[teestub]

I don't think it is unreasonable to guess that humans will survive in one way or another. Paleoclimates have happened with CO2 levels much like those we'll get if we burn all of the fossil fuels. They were 8oC warmer and had crocodiles in the arctic etc. They were teaming with life.

I'm sure getting to that point would entail immeasurable suffering. We should try and avoid that. But we are avoiding suffering, not avoiding annihilation. I think realism matters, otherwise people just call BS on any climate change avoidance action.

Has anyone said that Homo sapiens as a species will be wiped out? What sort of level of civilisation are you predicting to remain, few folk in a cave with pointy sticks? Would you agree that worsening climate will increase the chance of wars, giving is another avenue towards annihilation?

[stone]

Has anyone said that Homo sapiens as a species will be wiped out? What sort of level of civilisation are you predicting to remain, few folk in a cave with pointy sticks? Would you agree that worsening climate will increase the chance of wars, giving is another avenue towards annihilation?

Is it possible that the world gets so hot everyone on earth dies - yes
Is it possible that the world gets so cold that everyone on earth dies - yes
Is the kind of warming that kills everyone more likely if we continue burning fossil fuels - yes
Do I think there's a strong chance that there's still upwards of 8 billion people on the planet in 10 thousand years - no.
Do I think that significant sudden population decrease is most likely due to climate change - No - I'd argue disease and wars are the much more likely culprit at least for the next few centuries and probably for a lot longer.

[teestub]

Ah Nemo said possible, i.e. >0 probability. Are you saying there’s zero chance? We are pretty good at mass extinction events on earth!

[Nemo]

"The climate has been stable (I suppose bistable) for the 60 million years of the current ice age.
This suggests that we are in a minimum but probably a local one.
As a crude analogy think of a ball on a hillside currently sitting in a shallow dip so it doesn't roll.
That's a local minimum for that system. Nudge the ball a bit and it falls back into the dip.
Nudge it out of that dip though and it will roll downhill to the next minimum. - i.munro"

I don't know what temperature graphs you've been looking at, but that all feels very misleading to me.
The climate has been stable for the last 12 thousand years (the Holocene era), since the end of the last ice age.
Before that the climate has been wildly unstable as far back as you want to go.
The only "stability" before that was the roughly 100k year ice age cycle (it's way more complex than that, but that's the basic story).  But that isn't stability - it's massive radical climate shifts, often happening extremely rapidly.

So the ball sitting in a shallow dip analogy feels to me like mindset I was referring to earlier - the idea that everything was perfectly happy and stable until pesky humans came along.  Any analysis of real world data makes that view look a million miles away from the truth.
Sure things have been stable for the past 12 thousand years, and sure, burning fossil fuels has precipitated our move out of that stable zone.  But that we were going to leave that stable zone was always completely inevitable.

So if you want an analogy I'd say a better one was a ball rolling along crazy terrain with loads of bumps and hills and mountains all over the show.  Which has for the last 12 thousand years found a bit of level ground to roll along.  Before it was inevitably going to go off back into crazy territory again.  But just before setting off from the plain again, we've given the ball a kick by burning loads of fossil fuels.  So it's going to roll off over a different part of the crazy territory.

Are there loads of tipping points all over the place.  Sure.  Is it likely that the gulf stream will switch off at some point in the not too distant future - yes.  The complexity of the ocean current system and the interaction with the atmosphere and climate is huge. 

Past 100 thousand years:


Past 1 million years:


Past 65 million years:


Full view of past 500 million years (with data more compressed the further back you go obviously):

"The problem isn't climate change per se, but the unfolding consequences. Increasing disease and conflict are definitely part of the package. The key word is climate change - we have grown a very delicately balanced economic ecosystem which will be highly disrupted by a change to the ecological niche that permitted its development. - mrjonathanr"

Completely agree with everything you posted, and wish more of the discussion of this subject was like that.

Humanity has evolved and survived in relatively small numbers during periods of climate chaos before 12 thousand years ago.  But it has multiplied and multiplied to the vast numbers of people currently on the planet in the very stable last 12 thousand years.  That stability was always going to come to an end. And almost certainly the planet won't support that number of people as and when it does change significantly.

"If we all stop flying we make a huge contribution to reducing carbon output with limited downside - JB"

But it's just not going to happen.
You're not gonna stop people flying any more than you're gonna stop people driving cars.  Exactly the opposite.  Vast amounts more people are going to be doing both in the not too distant future.  As I said before, the rest of the world wants western lifestyles.

What you might do given enough money going in the right places, is come up with an alternative to jet fuel that doesn't cause the same problems.  And eventually electric planes.

To me at least, the "solutions" to any of this don't involve "conscience" or people curtailing their lifestyles.  Because that simply won't work voluntarily, and any government forcing it won't last very long, because people will be looking at all the rest of the world doing what they're not allowed to do. 

The "solution" does entail new tech and so research is the key, not pretending that a few people in the west abstaining from various things is going to make any difference to anything other than how they feel about themselves.

But of course that "solution" is just talking about how to eventually stop burning fossil fuels - that's not going to stop the climate changing.  It will just impact how the climate changes.  That it is going to change, and radically, is completely inevitable.

Ultimately I think over the next few hundred years the vast majority of the easily availble fossil fuels will get burnt.  As it gets harder to get at them, they will become more expensive.  And along the way, other tech will be providing alternatives that eventually get cheaper.  If you want to actually change the total amount of fossil fuels that get burnt, lobby for more money being spent on research, don't waste your time worrying about which holidays you're taking.

And in the meantime, we need to try and mitigate the effects of climate change of all kinds, by trying to make humanity less vulnerable to the kinds of changes that are inevitably coming regardless or whether we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow or in 200 years. 

And try and come up with geo engineering solutions to somewhat clumsily push on the climate in one direction or another.

[stone]

I'm all for research but I think it is naive to imagine our energy system is currently fitting some economic optimum based on the best available technology.

Politics and lobbying have had a HUGE part to play in how we do things. In the 1970s/80s France and Sweden were able to quickly and affordably decarbonise their electricity grids using standard nuclear technology. The USA at that time also built a huge fleet of nuclear power plants (more than any other country). Current ideology/politics dictates against the financing/monopoly set ups that were/are a prerequisite for that.

So to me this is mostly about politics not technology. We already have adequate technology. Amazing technology would help tremendously. But likewise amazingly crap politics can stymy pretty much anything.

[Fultonius]

Nemo, I don't currently have time to do this justice - I maybe come back to this later.

But as a quick response, I agree that we will not reduce c02 quick enough to do anything meaningful and will end up needing to do soem crazy cooling shit, and sadly I agree that we'll probably use most of the oil that's easily available.

Where I STRONGLY disagree, however, is in the attitude of "meaningful C02 reduction isn't feasible, so just carry on as is and then gro-engineer engineer our way out of it"

To me that misses the fundamental shift that humanity needs, which is to love away from seeing nature as something to exploit and something "controllable", to one that is in some way more balanced, less consumptive and in some way mor in harmony with everything we share this planet with.

Re:virtue signaling, again, what you call "virtue signalling" I call "living better". If someone doesn't start to shift the conversation, how will governments ever manage to impose anything? We need both top down measures and bottom up mind shifts, and maximum renewable energy AND comsumption cuts AND probably geoengineering.

I'm not saying this is you specifically, but a LOT of people like the "burn it all, geoengineer our way out the mess" as it is a cumsumers charter to just keep on living the good life. I think this is a folly.

[Will Hunt]

as it is a cumsumers charter to just keep on living the good life..

Your autocorrect has somewhat told on you there.

[Tom de Gay]

This 20k year view is quite sobering:
https://m.xkcd.com/1732/

Sidenote: 8A in 2600 BC is a fine effort!

[SA Chris]

As is Grade 31....

[Fultonius]

as it is a cumsumers charter to just keep on living the good life..

Your autocorrect has somewhat told on you there.

[Nemo]

"In the 1970s/80s France and Sweden were able to quickly and affordably decarbonise their electricity grids using standard nuclear technology. - stone"

Fully support the use of current nuclear fission reactors.  And all renewables for that matter.  Getting electricity generation away from burning fossil fuels is clearly a good thing for a whole pile of reasons as well as the climate, from pollution to reliance on other countries for energy supply. 

The caveat is obviously cost.  I'm definitely not for borrowing loads of money to spend on short term climate goals.  Being in more debt just leaves any country more vulnerable to the situation when things really go bad and you really need to borrow money.  And any money spent on the above is money not being spent on research, which I'd argue for the time being is more important.  But a gradual move to decarbonise the electicity grid is definitely sensible.

"We already have adequate technology. - stone"

Here we're gonna disagree.  Technically you're obviously right, given an infinite amount of money.  The problem with current renewable tech is that in the vast majority of places it's still way more expensive than digging stuff out of the ground and burning it.  The advancing tech and the research to support it, is what is absolutely required to bring the price of energy generation down so that it's eventually cheaper than fossil fuels.  It is that that is completely critical, if you actually want to have a real world impact on the climate.  Someone somewhere will always keep burning stuff until it's cheaper not to do so. 

"meaningful C02 reduction isn't feasible, so just carry on as is and then gro-engineer engineer our way out of it - Fultonius"

I think perhaps you have me pidgeonholed in a box that I'm not actually in.  I certainly don't think that. 
It's not like I'm happy that we're burning loads of fossil fuels.  It would obviously have been way better if we weren't doing so.  If we'd got lucky, we may have got another few thousand years of climate stability before the chaos ensued, which would have given us a lot more time for tech to advance so we were in a much better position to deal with it.

So, I'm all for stuff that will actually work in reducing the total amount of fossil fuels that get burnt.
So getting away from fossil fueled power stations, multinational agreements to achieve CO2 reduction, COP etc, completely support all that.

What I don't support is stuff that might make people feel better but at best doesn't work and at worst is counter productive.

What matters primarily is how much fossil fuels are burnt before we get to the point where renewables are cheaper.  Reducing demand for fossil fuels in the west can certainly slow down the problem, giving research a bit more time to make renewables cheaper.  So it can potentially help.  But above all else, what's needed is vastly more funding for research, across the globe.  Without that, gaining a bit of time by slowing down the problem slightly doesn't actually achieve anything, it just changes who's burning stuff and when.

"We need both top down measures and bottom up mind shifts - Fultonius"

The trouble is that the bottom up mind shifts aren't working terribly well and aren't likely to. 
The left just isn't good at getting out of its echo chambers and understanding what the majority of people in society are thinking. 
And by keeping pushing people who don't buy what is being sold, what you end up doing is getting right wing politicians elected across Europe and the US.
Which puts in jeapordy the stuff which really can make a difference - which is the top down stuff and the funding for research.

So to take flights from the discussion above.
Anyone thinking that enough people are voluntarily going to stop flying to make any difference to anything are living in a parallel universe.
Obviously, a government could choose to ban flying (or more realistically, massively tax it).
But unless you've got agreement across most of the planet to do that, then any specific governments doing that are just going to get kicked out by voters.

So if you keep making people's lives more miserable by making them pay more for driving, or preventing them going on holiday.  You might think you're helping, but if the end result is getting right wing politicians elected, the tiny bit of gain you might potentially have made, is massively outweighed by the harm that is done.

You have to take people with you, and the left has spectacularly failed to do that on this subject and many others over the past few decades.

"To me that misses the fundamental shift that humanity needs, which is to move away from seeing nature as something to exploit and something "controllable", to one that is in some way more balanced, less consumptive and in some way mor in harmony with everything we share this planet with. - Fultonius"

In one sense (which maybe was what you meant), I'm all for harmony.  I'm all for trying to get to the point where we're not destroying rainforests, burning everything in sight, using all the natural resources we can get our hands on and wiping out vast numbers of species of animals etc.  On all that, I'm sure we'll be in agreement.

But if you're talking about the climate I very strongly disagree.  Because I think it's an entirely counterproductive view.
It all sounds nice of course.  In Hollywood or Ghibli movies, and left leaning books.

But any use of the word harmony in the context of a discussion about the climate just strikes me as absurd. 
We live on a crazy spinning rock, with an insanely complex climate, atmosphere and ocean.
This system is brutal on all species on earth, and we're no different.  We've multiplied massively under stable conditions.  We're gonna struggle massively as those conditions change.  It has wiped out many many species before, and it will no doubt wipe out lots more including large swathes of humanity going forwards.
That was always going to be the case.

Even if you take humanity out of the equation entirely - the climate system has never been and never will be in any kind of harmony with anything.
It's romanticism, not realism.
This isn't aimed at you, but more generally, I tend to see the above kinds of views in regard to the climate as part of an anti scientific mindset that is depressingly prevalent in the green movement.
Obviously there's plenty of people in the green movement who don't feel that way which is great.
But there's way too many that can't stand the idea of even using current nuclear power, let alone any kind of geo engineering.
That really isn't helpful.

If you just let the climate do whatever it's going to do, then regardless of whether we stop burning fossil fuels or not, humanity will be completely ripped to pieces across vast swathes of the globe on a regular basis.

If we want to survive in the long term, romantic dreaming about harmony in the context of the climate needs to go out of the window, and we absolutely need to focus on having a degree of (admittedly very crude) control.  It will still do all sorts of crazy unpredictable stuff, but basic nudging towards warmer or colder isn't beyond the wit of humanity.  We're doing a pretty good job of nudging it in the warmer direction currently.  We need to figure out practical ways of nudging it the other way. 


So I think my wishlist for discussions around the climate would be:
-  Stop pretending the earth is doomed in the next few decades - it isn't.  Saying that stuff just makes everything else said by those people sound completely implausible, and means large swathes of society ignore the other stuff that actually they should be listening to, stops them supporting the kind of research funding that is needed etc.  And makes people less bothered by the completely ridiculous stuff that the likes of Trump are saying.
- Stop trying to pretend that bottom up changes to lifestyles is ever going to be an effective strategy.  All it's going to do is piss people off to the point they vote for right wing politicians that make everything else that needs doing way harder.  Whilst in the rest of the world 10 people will be adopting that lifestyle for every 1 in the west that stops anyway.
- Fund research vastly more than it is currently.  This is the critical thing that needs to happen, and is the primary reason we have to keep society on board, in terms of them being OK with government funds (across the world) going in this direction.
- Get out of the mindset where everything will be fine if we just stop burning stuff.  It won't.  We need to figure out how to start having a degree of control, regardless of how much fossil fuel ends up getting burnt.
- Over time, vastly increase spending on making humanity less vulnerable to climate change of all kinds - because in one way or another, it's coming.

[abarro81]

What research do you want to fund? One issue here is that big cost reductions will likely require learning by doing. Western research didn't make solar cheap, high volume Chinese production did. Ditto batteries AFAIK. Plus a lot of the likely future cost is not at the project level it's at the grid level.. I really don't think we'll solve this stuff by doing government funded research.

[stone]

I think the Chinese  rail system is relevant to discussions about flying. They recently built a rail system that has killed off their domestic air travel. The equivalent in Europe would be like everyone traveling to Greece and Spain from UK and Sweden by train because it was easier than flying.

We need to be a bit more humble and learn from that.

Having their approach to building stuff like rail networks does not need to entail any hint of their awful human rights etc.

The thing I most disagree with in Nemo's post was the view that gov debt is somehow not a political entity but rather a hard constraint outside human choice. It is a system for organising ourselves. We can meld that system according to how we choose to govern ourselves. The hard constraints are human and natural resources. Debt etc are just means to best use those those human and natural resources. Don't let the tail wag the dog.

[Fultonius]

So much to unpick there, and I don't have the time to deal with all of it now.

Quickly 1. Wow, that was a massive straw man rant where you said "harmony, if you mean the climate".

No, I mean living within the planet's carrying capacity - be it water, soil (food production), natural resources. We know now that continually expanding a "consume, consume, consume" isn't going to cut it. That mindset NEEDS to change, or any amount of geo-tweakery isn't going to matter as we'll just hit the next natural barrier. Probably soil, maybe antibiotic resistant bacteria?
I'm fully aware the climate will do its thing and that this is just one major shock for humanity, and we need to adapt etc.

2. I'm with Alex here, funding research is very slow, very inefficient. I'm all for it in a general sense, but it's NOT the way to get current renewables (wind) to be cheaper. They already are pretty cheap, pretty efficient (the fundamentals of physics  is the upper limit and we already are at that) so the rest is.mostly manufacturing omlimisation, figuring out low care steel, improving the polymers in the bakde, but it's all incremental - there are NO opportunities for massive breakthroughs becuase, you know, physics....

If you fund basic research now, you might see the benefit in 20 years. By all means fund fusion....

The biggest bottle necks for deployment in renewables just now in the UK are physical things like lack of grid connection, lack of experienced resource, cost of finance.  If you swapped out current tech for some hypothetical "Uber tech" it can only improve things but a few %, way less than adding one more turbine to the wind park....


3
Echo chamber. Guilty. We do have a lot of friends that are actively making efforts, flying less, finding the enjoyment that staying local, consuming less and being more aligned with nature can bring. And we know on some ways we're being the martyr for potentially no benefit but thats out choice, we hope our actions influence enough others that they also do that too. Maybe it's naive, but maybe others read this and it nudges then in the right direction.

The WORST thing I can imagine is the developing world deciding it wants what we have not realising it doesn't actually bring happiness to be stuck in this horrid consumption loop.


Final point. Travel is great, it's on our nature, brings us all closer together, it's good, so I really hope we sort out a sustainable way to do it, quickly.

[stone]

The arbitrary and yet overwhelming significance of financing arrangements, can be seen by comparing Hinkley-C with how in the 1970s and 1980s, Sweden, France and even the USA quickly and affordably built large fleets of nuclear power plants.

In the 1970s and 1980s, governments more or less paid upfront for nuclear power plants as they were built. They "got the money" for that by issuing government debt with a yield pretty similar to the inflation rate. So the overall real cost was no more than the building cost. That all makes sense and comes about when public purpose is the political/ideological motivation.

Hinkley-C is financed by the government agreeing to police a system whereby Hinkley-C gets paid a fixed price for electricity as it is produced into the future. That fixed price was negotiated to be whatever was needed to get anyone to pay for building Hinkley-C in the prospect of receiving that fixed electricity price into the future. The terrible problem is that there is a HUGE political risk to that revenue stream and that political risk is entirely outside the control of the people building/running/financing Hinkley-C. A few years after building, some government could go all Angela Merkel and shut it down for no reason. Or they could say electricity was only going to be bought when it wasn't windy, or whatever. Consequently the agreed electricity price has to be extortionate. Consequently the financing cost is five times the build cost.

It is basically a gamble for the financiers, if all goes according to plan, then they will be rolling in it. If Angela Merkel II gets elected, they will lose everything. That is the polar opposite to how nationally significant projects ought to be financed. The risk to the debt holders ought to be no more than the risk that the nation won't carry on (ie "risk free"). There is a big appetite for such risk-free debt. Public purpose projects should make the most of that.

Neoliberal financing ideology is what has killed nuclear power.

[stone]

I agree with Nemo, that blue-sky transformative technological leap-forwards are great and should be nurtured.

How to do that isn't all that obvious to me. I suspect that say increasing UK research council funding of "energy research" or "physics research" 10x would very much get diminishing returns. Might it lure more capable people away from wasting their time in investment banking or whatever? -I don't know.

I totally agree with Alex that "learning by doing" is crucial. I don't think that is just about finessing efficiency. Conceptual breakthroughs can come about in response to mundane pressures. I also think having an overall high-pressure economic milieu is crucial. I think it is important to argue the case that inflation risk is worth it because our future depends on the technological breakthroughs a high-pressure economy gives rise to. There is plenty of effort/money put into swaying public opinion in the opposite direction.

I also think we should give a lot more thought to making the most of the potential of humanity at large. If someone is among the most privileged 1B people on earth and is psyched and talented enough to make a difference to fusion research, then perhaps there is already enough fusion funding to make the most of them. I think stuff such as free online education available worldwide might be the best use of resources. Also ensuring high quality open access academic publishing; lots of scholarships for foreign students etc.

Within the UK, funding for stuff such as the "Sure Start" pre-school education might be money well spent to get closer to fusion power and the like.

[Nemo]

@Fultonius - pretty much agree with all of that post.
 

"The WORST thing I can imagine is the developing world deciding it wants what we have. - Fultonius"

But unfortunately, as far as I can see, the above is what is actually happening, and so that needs to be taken into account in any realistic planning for future climate change. 

@abarrow81
Yeah, you're right, I should have said tech and engineering in general throughout, rather than emphasising government funded research.
Specifically what I had in mind was properly funded global scale nuclear fusion and geo engineering projects.  If I'm honest I'd also thought there were likely to be significant more gains to be had in the renewables sector, but Fultonius clearly knows his stuff on that, and so it sounds like it's gonna be unlikely.

But it would be great if at COP, as well as agreeing CO2 targets etc, large numbers of countries could agree to put significant cash into joint projects at a large scale to try and figure out practical ways of cooling the earth.  I really don't think that's that unrealistic, given proper funding.  I'm thinking SpaceX type resources going into geo engineering projects rather than giving billionaires a pretty view of the earth.

Other than that, I agree with a fair bit of what's been said since my last post, and there were a few things I wasn't aware of, which is why this forum is interesting.  I'm well aware that whilst I don't know nothing on this subject, I don't have time these days for keeping up to date with everything.
I posted my current thoughts on this to be told why I'm wrong.  More than happy to change my views on stuff, given sufficient new information.

[stone]

The talk about fusion made me wonder just how transformative it might be. A quick google gives the impression that it won't be a route to boundless cheap energy. It will be hard and expensive much like other alternatives to fossil fuels. I'm all for pushing forward and getting it going. But it certainly doesn't look like a good idea to hold back on other stuff in the anticipation that fusion will save the day. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2023.113511

[Moo]

I went down a fusion rabbet hole recently ( not that I understood a whole heap of it mind ) and unfortunately the prevailing opinion seemed to be that it'd actually be a bit useless by the time we got it figured out. By then wind / solar / tidal geothermal etc would be so cheap and so efficient that it'd be difficult to make it economically viable.

[stone]

I'm a bit wary when people say wind and solar are or will shortly be cheap. Yes they are cheap when it is windy and/or sunny.

So what.

What matters is the total system cost of a reliable grid powered by wind+solar+tide+ whatever renewables are geographically feasible. There will need to be extraordinary interconnectors and yet-to-be-developed storage and demand response systems. That will be very expensive and hard to achieve.

Remember the UK is already clear-cut logging ancient woodland in North America as a bullshit box ticking fudge to claim reliable renewables by way of converting Drax to woodburning https://dogwoodalliance.org/our-work/wood-pellet-biomass/

[teestub]

Remember the UK is already clear-cut logging ancient woodland in North America as a bullshit box ticking fudge to claim reliable renewables by way of converting Drax to woodburning

Drax have all their wood sources in their ESG report, the majority of what they burn looks to be industrial waste from saw mills and thinnings.

https://www.drax.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Final-Signed-ESG-2023-Supplement.pdf

There’s some more info on the different biomass streams here https://www.drax.com/sustainable-bioenergy/better-forest-management%E2%80%8A/

Unless they are just completely fudging it, it seems likely that those old growth forests are being cut down for the reasons they always have been (paper, timber) and Drax are using the byproducts?

[stone]

The get out that Drax use is that they only burn non-timber-quality wood. Ancient swamp forests have hollow trees etc and can be deemed non-timber-quality -so get clear cut and pelleted.

I think it is well worth listening to the people who live where the pellet wood is being sourced. https://www.nrdc.org/resources/our-forests-arent-fuel

The extraordinary quantities of wood required to fuel Drax and similar power stations elsewhere in Europe make a mockery of the claim that it comes as a byproduct of the timber/paper industry.

[stone]

If it were possible to have grid scale power-stations from by-product biomass, then a key principle IMO should be that those biomass power stations should be close to the wood source.

Then there would be genuine accountability and transparency. If forests got clear cut to fuel them, the power station companies would have to explain themselves.

As it is, Drax can imagine a counter-factual scenario under which what they do would be OK. That becomes a talking point to get UK politicians dithering whilst Drax continue.

UK politicians don't have to face the people where the forests are being clear cut. That is the only thing that would stop them dithering.

[stone]

Teestub, I was struck by your link to the Drax ESG report. I don't know how these things work but if Drax got shut down (as it needs to be ASAP), then I'd imagine an ESG report like that would open them up to accusations of security fraud. I suppose it is a prerequisite for their business model though, along with paying Ofgem fines for not adequately reporting the source of their wood:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/29/drax-fine-ofgem-data

[teestub]

From the article link

. Ofgem said there was no evidence to suggest that the breach was deliberate, and said instead that it was “technical in nature”. It also found no evidence that the biomass sourced for the power plant was unsustainable or that Drax had wrongly laid claim to millions in renewable energy subsidies.

I like you would prefer a nice nuclear power station where Drax is, but I guess their business model is based on govt policy that wood pellets count as renewable? On a different scale, but I’m  currently working at a large property with biomass where the heating is always on high and the windows are open as required, as the more pellets they burn, the more they get from the incentive scheme. It seems v difficult to get incentives for these sorts of things right without people finding ways to ‘game’ them.