We need the land for people not trees. The UK has a food deficit. Nut trees would be better than pine.
Offshore wind and storage is the way forward. We need to press on with getting that sorted and save the land for other uses.
Offshore wind and storage is the way forward. We need to press on with getting that sorted and save the land for other uses.
I think the UK probably can’t add so many greenhouses because, in my opinion, local politics means “pretty” is valued more than “functional”.
This is also why on-shore wind isn’t already everywhere in the UK even though wind farms don’t prevent agriculture.
As for grid scale storage, the Tesla battery in Australia is 185Mwh, or roughly a 10th of the amount of power the UK receives from France in an hour as a result of their overproduction of nuclear power. It's a drop in the ocean compared to what would be needed to get us though a stormy night when the offshore wind shuts down in high winds.
Pumped hydro is great but is hugely dependant on topology. There are some interesting developments like liquid metal batteries that might one day answer the storage problem but none which have demonstrated the scale required to go completely free of carbon emissions.
I think load shaping will probably play a larger part than most people give it credit for. There are some interesting developments, including solid state circuit breakers, which could be switched on and off over a network to reduce the load or to take advantage of over capacity of renewables.
Interesting this popped up, as I'm studying an Ecosystem Restoration Design Course and the first week was studying exactly this, related Ted Talk here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAGHUkby2Is
But yes, overgrazing is the main culprit there (and also in a lot of other places that have suffered ecosystem collapse).
Does the UK produce enough food to feed herself, but chooses not to in exchange for foreign 'delicacies' from bananas to olives?
> Food Production to Supply Ratio is calculated as the farm-gate value of raw food production (including for export) divided by the value of raw food for human consumption. It provides a broad indicator of the ability of UK agriculture to meet consumer demand.
> A high production to supply ratio fails to insulate a country against many possible disruptions to its supply chain. The ratio in 2018 was 61% for all food and 75% for indigenous type food.[1]
My broad understanding is that showing an indigenous type deficit means that it is not _just_ a choice to not do so in exchange for foreign delicacies, as they could be grown in this country but aren't, particularly as "[i]n 2018 the value of imports was greater than the value of exports in each of the broad categories of food, feed and drink except 'Beverages'". It is worth noting that the article states "[s]ourcing food from a diverse range of stable regions, in addition to domestically, enhances food security", so some net negative may not be a bad thing, as it insulates us to some degree from issues that would decrease local production.
Furthermore:
> Domestic production of fresh fruit as a percentage of total new supply for use in the UK was little changed at 17% [...and] for all fresh vegetables was 52%[2]
Even if we were able to produce enough food, in broad terms, to feed ourselves, it may not be able to support a particularly healthy diet, making the imports more of a necessarily than delicacies.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-statistics-p...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...