Carbon Baloney

The crap targets being adopted by various countries amongst their wailing and gnashing that this will be so hard and cost so much are evidence of how easy the task really is.

India will cut carbon intensity (though as a major agricultural state they should have gone for GHG as the measure) by 20%-25%.

A joke. Some posts back I showed how our household cut energy intensity by 65% (no matter the change in the source of electricity that beats 25% hands down). The whole energy thing cost less than 10% extra of the overall redecoration budget; done by itself it would have been 50% of the redecoration budget.

Sometime this week I put on this blog how much per unit the business has cut energy intensity. I suspect that the number will be around 50% from 6 years ago, but perhaps as much as 20% just this year; and it may well be another 20% next year.

Again, their is only a minor extra cost to go energy efficient as this is being done as part of an expansion. We are buying better and faster machines anyway; the only extra cost is making the new aircon system more efficient, and making it bigger to subsume the old, shitty one. Extra cost - about 1% of the total capital budget for the next 1 year.

What both of these examples show is the following:

1) The places to make the changes are in the developing world because we do not have much infrastructure in place.
2) The easy way to do it is to have high standards and codes for buildings. This will also build an industry for building materials that can be sold worldwide. No technology is needed - all this stuff exists.
3) Growth will take care of the rest as new stuff comes up and old stuff is replaced.

Our legacy of a low component of manufacturing will help as we do not have many legacy assets to protect. The right rules (if enforced) on energy standards and pollution controls, will ensure better development.

The most heretical way to keep industrial energy efficiency high is not to dismantle our labour rules as many suggest, but to enforce them absolutely. This will mean even more capital intensity to Indian business, but it is a fact that the more labour efficient a machine, the more expensive, the more expensive the more powerful, the more powerful the more productive.....