Burning petrol & diesel in an uncertain world

gravygraham

gravygraham

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I’ve been away from the forum for some time so please excuse if this topic has already been done to death. After a boating absence I‘m hoping to get afloat again next year in something hopefully 30+ feet, with 300+ HP, but the world has changed and I’m wondering what my inner self will say about me setting alight 2, 3, or £400 worth of fossil fuel in a day in the name of fun. Does anyone else wrestle with their conscience?
 
Until the explanation of the other three ( or what ever the number is ? ) ice ages is understood then Nope !
Remember after an ice age , the last one the ice went to a line near Lyon ,Geneva across horizontally in the EU there was “ global warming “ The channel you sail in was gouged out last time .
Arn’ t those white cliffs ever so pretty ? :) BTW .

Bit rusty on historical facts but recall Otto Diesel did his stuff 1880s .Meaning Stone Age man in the SoF I guess did not have diesels while the ice ( 3 rd time ) receded - something along those lines .

While every week China brings online a coal fired power station the size of the UKs recently decommissioning of Drax .An area the size of Whales in rain Forrest is lost annually in Brazil + arguably human overpopulation ( despite Covids better attempt to reduce it ) then I do not “wrestle with my conscience “ using a mobo for leisure .

The contribution of leisure diesel use mobo ing is so tiny as to be insignificant compared with the bigger drivers .
Then there are the unknown drivers to climate change like those ice ages , tilt of the earth s axis , and the occasional asteroid smack .
 
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I for one am heartily sick of the media trying to make me feel guilty for driving a car, turning the lights on, heating my home etc. I refuse to be bullied into justifying my infinitesimally small contribution to climate change. I wouldn't waste fossil fuel, but boating isn't a waste, it maintains my mental health.
 
wildmurphy said:
Whilst I’m with you entirely in that I don’t give a rats your point is surely invalid. Each person only uses a tiny bit. It’s the combination of us all that adds up. So only if everyone changes Will anything work
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Sorry, but I don't agree. This is the great lie perpetrated by the media; that we're all responsible and we must all do our bit. If we all 'do our bit' we'll save ourselves from a climate catastrophe . Rubbish. To the extent that there is a climate catastrophe, what will avert it is China, the USA and India doing their bits. I don't have any stats and frankly, I can be bothered to find out, but I'm willing to bet that if we all stopped leisure boating tomorrow, it would account for five minutes of China's output of CO2.

Apologies for ranting, but this politics of fear stuff really winds me up!
 
Like most leisure motor boat users the vast majority of our tIme aboard is spent stationary in the marina, on a river mooring or at anchor and the boat spends at least half of each year unused. Also like most we use diesel, which is generally better from a CO2 perspective than petrol and our use is offset by the fact that we have not taken regular foreign holidays whilst owning a boat so don’t contribute much to emissions from flying. It would be interesting to properly understand our carbon footprint but as has already been said, we aren’t really the problem.

To my mind politicians are the greatest danger to our pastime as they pursue carbon reductions and take politically motivated decisions with little regard for balance and pragmatism.
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I don’t totally disagree but China does not just pollute for no reason. We all buy their stuff and those power stations are for the factories and homes we all use.
All pollution is for the collective not ‘government’.
People are absolutely the reason. I don’t buy the effect or the hysteria.
A mud slide is only a climate disaster because someone lives at the bottom of the hill.
 
While the burning diesel for fun argument is valid - that is its we all feel a bit dirty for doing this - we can for example do other things to compensate a bit, like having 20 deg in the house in winter insted of 22, take a train instead of your car when you drive alone, install a few kw of solar panels on the roof and so on. In winter I use wood to heat part of the house (wood is carbon-neutral), it is a bit inconvenient to bring the piece of wood into the house but we save almost half on the gas heating bill which means less fossile-generated co2. And so on.

Even if we all will collectively sink our motorboats and go sailing it will not solve the problem at all due to the minimal impact on the co2 production worldwide. And we know how to do it, solar, wind, clean energy, get rid of super polluting container ships etc etc. Only problem this would raise prices over the board, which for the relatively wealthy 50" yacht owners in the med does not really matter, but for untold millions it does and they will vote and guess what - it will not be the party that want to fix things.

In Germany we had this year the big flood, 180 dead, 10000 homes destroyed, did the public attitude towards climate changed ? A bit. So I guess once you have 50K people dead a year from mudslide / rain / wind alone, parts of the country (deep valley, coastal region) that will be abandoned to nature, and people start to personally get hit (a father-in-law drowned, a kid they know dead under falling trees etc) then the threshold will be reached where a "radical" approach would be accepted.

It will then take longer to fix the problem, or even to keep it in check, but this does not really matter on a billion-year scale where earth gets covered by 3km tick ice every 800/1500 Mio years anyway.
 
seastoke said:
I do work for two companies that buy scrap lorries , that can’t pass an mot over here , then they export them to Africa where they use them every day. Churning out toxic fumes. What is the use we have standards when others don’t,
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We volunteered to put up a couple from a visiting American choir. They turned out to be 7th day Adventist and he bought old planes and resold them to Africa
Just sayin’
 
seastoke said:
I do work for two companies that buy scrap lorries , that can’t pass an mot over here , then they export them to Africa where they use them every day. Churning out toxic fumes. What is the use we have standards when others don’t,
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Very true, I used to live in Africa. But the real question is, is that worse than scrapping them? I remember being stopped by police in my very clean LandRover for excessive fumes. I pointed out the constant stream of vehicles belching smoke, and he said, we expect better things from you....
 
Whatever we might think or mentalize ourselves that it is a non issue or that it's much worse elsewhere I believe that TPTB in Europe will make our diesel fumed lives more difficult. Most likely the diesel as is will be taxed to death opening for more environmentally friendly and expensive alternatives which btw I expect will give us a sh*t load of issues with the engines for many years. Frankly I try not to think about it but I find it difficult to ignore.
 
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