Rishi said he wanted an honest, open conversation about net zero, and that he was committed to meeting UK climate targets.

So let's run the numbers on what his speech means:

https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1704518476998852987

At energy security day in March, Rishi Sunak's government increased the gap between our net zero ambitions and our actions, by focusing on new oil and gas extraction.

Today's announcement is worse.

All eyes on Ed for how Labour would respond to IRA. He's bullish: 'we should match US ambition on climate action and stop moaning' #GAevent Ed: the winners of the green global race will not be decided in a decade. They're being decided now. IRA supercharges the race to decide who wins.

The thing about CCS is that we need it (for a narrowing range of heavy industry + greenhouse gas removals) but not all uses are valuable. A 🧵

A decade ago, I said we’d want 10GW of power CCS by 2030 (greenallianceblog.org.uk/2012/04/02/a-s…), or we’d need more wind power. That was before…

https://twitter.com/rharrabin/status/1639916571169636352

we made offshore wind cheap. Today, I can barely see the case for one CCS power plant - much better to build cheaper wind and (probably) use hydrogen or long duration batteries to fill the gaps when the wind doesn’t blow.

Same story for steel. My colleague @VernerViisas showed…

You've probably heard a lot about the US Inflation Reduction Act. You're gonna hear a lot more over the next 18 months. Read these essays to get our take on what IRA means, and how the UK can respond.

Here's a 🧵on my take.

https://twitter.com/GreenAllianceUK/status/1633757219408818176

IRA was born of crisis.

For unions, the crisis was of offshoring.
For climate activists, the crisis was failure of any prospect of 'well below 2c'
For Democrats, the crisis was Trump beating Clinton.

IRA is an emergency response for all three groups. Emergency means 2 things:

Big announcement from @DefraGovUK today on ELM. Perhaps the first significant one in years and on balance a small step in the right direction. What can we take from it? 🧵 First, the good news! the highest value-for-money bit has survived: Landscape Recovery is expanding, if slowly. The first round was FAR more popular than expected, and supporting farmers on 10% of land to do LR-type activity could halve the land system's carbon emissions by 2035.

The report contains multitudes! Impossible to summarise in a tweet, so instead here's what jumped out at me:🧵

https://twitter.com/adamvaughan_uk/status/1613601738593796118

Its focus is on growth and business and yet it lacks any squeamishness about regulation (of buildings, boilers, cars) and state facilitation (deployment roadmaps for renewables, H2; and directing regulators to hit net zero).

sigh

I shouldn't have to do this but let me explain why the future won't, in fact, be cold and dark if we power it from renewables. thetimes.co.uk/article/the-fu… THREAD This article (paywalled, likely a good thing in this case) draws heavily on a concept called 'Energy return on investment' or EROI.

It was popular in the peak oil days of 2007/8.

Basically, it said modern civilsation would end if we used energy resources that had low return.

Definitely worth reading Guy's take on how to protect land for nature. I like it, but I have a few points of friendly critique:

https://twitter.com/guyshrubsole/status/1550060001661751302

1. I think Guy underplays paying landowners (and tenants!). Why? Nearly 4 in 10 farms are unprofitable without basic payments; rising to 7/10 without agri-environment payments.

Paying the least profitable farmers to restore nature could be a way of levelling up rural Britain.

I find that quoting 'primary energy' is a useful heuristic for misinformation, which this piece absolutely is. Here's why: (short 🧵) dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1… Primary energy is energy input. What you care about is 'final energy demand': the energy the wheels of your car, for example. This matters because fossil fuelled machines waste so much primary energy that it makes it look hard to replace them with clean energy. Some comparisons:

Discontent over gas prices is only going to get louder, and I'm worried that enviros think it'll be a rational debate that is stacked in our favour.

After all, it's fossil gas prices that are responsible, and renewables+insulation are cheap.

So just get out of gas, right? Uh no. Energy bills are complicated and boring:
- 49% of people don't know what the energy price cap does
- only 26% are confident about how their bills are calculated

The past half decade shows that good stories win out over true ones, especially when knowledge is low and...

You will all be reading about the great gas price spike, fertiliser companies stopping production, and energy companies going bust. A quick THREAD on #GasPrice First, what's going on? 4 UK nukes are unexpectedly off, we've had one of the least windy summers in 60 years, and the UK's biggest interconnector (to France) caught fire last week. That means scarcity in clean electricity, and more demand for gas power. Events, dear boy!

A 'supply ourselves' consumption frame is the wrong one for a declining oil/gas resource. Instead, we should be asking what we pay to extend UK oil/gas production, and whether it's worth it. A short thread:

https://twitter.com/NathalieThomas3/status/1432979903511678976

OGCS's latest publication makes it look like new oil/gas extraction magically fits into carbon budgets (left image). This is misleading. Around half of gas use requires CCS by 2035 (right image), even though total use declines by close to half over this period.

This is the key problem with offsets. Residual emissions mean planting a forest the size of Australia to keep below 1.5c, and we don't have a spare Australia sitting around. If we use offsets for emissions we could instead cut, we'll need even _more_ land.

https://twitter.com/CamillaHodgson/status/1432661417547767817

Now don't get me wrong - I'm totally up for planting an Australia (or India) worth of biodiverse forest, and having credits money pay for it. The problem is where.

That's why we need an offsets regulator, as proposed here: green-alliance.org.uk/The_flight_pat…