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Climate change: and rendering property obsolete

  • by JW

It’s hot out there – as noted by the BBC:

Climate change: Heatwave made ‘at least’ five times more likely by warming

 

And changes in the mean temperature could mean changes in the extremes – as this video on Vimeo shows:

 

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Causes and Consequences of Climate and Weather Extremes – Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Stanford University

 

The UK government is taking steps to tackle this:

UK for a green future: Landmark Green Finance Strategy announced

Investing in action to combat climate change

 

Because it has set very high targets and has to act on them, as reported by CNN:

 

Drastic restrictions on almost every aspect of people’s lives, from the cars they drive, the way they heat their homes, to the fridges they buy — even the food stored in them. That is the reality of what awaits us in 2050 if a UK government pledge to cut greenhouse emissions to “net zero” is to be met.

If it can do it, the country will become the world’s first major economy to stop contributing to climate change. But the goal is extremely ambitious — the roadblocks massive.

What would life be like in a zero-carbon country?

 

Because: not acting on climate change could be expensive – as a piece in today’s Conversation points out:

 

Climate change: real estate worth billions could become obsolete – unless owners act now

From the school strikes for climate, to Extinction Rebellion protests and calls for a Green New Deal, citizens around the world are putting pressure on their governments to prevent global warming more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

In the UK, these efforts have met with some success – the government has declared a “climate emergency” and promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. Even so, scepticism persists in some quarters: the chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Hammond, has argued that the UK government’s goal may be unaffordable, based on estimates that the transition to a zero-carbon economy could cost up to £1 trillion.

Of course, there is likely to be significant public money spent on renewable energy transition and carbon offsetting. The costs of assets made obsolete by climate change policy – such as unexploited fossil fuelreserves – is also potentially huge.

But the problem with perspectives like Hammond’s is that they don’t balance the cost of acting now against the cost of doing nothing. In the UK and around the world, people live and work in buildings that are typically powered, heated and cooled using energy from fossil fuels. If these buildings are not retrofitted with energy efficiency measures, there is a real risk they will be rendered obsolete by policies aimed at reducing greenhouse emissions…

Climate change: real estate worth billions could become obsolete – unless owners act now