Vive la France!

Congratulations to France, which has de loin the lowest per capita CO2 emissions in the G8. Good news for those who think the future is nuclear. Of course some of us think that the future will not be nuclear. If anyone has a G8 league table of hazardous waste per capita please post the link.

PS I am guessing France benefits from a bit of warm weather too, from a quick look at the Canada column. The dataset comes from here if you are after the source.

1 in 3 Brits say climate change is bunkum

The BBC published a poll in February showing 25% of British people think Climate Change is not happening. Another 10% believe it is happening, but it isn't man made. So it's official: 1 in 3 Brits do not believe in man-made Climate Change.

Well, I for one am one of the other two. I doubt I could express my reasons as well as Peter Gleick in his letter to Science magazine this month, signed by 250 members of the US National Academy of Sciences. Sensible, straightforward stuff.




Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8500443.stm 

We're saving £5 of energy a year - that's all

In March we posted that UK residential CO2 emissions were 500 years off target. Apologies. It turns out that we are in fact only 369 years off target - as shown below. The trend rate of improvement since the year 2000 is 0.4% per annum. In other words, since there are 27 million households in the UK, we're cutting our actual CO2 emissions by about 25 kg per household per year. 

Another way of looking at this: the total impact of all UK energy saving policies is about £5 of energy saved per household, per annum. Now, that's not a figure you'll hear quoted very often in the House of Commons.