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Climate change: Do we have the skills to tackle it?
Former Community Member
By working more closely with schools, colleges, and universities, can industry prioritise reskilling and upskilling the current workforce? How do we ensure future engineers have the right skills to address climate change? Comment below to share your thoughts! You can also learn more in our recent IET skills for net zero and a green recovery 2020 survey.
I see your point Rob Eagle, but the question is broader than government intervention. Companies are always working to meet environmental goals for all sorts of reasons - compliance, market expectations, cost-saving, and sometimes for ethical reasons - yet concerns exist that the workforce doesn't have the skills. What do you think the industry could be doing to upskill the workforce?
I think I am quite on topic, I am suggesting that we shouldn't be spending tax payers money on unachievable or pointless campaigns. Leave it to the private sector and market forces - far more effective. A fair point of view I think.
Market forces don't solve a whole class of problems. Pollution is one of those problems.
Market forces didn't encourage the phasing out of single-use plastic bags. It costs nothing to them if the disposable plastic bag they have given you is dumped and left to litter the countryside or blow into the sea. So they see no benefit in solving it. The government chose to add a charge on single-use bags, and their use dropped dramatically.
Market forces won't stop factories from polluting the air, or rivers. It's cheaper to dump your waste into the environment than to pay somebody to take it away. That's why in the 19th century, many rivers were dead and the air was polluted. It took government action to clean that up.
And the thing is, much of this doesn't actually involve spending large amounts of taxpayer's money.
Occasionally, the government does subsidize early adopters of new technologies. So, for example, you currently get a discount if you buy an electric car. But there's nothing "unachievable" about electric cars. The numbers of them being bought every year keep going up. I expect the government to phase out the subsidies before long.
It’s not too hard, it’s pointless. Unless the seriously big polluters change then there is absolutely no point in us doing so. We are a minuscule island on the planet, why impoverish ourselves for some virtuous cause that will, globally, make absolutely no difference whatsoever, it is absolute madness but appeals to the virtuous fools following the current fad.
Oh, and by the way I do not subscribe to the tax everything policy, it generally disproportionately disadvantages the less well off.
We're not that small - we're big enough to be in the G7.
As we are looking for an engineering solution to this we first need to define the problem. There are three things mentioned in the OP:
i) Climate Change
ii) Net Zero
iii) Green Recovery
What are they and what are the problems we are trying to solve?
i) Climate Change has happened, is happening and will continue to happen. Man’s influence on it is at best dubious. The IPCC noted the pause and the deviation from the models in AR5. I am awaiting to see how they deal with this in AR6.
Most of the problems were discussed in this thread which was then closed by the moderators:
What does CO2 Neutral mean? 1) Don’t burn anything that contains carbon? 2) Burn things containing carbon and then stick the carbon back in the ground somehow? 3) Burn things containing carbon and buy carbon credits (indulgences)?
The technology for 2) does not exist in an industrial form yet and probably won’t by 2050. It might be available by 2100. If the whole world is trying to become CO2 neutral there won’t be enough carbon credits to go round for 3) to be practical so that leaves 1).
1) means don’t burn coal, oil or gas (possibly wood as well) for: a) Electricity generation b) Process heating c) Domestic heating d) Transport
iii) Green Recovery, also known in the UK as Build Back Better. What does this mean? What is ‘Green’? It currently seems to mean shift all the pollution to China and then ignore it. In Germany it seems to mean cut down forests to install wind turbines. I guess they can at least burn the wood and get a double ‘Green Boost’. Does it mean cover as much of the landscape as possible with low energy density wind and solar PV generation?
The main problems I see are pollution and overuse of finite resources. Both of these are made worse by the increasing world population. Is the IET looking at these or just virtue signalling about ‘Climate Change’
