Thread by @DrSimEvans

UK govt has announced a ban on domestic use of coal & wet wood.

It's designed to cut air pollution – but obviously there are CO2 implications.

Some charts…

First, UK homes use around 7x more wood fuel than coal & the amount is rising quite quickly, whereas coal use is static.

But there is considerable uncertainty around how much wood is actually being used in UK homes…

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

There's also huge uncertainty around how much of the wood used in UK homes is "wet" (ie would be banned by the new policy).

(FWIW I would guess wood sold "wet" isn't necessarily burned wet, as it is often stored)

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

Turning to UK domestic coal use, again, the amount has been static in recent years after falling by around half since the early 2000s

Meanwhile UK coal demand for other uses has fallen dramatically over the past five years, with the total down 83% to less than 10Mt in the 12-mths to October 2019

(most recent data)

This means that domestic coal use is making up a rising share of the UK total, reaching 6% in 2019 and potentially 10% by 2025, once coal-fired power stations are all closed

You'd imagine banning coal is good for the climate…

BUT

UK govt IA assumes banned coal is replaced w "smokeless solid fuel", which has *higher* carbon emissions (tho "black carbon" warming impact is lower)

Net impact isn't calculated…

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

Other obvious uncertainty here is if domestic coal users shift to smokeless fuel long term or ultimately move away from (expensive + polluting) solid-fuel heating

+ need to decarbonise all UK heating for net-zero…

(UK heat "roadmap" coming Q3…)

hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2020-02-…

Oh, here are the data sources for the charts:

gov.uk/government/sta…

gov.uk/government/sta…