Convenience Big Store: There’s nothing simple about abandoning fossil fuels

13 December, 2023

In the headlines

COP28 has ended with a historic agreement by the nearly 200 countries attending to "transition away" from fossil fuels. Dubbed the "UAE Consensus", the deal is the first in the conference's history to include a pledge on fossil fuels, but has been criticised by environmentalists for stopping short of demanding they be phased out. Rishi Sunak is now as unpopular as Boris Johnson was when he left No 10. A new YouGov poll – taken before the PM's controversial Rwanda bill passed a Commons vote last night – gave him a net favourability rating of minus 49, down 10 points from late November. Historic England has added 227 places to its national heritage list, including a World War Two radar station in Northumberland; a 1960s church in Lancashire that resembles an upturned boat; and, in Hertfordshire, a 400-year-old "car wash" for carriages.

Historic England

Comment

George Monbiot voicing a widely-held view on BBC Question Time

There's nothing simple about abandoning fossil fuels

Many people think the climate crisis is maddeningly simple, says Ed Conway on Substack: we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and anyone who disagrees must be in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. But it's not just oil producers like Saudi Arabia pushing back against this goal – it's also the likes of China, India, Brazil, and many more. The reason is the "energy inequality" between rich and poor nations. This doesn't just mean heating and powering homes. Energy is used to create literally everything that makes a country more developed: the steel in basic infrastructure; the cement to replace mud floors with concrete ones; the copper to bring electricity to towns and settlements. And the energy imbalance now is staggering. In per capita terms, many nations "remain where Britain was in 1800".

That's why these nations don't want to stop burning fossil fuels. Barring some miraculous new renewable technology, it would consign them "to a permanent life of energy poverty". This may seem baffling to us well-meaning folks in the West – surely the planet's more important? But it's useful to remember just how poor most of the world is: "85% of people living on planet Earth have never been in an aeroplane". Rich nations could do more to bridge the energy gap, by sending their green tech to poorer nations, subsidising the construction of renewables infrastructure, and so on. But they know that would cost trillions, and they're finding it hard enough to keep their citizens behind net zero as it is. So no, this isn't a case of "good vs bad". It's "desperately complex".

Noted

A Russian veterans' group has released an illustrated calendar which shows the Kremlin's armed forces in a "heroic – and occasionally softer – light", says The Daily Telegraph. It features a pumped-up Putin with straining muscles and "bulging veins"; troops in front of the US Capitol building; one soldier carrying a ginger cat; and another stroking a strange monkey-like creature. See all 12 months here.

Inside politics

Rishi Sunak may be struggling to control a restive Tory party, says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman, but he fared much better at the Covid inquiry. Whereas Boris Johnson "waffled and stuttered", Sunak spoke with "the eager eloquence of a schoolboy who's been looking forward to their French oral exam". He had to be repeatedly told to slow down, so great was his excitement at getting to use all his facts. At one point, barely managing to conceal his smugness, he interjected: "Can we bring up paragraph 257 of my witness statement?"

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Tomorrow's world

An AI-generated image of a robot sommelier, made using Stable Diffusion

AI has a new job in its sights, says New Scientist: sommelier. Researchers at the University of Geneva trained an algorithm to recognise the chemical components of 80 different Bordeaux wines. The bot was then able to identify which chateau the wines came from with 100% accuracy – though it was only 50% accurate at guessing the vintage.

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Graduation day at Cambridge: a global affair. Flickr/Sir Cam

A better way to tackle our immigration problem

All this political drama about sending asylum seekers to Rwanda is absurd, says Alice Thomson in The Times. Only 29,090 people have made it to Britain's beaches on small boats this year, down from nearly 46,000 in 2022. The real problem is that since Brexit, legal net migration has risen from 200,000 a year to a whopping 672,000. Of these newcomers, nearly 40% are non-EU students and their families – a tenfold increase since 2019. A recent poll of Tory voters found that 41% think immigration is the country's biggest issue. Overseas students are the "largest single contributor to net migration". Why are ministers not tearing lumps out of each other over this?

Part of the problem is that universities are "actively recruiting" kids from abroad, because the fees they pay (up to £38,000 a year) are so much higher than those paid by people from England and Wales (£9,250). Imperial College aims to attract 70% of its student body from abroad by the end of the decade; already, 44% of Edinburgh students are international. Of course, many of these overseas arrivals are not only subsidising British undergraduates – they're also "bringing in new ideas and turning us into a global powerhouse". But new research shows that meaningful numbers are dropping out or performing poorly, leading to concerns that some universities are "selling immigration rather than education". Put simply: relying on overseas students to subsidise everyone else isn't sustainable, and it's massively fuelling fears over immigration. Our politicians should put more time into solving this conundrum and stop bickering about the "Rwandan dead end".

Love etc

Golden retriever, left, and Travis Kelce. Getty

Taylor Swift has found a "golden retriever boyfriend" in Travis Kelce, and now everyone wants one, says GQ. The internet defines the "GRB" as someone who is kind and trusting, unashamed of his feelings, and, "while a little naive, full of optimism and positivity". The type of guy who searches worriedly for his partner at the airport, "lighting up when he sees her". And it turns out there are lots of different breeds of boyfriend. They include dobermanns ("strong and silent"); rottweilers (easily annoyed and standoffish); German shepherds (sweet but overly protective); and borzois (lanky and aloof, and "something of an acquired taste").

The Knowledge Book of Notes & Quotes

"Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow." Or so said Mark Twain. But there are exceptions. If you want to get a copy of The Knowledge Book of Notes & Quotes before Christmas, time is running out. It's just £12.99, incl P&P (UK only).

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Staying young

Chocolate is good for you, says Vogue – provided it's the right kind. According to Professor Tim Spector, who runs the Zoe personalised nutrition scheme, the tasty treat is a "health food" if it's over 70% cocoa. He says dark chocolate is packed full of fibre and polyphenols, which are strong antioxidants. A recent study of 20,000 people found that those who had cocoa every day were 27% less likely to die of heart disease than a placebo group. 🍫😇

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It's a 500-year-old Italian Renaissance bronze, which has been donated to the British public in lieu of payment for a £10.5m inheritance tax bill. The 16-inch statue of Apollo was owned by property developer Cecil Lewis and his wife Hilda, and will join the collection of bronzes at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. In the past decade, says The Guardian, the "acceptance in lieu" scheme has brought £479m worth of artworks and other objects into public ownership.

Quoted

"We love well only once, the first time. The loves which follow are less involuntary."