is anyone else considering their carbon footprint?

We will survive. No doubt about that.

Our grandchildren's children though?

We will all drive electric. Eventually.

Even electric cars are very ungreen. It takes the equivalent of 100,00 miles of car travel energy to make the batteries, they only last eight years and are very difficult to recycle because of the dangerous and damaging heavy earths and rare metals used in making them.

Why do you think XR want think tanks (citizens assemblies) set up to get research going in a serious way?

Sorry - did I interrupt anyone?

Gonegirl Which part of Oxfordshire is that? I live close to Didcot, which once had a magnificent power station, sadly now demolished.

Yes, and the lives those power station chimneys took with them is even sadder Monica.

A lot of the Uber rich have properties and estates scattered across Oxfordshire. And some on Berks and Bucks of course.

And many of them do love their shooting.

It was the collapse of the generation hall that caused the deaths. The cooling towers came down safely. We still do not know what caused the failure although it is nearly 3 years since it happened HSE and the police have yet to report.

A lot of shooting countrywide is rough shooting by farmers and their friends, one local farmer and his friends meet at the pub two doors down after a shoot and I can assure you there is nothing posh about them.

Anyway why are people so unpleasant about people with more money than them and how they spend it. If they want to shoot and what is shot ends up in the pot somewhere, what does it matter. We buy a lot of meat from our local game dealer. It is remarkably cheap. We had wild duck last weekend. It cost £4.50 and fed 3, with stock and scraps in the freezer for soup. A pigeon costs a couple of £s. pheasant not much more.

I miss those cooling towers when I go by train to Didcot to see DS2 and family. They were such a landmark, seen from many miles around.

We buy locally shot game too. If we were all vegetarian there would be no need to preserve them at all. Deer especially do an enormous amount of damage to crops and woodlands here in Norfolk. If we didn't buy them to eat, they would all be destroyed.

On the subject of batteries, apparently it is now possible to make them from hemp rather than lithium (not much difference) and they're much more efficient - but that may be fake news.

I haven't read all 11 pages of this thread in detail, but I wonder if people realise that the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars is intended to take effect from 2035 and that the government intends to ban gas boilers from 2025 in new buildings, and then later on (maybe 2030 ot 2035) they'll start phasing out gas boilers in everyone else's homes. The replacement might be hydrogen or it might be very efficient electrical heating like heat pumps like they have in Sweden.

So plans are well in hand by the government which is something of a relief. I think a lot about my carbon footprint. We live a low carbon lifestyle but a visit to Australia last year wiped out our whole carbon savings for the year (we were in a group learning about leading a low carbon life, that's how I know).

A strange fact I learned recently is that about 80% of the venison consumed in the UK is imported from deer farms in New Zealand. Their meat is more popular and less "gamey" than that from the wild Highland deer which have to be culled periodically to keep their population down and to keep down the tick population.

Good points anniezzz.

No fake news, Nfk. It is real. www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28770876

But the material has to go through a transformation process that is currently 'prohibitively expensive' to work as a battery, but give it 10 years, I reckon and it could be reality.

Wonderful MOnica, that will be truly revolutionary as the hemp battery I read about was incredibly more efficient and powerful that the present lithium ones.

We eat local deer, either culled from the wild or from local deer farms. The wild deer are roe or red deer in Norfolk, sometimes muntjac. There are far more deer around than most people realise.

The venison we get from our local farm shop is wild deer shot locally.

Wild deer are becoming pests in many parts of the country, destroying trees and crops. We have one local restaurant where the owner/chef shoots most of the game he serves to his clients, himself, in woods around his premises.

For me, Didcot means GWR - and huge family ties to GWR.

Wonderful to see that in Europe, huge efforts are being made to boost the use of trains, including the re-introduction of night trains- for inter-Europe travel. If it was not for Emma, our adopted 14 year old dog - we would always go to UK by train- and not fly. So Easy with TGV and Eurostar- town to town and no parking costs, etc.

The argument that if “we didn’t eat them we would have to so destroy them” is so ridiculous. Like we are doing them some kind of favours by eating them.