Professor John Robertson OBA
Thanks to Bob Lamont for alerting me to this, today
Up to 100 truckloads of Scotland’s waste will be moved each day to England once a landfill ban comes in at the end of the year, the BBC’s Disclosure has been told. The Scottish government is banning “black bag” waste from being buried in landfill from 31 December but acknowledges that there are not currently enough incinerators to meet the extra demand.
Such biodegradable waste breaks down to produce methane, a greenhouse gas that is around 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
You see what Kevin is doing there to try to make this seem as damaging as possible for the environment with that last bit about the relative ‘potency‘ of methane compared with carbon dioxide?
He’s, strictly speaking, correct about that:
Carbon dioxide is the most abundant greenhouse gas and is primarily released through the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes. Methane, on the other hand, is a more potent greenhouse gas, trapping heat more effectively than CO2.
He’s being either thick or sneaky, however, by omitting to tell us this:
Methane is a colorless, odorless gas that’s produced both by nature (such as in wetlands when plants decompose underwater) and in industry (for example, natural gas is mostly made of methane). It is widely regarded as the second most important greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide (CO2). However, methane is about 200 times less abundant in the atmosphere and lasts there for only about a decade on average—while CO2 can last for centuries. To put it another way: methane does its damage quickly but soon fades away, while CO2 traps a smaller amount of heat consistently, decade after decade.
So, put simply, Keane is trying to make the less damaging greenhouse gas seem more damaging to make a political point. Rubbish and shameful but oh so predictable.
Keane has previous in dishonesty. See from 2019 – What is an Environment Correspondent? https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2019/01/10/what-is-an-environment-correspondent/
Is Keane qualified in any way for his role?
No mention of any qualifications. I can find none.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
HERE WE ARE YET AGAIN
ALL BBC SO CALLED CORRESPONDENTS ARE TALKING ABSOLUTE CRAP
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you are correct, John. The real threat from methane is a sudden, large, release – known as a methane burp. This could cause a huge problem for life on Earth, not just from increased warming through ecological positive feedback loops, but also the possibility of sudden anoxia. There is a thought in some quarters that such a “burp’ caused a mass extinction 250 million years ago.
Global warming could possibly cause such an event by a sudden melting of the permafrost in the northern tundras. There is a huge amount of methane sequestrated there. There is even more held by temperature and pressure within Clathrates on the sea floor. As you may know, the island of greater Britain is still rising from the earth’s crust around Cape Wrath in the northwest. This is an isostatic rebound after the last ice age. All this means, if course, that the southeast of the main island is sinking into the north sea and eastern English Channel.
There was a thought that the northern seafloor rising to shallower waters might release methane from clathrates, but it is reckoned there is not enough there to cause any severe problems. The earth is a unique and wonderous organism, is it not?
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15% of methane comes from waste landfill. It does not miraculously disappear as long as we keep topping it up. Like to know if the English will just use our waste for landfill.
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Donn’t mean to go O/T but this is not funny all this money and I suppose Scotland will have to share the cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-tpHG-wkCU
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Presumably Kevin’s brief was simply to advertise the latest edition of the ‘Disclosure’ team’s ‘SG couldn’t organise a pissup in a brewery’ series, platforming Douglas Lumsden to make cheap political points about the SNP, rather than understand the subject any more than Kevin Keane….
SG’s ‘energy to waste’ strategy would be familiar to Scandinavians going all the way back to the first ‘Dano’ plant in the 1950s, long before emissions and global warming were on anyone’s ‘half a brain’ radar, Richard Tice and Mango Man being the most prominent exceptions.
Yet emissions are only the most recent component of a societal problem going back centuries, finding space for the volume produced – For sure reducing waste at source will make a difference as will recycling, but we’re still talking about huge volumes before even considering sewage sludge cake – That’s where incineration comes into it’s own, neutralising the potential effects and reducing the volume to landfill…
A short term logistical issue pending build up in available capacity is the least of our problems, perhaps BBC Scotland’s reducing it’s shite output can assist… Kevin ? James ?
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