Net Zero

midlandslad

Member
Location
Midlands
Morrison’s have made a big commitment for all farmer suppliers to be bet zero by 2030.

How will machinery intensive businesses achieve this particularly thinking of the root cropping guys and large dairy units.
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
Morrison’s have made a big commitment for all farmer suppliers to be bet zero by 2030.

How will machinery intensive businesses achieve this particularly thinking of the root cropping guys and large dairy units.

I wonder if this will apply for all farm derived produce that they sell, including imported, or do these rules only apply to domestic production?

What about non-farmer (i.e. indirect) suppliers?

Will this apply to manufactured products also? I’m thinking of prepared items like ready meals and non-food goods also.

Will Morrisons themselves also be carbon neutral in their own operations?

Will offsetting be considered acceptable, or will they see it (correctly) as passing the buck?

Sounds to me a lot like virtue signalling with headlines, making others do the work to grab those headlines, but underneath no fundamental change at grass roots just the creation of a fuzzy feeling of “saving the planet” by those in denial.
 

Treg

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Cornwall
Haven’t Morrison’s ever heard of Photosynthesis?
Perhaps they are too stupid to understand that every farmer growing grass or any crops that are green during their lifecycle have always been carbon neutral and carbon footprints must include all the CO2 that photosynthesis captures.
I think they have & are just doing a bit of clever marketing.
 

delilah

Member
Morrison’s have made a big commitment for all farmer suppliers to be bet zero by 2030.

Of course they have. Because net zero by 2030 is the target the NFU have set for the industry. that's all of you, whether or not an NFU member. And the NFU isn't run by or for farmers, it is run by and for the supermarkets.
Wake up ffs.
 

Gong Farmer

Member
BASIS
Location
S E Glos
Haven’t Morrison’s ever heard of Photosynthesis?
Perhaps they are too stupid to understand that every farmer growing grass or any crops that are green during their lifecycle have always been carbon neutral and carbon footprints must include all the CO2 that photosynthesis captures.
Indeed, just make up some figures, it's what they'll do after all.
 

DrWazzock

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
I’m willing to host half a dozen mega wind turbines but listen to the nimbies protest when you even mention it.
Everybody thinks net zero is wonderful until it affects their personal lifestyle, spoils what they perceive to be a nice view as they sit looking out of their retirement home window for 30 years drawing an index linked publicly funded pension. Don’t even ask how any of that can possibly be sustainable.
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
Seems like a good place to post this article I read the other day:


We are still not being told the true cost of Net Zero
The failure to have an honest debate about climate change has squeezed out one vital fact – the Government's targets will leave us poorer
ROSS CLARK5 March 2021 • 12:58pm
Ross Clark


If it involved any other subject, the news that the Government hid estimates of the true cost of one of its policies would be a scandal. Imagine, for example, how bonkers the Guardian would go if it emerged that ministers and civil servants had colluded to conceal their real estimate of the costs of Brexit. But when it emerges that the Treasury withheld what it regarded as the "more realistic" £70 billion a year estimate of the cost of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 there was barely a murmur.
There is a long tradition of dishonesty over the cost of climate change policies. It wasn’t so long ago that the Coalition was implausibly trying to tell us that the Climate Change Act was going to save us money, by creating "green jobs" and saving us from ever-increasing fossil fuel prices. The collapse in oil and gas prices in 2014 put paid to that pretence, and when Theresa May’s government upped the legally-binding target contained in the act from an 80 per cent cut by 2050 to net zero emissions by that date the then chancellor, Philip Hammond, did quietly admit it would cost us £50 billion a year. But it now transpires that officials, even at the time, thought that an under-estimate.
The Government has got away with committing Britain to such a ruinously expensive policy because we have no proper debate over climate change and what we should do about it. The Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 with only five MPs voting against. Opposition to the net zero target is squashed through emotive charges of climate change "denial" and falsely claiming that all those who criticise climate change policy are stooges for the oil industry. The absence of debate has blinded us to the reality that while many countries have made vague pledges to cut emissions, only a tiny handful have tied themselves down with legally-binding targets which provide no wriggle room.
Very few people are aware of a fatal flaw in the Climate Change Act that could condemn most of our remaining manufacturing industry to oblivion. The net zero target only refers to "territorial emissions" – ie those physically spewed out within Britain. It excludes aviation, shipping and emissions elsewhere in the world made in the name of providing goods and services for UK consumers.
It is not hard to work out what will happen: UK manufacturing will be forced to relocate to China and other countries which have not been so foolish as to paint themselves into a corner by setting a net zero target before they have any idea how it can be achieved. We have as yet no commercially viable means of decarbonising high-emitting industries such as steel and cement, for example.
That is why even the Government’s higher estimate of £70 billion a year cost to achieve net zero by 2050 is likely itself to be an under-estimate. If we lose these industries and are forced to import these goods (to no net benefit for the planet) the cost to the economy will be far greater.
The public is right to be concerned about the environment and there are all sorts of reasons why we should invest in clean energy, hopefully eventually phasing out fossil fuels. But the real deniers are those who claim that we can achieve a unilateral policy of net zero by 2050 without serious costs to the UK economy, if not an outright diminution in living standards.

 

DaveGrohl

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Cumbria
Net zero, what a joke. Morrisons are having a larf. There's hardly an industry in the world that will ever be net zero, let alone by 2030. Farming is one of the few that actually absorb carbon to start with. Every other industry/human emit emit emit. Some sections of humanity have lost their minds and all capacity to think logically. As Bald Rick says, what a time to be alive.
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
Net zero, what a joke. Morrisons are having a larf. There's hardly an industry in the world that will ever be net zero, let alone by 2030. Farming is one of the few that actually absorb carbon to start with. Every other industry/human emit emit emit. Some sections of humanity have lost their minds and all capacity to think logically. As Bald Rick says, what a time to be alive.

Good point that. I wonder if when people put in solar panels or a wind turbine whether they actually consider the carbon emissions used to manufacture that too. Or do they just include the good bits and ignore the rest? I think so.
 

DaveGrohl

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Cumbria
Good point that. I wonder if when people put in solar panels or a wind turbine whether they actually consider the carbon emissions used to manufacture that too. Or do they just include the good bits and ignore the rest? I think so.
Having already done that (turbine), I looked into the carbon used in the process out of curiosity. The carbon would be paid back in less than a year in our case but I can't offer a source for that I'm afraid.
 

DaveGrohl

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Cumbria
Seems like a good place to post this article I read the other day:


We are still not being told the true cost of Net Zero
The failure to have an honest debate about climate change has squeezed out one vital fact – the Government's targets will leave us poorer
ROSS CLARK5 March 2021 • 12:58pm
Ross Clark


If it involved any other subject, the news that the Government hid estimates of the true cost of one of its policies would be a scandal. Imagine, for example, how bonkers the Guardian would go if it emerged that ministers and civil servants had colluded to conceal their real estimate of the costs of Brexit. But when it emerges that the Treasury withheld what it regarded as the "more realistic" £70 billion a year estimate of the cost of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 there was barely a murmur.
There is a long tradition of dishonesty over the cost of climate change policies. It wasn’t so long ago that the Coalition was implausibly trying to tell us that the Climate Change Act was going to save us money, by creating "green jobs" and saving us from ever-increasing fossil fuel prices. The collapse in oil and gas prices in 2014 put paid to that pretence, and when Theresa May’s government upped the legally-binding target contained in the act from an 80 per cent cut by 2050 to net zero emissions by that date the then chancellor, Philip Hammond, did quietly admit it would cost us £50 billion a year. But it now transpires that officials, even at the time, thought that an under-estimate.
The Government has got away with committing Britain to such a ruinously expensive policy because we have no proper debate over climate change and what we should do about it. The Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 with only five MPs voting against. Opposition to the net zero target is squashed through emotive charges of climate change "denial" and falsely claiming that all those who criticise climate change policy are stooges for the oil industry. The absence of debate has blinded us to the reality that while many countries have made vague pledges to cut emissions, only a tiny handful have tied themselves down with legally-binding targets which provide no wriggle room.
Very few people are aware of a fatal flaw in the Climate Change Act that could condemn most of our remaining manufacturing industry to oblivion. The net zero target only refers to "territorial emissions" – ie those physically spewed out within Britain. It excludes aviation, shipping and emissions elsewhere in the world made in the name of providing goods and services for UK consumers.
It is not hard to work out what will happen: UK manufacturing will be forced to relocate to China and other countries which have not been so foolish as to paint themselves into a corner by setting a net zero target before they have any idea how it can be achieved. We have as yet no commercially viable means of decarbonising high-emitting industries such as steel and cement, for example.
That is why even the Government’s higher estimate of £70 billion a year cost to achieve net zero by 2050 is likely itself to be an under-estimate. If we lose these industries and are forced to import these goods (to no net benefit for the planet) the cost to the economy will be far greater.
The public is right to be concerned about the environment and there are all sorts of reasons why we should invest in clean energy, hopefully eventually phasing out fossil fuels. But the real deniers are those who claim that we can achieve a unilateral policy of net zero by 2050 without serious costs to the UK economy, if not an outright diminution in living standards.

Some salient points there. It's a shame he only focussed on the costs and didn't consider how deluded the whole concept was to start with. Maybe that'll be his next article? Oh, and we all know what to make of govt estimates. Multiply by a figure somewhere between 10 and 100 and you'll get to a ballpark.
 

DrWazzock

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
Renewables with storage, and mostly nuclear. That's the only way we will make any inroads.
All the rest is trying to pull ourselves up with our own bootlaces.
Even plants grow without farming, always have done and always will. I don't think its quite right that we as farmers suddenly take the moral high ground because we are attendant to natural processes, while pointing the finger at other industries for whom net zero is completely and inherently unattainable. Carbon credits and offsetting need knocking on the head in my view. They are a distraction and just another money making scheme which won't change fundamentals. Everybody should be doing what they can. Some can do lots, some can't, but it's not necessarily their fault.
 

DrWazzock

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
Good point that. I wonder if when people put in solar panels or a wind turbine whether they actually consider the carbon emissions used to manufacture that too. Or do they just include the good bits and ignore the rest? I think so.
That's a very valid concern. Do solar panels really do anything more than plants? I know they aren't biodegradable where plants are. How much concrete and steel goes into a wind turbine?
My only enthusiasm for turbines arises because of the huge amount of wind that blows over us here. And its all wasted as we speak, hour after hour. A free resource that could be doing some good instead of just causing damage. Folks won't have it though largely out of jealousy. They see a landowner who might be benefit and they won't have that. Oh no siree. Offer to sharethe proceeds and its a "bribe". Can't win. Would be better if central government just put crosses on the map and just got on and built them paying us maybe some way leave. I am not really interested in the income myself, just would like to see the wind better utilised.
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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