Can we deliver the promised 80% carbon savings by 2050.

Bear in mind we are already behind any reasonable target position on the pathway to 2050 and the path gets unpleasantly steep towards the end.

Keith Bothwell in his excellent article in the current GBF raises some very serious questions about our ability to deliver the necessary retrofit energy saving measures into our building stock. Is there any hope of us doing it - no I don't think that there is.

Nope. Ridiculous target.

Have a play with this tool:

http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/pathways/1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111/primary_energy_chart

...and you'll see that quite a lot of unrealistic things have to happen quite soon to hit the target.

Posted By: jamesingramAs food production and delivery is so energy/CO2 demanding

Not that bad really compared to other energy using categories, according to Milani, Nutter and Thomas (2011), 21% of human GHG can be attributed to food production. of which only a tiny percentage is for transport (as long as you don't drive to the organic farm shop!!)
As I am doing some reading on this, I have noticed that there are several ways of calculating (different methodologies) the CO2e/kg of food products. This makes comparison impossible, and example of this is cheesemaking (not for the meek). The highest impact was the dairy production at 94%, dairy production plant at 4.2%, 1.4% for the remainder when the 1% rule is invoked. This means a kilo lump of Angsgarden cheese has 8.794 kg of CO2e attached to it. Making the transport less than 0.123 kg. To really muddy the water, some measures of dairy farming take beef production into account, while others do not. If the farm has both dairy and beef, then it is relatively easy to split them, but it has been noticed that dairy yields have gone up, leading to less cows needed, but this is counteracted by beef production rising, causing the same environmental effect overall.
If you want to 'help the planet' avoid yoghurt, most ends up in the bin.

If anyone is interested in dairy production and energy use, I can send papers on the promise that they read them and précis them for me, then I can concentrate on the more interesting electrical bit

There is an old say 'we get the government that we deserve'.
I have great belief in human ingenuity and adaptability which leads to the 'wisdom of the crowd'. Sometimes this mean that we willingly and knowingly do things that have a short term gain but a long term cost because we know we can put things right later on. At the risk of being UK centric, but probably holds true in most places, we can tolerate a certain amount of environmental change, so one sweet wrapper in a national park is not considered an environmental problem, more a societal problem, building wind turbines on a national part is considered an environmental problem and not a societal one. A lot of it has to do with scale and your personal distance from the issue.