this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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UK “Green levies” are making heat pumps more expensive | Heat pump takeup in the UK is extremely low. But there's a simple way to reduce running costs for those that make the switch. (www.newstatesman.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

If the government actually want people to install heat pumps (I hope they do) they really need a lot more policy.

The current £7,500 grant sounds great, but when you look at British Gas' installation estimates[1], it costs about £5,000 more than that on average to carry out an installation. That means even for customers who have to install a new heating system (i.e. their current boiler is broken beyond repair) it is still substantially cheaper to install a combi-boiler (less than half the price on average).

And that's people who have to install a new system- if we want to move from fossil fuels we need people to replace working boilers with heat pumps.

Honestly, the government has a tonne of levers it can pull, but any serious plan needs to not rely on people making hard to afford decisions because they are environmentally justified. They beed to actually do something so that the relstive emissions of heating get reflected in the cost of systems and fuel.

[1] https://www.britishgas.co.uk/heating/air-source-heat-pumps/carbon-cruncher.html

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Yep. Needs to have both clearly cheaper up-front costs and longer-term costs paid by the property owner.

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