgrade to if you've got the wiring. My town just voted in building codes that require all new bills to have the electrical system capable of running the property on all electric heat.

Of course, ideally new developments would build in ground source heat pump loops when being built, because air source is less efficient.

[IvanV]

Heat pumps are pretty cheap to upgrade to if you've got the wiring.

You need a system to distribute heat to the rooms with the heat from the heat pump. If your present installation is electrical storage heaters, you don't have that. I don't think that's a cheap upgrade.

[dyqik]

Heat pumps are pretty cheap to upgrade to if you've got the wiring.

You need a system to distribute heat to the rooms with the heat from the heat pump. If your present installation is electrical storage heaters, you don't have that. I don't think that's a cheap upgrade.

That depends on the construction of the house.

I don't think anyone is installing the old style electric storage heat anywhere, as it's a massive waste of space, which is expensive and valuable.

Ductless mini-splits in the more open downstairs and a ducted mini-split in the attic is easy to install in a normal two storey house.

[IvanV]

Heat pumps are pretty cheap to upgrade to if you've got the wiring.

You need a system to distribute heat to the rooms with the heat from the heat pump. If your present installation is electrical storage heaters, you don't have that. I don't think that's a cheap upgrade.

That depends on the construction of the house.

I don't think anyone is installing the old style electric storage heat anywhere, as it's a massive waste of space, which is expensive and valuable.

Ductless mini-splits in the more open downstairs and a ducted mini-split in the attic is easy to install in a normal two storey house.

Air-to-air heating in a domestic setting is rare in Britain, I've never knowingly been in a house that had it. Air conditioning also remains rare, though people are suddenly much more interested after extensive areas experienced 39C for 2 days a couple of years ago. And that might help sell air-to-air. So I guess air-to-air will become rather more common as people try to solve difficult retrofit problems, and build electric-only houses. It might well be what is going into some modern apartment blocks rather more commonly these days. But I don't think a lot of heating installers know much about it.

A friend of mine, who has a small mid-terrace house that never had gch or any heating system installed - he largely steals heat from his neighbours, which he supplements with portable devices in very cold weather - suffered badly in the recent heatwaves. He was asking me and others about aircon/heat options - he was more interested in the aircon aspect. He was finding it difficult to source something that would be relatively easy to fit, by which he meant not knocking holes in walls. But I think if he wants anything half sensible he will have to at least knock a hole in a wall, maybe several. Apparently the kind of easy-to-install thing that sits in window spaces, that you widely see in the US and warm parts of Asia, isn't really available here, probably because it doesn't comply with local regulations which are often daft. And being a particle physicist he doesn't have a lot of money, and is probably being unrealistic about what he can do for almost nothing.

Unfortunately, electric storage heating remains common in Britain, mainly in places off the gas network. It is also, sadly, found on the gas network, because it is so much cheaper to install than anything else, and the cheapskate seller hopes that their purchaser doesn't realise how expensive it is to run. Recently storage heater sellers have been doing a big push telling people how much smaller and "more efficient" they are these days, and I doubt those ads would be so prominent if they weren't working. Obviously they are not more efficient in a technical sense, as all storage heaters are precisely 100% efficient. But modern ones are more effective at releasing their heat more usefully than they used to be, as well as being substantially smaller than the old type. I just read something from a reputable independent source suggesting that the modern types can achieve the same comfort level with about 25% less energy than the old type, presumably through more effective heat management.

[Opti]

Inverter air-con is huge over here. Ours gets much more use in the winter for heating than it gets as air-con in summer, it seems to be quite efficient at heating. This summer we've mostly been able to cope with the heat by just using the fan function on the a/c. Pretty economical as well but that is probably helped by the cost of electricity here, which I'm given to understand is among the lowest in Europe.

This year the anti-solar farm lobby appears to be much smaller than it was a couple of years ago. It used to be objected to by one group of people complaining that it spoiled the view, another complaining that it was all being proposed by existing energy giants and the last group complaining that it was taking over (marginal) agricultural land. This years lack of water and lengthy periods of very hot weather has shut up the 'agricultural' lobby and the other 2 groups are beginning to realise that Spain needs to exploit it's plentiful sunny regions.

[discovolante]

Couple of months late with this, but the think tank Carbon Tracker has produced a report arguing that pensions investors are underestimating the economic impact of climate change.

The report can be downloaded here: https://carbontracker.org/reports/loadi ... -pensions/ - you need an account but it's free I think.

Because it's registration only I'll just post the key findings/exec summary:

Investment consultants to pension funds have relied upon peer-reviewed economic research to provide advice to pension funds on the damages to pensions that will be caused by global warming.

Following the advice of investment consultants, pension funds have informed their members that global warming of 2-4.3oC will have only a minimal impact upon their portfolios.

The economics papers informing the models used by investment consultants are at odds with the scientific literature on the impact of these levels of warming.

The economics of climate change is an interdisciplinary subject, but papers on the economics of climate damages were refereed by economists alone. Properly refereeing these papers required knowledge of the science of global warming that economists typically did not have. Consequently, economic referees approved the publication of papers that made claims about global warming that are seriously at odds with the scientific literature.

These claims have been fundamental to the predictions by economists of minimal impacts on the economy from global warming.

Economists have claimed, in refereed economics papers, that 6oC of global warming will reduce future global GDP by less than 10%, compared to what GDP would have been in the complete absence of climate change.

In contrast, scientists have claimed, in refereed science papers, that 5oC of global warming implies damages that are “beyond catastrophic, including existential threats,” while even 1oC of warming—which we have already passed—could trigger dangerous climate tipping points.

This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for.

Consequently, a wealth-damaging correction or “Minsky Moment” cannot be ruled out, and is virtually inevitable.

Pension funds have a fiduciary duty to correct the erroneous predictions they have given their members.

Similarly, financial regulators, who have used the same erroneous and misleading economic damage predictions to stress test the exposure of financial institutions to climate change, must drastically revise their stress test studies.

This report calls on all stakeholders, from governments, regulators, investment professionals, all the way to civil society groups and individuals, to ensure that climate change policy is based upon the work of scientists.

Climate change must be treated as a potentially existential threat to the economy, rather than an issue which is suitably addressed by economic cost-benefit analysis.

The point is, I suppose, that not only are people's investments more at risk than has been accounted for, but pension funds are more likely to continue investing in fossil fuels given that the economic risks of climate change have apparently been underestimated.

[IvanV]

Couple of months late with this, but the think tank Carbon Tracker has produced a report arguing that pensions investors are underestimating the economic impact of climate change.

The report can be downloaded here: https://carbontracker.org/reports/loadi ... -pensions/ - you need an account but it's free I think.

Because it's registration only I'll just post the key findings/exec summary:

Investment consultants to pension funds have relied upon peer-reviewed economic research to provide advice to pension funds on the damages to pensions that will be caused by global warming.

Following the advice of investment consultants, pension funds have informed their members that global warming of 2-4.3oC will have only a minimal impact upon their portfolios...

"Investment consultants." It's a funny business. Tracker stocks on average beat other kinds of stocks. Is investment analysis even worthwhile, given the cost of doing it?

But a tracker stock isn't the answer to every question about investment that is worth asking. There are difficult questions about investments, which are not about knowing better than the market. For example, choosing the best portfolio of investments for the particular needs of the recipients, having regard to risks. And here is such a question, apparently. So there are hard and sensible questions, that people with suitable expertise can address, and potentially this is one of them. But the question, how do global investment returns vary with global warming, seems more like futurology, than being a question amenable to being answered by scientific methods relying on solid literature. And consultants would as far as possible like to rely on solid literature.

I suppose it is easy to see how they might come to such an answer if you do use less speculative methods. The places most at risk from global warming are mostly poorer areas of the world which don't deliver a lot of investment returns. So perhaps it would look like the places that produce most investment return are substantially insulated from quite a lot of global warming. You might look at trends in the cost of cleaning up from natural disasters as a proportion of global GDP, and see that it hasn't tended to increase of late. That's because increasingly people prepare for such incidents and keep the costs down. You could also look at the impact on actual investment returns from such natural disasters, and discover that most valuable productive activity was relatively little affected by it. It seems to affect residential areas more than highly productive businesses, which more often locate themselves away from such risks.

But, as you say, the difficult issue is what transformative changes will occur with larger amounts of global warming. We can't really just project like that. And so there isn't really a reliable literature to analyse. It lies well outside the range of what can be projected.

So maybe this is an issue of, ask an unanswerable question and you'll get a silly answer.

Or maybe it is an issue of employing a consultant to give you the answer you want. There are plenty of consultants out there who provide such services. "Don't have to do anything" is an answer people often would want to have.

[discovolante]

The problem is (if you only consider it a problem when it affects richer countries), things are starting to change pretty quickly. So in that sense the report probably comes too late. But the overall modelling seems to be based on quite significant temperature rises having not that much of an overall effect - and yes the risk of specific tipping points happening at particular times, and their effect, is difficult to predict, but it seems the risk of that doesn't seem to be built into the modelling, from what I can gather.

[dyqik]

A big factor is how investment consultants model the behaviour of the companies being invested in. If you assume that enough of the companies will respond adequately to the risks posed by climate change, and that the investment funds will respond adequately, the funds will thus pick up those companies that win as well as those that lose in roughly equal measure, then you can easily come up with a low risk overall.

If companies are prevented or encouraged not to response adequately, by policy decisions in government, then you can suddenly get a large downside risk long term.

[IvanV]

A victory in the ECHR for a group of older Swiss women complaining about insufficient action against climate change by the Swiss state. Two similar cases from France and Portugal were rejected on technicalities.

Joshua Rosenberg reports that the UK judge on the case thinks it might be a pyrrhic victory. It will actually interfere with the process of determining on a sensible package of measures.

From my perspective, the difficulty of these cases is that a small nation's own carbon reduction measures have a correspondingly small impact on climate change in that nation. A nation, especially a small nation, has practically no power to limit climate change, except in concert with other nations, and they cannot be made to agree. It is one thing to complain that a nation has reneged on its international commitments - and probably the state's own individual citizens are not the suitable claimants in a case about that - it is another to complain that those failures have much direct effect on the individuals in that nation. For they do not.

Demanding that the state take more action to protect its citizens from climate change, and further obtaining a legal right to that, seems to be more likely to get a state to focus on measures to adapt to climate change, than to reduce its carbon output. Since the adaptation measures do lie much more within its control, and can do much to reduce the impact of the climate change on individuals in that nation.

But perhaps that is actually what such states should do, given that the carbon emissions we have already made have "baked in" a large amount of climate change over the next several thousand years, even should we all stop emitting carbon tomorrow. For whilst there is an instant change in climate from atmospheric changes, there is additionally a slow change also as large bodies, such as the oceans, take many years to come to thermal equilibrium given the new heat flows. Feedback effects further affect and delay the new thermal equilibrium.