The Weekly Climate

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.weeklyclimate.com

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

A brief note (pun intended), that I’m now on Substack Notes. After Twitter blocked Substack a week or so ago I’m now trying Substack’s competing thing out. You can follow me there, if you aren’t already. My plan is to try and use it more than ever used Twitter 😅, but we’ll see about that.

Remember that you can once again listen to the newsletter as a podcast right here, if you want to 🎧. Free subscribers get the first minutes to try it out and remember that you can always upgrade or try a free trial if you want to check out the whole thing.

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Emissions from banned F-gases are mysteriously rising

😻 Fossil gas can’t compete with renewables.

😼 Why are global taxpayers propping up the fossil fuel industry?

💩 New leaked fossil fuel memo reveals how much the fossil fuel industry was expecting in terms of climate migration and more.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#f-gas] — A recent study published in Nature Geoscience shows that emissions from banned chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are on the rise, with implications for both the ozone layer and climate change. While some of the increase can be attributed to a loophole in the Montreal Protocol that allows for CFC emissions in the production of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), two of the CFCs measured are a mystery and not approved for any use. The rise of these chemicals is concerning for their global warming potential and efficacy of the Montreal Protocol.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#renewables] — A new levellised cost of energy assessment by Lazard confirms that wind and solar, even with battery storage, are cheaper than fossil fuels. The assessment shows that on pretty much any assessment, wind and solar win easily, without counting the carbon cost of their competitors. The study also notes that despite moderate to significant increases in the LCOE of new renewable assets in the last year, costs for so-called “best in class” renewable assets continue to decline.

[#nuclear] — Germany is shutting down its last three operating nuclear power reactors, marking the end of a more than 20-year journey away from nuclear power. The decision to phase out nuclear power was made by various coalition governments in the country, with the last new nuclear power plant commissioned in 1989. The closure of the last three reactors, Isar 2, Emsland, and Neckarwestheim 2, all pressurized water reactors, had been due to end their lives by the end of last year, but were allowed an extension for the winter following energy capacity concerns as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war.

[#wind] — According to a market outlook by Wood Mackenzie, global wind energy capacity is projected to hit 1 TW this year and double to 2 TW in the next 8 years, with offshore wind alone experiencing sevenfold growth by 2032. However, the need for rapid expansion of transmission and grid interconnection is highlighted as transmission takes a long time to build and without it, resources cannot be brought online. The federal government and states need to make transmission buildout a top priority to meet decarbonization goals and save costs.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#electrification] — This article from The New York Times discusses the idea of electrifying almost everything in order to tackle climate change. The article explores the challenges of electrifying transportation, residential and commercial buildings, and industry, as well as the need for sweeping changes to the nation's power grids. But even though there are challenges, as Saul Griffith puts it: “How on Earth are we going to power the modern economy cleanly,’ nothing else makes sense”.

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.weeklyclimate.com

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

The podcast is back! At least for a bit.

Free users will get the first ~6 mins for free in this relaunched episode of the podcast. And as always you should see a free trial option if you want to check out the full episode.

I’m brewing on some changes here a…

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

Happy anniversary to The Weekly Climate!

Can you believe it? It’s been one full year of non-stop gathering the most important climate crisis news for you all. Thank you to each and everyone of my dear 696 readers for reading the newsletter every week (or almost exactly every other week according to my stats).

Here are the top 3 most read issues that you may have missed:

[Deep dive] Death to net-zero

[Deep dive] Before the tractors…

[May 17-23’21] No more fossil fuels from this year!

In general it looks like my deep dives are getting a lot of reads, which I’m grateful for. The problem as you may have noticed is that I haven’t had the time to do as many as I was hoping for, which brings me to a small announcement.

You can now pay me if you want to

I’ve been doing this for a year. The newsletter is growing steadily. It’s time to go paid to ensure that I can keep it going for the next years. It is quite time consuming to write this newsletter. I spend maybe 2-3 full work-days spread out over most evenings of the week to prepare, write and record it. I need to either expand or go home. But before I ask you to pay me I want to let you in on a few plans that are cooking and that I hope can come to fruition depending on how well received this will be of course:

State-of-the-Climate 2021: Together with my researcher Knut we’ve been working on a presentation that sums up what has happened in climate for 2021. We have a database, a report format and are busily updating it. So be on the look out for this in early 2022.

Local edition: As I’ve highlighted a couple of times. I’m only able to post english-speaking news (since that’s the language I understand). This means that whatever news I post from non-english speaking countries will have to be so newsworthy that they are posted in global media outlets. This is not good enough. So I’m working on a concept to do a local version of the Weekly Climate. But for this I need more support (and to begin with volunteers in non-english speaking countries).

Podcast: I feel like the podcast as it is right now could do more. Still I don’t have the time for it. Would love to be able to expand it.

These are of course not set in stone and I can’t guarantee that I will do them, but these projects are what’s in the works. But it’s also clear that I can’t do any of them without being able to get more people onboard. So that’s one of the primary motivations for going paid.

What will it mean for the newsletter that it will be paid?

You may already have noticed one change. This morning you received two newsletters: “The Brief” and one titled as I regularly title them (in the following referred to as “The Long One”)

The Brief contains only this intro section, “News you can’t miss” and a couple of important sections from the rest of the newsletter. It won’t be narrated but it will always be free.

The Long One is the one you’ve been receiving for free this whole time. It will be narrated as always. But will be for paid members only.

Paid subscribers will also receive any deep dives that I manage to do. Paid subscribers will get both The Brief and The Long One.

All already published newsletters will remain free.

As for the price. If you don’t get 1.25$ worth of something from each newsletter, whether I’ve saved you time or you learned something, then I don’t think this newsletter is doing what it should do. Therefore, the starting price for paid members is 5$/month. You can choose to pay me more and if you do you will be mentioned on my about page along with a little sentence or link of your choosing (with my full right to change it if it’s abusive etc). More info on both memberships on the subscription page. Right now if you subscribe within the next two weeks you get a 20% discount.

If you have any questions regarding this don’t hesitate to ask (michael@weeklyclimate.com). Now all that’s left to ask is please consider to upgrade your subscription to paid if you enjoy this newsletter. To do that please click on the menu in the top right -> My Account -> And then there should be a big button up top that says “upgrade to paid”.

Thanks again for reading and on to the IPCC fueled newsletter for this week!

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 The new IPCC report is “code red for humanity”

😻 Prescribed burns played an important role in containing the Bootleg fire.

😼 Humus (no not a typo, I’m not talking about hummus here) may not be as long lasting as we thought. If you don’t know why you should care, read this.

💩 Half-assed oil-spill clean-up in Trinidad must not go unpunished.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#EU] — Highest temperature recorded in Europe ever was logged in Sicily last week. A sweltering 48.8C. The previous record was 48C, which was set in Athens in 1977. It is still pending acceptance by the World Meteological Organisation.

[#heatmaps] — If you’re still confused about how a seemingly tiny change in temperature (of 1.2C) can cause such extreme weather events take a look at this map of the world, which maps which areas are heating up more. 1.2C maybe the global average, but +6C is what’s going on up North.

[#smoke] — Here’s another record that we shouldn’t be particular proud of. Smoke from SIberian wildfires have reached the north pole for the first time in recorded history. There are 3.000 km from the fires to the north pole. And the fires are getting worse.

[#ipcc] — ‘Code Red for humanity’. Those were the words of Antonio Gutierrez when he presented the new IPCC report last week. The rest of the climate science section will therefore be dedicated to that report, in fact the main part of the newsletter this week is dedicated to that report. There are a few other noteworthy news items, but this is really the most important one.

This is the final final final warming (yes we’ve had some over the years) and thus the report remains hopeful that if we act now we can still have some positive impact on the climate. There’s no room for excuses, to quote Gutierrez. The different between this and the 5th Assessment report is that the Science has gotten a lot clearer on many things especially around the attribution aspect.

As for the contents, the report cements with absolutely certainty that yes global warming exists and yes it’s us. This means that anybody, ANYBODY, telling you otherwise is misguided. And it’s your job to ignore them or help them. Here’s a few key climate stats from the report:

Global temperatures between 2011 and 2020 averaged 1.09C higher than 1850-1900.

The past 5 years has been the hottest since 1850.

Rate of sea-level rise has tripled compared to 1901-1970

Expected sea level rise 2m (2100) and 5m (2150) cannot be ruled out.

The report also states that we have already made changes to many ecosystems that can only be reversed on a decade or century scale. The oceans will continue to rise and glaciers will continue to melt for decades or centuries to come. There’s no stopping that now. We can only stop how chaotic it will get.

So what can we do? ”This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet” quoting Gutierrez again. We’re emitting ~40Gt of CO2 every year and we have 500Gt to go to have a 50/50 chance of staying below 1.5C (remember we’re at 1.1C now). There’s no longer any excuse for any politician anywhere to continue to drill fossil fuels out of the ground. It has to stop and it has to stop now.

Other take-aways from the report includes:

We need more “adaptech” to help the world adapt as extreme weather events become increasingly chaotic.

Food security around the world will suffer no matter what we do, with impacts already expected in the next couple of decades.

Methane emissions are just as important as carbon dioxide and needs just as much attention as carbon dioxide emissions.

The report should be a rallying cry to lawyers around the world as the new report puts forth the standards with about things like attribution science, which is needed in order to blame specific events on big carbon emitters.

If you want to dive into the very deep details of what the report is saying on extreme weather events I can recommend this Carbon Brief article.

This Grist article looks at the commentary from a wide variety of climate scientists.

A very interesting look at the differences between the “Summary for policy makers” part of the report for the past years. And related, Heated reports that once again it’s very odd that the summary for policymakers (which let’s face it, is the one that most people read if anything) doesn’t contain a single word on fossil fuels. Parts of the report did, but it’s not very damning as it should be.

Ok that’s it for the IPCC report. You may find references to it sprinkled through out the rest of then newsletter, but this is my main discussion of it.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#renewables] — According to a new report the electricity mix in the US will rise to 23% renewables (solar, wind, hydro). Nuclear and coal is dropping and the renewables are only second to fossil gas.

[#energystorage] — Here’s a detailed look at the hottest battery techcnology startups around currently. A week or so ago we heard Form Energy’s “rust” based battery, but this article also looks at other startups in the space and which technologies they’re looking into.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#heatpumps] — Not only are heat pumps one of many climate solutions (provided they replace a gas burner or similar fossil fuel equipment) but they will also enable households to adapt better to the coming many years of extreme heatwaves. The Rocky Mountain Institute has looked at how heat pumps can help manage the cold as well as heat inside a home.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#steel] — The world’s largest steelmaker, China Baowu Steel Group is trialling a new steelmaking technology that could reduce carbon emissions from steel production by 30%. It has been testing the technology since June. According to company officials the company is using hydrogen and recycled gas to reduce it’s carbon emissions by 10% in 10 days.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#rewild] — We must rewild an area the size of China before 2030 to avoid the collapse of our life support systems. Yet that might be a challenge, because in many places (certainly in the UK which is the vantage point of this article) land is owned by the few. In the UK for instance, 50% of all land is owned by just 1% of the population. How can we make many landowners do as the “death metal baron” from last week’s newsletter does?

[#hermitcrabs] — You may have seen a couple of click-baity headlines this week with the headline something along the lines of “hermit crabs sexually attracted to plastic”. I even added it to the very early version of this newsletter, but fortunately, somebody (here Gizmodo) actually took the time to read the paper sighted and it tells a different story. No hermit crabs doesn’t get a boner when smelling / seeing plastic, but rather they’re attracted to it because (as one potential but still unconfirmed theory goes) it smells like their food. Which is a rather sad story instead.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#regenerative] — Regenerative farming are picking up in the UK and that’s probably a good thing. Many farmers who do that are seeing higher margins because these practices doesn’t require as many inputs (pesticides, fuel etc). So not only does the farm itself produce fewer greenhouse gases but it also helps sequester more.

[#climate] — Here’s a look at two vineyards in the US. One that uses dry-farming (which means no irrigation) and one that doesn’t. One of them is doing better than the other and it might not be the one you think.

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#humus] — This is a very interesting article that I don’t really know what to think about after reading it a couple of times. Basically, it highlights what appears to be a large group of researchers who believed they have debunked the myth of so-called long-lasting “humus” which is long-lasting carbon molecules embedded in the soil that are produced by plants. Although the existence of humus is unquestionable, the long lasting properties of it is. As the researchers have proved that these molecules are eaten by microbes in the soil. The problems is that not only are universities around the world still teaching about long-lasting humus but reports such as the IPCCs latest relies on it. That the soil does sequester carbon for a long time however, is not questioned by the researchers, we know it is. But we don’t understand how.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#venturecapital] — The global climatetech ecosystem is seeing an influx as capital as never before. VC veteran Chris Sacca announced 800M$ spread out in four funds under his Lowercarbon Capital.

[#thehumanrace] — Just a brief reminder that the #thehumanrace is starting today. If you do any kind of exercise for 100mins during the next 2 weeks and you record it using the Strava app you can help put pressure on politicians to stop kicking the can down the road when it comes to climate action especially regarding the 100B$ promised to the global south. I signed up and will run my first run under that banner today.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#brazil] — Brazil’s government announced last week that despite calls for clean electricity it wants to ramp up coal production by investing 4B$ in expanding mining operations in the country.

[#california] — What may sound really boring but is actually a really important step, California just signed it’s first green building energy code that heavily encourages electrified buildings. It is hoped that building codes such as this will help get rid of old gas burners and replace them with electric heat pumps. The standard also updates provisions around solar power.

[#ukraine] — One of the poorest countries in Europe, Ukraine, has submitted it’s updated NDCs with an increase in ambition. The country aims do so while it is fighting poverty and a war with Russia. I can think of countries with lesser problems that are not upping their ambitions enough.

[#kickthecan] — This article looks at the trend that politicians especially from G20 countries are exhibiting: Kicking the can down the road when it comes to fulfilling the pledge to be providing 100B$ in climate adaptation and mitigation support to the Global South.

🛡 Adaptation

Adapting our civilization to the coming climate crisis is vital. Here we cover various ways that is happening (or isn’t).

[#wildfireUS] — The Dixie Fire burned through 550 more homes last week, thus it just became the most destructive wildfire in California’s history. It has burned more than 2000 km2 and more than 1100 homes. And it’s not even close to being contained, currently around 30% contained and on some days it’s tearing through 1 acre (0.4hectares) every second.

[#fightfirewithfire] — As the big Bootleg fire was thundering towards the Sycan Marsh Preserve in Oregon something amazing happened. The fire slowed down, which allowed the fire fighters to gain control of it. A similar thing happened in the Black Hills Ecosystem Restoration project. What does these two areas have in common? Both areas are being managed following traditional and tribal forest management principles, in which small prescribed burns are being done to remove fuel from the vegetation.

[#wildfireEU] — The wildfires that have ravaged Greece these past weeks are more under control than they used to. A thunderstorm helped douse some of them while sparking a few others. But the fires are wake-up call for Greece which needs to change a lot of things to help cope with future events.

[#wildfireRUS] — Wildfires in Siberia are so bad that 11 municipalities around Yakutsk in Siberia has been given a non-working day on Friday Aug 13, where the leader of the region has urged people to stay indoor for health reasons.

[#wildfireAfrica] — And wildfires are burning on and on. This time in Algeria, where at least 40 people were confirmed dead in the blazes. Fires are currently burning east of the Algerian capital in the Kabyle region.

[#infrastructure] — Portland sees on average 1 day at 38C. This year it has seen 6. Seattle has seen 3 days of 38C+. Which is as many as it has seen the entire century before. So yes it’s getting hotter. But the problem is that these cities’ infrastructure aren’t built for these temperatures. For instance in Seattle, maintenance workers had to spray water on a metal bridge in Seattle to prevent the metal from expanding too much. Sounds like an expensive tax bill coming up to adapt to this. But just as infrastructure is under pressure from climate change it can help be a solution too, as this article argues. The latest IPCC reports describe how urban geometry helps keep temperatures high in cities. Especially tall buildings create so called “urban canyons” which can get very hot. So although they might be good for housing, they’re not good to help us manage the climate crisis.

⛽️ Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#oilspill] — An oil spill in Trinidad are raising eyebrows. Not only because this obviously harms environment and foodchain there, but certainly also because of the half-hearted clean up that the company behind is doing. It’s claiming that it’s using booms and other equipment to collect the oil when a group of fishers filmed them using another strategy. Running a speedboat through it such as to get the oil to sink, and “disappear”. Except it won’t disappear. It will just enter the foodchain and thus people living in that area.

[#oilspill] — An oil spill that happened 50 years ago in Nigeria was finally settled. The spill came from a ruptured Shell pipeline which, according to Shell, was caused by oil thieves. The spill happened in 1970s in the middle of Nigeria’s civil war. Still the spill was caused by a ruptured oil pipeline so Shell has been sentenced to pay 111M$ in damages.

[#endfossil] — When I’m the most angry and frustrated about the climate crisis such as when reading the new IPCC report an article like this feels like some sort of revenge fantasy. Yes let’s destroy those b*d fossil fuel companies who knew all along yet still continued their planet destroying activities. This article dives deep into that fantasy. As the article outlines it will be very tough. An still others (not in this article) question whether that is even the right thing to do. After all the one thing the fossil fuel industry know how to do is building infrastructure. And oh boy do we need infrastructure.

That’s it for this week folks!

This is a big day for me! I’m going paid! Thus it really puts the newsletter to the test. Does it provide you with 1.25$ worth of value every week? I believe it does. In fact I really hope that just the time alone I save you should easily cover those 1.25$. Remember that you can save 20% the first year by upgrading to paid today. Also ping me on michael@weeklyclimate.com or comment below with any feedback or comments regarding this.

Remember if you’re feeling down, angry or sad from some of the news in this newsletter one cure is to act. And one way you can always act that also happens to be one of the most powerful things you can do is to talk about it. That also works if what you just read made you hopeful or happy btw.

If you enjoyed this newsletter don’t forget to share it with your friends, coworkers or other people you think could benefit from getting it. If you got directed here by a friend or another link on the Internet don’t forget to subscribe!

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

I’m very proud to report that I managed to get out and run 4 times last week totaling a whopping 13.6km 😎. Which is the first time in more than 1.5 years that I managed to do that. And I feel very motivated about it — probably the endorphins 😅. If you’re a runner or consider taking up running then I have a climate change reason for why you should get out right now. The UN and Strava (sports app) have launched #thehumanrace which aims to get as many people as possible to commit 100 minutes of total exercise time during the period of Aug 16-31 to show the world leaders that solidarity with the Global South is of paramount importance and that the Global North must follow through on their 100B$ commitment in climate mitigation and adaptation support (here’s a direct link to the challenge in Strava). Let me know if you’re around Copenhagen, Denmark and want to go on a run (albeit a slow on if with me) against the climate crisis!

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 The Gulf Stream is showing signs of shutting down.

😻 Plant-based metal ?!

😼 Close to worst case answer for how long it takes for your rooftop solar panels to reach break-even: 7.2 years.

💩 Boulder, Colorado wants big fossil to pick up the bill for infrastructure expenses in the coming decades.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#gulfstream] — A new study concludes that the Gulf Stream (which have a huge impact on how liveable climate) is showing warnings of shutting down. If it did that it seems likely that the monsoon in Asia would be disrupted, Europe would be much colder and sea level rise in North America, just to mention a few effects. This cannot be allowed to happen. Maybe this is the “ozone layer” moment in climate science. Somehow the world’s politicians managed to fix that one because every one could imagine being scorched by the sun, maybe this is single event exacerbated by climate change that can unite the world?

[#siberia] — A new study has found that the Siberian heatwave last year did increase methane emissions from melting permafrost. But not by much. Temperatures last year in Siberia reached in many places 6C above normal, which caused some of the methane from the permafrost to enter the atmosphere.

[#attribution] — Here’s a nerdy look at so called attribution science, which looks at how humans impacting extreme weather events and whether a certain event can be attributed to climate change.

[#temperature] — July 2021 was the 3rd hottest globally and very close to 2020, making July 2020 and July 2021 the joint 3rd hottest July’s globally. Only July 2019 and 2016 was hotter.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#rooftopsolar] — A lovely post on how long it takes for solar panels to pay for themselves in a close to worst case situation: The author lives in Denmark (cold, overcast and rainy 6 months of the year) and where energy prices are through the roof except when you sell surplus electricity in which case you’re being paid 13% of what you buy 1 KWh for. And the answer: 12 years. IF you bought the panels 10 years ago. Now you can get a similar setup as what he has (4KW output) for 60% of the price. So expect around 7 years in a close to worst case country. And if you’re pumped about that you might take a look at Patagonia’s new movie “We the power” about community-driven electricity projects.

[#spacesolar] — A massive moonshot (or spaceshot?) project has received a donation of 100M$ to create satellites that harvest power of the sun and beam it back the Earth. Exciting, but also a moonshot.

[#energytransition] — Here are 3 graphs that shows how the energy transition is going in the US. Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas are the 3 states that produce the most GW of renewable electricity. Where Texas, Missouri and West Virginia are the states that produce the most coal power, but which have also seen some of the largest drops in coal power production.

[#satellites] — A new partnership between IRENA and ESA aims to make satellite data more useable for planning the deployment of renewables. The data can be used to map suitable spots for deploying renewable energy on the Earth and to forecast production.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#plantmetal] — My mind was completely blown by this. Did you know that plants can be used to make metals?! I certainly didn’t. But plants known as “hyperaccumulators” can actually be transformed by heating into a form of “bio-ore” which contains metals. For a small project in Malaysia, about 25% of the mass of the plants in the project is pure nickel. There are about 700 known species of hyperaccumulators. The process is known as phytomining and have been studied since the 80s.

[#bikes] — Here’s some disruption for you (I don’t know why but I still cringe at the word disrupt, maybe a work injury for being too much in the startup environment): A new study has found that electric cargo bikes deliver packets 60% faster than vans and reduce their carbon footprint by 90%. Boom. No reason at all for anybody running a shipping company to buy a van ever again.

[#recycling] — A bit of an interesting lawsuit popped up last week against recycling startup TerraCycle. The company is helping customers and companies around the world recycle very hard to recycle stuff like cigarette butts and candy wrappers. The way they do it is that as a consumer you sign up and get a box for each of the hard-to-recycle items which you then mail back (causing CO2 emissions) to TerraCycle. It sounds good, but the lawsuits states that the program is hard to follow for consumers as well as spreads doubt about whether the was are actually recycled. If the latter is true then obviously TerraCycle is doing nothing more than greenwashing for the big plastic polluters of the world.

[#remotework] — With COVID came a wave of remote workers. Suddenly everybody had to work from home and most people liked it. Many large organisations have claimed that they will never go back to ordinary office working again. And if companies commit to having people work remotely fulltime, then that might be very good for the climate as this means that people will emit fewer emissions during transportation and they might even be home to use some of the power their solarcells are generating and so on. But a new study reveals that the hybrid model which most companies seem to be adopting (in which people switch between working from home and at the office) is worse than working fulltime at the office because now the company still need to run a full office 24/7. So they don’t get the energy or the transportation emission savings

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#rewilding] — Here’s a good one. A death metal baron in Ireland is leading the most ambitious rewilding project in EU. His 650 hectare land is completely overgrown to the delight of insects, birds and other plant species. Sounds amazing.

[#wildfire] — Turkey, Greece, Italy and Bosnia are all heavily affected by wildfires due to powerful heatwave over the area causing temperatures between 40-43C in many places. Turkey is particularly hard hit by wildfires and this image of a small boy watching a firefighter plane on the beach went viral last week. It’s also getting really really bad in Greece, where wildfires are approaching Athens causing thousands to flee. But wildfires are not exactly silent in the US either. The Dixie Fire which is the 6th largest ever in California has just engulfed the town of Greenville. If you want to see what wildfire destruction looks like take a look at this article. On the good side of US wildfires, it seems that fire fighters have made progress against some of the larger one’s last week. In particular the Bootleg Fire is now 84% contained. And if you think this year is worse than other years in terms of wildfires, you would be right. This July was the worst since satellites began mapping wildfires. An estimated 343Mt of carbon (that’s roughly 1Gt CO2) has been released into the atmosphere.

[#arctic] — One of the last orders that Trump manages to out was the selling of leases to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But the Biden adminstration has found serious flaws in the impact review made during the Trump administration.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#vegancheese] — One of the hardest products for me to survive without is cheese. So it’s good that people like the “Queen of vegan cheese” is working hard on solving that problem. She’s making cheese from sources such as nut milk. Vegan cheese is expected to grow 71% between 2019 and 2027.

[#water] — What’s the impact on natural resources when comparing tap water and bottle water? 3500 times. Resource extraction (water, oil etc) to make the bottled water is 3500 more expensive than tap water. In the US 17million barrels of oil will have to be extracted every year to meet the demand for plastic in plastic bottles.

[#drought] — Water scarcity on US West Coast is making lives extremely hard for farmers there. Due to the drought the federal government cut off water supplies to farmers in May. It’s the first time this has happened in more than a century.

[#microbialprotein] — Care for a microbial protein burger? Microbial proteins appear to be the new hot stuff in food tech. A couple of recent studies looked at how direct air capture and solar power can be used to make microbial protein which can be turned into animal feed or even for human consumption. But a few roadblocks are in the way.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#foodsecurity] — Oxfam have released a new report which concludes that governments and businesses drive to offset emissions by planting trees must be more careful in selecting where those trees are planting as they present evidence that tree planting in the global south may be displacing food production and thus threaten food security. They estimate that food prices could increase by as much as 80% by 2050 if offsetting by tree planting in the global south continue.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#emoji] — Ok now we’re in the lighter category of problems here, but stil, here goes: While there’s a oil barrel, a petrol pump and a polluting factory there’s still no emojis for wind turbines. A group tried to submit one but it got rejected. The Unicode Consortium who decides such things didn’t reply to request for comment from the authors of the article. So I guess until it gets approved we just have to stick to the lollipop 🍭.

[#tech] — Tony Seba’s think tank RethinkX have released a new report in which it promotes 8 technologies that are available today, but which should be supported heavily by public and private funding in order to get us to netzero. These are solar, wind, batteries, autonomous transportation, electric vehicles, transportation-as-a-service, precision fermentation and cellular agriculture. It primarily focusses on three sectors: Energy, transportation and food. And sure those are big part of the pie, and here’s a what-aboutism alert (but they are important with blunt statements like this) but what about cement, steel, not to mention everything about climate justice and carbon removal just to mention a few obvious one’s which are missing.

[#netzero] — This is a great article that calls b**t on all the net zero talk. It uses a lot of data to show that net-zero is ultimately a form of greenwashing. Which, until proven otherwise, I agree on (as you know). However! He also argues that despite all that, it has managed to achieve a few good things. Highly recommended read for this week.

[#venturecapital] — Greentech Media’s Energy Gang 🎧 talks with Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch about the venture capital market’s renewed current love affair with climate-tech.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#US] — The US just passed its big bipartisan 1T$ infrastructure bill and while it’s definitely lacking in some places it does (if nothing else) signal that both parties are now acknowledging that climate change is a crisis and that we will need a lot of money to solve it. This post has the details about the contents. A few things to highlight: (1) the bill does direct a huge amount of money towards climate resilience, (2) a tightening of vehicle emission standards should help phase out ICE cars, (3) setting a target of 50% of all cars sold should be EVs by 2030 and finally, (4) a focus on nuclear, carbon capture and electricity transmission. Must admit that I was pleasantly surprised to see nuclear as one of the focus areas…

[#degrowth] — Here’s an interesting and quite well researched piece (although it seems to accept some quite contested “facts” such as the fact that western world are decoupling) about degrowth. Degrowth is a movement that is gaining traction and essentially concludes that to solve the climate crisis world must stop focus on growing GDP and start focusing on degrowing GDP to limit emissions. I don’t think that there’s any doubt that if GDP went to zero in all countries that we would emit less. So degrowth is certainly ONE solution to the climate crisis. But is it the solution we want? The article argues that no it’s not.

🛡 Adaptation

Adapting our civilization to the coming climate crisis is vital. Here we cover various ways that is happening (or isn’t).

[#flooding] — A new study looks at global flood impacts from 2000 to 2018. In that period between 250 and 290 million people were affected by flooding. This number is expected to increase by 10x in the coming decade due to growth in population those areas. The study found that areas with flood impact have a population growth of 34% compared to 18% as the global average. This seems to indicate that more and more people are moving into flood prone areas, which is obviously not a good move.

[#china] — And related.. Death toll from China’s flooding a week or so back has increased to over 300, which is more than 3x the previously stated number.

⛽️ Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#infrastructure] — Boulder, Colorado has calculated that taxpayers will need to pay 100M$ over the next decades in order for the city to adapt to climate change. And it’s not going to have taxpayers foot that bill. No it has sued the oil majors for having to use a fairshare of their “vast profits” to pay for the damage they’re causing. This one will be interesting to follow as it could create a ripple effect of precedence if won.

[#exxon] — Exxon was kicked out of the Climate Leadership Council a group that (by this move at least) appear to be working on getting a carbon tax approved. This probably has something to do with Greenpeaces “fake job interview” from a few weeks back. They might be trying to do some more greenwashing with as it looks like they’re joining the climate pledge bandwagon any time soon. According to WSJ Exxon is considering to make a climate pledge for 2050. Targets they don’t cost a thing (as a fantastic rockabilly band from North Carolina once sang.. almost).

[#shellmuseum] — Remember that Shell sponsored carbon capture exhibition in the Museum of London called “Our Future Planet”? The exhibition itself is scandalous primarily because the Museum has allowed Shell to get a clear avenue to greenwash and hereby influence the thousands of citizens who may go there unknowingly. It’s a disgrace. But what’s more a disgrace is that upon signing the sponsorship the museum also signed away the rights to say anything discrediting about Shell.

That’s it for this week folks!

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Record-shattering heat extremes expected to be more common.

😻 An uplifting and motivational post about how we can still stop climate chaos.

😼 A new study looks at how many deaths each countries emissions are causing.

💩 The world’s flagship fossil fuel carbon capture project has failed miserably.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#india] — India has also been hit by heavy moonsoon rain which so far has killed more than 160 people in the country. Just look at the devastation in this video. Indian climate scientists are trying to raise awareness that stronger adaptation are needed as global warming will increase the number and intensity of the moonsoon and cyclones in the area. The tricky thing is that India is in fact very dependent on the right amount of monsoon rain. Too little and there will be drought, too much (like right now) will wash away useful fertile topsoil.

[#heat] — A new study has found that “record-shattering” heat extremes as the one witnessed recently which broke heat records by more than 5C, will be more and more common with global warming. Especially in the mid to Northern lattitudes. These events will not only be more common, but also longer lasting and more intense.

[#heatwaves] — Remember a few weeks ago when the US West coast was baked in a “heat dome” (a large area of high pressure parked over an area of land)? There’s another currently running from Montana to Georgia in the US. While not as fierce it is still leaving heat warnings in 17 states across the US.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#energystorage] — Here’s a market report on the molten salt storage market. It is expected to grow 15% by 2026 from 629M$ in 2019 to 1.7B$.

[#tidalpower] — The world’s most powerful tidal turbine just started to crank out power in the UK. It can power thousands of homes for the next 15 years.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#electrichighway] — In Indiana a project has been launched that aims to make the world’s first highway that will charge EVs while they drive on it. The project hopes to start building the first highway in 2023.

[#batteryswap] — The battery swapping idea of Shai Agassi’s Better Place was genious as it solved the major issue that many people are having with EVs — that they have to be charged which takes (some) time. If you thought Better Place was dead take a look at this episode of “Just have a think”, in which the authors explores this battery swapping trend in China and India where apparently it is growing.

[#urbantransportation] — Going carless is mostly a question of infrastructure, i.e. how can you get to where you need to go (work, school, kindergarten) without the use of a car. Here’s a list of the top 10 best and worse US cities to go carless in.

[#businesses] — The first article in The Guardian’s newly launched series “Green light”, they dive into the truth behind corporate climate pledges. The recent trend for most businesses are to make a climate pledge, however what The Guardian finds is that few of these are ambitious enough with only 20% science-backed. None of the targets are ambitious enough to get to 1.5C, that’s for sure.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#trucks] — This BNEF article provides an optimistic look at electrifying trucks. Most people agree that long-haul heavy duty trucks are unlikely to be electrified soon simply because batteries are still too heavy or more crucially and technical, their energy density is too low. But there are many heavy duty truck applications that are not long-haul, such as garbage trucks, who rarely goes on freeways and rarely drives more than a few hundred kilometers everyday. These would be possible to electrify.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#wildfires] — Wildfires are not just something that happens in the US, Canada and Siberia. It happens in Europe too. Here’s a look at Sardinia, who has recently been ravaged by severe wildfires killing everything from humans and animals to an 1100 years old olive tree. Sardignia is not the only place in Italy that burns as there are 800 wildfires currently burning in the country.

[#wildfire] — Here’s some good-ish wildfire news. There’s evidence from one of the largest fires currently burning in the US called the Bootleg fire, that thinning forests of fuel using techniques like controlled burns will help control the behavior of even megafires like this one.

[#streettrees] — Here’s a quick guide for how to plant a tree on your street. The article looks at the US, but is likely similar in whichever country you live in. Planting trees in cities are important as they help cities adapt to climate change in countless ways.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#gardening] — As I just moved from an apartment to a house I’m trying to get into gardening. So this article was right up my alley. It’s about a guy who has written a gardening column for 45 years and which have ended up helping to document climate change.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#xr] — Extinction Rebellion has launched a tabloid, which according to their press release, presents the truth about the climate crisis that the Rupert Murdoch media empire is too scared to publish. There’s no doubt that Rupert Murdoch is not a friend of much related to climate action. But I do hope that their new publication won’t be too doomist but striking a good balance between facts and action.

[#motivation] — If you’re feeling down from all the pretty horrible climate disasters happening all over the world these days, this post should hopefully make you feel more empowered. At least it had that effect on me.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#g20] — The G20 meeting held last week was finished without important progress on a couple of major points: (1) Like the G7 meeting recently no agreements on when to phase-out coal was reached. Most countries agree to phase-out coal, but China, India and Russia blocked it. (2) Whether to move faster to decarbonize as the Paris agreement requires them to. The final outcome of the G20 meeting was to upgrade the countries NDCs (which so far unfortunately, have done very little than being targets).

[#australia] — Politicians from US, EU and UK have met a number of times in Canberra in Australia to try and convince the Australian government to make a firm commitment to reach net zero by 2050. Australia is wellknown for not doing enough politically to get to net-zero.

[#USA] — A world wide first ever ban on building new fossil fuel infrastructure was just passed in the county of Whatcom in Washington. The ban makes sure that no more fossil fuel infrastructure whether pipelines or refineries can be built.

🛡 Adaptation

Adapting our civilization to the coming climate crisis is vital. Here we cover various ways that is happening (or isn’t).

[#wildfire] — Many farms in California has lost the ability to be covered by insurance simply because insurance companies won’t cover their property or demand outrageous prices. In once case a farmers premium went from 16K$ to 55K$ in one year. The insurance industry in California is under heavy pressure. The losses from just the years 2017 and 2018 was higher than their profits from the last 25 years. Here’s a look what many vineyeards in California are going through after severe wildfires teared through the area last year.

[#survival] — A new study concludes that New Zealand followed by UK; Tasmania and Ireland are the best places to survive the collapse of society. Countries are ranked based on a number of parameters that are useful to survive, such as their ability to grow food to support the population, protect borders from unwanted migration and so on.

[#utilities] — Here’s a look at how the climate crisis appear to have caught power companies completely unprepared — at least in the US. It even cites a case where Oregon residents called their power company in hordes to have the power turned off due to an approaching storm. They were afraid that the storm would rip out power lines which would cause fire as seen in the California. This is pretty unprecedented and goes to show how much with their pants down the power companies appear to have been taken.

[#china] — While the Chinese boom in recent decades have pulled millions of people out of poverty, it forgot one thing: Climate adaptation. This became very clear from last weeks severe floods which killed at least 69 people in central China. While flooding has always been an issue in China, the rapid urbanization has meant that the rain now has fewer places to be absorbed and scientists believes that this is exacerbating the problems in China.

⛽️ Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#health] — Here’s an interesting (if a bit macabre) new framing of carbon emissions which looks at the costs of carbon footprints, not in dollars, but in lives. How many deaths does your emissions cause (i.e. from increases climate risks not directly of course)? For instance, you would need 3 American’s emissions to kill one person. Where as you would need 146 Nigerian’s emissions to kill one person.

[#lobbyism] — Here’s yet another example of how one US city, Tampa, tried to run on 100% clean energy, but which the lobbyism by the fossil gas industry on a state-level made sure it couldn’t.

[#carboncapture] — The world’s largest carbon capture project has failed it’s 5 year target pretty badly. As the Chevron-run refinery has only managed to capture 30% of it’s target in those 5 years. It is expected that Chevron will have to purchase roughly 73M$ in carbon credits to make up for that short fall. It also goes to show how far along most politicians trusted carbon capture technology is when the flagship operation fails this bad.

That’s it for this week folks!

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 New study reveals that clouds are definitely (97.5%) adding to global warming

😻 For the umptienth time EVs are not worse than ICE cars, even on a dirty grid.

😼 Is climate change happening faster than expected?

💩 A look at how the American Petroleum Institute manipulates global politicians.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#rain] — A new study concludes that floods such as the one we’ve seen all around the world last week, from town obliterating floods in Central Europe to subway flooding in China is likely to occur more often. These slow-moving storms could occur 14x more often in the future.

[#clouds] — One big uncertainty in many climate models is how big an impact clouds will have and what the impact of clouds will be in a warming world. Now a new study confirms with 97.5% probability that the impact that climate change is bringing on clouds will be to amplify warming. This thus resolves a big issue in many climate models being used today and will allow scientists to more accurately model future climate (although not in a more positive way for us).

[#speed] — With the heavy concentration of climate disasters in the recent weeks one is set to wonder (as was the headline of my last newsletter) whether all these disasters are hitting us faster than expected. Grist teams up with a climate scientist to try and answer that question. The short answer: No disasters are not happening faster than expected, but the impacts of 2C looks like they may be worse than we thought.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#germany] — According to a new report, Germany’s entire energy demand can be met by renewables in 10-15 years. Although possible the report makes it clear that Germany needs more ambitious targets to pull it off (and probably even more ambitious action following that).

[#energystorage] — Four year old startup Form Energy, claims to have solved one of the biggest problems with getting more renewables on the grid and that is long duration storage. It claims that it’s iron-air-based battery can discharge power over many days, which is exactly what is needed for utility scale energy storage systems (the batteries are too heavy for use in applications like cars). Not only that but it’s cheap. A regular lithium-ion battery cell costs around 50-80$ pr KWh stored. This new system battery 6$ pr KWh stored. It looks like a breakthrough, but it also frankly looks to good to be true.

[#wildfire] — Equipment owned by the utility PG&E in California may have been linked to a wildfire that burned more than 16.000 hectares. The utility experienced an outage on a part of the system close to where the fire is believed to have started and an responding technician found some blown fuses and the base of a tree on fire.

[#copper] — Here’s a look at the energy transitions copper problem. Right now 60% of all copper mined goes into wind and solar, EVs and other related infrastructure. The problem with that is that we’re going to see lots more of those things and the fact that copper mining is not very good for the environment as it uses a lot of water and leaves toxic waste behind.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#evmyth] — Yet another study kills the hard-to-kill myth that EVs on dirty grids are worse than ICE cars. The new study claims that even when taking batteries into account that the EVs in EU are around 66-69% cleaner, in the US 60-68% cleaner, in China (which uses more coal) 37-45% cleaner and India (which also has more coal) 19-34% cleaner. Let’s hope this study managed to drive the stake all the way through this time.

[#evadoption] — A new report by Ernst & Young predicts that electric cars are coming sooner than many people expect. In some countries like Norway 3 out of 4 carbuyers pick an EV (although that does include hybrids 🤐). According to the report Europe will lead the way with in 2028 where EV sales will surpass ICE cars, followed by China in 2033 and US bringing up the rear in 2036.

[#gender] — A Swedish study has looked at how much men and women emit with their money and concludes that men emit about 16% more than women (despite the amount of money studied is very similar). In the sense the study is quite stereotypical as it concludes that the primary sources of additional emissions for men are transportation and holidays. The two categories women emit more in is healthcare and home furnishing. (The study looked at single men and women).

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#aviation] — United Airlines have bought 100 electric airplanes from Swedish startup Heart Aerospace. The startup’s ES-19 airplane will be able to fly 19 passengers 250 miles on a single charge and are expected to deliver them by the end of the decade.

[#fashion] — Recently, a new report was released which claims that renting clothes is worse than buying new primarily due to transportation and cleaning. But now a number of climate focussed fashion companies have published a counter study that argues that if renting companies address things likes transportation and cleaning then it will be cleaner, which most of the companies that joined the new study did.

[#ac] — Here’s a book review of the book “After cooling: Freon, global warming and the terrible cost of comfort” which looks at the history of air conditioning how it first threatened us by using a gas that destroyed the ozone layer and how it’s now threatening us by using the most powerful greenhouse gases known.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#offsets] — In my recent deep dive on netzero targets I was quite critical about offsets and the way they work today and here’s one reason. The Bootleg fire in Oregon just burned 90.000 acres of carbon offsets. This means that companies or governments that bought these carbon offsets are now in the atmosphere, hence the companies / governments emitted, bought the offsets to “negate” the emissions and now negation ended up in the atmosphere anyway.

[#pigs] — This looks like an attempt to divert focus from more important matters, but I assure you I’m only posting this because it’s an interesting fact. It turns out that the world’s feral pigs emit as much CO2 as 1.1 million cars every year because they dig up soil. Should we exterminate feral pigs? No we should exterminate fossil cars (disclaimer: Please note that I do not condone nor instill violence against fossil fuel based cars).

[#siberia] — Citizens of a city in Siberia was urged to stay indoors and close windows as deteriorating air quality due to wildfires made it unhealthy to breathe the air. Also Siberian wildfires have emitted an estimate 65Mt of CO2 with still 2 months left of the wildfire season.

[#forests] — A new NASA study find (as a study last week also measured) that tropical forests ability to absorb carbon dioxide is getting weaker and weaker. In other words, tropical forests around the world are not extracting as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they used to. In fact in some cases they’re emitting. These emissions from these forests offset 90% of all carbon that is being sequestered by other forests around the world.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#fish] — More than 1billion people rely on fish as their single source of protein and according to a new study, climate change is threatening the nutrients available in fish. The study encompasses 800 species across 157 countries.

[#microbes] — Startup Pivot Bio just raised 430M$ in a series D to bring their micro-organisms to work in agriculture. The company has developed a micro-organism that produces nitrogen, which is the fertilizer that plants need to grow effectively. Spreading of fertilizer today has a lot of emissions associated with it because the nitrogen from the fertilizer leak into the atmosphere. With Pivot Bio’s microorganisms the nitrogen is produced where it’s consumed so to speak, which hopefully lowers the climate impact of fertilizer world wide.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#disadvantagedcommunities] — One of Biden’s first executive orders in office was to make sure that “disadvantaged communities” in the US would get equal benefits of clean energy, infrastructure, and so on. So now the big question becomes: What defines a “disadvantaged community”? We need everybody to help solve the climate crisis also the one’s who can’t afford the upgrades that we need to have to solve this problem.

[#famine] — The current famine in Madagascar affecting over 1.1M people is the first in history to be solely blamed on climate change. Madagascar is facing the worst drought in over four decades, which have caused food sources to almost completely disappear. Madagascar may be the first case of an actual climate change fueled famine, but all over the world food insecurity is increasing.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#bezos] — Bezos spaceflight got almost as much media coverage on a single day (212minutes) as climate change did in the entire 2020 (262minutes) measured across 3 major news channels in the US. (And yes I’m aware of the irony of me talking about Bezos space flight and thus adding to that statistics, but fortunately, I do also talk about climate 😅).

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#ipcc] — Recently a couple of IPCC reports has been leaked to the press prior to publication. I used to view these as a good thing, because the IPCC has been known to frame their language according to what political powers wanted it to sound like, but this article by Inside Climate News paints a different picture, that these leaks might undermine the IPCCs work even more. Which obviously isn’t such a good thing.

[#germany] — Angelika Merkel reviews her climate credentials after 16 years as German Chancellor and concludes that although a lot has been done it is not enough to meet the Paris targets. She also defends the decision to shut down nuclear power plants, which is sad…

[#japan] — A new policy draft from Japan reveals that the country is boosting it’s renewable target for 2030. 36-38% of Japan’s power should be generated by renewables and 22% (which corresponds to no growth) from nuclear, bringing in the country’s total clean electricty to around 56%. The rest is mostly gas (41%) and coal (19%) (although weirdly when adding those numbers one get’s more than 100 🥴).

[#eu] — Here’s a very detailed post on how EUs Fit for 55 will help EU reach its climate goals. And it pretty much ignores the elephant in the room which is that EU wants to continue to burn biomass and use crop stealing biofuels. Still the authors argue that a big part of the policy proposals might be close to what’s needed for EU.

[#australia] — It appears that the Australian government has won enough support to keep the Great Barrier Reef off UNESCO’s “in danger” list until at least 2023. Sad.

[#france] — France passed its climate law last week and most critics say that while it does contain good things it appears to definitely fall short of most people’s hopes. A few selected highlights of the few good things it does contain: Landlords are now no longer allowed to rent out poorly insulated homes, single use food packaging made of plastic banned in 2025 and ban on fossil fuel ads to be imposed.

[#subsidies] — A new report reveals that G20 countries have supplied the fossil fuel industry with over 3T$ (that 3.000.000.000.000$) in direct subsidies since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. How about some real action at some point?

⛽️ Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#lobbyism] — Here’s a detailed article on how the fossil fuel industry is using a US lobby group to block climate action. That group is infamous American Petroleum Institute (API). An example, when Shell published it’s annual report in April this year it claimed it was investing heavily into renewables. On the same day it released another report reporting on it’s political donations. 10M$ went to the API which have vowed to fight climate action on all fronts. So you see when Shell’s CEO is crying because he’s being forced to comply with a lawsuit (last week), then that’s a VERY good thing.

[#wildfire] — In case you need another reason to fear wildfires here’s one: A new study has confirmed that smoke from wildfires can increase the levels of toxic metals in the air. Everything from manganese to lead.

[#shell] — To no big surprise Shell has confirmed that it will appeal the ruling that confirms that Shell must do more to reduce it’s carbon emissions. Their argument is that forcing one company to do it doesn’t make sense.

[#lobbyism] — If you’re looking for a cognitive dissonance, I’ll give you one right here. (1) Fossil fuel giants are pledging net zero targets to honor Paris agreement and (2) fossil fuel giants are ignoring IEAs net zero report by continuing to expand fossil fuel development despite the fact that IEAs net zero report says that doing so will make it impossible to reach the Paris targets.

[#shareholderactivism] — Shareholder activist organisation Market Forces has accused Australian coal company, Asic of misleading investors, because the CEO has claimed in many interviews that coal will always be a part of the mix despite what many organisations including the IEA says.

That’s it for this week folks!

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].

The title for this weeks issue is taken from the 4 adaptation posts included in this weeks newsletter. Mother nature does indeed seem to punish us for our atmospheric intrusions these days. It’s weeks like this when we can really see the brunt force of mother nature that really makes one wonder if we are so much in control as we think (hint: I don’t think we’re in control at all).

That’s why I want to start out talking about a board game. Seems odd perhaps but let me explain. A very interesting Kickstarter launched last week and it’s a board game called Solutions*. It puts you and your friends at the helm of solving the climate crisis. Like Heated puts it this week: “What can I do? Anything” and this game goes out of it’s way to help you figure out what that “anything” could be. Because not only will you and your family/friends learn about the solutions to the climate crisis, but you will also be giving an easy way to act if a particular solution inspires you. And if these past weeks of heat, flood, drought and fire has taught us anything it’s that it’s all hand on deck now. And this is the other big problem that this game solves. It engages anyone in trying to help solve the climate crisis. Even your stubborn old uncle Bob who thinks climate change is load of bull-💩 and your other uncle John who just don’t give a 💩. No amounts of heated dinner discussions will convince them of anything. But perhaps a game will. At least through play they will be forced to learn about the realities of climate change and the solutions to it. Oh and just in case you think it’s just some random game about climate change, Paul Hawken, the founder of Drawdown and Regeneration endorses it.

Needless to say I got one and can’t wait to try it out. Thanks to Sam and Mehrad for all your hard work on this and if you’re interested you should check it out here.

Other than it was a bit of an unusual week news-wise. There was a lot of policy news and details about all the climate disasters that are happening around the world, but few important ones on most other topics I usually cover.

*Full disclosure: The team was a finalist in one of my other climate projects Massive.earth’s very first Challenge program, however, I have no financial interest or other association with the team apart from being a big fan.

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 A new study confirms that the Amazon is now a net source of CO2 emissions and not sink.

😻 EU VC investments in cleantech shattered all records in the first half of 2021 coming in at 7B€ almost twice that of the former annual records.

😼 A great rallying cry from Heated that I hope will inspire everyone who’s not yet doing something for the climate.

💩 The fossil gas industry vs energy efficiency policies.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#hurricanes] — A new study concludes that the recent increase in hurricanes represents a radical deviation from a 1960-1980s lull. The authors have found evidence that this increase in hurricane number and strengths seem to be on a rebound due to man-made air pollution.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#iea] — A new report released by IEA predicts that electricity consumption, which dropped, during COVID, will rebound sharply in 2021 with an increase of 5% and 4% in 2022. More than half of this growth will come from China, which likely means that about half of that increase in electricity production will come from coal. The report makes it clear that although renewable energy deployments have increased rapidly in recent years it’s still not where it needs to be.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#electrification] — A great and hopeful post by Saul Griffith explaining what we (in this case focussed on the US, but could be applied to all of the global north) must do to solve the climate crisis. 42% of the climate problem can be solved by making the right purchasing decisions at a household level. And in this post Saul counts all the devices we need to replace. All 1billion of them. And that’s just in the US. This needs to be happen everywhere of course.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#aviation] — Boeing, Alaska Airlines and NOAA has joined forces to measure greenhouse gas emissions of airplanes mid-flight. This will provide scientists and policy makers with more concrete data points for which the latter probably won’t use for anything. But still the science part seems important.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#bluecarbon] — A new study maps the so called “blue carbon wealth” which is the carbon sink contributions from various ocean based carbon sinks mapped to individual countries. In short the study shows that Australia, Indonesia and Cuba has the most blue carbon wealth. But only a handful of countries have enough blue carbon to offset their emissions.

[#australia] — And related to the study on “blue carbon wealth”, environmental groups are urging the UN to put the Great Barrier Reef on it’s “in danger” list which the Australian government is opposing heavily. The environmental groups refer in their letter to the mass bleaching (coral dying) events of 2016, 2017 and 2020.

[#amazon] — A new study using planes that has sampled the air above the Amazon has determined that the rainforest is now releasing more CO2 than it stores. This has long been speculated by climate scientists that this would happen some time in the future but this effect has now already been detected in huge country sized swaths of the Amazon.

[#greenland] — A new report confirms that the Greenland Ice Sheet appear to be melting at it’s highest rate in the last 12.000 years. But that’s not the scary part. The scary part is how fast the rate of change is happening.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#rallyingcry] — I really enjoyed this rallying cry of a post from one of my favorite climate journalists, Emily Atkin. She sums up all that is happening right on many people’s doorstep (focussed on the US, but she might as well have added the floods in Germany this week, or the burning tundra in Siberia, record shattering heatwaves in Norway etc). These things are happening to everyone and it doesn’t have to take much to make a difference. Read her post for your weekly dose of inspiration and do what you can.

[#investing] — A new quarterly report by Breakthrough Energy founded “Cleantech for Europe” reports that the first half of 2021 has seen a record shattering level of VC investments in cleantech: 7B€. The previous annual record was 4.1B€. With 6 months left to go this seems like quite a jump. The report mentions that although a very good sign and a (still vanity metric though, red.) kudos to the EU cleantech venture community that EU policy frameworks is still needed to be able to support even further investments and development in the sector.

[#book] — Here’s a book review by Ezra Klein on the book “How to blow up a pipeline” about the role of activism and how activism could and (according to the author of the book) should have a more violent angle.

[#reduceremove] — Here’s a great and clear post from Grist’s Ask Umbra series on why we must both stop emitting and remove carbon from the atmosphere. Highly worth a read if you’re still confused about why we must do both.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#covid] — A new report has analyzed the bailouts spent during COVID and concludes that out of the 17T$ spent globally only 10% of that was used in a way that helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

[#fitfor55] — The EU introduced it’s #fitfor55 package of law proposals last week. And it’s a mixed bag. Some call it ambitious, others not so much. It doesn’t definitely contain some good things like banning fossil cars by 2035, including shipping in the emissions trading system and a import tax for steel, cement and other polluting products. Yet among some of the most worrying elements are the fact that under the new laws trees can still be burned to produce energy. Right now the #fitfor55 package are just proposals and if it goes as it always does fossil & co lobbyists will thwart the most ambitious and necessary parts of it. Pardon my negativity here, but we’ve seen enough of these handwavy proposals in my mind.

[#china] — Last week, China opened it’s national carbon emissions trading market, similar to many carbon emission trading markets around the world. It’s seen as an important step to help China curb it’s emissions. Will be interesting to see, although these markets doesn’t really seem to have had a very big effect on emissions just yet…

[#responsibility] — More than 100 leaders of countries from the global south is (once again) urging leaders of rich nations to curb emissions faster. They’re not asking for much. After all, we caused the problem, so of course we have to fix it — especially as these countries will stand to suffer the most.

[#ranking] — A new report has analyzed the NDCs submitted by countries around the world and conclude that few (especially the rich one’s) are doing enough on climate change and health as well. A couple mentions targets but no or little concrete in terms of actions to take.

[#biden] — A new report highlights one key item that was left out of Biden’s infrastructure bill and that’s a clean energy standard that would force utilities to start replacing dirty energy sources with clean ones. The report calculates that such a standard would enable Biden to get to 80% of the net-zero goal by 2030. Sadly, the standard was left out in a compromise with the Republicans.

[#lobbyism] — The forestry industry, in particular, the Swedish Forestry Industry, has heavily criticized a new EU forest strategy (as one would expect when an industry is being hit by the realities of some necessary climate solutions). In this letter 62 researchers counters the forestry industry’s criticism by saying there’s no research evidence to support their claims. Great job.

[#lobbyism] — 92% of S&P 100 companies have stated clear carbon emission reduction pledges these recent years. At least verbally. When it comes to action. Not so much. In fact, 60% of the S&P 100 companies have been caught lobbying against measured that would make achieving their carbon emission reduction pledges cheaper. This seems very much at odds with any kind of business sense.

[#biodiversity] — The UN is working on a new accord that sets out clear target for new biodiversity goals post-2020, after the 2020 goals completely failed. While the targets looks right to most experts its also clear that with out concrete tasks and national accountability the chance that the targets will be achieved will be extremely low.

🛡 Adaptation

Adapting our civilization to the coming climate crisis is vital. Here we cover various ways that is happening (or isn’t).

[#managedretreat] — One key adaptation measure that many cities will likely need to employ in the coming years is so called managed retreat. Managed retreat is when an entire city (or a large portion of it) is moved to some other location for the simple reason that the old location was facing too severe climate disasters. This could be due to wildfires, flood or sea level rise. As I have highlighted before though at least in the US there’s an issue with insurance here as many insurance companies only pay if a particular house or building is built in the same location as it was destroyed in. This limits the places a city can go quite a lot. This article looks at a city who did it anyway.

[#heat] — An analysis of US cities have mapped the heat trapped in cities vs it’s surrounding areas. Here cities like New Orleans come up at the top with the highest difference between city and surrounding areas. New Orleans is on average 5C hotter than it’s surroundings. Lots of factors play into this such as the amount of dark colored areas in a city, the amount of green spaces etc.

[#wildfire] — A firenado is a new thing that humans created by causing the climate crisis, and yes it’s exactly what it sounds like: A tornado but with fire. California saw two of those last week. That article also gives a good overview of the current blazes in California. Even Hawaii is facing severe blazes . Russia is even sending in the army with water bombing planes to try and put out the fires in Siberia that have spread to more than 800.000 hectares in recent weeks. If you want to dive deeper in to the wildfires in the West here’s a dynamic map over the wildfires currently burning out west and the corresponding air quality.

[#drought] — Droughts are having real tangible impacts on people’s lives in the US these days. In particular if you’re a farmer who rely heavily on a steady flow of water. A farmer in Ledoux, N.M, for instance has seen his production of hay drop from 6000 bales to 300. The reason, drought has caused a relentless drop in snowmelt over the past years.

[#flood] — Detroit has experienced it’s second 500-year flood in just 7 years (one in 2014 and another just end of June this year). Think the universe is telling us something? The one in 2014 caused over 1.4B$ in damages. They also had major flooding events in 2016, 2019 and 2020. Also last week, central Europe was hit with severe floods. In Germany alone more than 1300 people is missing and towns have been destroyed.

⛽️ Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#lobbyism] — Remember that time when two senior Exxon lobbyists laid all of Exxon’s lobby strategies bare? (If not, then see this). In those videos they mention 6 Democrats and it turns out that Exxon paid them nearly 333.000$ in donations.

[#health] — Three chemicals used in fracking will decay into so called PFAs which are super toxic to humans and animals and will likely stay in the nature forever. These were ok’ed under Obama’s EPA despite the fact that EPA knew of the risks. And it’s not just those who happen to live close by these sites, but certainly also the workers at the drill sites that are at risk.

[#fossilgas] — A great investigative piece by Grist who looks into how the fossil gas industry publicly looks like it’s supporting things like energy efficiency but in secret it’s derailing policies that will keep inefficient and dirty fossil gas boilers in the market.

That’s it for this week folks!

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Heat waves are already wreaking havoc in the Northern Hemisphere

😻 Shell’s CEO is “crying”

😼 Here’s a review of 60 years of climate science pointing at all the sings we missed or ignored.

💩 10 years of failed EU biofuel policies has wiped out forest the size of the Netherlands

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#heat] — A new report reveals that climate change made the recent heat waves in the US and Canada (which smashed heat records by more than 5C) 150x more likely and thus urges the world to first of all curb carbon emissions (obviously) but also start adapting to these extreme temperatures. The Oregon declared the heat wave a “mass casaulty” event, which is usually only used on things like mass shootings. More than 500 people have died on the West Coast as a result of the heatwave. And more may still die as more than 180 wildfires have been started in Canada alone as a result of the heat wave. But humans are not the only one that suffers. It is estimated that more than a billion of seashore animals might have been cooked to death in the heatwave. And as if all this weren’t enough California is expected to be hit by another heatwave, where temperatures in Sacramento Valley is expected to reach 45C and in Death Valley up to 50C.

[#nordic] — But not only Canada and the US suffers from heatwaves, the Northern most part of Lapland also endured a heatwave that for the lattitude is extreme. 34.7C was registered which is the hottest since 1914. The heatwaves in North America and Norway are connected as the heatwave there is likely to have caused the one in Norway.

[#june] — The month of June was the hottest ever for North America (by 0.15C) beating June in 2012 and the 4th hottest globally. It’s similar for many countries. For New Zealand for instance, despite a polar blast last week, the country has experienced the hottest June ever by more than 2C. Individual heat records were beaten in 24 locations around the country.

[#climatescience] — When you read this article, knowing what we know now, you really start to wonder if it’s just in our nature not to solve the climate crisis. This article dives into all the signs and warnings of climate change through the 20th century that we ignored / missed. There’s quite a lot of them.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#energystorage] — Just in case you didn’t think wind turbines were green enough, here’s a new project that are looking to use end-of-life windturbine materials in a gravity based energy storage system.

[#solar] — This Bloomberg article looks at the state of solar and looks at the many pathways that solar has to become even cheaper. From optimization in production processes to more powerful materials like perovskite.

[#fossil] — The numbers are in. US fossil fuel consumption fell by 9% in 2020. This is the lowest level in 30 years. And yes, it was due to COVID, but still..

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#eu] — This is so damn embarassing and dissapointing. EU has fined a group of the largest auto-makers (VW, BMW, Daimler, Audi and Porsch) in EU over 1B$ for collaborating to stop clean emissions technology. Daimler only got a smaller part of the fine because it revealed the collaboration.

[#repair] — It looks like Biden may be signing a new executive order that targets people’s right to repair. This will enable shops and/or people themselves to repair their equipment and especially devices such as smartphones and tablets that are notoriously known for being near impossible to repair.

[#energystorage] — Between 2010 and 2020 the US produced over 76GWh of batteries for use in plug-in electric vehicles (i.e. both full EVs and plug-in hybrids). 76GWh is roughly enough to power Ireleand for one day. Of these 76GWh Panasonic / Tesla are producing the most.

[#fashion] — Here’s a question: What is best for the climate, buying or renting clothes? I must admit that I thought renting by a longshot but in a new study the authors have calculated that due to the increased amount of transportation per clothing item renting clothes is actually the worst you can do for the climate when it comes to fashion. Although this still feels a bit equivalent to saying that you shouldn’t buy an EV because you’re charging it with fossil gas or coal in some places. You should still by an EV, but you should buy it because or electricity supply has to become clean in the coming years. Same with transportation, it has to become clean. And once emissions from transportation costs gets to zero then I bet renting clothes is better. Still an EV might stay with you 5-10 years, where as your clothes probably shorter. So this does make the argument for buying an EV (although it is charged with fossil gas) better than renting clothes because it is transported more right now. Nothing is black and white here…

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#ocean] — When organisms in the ocean die they sink to the bottom, but on the way don they consume oxygen under the surface of the ocean. When lots of organisms die this creates so called marine oxygen minimum sites, which emit a lot of N2O. About 25% of the global N2O emissions comes from the oceans.

[#wildfire] — Cyprus has requested help from surrounding nations in tackling the country’s worst wildfire, which is currently burning more than 50 square km, which although teeny tiny compared to some of the US west coasts mega blazes, is still very destructive for the people living there obviously.

[#biofuel] — Since EU’s biofuels law was introduced in 2010 it has wiped out forests the size of Netherlands. 80% of all biofuels produced in the EU is using virgin vegetable oils, meaning oils produced from foodcrops such as rapeseed, soy or palm oil and thus directly competes with agriculture for land use.

[#animals] — Here’s an interesting side-effect of climate change: Some birds, mammals and fish are getting smaller. Sizes of animals have been studied for a long time and now we’re seeing consistent evidence that some species are getting smaller and it’s due to climate change. It seems likely that the evolutionary trait that are being expressed here is that smaller body size in many cases means lower temperature.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#lawsuit] — The Australian federal court have ruled that the Australian government must do more to protect young people from harm of the climate crisis, thus echoing a lot of similar lawsuits in the recent years. The, excuse my english, f-ed up Environment Minister of Australia has decided to appeal the decision, I mean WTF.

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#utilization] — A Berlin startup called “Made of Air” has produced a carbon negative thermoplastic from waste from farms and forests. The plastic is made of 90% carbon and thus effectively stores 2 tonnes of CO2 per 1 ton of plastic. What’s even more interesting about this technology (to me at least) is that it’s created from biochar. Made of Air has teamed up with H&M to use the plastic to produce carbon negative sunglasses (assuming that the glass, logistics etc still keeps it carbon negative of course).

[#removal] — Carbon Engineering and BeZero launches an online platform where customers can pay to have a certain about of CO2 removed from the air by Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture process. The CO2 will then be injected into suitable rock formations where it will be sequestered by mineralization.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#malaria] — A new study has found that 8B people could be threatened by malaria and dengue by 2080 (assuming the world adds another 4.5B people in the period up to that) and most of that increased risk comes from — you guessed it — climate change.

[#attitude] — A global survey has determined that there’s a small majority who still believes we have time to avert climate disaster. One might wonder whether these people watch the news, because it would seem that we have climate disasters all over. IMO this survey seems to show nothing more than that people have no clue about what the risks are. And the explanation appears to be in the demographics because it’s mainly those above 55 who believes we have still time (even though the climate disasters were here last week). So if you are over 55 - thank you for even more so for reading this newsletter and go tell your friends (also if you’re under 55 😉).

[#siliconvalley] — Here’s an interesting post on Forbes that discusses Silicon Valley’s love-hate relationship with cleantech. In early 2000s cleantech boomed, which then died in 2011. Only now to re-appear. In 2020 17B$ was invested in to a little over 1000 companies.

[#climatefinance] — The Multilateral Development Banks committed over 60B$ to climate investments in 2020. About 70% of the money goes to climate mitigation efforts like solar and such and 24% goes towards climate adaptation. This sounds good but the number I wanna see is what this number is compared to fossil fuel investments, otherwise it’s a bit meaningless.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#germany] — The person in line to replace Angela Merkel has said that EU joint CO2 targets must not hurt German industry. Obviously in a climate crisis this is an idiotic statement. But frankly I rather like the honesty here, than the greenwashing game that most politicians are running 😒.

[#uk] — It has been revealed that the UK government met with top fossil fuel execs ahead of COP26 from Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron and Equinor in Texas where the fossil fuel majors lobbied hard for fossil gas as a key solution to the climate crisis which everyone (except fossil fuel majors and politicians) knows it isn’t. Apparently the UK politicians have bought it.

[#france] — The French government were planning on enshrining fighting the climate crisis into it’s constitution but disagreement between branches of governments on exact wording have so far put that to rest.

[#canada] — A new report has revealed that the Canadian government has funneled 18B$ in subsidies to the fossil fuel majors to build 3 pipelines in the country since 2018. This is an outrageous amount of money in a climate crisis and in a global attempt at stopping additional fossil fuel expansion.

🛡 Adaptation

Adapting our civilization to the coming climate crisis is vital. Here we cover various ways that is happening (or isn’t).

[#chicago] — A look at one massive adaptation challenge taking place in Chicago. The city was built on a svamp next to Lake Michigan and climate change is making the lake swell higher and drain lower than before thus challenging the infrastructure of Chicago on multiple levels.

[#rainfall] — To no big surprise our greenhouse gas emissions are influencing global rainfall. It is important to understand how we affect these precipitation patterns, as this will allow us to plan how to use our water in the best way and plan adaptations to reduce risk of flooding and water scarcity.

[#pavement] — Here’s the latest in “adaptech” (technology for climate adaptation”) and it’s a sunscreen for your pavement! It has been proven to lower temperature of streets. The exact contents is a trade secret but it’s based on titanium oxide, which is also in regular sunscreen, white paint and pharmaceuticals.

⛽️ Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#oiltrains] — DesmogBlog reports that the Exxon tapes from last week also revealed details about how Exxon are working against regulations for oil trains such as the one that killed 47 people in Canada in 2013.

[#firstdog] — This “First dog on the moon” cartoon is saying things at they are. Except for one thing: It’s not “humans” that are doing it, it’s mostly the fossil fuel industry and the agricultural industry. But apart from that it’s pretty spot on. How come we’re sentencing an activist to 8 years in prison for sabotaging one pipeline when the fossil fuel industry is lighting the ocean on fire and literally making our world burn. It makes no sense and it’s realizations like these that I must admit sometimes get’s me 😢. This other “First dog on the moon” is more funny.

[#conoco] — The fossil fuel industry have long been known for being extremely good at propaganda and for getting their message out on social media. This article on gizmodo dives into some of the recent trends in fossil fuel company Conoco’s social media activities and strategies. If only the good gals/guys were as good.

[#shell] — The CEO of Shell is crying. He warns the world that forcing Shell to cut it’s oil and gas production fast as a result of the recent court ruling will put Shell in a “valley of death” of which he believes it won’t be able to recover. Buhu. Just go away already.

That’s it for this week folks!

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].

This was a pretty crazy week. I mean just the two main “attractions”: Greenpeace’s undercover operation that revealed a lot about how the fossil fuel industry works with politicians just as the ocean caught on fire and a heat dome killed more than 400 people in North America, along with wildfires and heat records beaten many places.

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 EU will be ripped apart by climate change according to Politico study.

😻 12% drop in emissions for new cars in the EU in 2020

😼 Advances in climate science makes it easier to sue the companies and countries causing the climate crisis.

💩 Two Exxon lobbyists caught spilling the beans in everything from shadow groups to how to counter climate action.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#antarctica] — A new report confirms the highest so far measured temperature in Antarctica from February last year. A whopping 18.3C was confirmed by the UN.

[#heatdome] — Here’s a good explanation of how the so called heat dome over western US formed last week and as climate scientists argue nowhere is really safe from these. Heat extremes are predicted and totally expected by all climate scientists.

[#lytton] — Just before Lytton, BC burned to the ground it registered the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada: 49.6C … 3 days in a row.

[#lawsuits] — A new report makes it clear that advanced in climate science is likely to spur a whole new wave of lawsuits against various polluters because it is now possible to attribute concrete damages to the companies emissions. Anybody who knows a lawyer, let’s do this!

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#solarfarmers] — I’ve posted a few articles about how agriculture and solar can interact in good ways but this article looks at an interesting related trend in the UK in which land owners increasingly swaps out crops for solar power. The reason for the surge is likely that a utility scrapped the upfront cost of connecting a utility scale solar power plant to the grid.

[#coal] — In attempt to beef up it’s climate credentials prior to COP26, the UK has announced that it will end all coal power in the country by 2024.

[#hydro] — A new report by the IEA hails one of the often forgotten renewable energy sources: Hydro power. Hydro is expected to grow by 17% in the next decade led by China, India, Turkey and Ethiopia. However, it does appear that hydropower growth is slowing down, therefore IEA calls for more investments and government support.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#cars] — As I’ve shared in the past newsletters EVs have had a great year in 2020 especially in the EU. And with that comes obviously a drop in average emissions for new cars sold in region. The average emissions of a new car fell by 12% to 107.8 gCO2 / km.

[#heatpump] — In case you didn’t know an electric heat pump is actually also a cold pump, i.e. it can run in two ways. So this article dives into how heat pumps is a great climate solution as well as how they can help during heat waves.

[#ev] — A new study has found that implementing more intelligent charging of EVs could reduce the emissions from charging them by up to 14%. More intelligent charging could mean for instance taking advantage of solar and batteries in people’s homes or only charging when there’s a sufficiently high amount of renewables active on the grid.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#plastic] — A new report has been published that calls for a global treaty to end the production of so called ‘virgin plastic’ by 2040. Since 1950s we have produced 8 billion tonnes of plastic and much of that ends up in the oceans and landfills. Some of the big posts on the plastic budget is: Packaging materials with 47% of all plastic, 14% from textiles and 6% from transport.

[#cement] — Here’s an interview with the founders of Alcemy, which have developed AI-based software that can increase the precision and accuracy of cement production hereby lowering the overall production of cement.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#heatwaves] — There’s one solution to adapt to the increasing number and intensity of heatwaves which also happens to be a great carbon removal solution, and that is trees. Researchers have found that trees can lover the temperature of it’s surroundings by around 6C. The problem though is that trees are not having an easy time in cities. This article looks at that problem.

[#offsets] — Here’s a couple of examples of flaws offsets in which an offsetting program promised forest protection and got rewarded multiple millions $ for it, only to have Global Forest Watch discover that forest cover actually decreased in the period they were paid for. And it’s not the only place where this is happening. Another report has revealed that carbon offsets offered in Colombia has not only been used by companies to dodge taxes but also overstate their impact on forest protection.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#plastic] — Researchers have found an enzyme in the stomach of cows that can break down common plastics. An immediate question is presents itself: Why? Apparently much of cows food contain a kind of shell with similar structures as plastic hence this is why the researchers think the cows have evolved to have that enzyme. The image of cows munching down plastic though is a pretty horrible one.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#lawsuits] — Here’s a slide-based overview of the rise in fossil fuel based lawsuits. In the last decade more than 700 lawsuits have been filed against the fossil fuel industry. Right from cities suing because they’ve been forced to build a sea wall to more widely scoped public nuissance lawsuits because the impact of fossil fuels have made areas less livable. The slide-based overview is followed up by a more in-depth article on the matter.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#wildfire] — Here’s an inspiring video produced by the US Department of Natural Resources about how wildfires are affecting big parts of the US and how the people has recovered from these traumatic and lifechanging experiences.

[#climatetech] — Two very interesting discussions on the Interchange podcast. The first one titled “🎧Where are the gaps in climate tech” looks at the state of climate tech, where the gaps are and discusses how big the impact ultimately will be. The other one is titled “🎧The New ‘Valleys of Death’ in climate investing” looks at why climate tech companies dies starting off with the beginning of the cleantech crisis in 2011 and back to the future.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#ranking] — Australia ranks worst on a list for climate action among all 192 UN member states says a new report. Australia is followed by Brunei, Qatar and Norway. Finland, Denmark and Sweden are 1, 2 and 3 respectively.

🛡 Adaptation

Adapting our civilization to the coming climate crisis is vital. Here we cover various ways that is happening (or isn’t).

[#EU] — Politico did a survey of a 100 scientific papers looking at what will happen to the EU in the case of 1.5C and 2C temperature increases. And their findings are pretty scary. Both ends of the continent (north and south) will struggle with various problems. From fires and floods up north (even for the low temperature scenarios) and down south it will be droughts, heat and agricultural decline. The report argues that these very different but very hard problems will tear Europe apart. It’s a long but very interesting read.

[#heat] — The extreme heat wave on the US West coast this past week has broken so many heat records (even worst case climate models) that it’s hard to count them all and it makes it clear that we need to build cities differently to handle all that excess heat. Here’s an interview with a climate researcher about how cities can adapt. As the heatwave was at it’s top he drove around Portland, Oregon and measured temperatures of buildings and found that they could vary by as much as 4.5C. These differences can be lifesaving as many thousands have died from the heatwaves this past week and still many left to be found.

⛽️ Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#exxon] — The biggest news item from last week was the sneaky sting operation that Greenpeace’s Unearthed ran on two key Exxon lobbyists. Posing as recruiters they got a senior Exxon lobbyist to spill the beans on all of Exxon’s strategies and tactics for killing all climate action policies through “shadow groups” and manipulation of key senators. There’s topics like how they’re publicly supporting a carbon tax, but only because they know it will never become a reality right to outright stating that they aggressively fought climate science. The link I posted above was to Heated’s walkthrough, but here’s the link to the original piece on Unearthed. Probably the most rage inducing of all of this is Exxon CEO Darren Woods response: “We were shocked by these interviews and stand by our commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change,” F- you Darren and thank you Greenpeace 🙏.

Part 2 in the Exxon sting by Greenpeace was released later in the week and it dealt with how Exxon lobbyists have worked on making sure that regulations to kill plastic is being stopped.

Here’s a profile of some of the climate scientists who worked at Exxon and who back then sounded the alarm in scientific peer reviewed journals about the harm that the fossil fuel industry’s products is causing to the planet.

Oh and the ocean caught fire last week from a pipeline malfunction. Look at this.

[#ipcc] — Another draft IPCC report has been leaked which indicate that climate scientists are using strong language in terms of blaming the fossil fuel industry for the many curbed attempts at any real climate action. The report blames think thanks, trade groups and other third party groups for influencing policy that has had a detrimental effect on the world’s ability to tackle the climate crisis so far.

[#coal] — A new report by Carbon Tracker, reveals that just five Asian countries (China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam) are responsible for 80% of the world’s planned new coal capacity. Those 80% will add more than 600 coal power plants and a total of 300GW of dirty coal capacity on to the grid. More than 50% of this capacity (187GW) will be built in China.

[#china] — Here’s a detailed look at China’s industry and how much it pollutes. Turns out (as expected) that it emits so much that it’s very clear that China must decarbonize it rapidly to hit it’s 50% target by 2030.

[#china] — China’s biggest bank has decided not to fund a 2.8GW coal plant scheduled to be built in Zimbabwe. Good news, yet I wonder where they’re going to find those 2.8GW…

That’s it for this week folks!

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

A bit of housekeeping:

Last week’s live interview was unfortunately, cancelled, so I’m doing an e-mail based interview with the interviewees about offsets. I still expect the deep dive on offsets will still land in your inbox mid this week.

Also changing the format for announcing deep dive interviews a bit. Instead of announcing it in the weekly newsletter I will announce it a little later in the week when the speaker is known. I hope this will make it less confusing about what to expect from the interview.

Finally, this weeks deep dive will be the last I will do on a weekly basis. Instead I will switch to doing them 1-2 times pr month. This is to make sure I have time to get the right speakers and topics on.

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Leaked IPCC report reveals that climate scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about when we will reach climate tipping points.

😻 62% of renewable installations that came online last year was cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel option.

😼 A deep dive into the environmentally damaging waste-to-energy sector

💩 Massive methane leaks revealed at 120+ fossil gas installations around Europe.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#arctic] — Soo.. ground temperatures hit 47 degrees C in the Arctic Circle last week. That number was reached in Siberia, but the entire area is seeing scorching heat these days.

[#tippingpoints] — IPCC has long been criticized for adapting their reports to what political heads wants to be in them, so it’s probably good news (that comes with bad news) that a report was leaked. In the draft report leaked to a french news agency climate scientists are increasingly concerned that we’re getting closer and closer to climate tipping points. This is also good news as earlier IPCC reports have failed to include tipping points in their reports.

[#wildfire] — At least 15 wildfires are raging in the Arizona currently covering an area as big as 160.000 hectares. Here’s a satellite look at some of the wildfires currently raging in the West.

[#heatwave] — You have probably already seen reports of the record-breaking heat wave that is hitting the US west coast these days. It packs a pretty bad one-two punch as the area is also in the middle of the worst drought in many years.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#renewables] — Renewables are cheaper than building new fossil fuel power plants in countries that cover 46% of the global population according to a new analysis by BloombergNEF. In fact 62% (or ~160GW) of new renewable installations that came online in 2020 was cheaper than the cheapest new fossil fuel option. This is great news. In fact through 2020 the cost of solar felt by 16%, onshore wind by 13%, offshore wind by 9% and utility scale solar by 7%. Since 2010 utility scale solar costs have dropped by 85% and for offshore wind it’s 56%.

[#renewables] — And more good news on the renewables front: According to new numbers from the US released last week, renewables overtook coal generation in 2020 just barely. Both clocking in at around 800GWh (although that does include biomass).

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#waste2energy] — Here’s a look at the waste-to-energy sector. Waste-to-energy is highly polluting, not just in CO2 emissions, but also in other toxins that are released into the air from incinerating garbage. The problem is especially bad in EU where about 1/3 of all waste are burned releasing a total of 52Mt of CO2 in 2019 (more than Portugal). Carbon intensity of the process may be as high as 550g CO2e / KWh, which is more than 2x the EU average.

[#energyefficiency] — Here’s a great post on the all too overlooked climate solution that is energy efficiency improvements of buildings. It details how energy efficiency optimizations can save people and business money while at the same time cut carbon emissions. By 2050 it is expected that we can achieve 11.7Gt of carbon emission reductions from energy efficiency optimizations.

[#vw] — VW just announced that they will end sales of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars in Europe (only) by 2035 and China and US later.

[#amazon] — Here’s a pretty bad case for Amazon. According to an itv report published last week, Amazon caught destroying millions of products every year at a UK warehouse. This must have consequences.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#sails] — With all the talk of the shipping industry’s poor performance when it comes to reducing it’s carbon footprint here’s an interesting look at an old technology that might help: Wind. It dives into how modern sails work (surprisingly similar to how it work 100s of years ago) and how they can be adapted to fit a modern economy with expectation of stable shipping times.

[#steel] — The Swedish fossil-free steel project HYBRIT just reached a major milestone which is producing a key step of the steel production process (sponge iron) using their fossil-free process on a pilot scale, which is a step up from laboratory scale.

[#cement] — Here’s a deep dive into the cement industry. Written by Energy Impact Partners, Madison Freeman, she goes into the pathways that the cement industry has to reduce emissions and looks at interesting technologies in the area. Highly recommended read for anyone curious about cement. This is becoming increasingly relevant as a group of investors representing 2T$ last week started putting pressure on concrete producers to decarbonize.

[#aviation] — A new short documentary looks at the aviation industry’s attempt to go electric and is quite blunt about the fact that electric airplanes are coming and here to stay. This article looks at the key points of the documentary and the aviation industry’s general attempts and pathways to decarbonize.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#hemp] — Here’s a look at all the different applications of hemp and how it could likely be used in a wide variety of solutions: From fuels to building materials. Unfortunately, it looks like hemp-based solutions are still a bit controversial and was excluded as a topic from COP26 despite more than 4000 delegates registering their interest.

[#peat] — A look at an attempt to save Welsh peatlands and to no surprise there’s an animal solution to this. Typically the peatlands around that area have had roaming sheep run by sheep farmers, but the sheep are so many that they’re accelerating the erosion of the peat. Instead cattle should be brought in which will likely cause the farmers to have fewer animals on the pastures.

[#water] — Here we look at how wildfires are affecting water supplies. A wildfire can in many cases cause soil erosion and that erosion can lead to contaminated water supplies, which can remains so for decades.

[#amazon] — A key killer of the Amazon may have been removed from office as Brazil’s environment minister has quit, after he was accused of helping illegal logging of the rainforest. Still the kingpin Bolsonaro remains though..

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#airfood] — You’ve heard about vertical farming I’m sure, where giant warehouses or people’s own homes are being converted into an urban high-efficiency garden. Hereby in some cases eliminating the need for land (due to efficiency increases) and transportation. Here’s an even crazier idea, why not take the same solar used to power these (ahem that should be used to power these) and CO2 from the air and use that to make chemicals with which to grow microbes that can be used to replace things like environmentally damaging soya beans? That’s what a group of researchers are working on. It’s called food from air and it sounds totally magical. But the conclusion is that the same area of land can be used to grow 10x more food using this technology.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#indigenous] — A new UN report highlights that land grabs of indigenous land is not only a problem for the the tribes themselves, but for the planet’s biosphere as these incursions increasingly destroys biodiversity.

[#greenwall] — A project called the Great Green Wall is a reforestation project that aims to help those countries in Africa who are at the frontline of the climate crisis. The project will restore 100 million hectares, help pull down 250Mt CO2 and create 10 million new jobs across the African continent.

[#congo] — Here’s a rare glimpse at what the climate crisis is doing to Congo and especially the congolese people. Not only is deforestation rampant which is a by-product of poverty and violence and which is driving erosion, which in turn is fueling flooding which leaves many people homeless with close to no opportunities. This is really horrible.

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#carbonremoval] — MIT Tech Review dives into carbon removal via direct air capture and looks at the very technological pathways and talks with the players. The industry has its work cut out for it: The industry will need to grow by ~300x to get to the hoped 100$ pr ton CO2 removed.

[#geoengineering] — A great discussion piece on Bloomberg, not unlike my own deep dive on net-zero, argues that there are two extremes that are too often portrayed: Either you’re a techno-optimist or you think behavioral change is the only way to go. And surprise surprise: We need both. And we should be rational about developing both because at this point it seems likely that everything will be needed.

[#ccus] — A very interesting deep dive into the utilization options for CO2 in which companies inject CO2 into various products. It takes the vantage point of the company Interface that makes carpets. They analyzed their carbon footprint and realized various ways not only to reduce their emissions but also incorporate CO2 in various forms into their products.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#investing] — Such a needed discussion here and what I have been flagging since I first got involved in climate. When there’s money the people trying to capitalize on that will come just like what happened to AI a few years back. The problem this time around is that it’s greenwashing and is countering all other chances we have at solving this problem. More investor education is for sure needed and investors needs to take the responsibility of doing proper climate due diligence on their investments.

[#ecocide] — I’ve been talking about ecocide before and now finally a team of 12 lawyers have released a 160page definition of ecocide which is hoped to be included in the International Criminal Court. That process though, could take years…

[#showyourstripes] — If you’ve been on SoMe the past week you’ve probably seen people posting their stripes. This was a part of a campaign called #showyourstripes which aimed to get people to share their region’s warming stripes which in a simple way illustrate how the global temperature in each country has changed over the years. The University of Reading which launched the campaign are very happy with the results citing that it has started climate conversations all around the world.

[#systemicchange] — I had this article in my cross-hairs last week but thought it had a too rosy-eyed look at US emissions (and it does), but it’s points are interesting as was highlighted by a tweet thread by Dr Jonathan Foley of Project Drawdown. So here it is. The article basically argues for an interesting global phenomenon that seems to help drive down emissions (although it looks like the article per usual is ignored imported emissions) by incremental improvements across all of humanity’s activities from business to politics to individual behavior change. It argues (and I think Dr Foley does it particularly well) that “systemic change” doesn’t come from “a place”, no it comes from many many places.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#responsibility] — A new study calculates that the global north is responsible for 92% of all excess carbon emissions and thus argues that the global north should of course bear the major parts of the costs incurred by this “atmospheric colonization”.

[#eu] — A new EU law is being passed, which is the first ever to regulate how the shipping industry must switch to sustainable fuels. The problem: It’s allowing fossil gas and biofuels of the kind that are worse for the climate than fossil fuel counterparts. Detailed analysis by Transport & Environment.

[#g7] — The great Michael Mann walks through the climate wins and the loses at this years G7. Yes there was no firm date settled for coal phase out, but they did agree on phasing out funding for coal projects. It has also recently been revealed that China has decided to halve of it’s planned coal projects citing cost and risk as reasons.

[#netzero] — Last week’s deep dive article dived into net-zero and this one seems so well-timed as to be almost coordinated. It’s Climate Action Tracker who are tracking policies globally and how inline they are with the Paris agreement. They will start doing their own analysis of the commitments that countries submit to the UN (NDCs) and will among other things split their net-zero targets into emission reductions and carbon removal. Nice! Can’t wait for this report to come out.

[#biden] — Activists are worried that Biden’s climate pledges are falling apart. In the first weeks after he took office he was hailed as the climate saviour. But now it looks like many of the his pledges are running into trouble. The article cites a lot of Biden’s recent climate losses: From trouble with pausing all oil and gas drilling leases to giving the go ahead to new fossil fuel projects. Recently Biden has ok’ed a highly protested pipeline called Line 3 which will transport dirty Canadian oil sands oil through Minnesota.

[#policy] — Ezra Klein sat down with a group of respected climate veterans to discuss the key question of whether politicians will ever be able to help solve the climate crisis in any meaningful way. The answer is complicated and you will have to read the article to get to any meaningful conclusion yourself.

[#worldbank] — The World Bank just announced that it will commit to doing annual reports on its climate action plan and increase the amount of money it will spend on climate from 28% to 35%. It don’t commit to stop funding fossil gas projects for instance but does say that they will need to face high some high thresholds to win funding. So both good and bad I guess.

🛡 Adaptation

Adapting our civilization to the coming climate crisis is vital. Here we cover various ways that is happening (or isn’t).

It’s clear that adaptations to protect civilization from the coming climate crisis is already happening around the world and I felt it was important to give these their own section so here goes.

[#newyork] — New York City has launched a 1.45B$ project to project the lower East Side from sea level rise and extreme weather. The project will feature berms, sea walls and flood gates.

[#farmers] — Small scale farmers especially in the global south are usually improving their farms over their entire lifetime in response to changes in the climate. However, according to a new report by the World Resources Institute climate change recently are happening so fast that it leaves them no time to adapt and thus threatens not only their livelihood but their lives.

⛽️ Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#investing] — Engine no 1 is launching an index fund (a so called ETF) which will track the performance of the top 500 biggest companies in the US. All shares held by the ETF will be utilized by Engine no 1 to affect board member decisions and shareholder votes as we recently saw they had a lot of success with.

[#investing] — The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has released it’s energy survey, where they ask execs in the energy industry about their outlook on the future. And many fossil execs cites big concerns regarding raising enough money all citing green energy transition as the main culprit. It’s working.

[#petrostates] — The UAE sets 2050 net-zero goal. This raises an interesting question: Can a petro-state have a net-zero goal without them dismantling their fossil fuel industry (of which they have no plans AFAIK)? Net-zero goals doesn’t include a country’s exported emissions hence this would allow UAE to go net-zero without doing that. Akshat Rathi has a very interesting twitter thread about this which stand in somewhat contrast to my recent deep dive on net-zero.

[#greenwashing] — As expected the Science Museum in the UKs exhibition on climate change sponsored by Shell and featuring and awkward amount about carbon capture and storage was the target of an activist operation in which young activists employed civil disobedience and tried to stay in the museum.

That’s it for this week folks!

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].

🦉Twitter Spaces topic of the week

Carbon Offsets

This is highly related to the last week’s discussion on net-zero vs real-zero and to the discussion the week before about agriculture. And I feel the news story this week about the carbon neutral boat with fossil gas warrants a discussion of what the heck is going on with offsets. What are they? Are they good for anything? Which are good? Can we make them good etc?

Search for #twitter below to see which articles is included in that. Also check out previous newsletters which the past few weeks has had a lot on #netzero. Here’s a link to the Space on Twitter (click on it on your mobile phone and you will be able to set a reminder) and be sure to follow me there to not miss more great climate content 🐧. We had a few tech issues last time on Twitter Spaces but we are going to give it one more chance as I still feel the climate discussion is more lively there than on Clubhouse and we did also see quite an uptick in participants this time.

Click the link in this tweet to set a reminder. Exact time and date TBA but we’re targeting Friday afternoon at this point.

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 The Earth’s atmosphere is trapping 2x more heat compared to 2005.

😻 A look at the strategy employed by the lawyer who recently beat Shell in the courts.

😼 A nerdy look at how to produce salad.

💩 A look at Bolsonaro’s attack on climate.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#energybalance] — The Earth’s energy balance is a metric that looks at how much energy that hits the Earth from the sun and how much is bounced back into space. Due to greenhouse gases the Earth absorbs more heat than is bounced back — that’s a good thing, because it would be frigid cold here without. But it’s not good that the Earth absorbs 2x the amount of heat today than it did just 16 years ago in 2005!

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#fossilshare] — So how are we doing in terms of reducing the amount of fossil fuel capacity on the global electricity grids? I thought we were doing pretty well. But a new report by REN21 has got me thinking differently. While we sure have higher renewable capacity on the grid today than in 2009 (which the report looks at) the share of fossil fuel based generation is the same: 80.2%. This seems to indicate the renewable energy isn’t really replacing fossil fuel generation but more taking care of humanity insatiable thirst for more energy. Check out key messages from the report here.

[#wave] — Here’s a deliciously geeky deep dive on small wave energy power plants and how they can be stepping stone for wave energy in general. It looks at currently technologies and how they work.

[#investing] — According to a US sustainable investment initiative, investor confidence in renewable energy hits an all time high. The initiative launched in 2018 attempts to gather 1T$ in renewable investments and so far 1/6th of that has been reached (~167B$) and that’s despite a 20% decline in renewable energy investments in 2020. Of the investors surveyed 68% plan to increase their investments in renewable energy.

[#us] — And some good news. According to new numbers from the US released last week, renewables overtook coal generation in 2020 just barely. Both clocking in at around 800GWh (although that does include biomass).

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#buildings] — The UK is currently working on a new heat and buildings strategy. And one of the items being discussed is to equip low income households with free heat pumps. 14% of UKs emissions are attributable to heating low income households which are due to the heating source but certainly also due to energy inefficiencies in the buildings themselves. Also just slapping on a heat pump doesn’t make it green, but it’s a good start and sounds like a great initiative.

[#megadrought] — The New York Times looks at the megadrought currently hitting the western US and observes that the only thing that makes this year different is the severity. Drought is a “normal” condition for the west these past decades. In fact, it’s well-known that the west is in what’s called a megadrought which can last for decades.

[#steel] — A new collaboration between sustainable steel maker SSAB and Volvo puts Volvo on a path to start using fossil fuel free steel in their cars. Commercial production is expected to start in 2026.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#shipping] — The fossil fuel lobby should pat itself on the back for this one. Well done. The UN agrees on a feeble 1.5% annual carbon emission reduction target for the shipping industry.

[#aviation] — By 2030, all jet-engines made by Rolls-Royce will only run on synthetic sustainable aviation fuels. Seems a bit like hand-waving though as AFAIK many of these fuels are drop-in replacements from existing fossil fuels.

[#hydrogen] — Here’s a deep dive into hydrogen as an aviation fuel. The article argues that hydrogen is the strongest bet for a renewable aviation fuel. It also presents Airbus’ plans in the area. One caveat though is that we need to amp up renewable hydrogen production by a crazy amount to do this. But it for sure does look like one solution to the aviation problem.

[#aluminum] — Here’s a look at how to make green aluminum. There are various ways and basically this article argues that it’s already cost competitive with non-green aluminum.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#salp] — Meet the humble salp. A salp is a jelly-like sea creature who swim around at night and eat phytoplankton which during the day has sucked up a lot of CO2 by photosynthesis. During the day the salp go down to about 1000m to hide from predators and poop out tiny carbon containing pellets from their phytoplankton dinner, which sink rapidly and thus can be considered as a strong carbon sink. The salp themselves when they die also sink rapidly. It’s estimated that salp removes 2B tons of carbon every year.

[#wildfires] — The summer hasn’t even begun but already the western US is seeing an increasing amount of wildfires. This season is expected to be a bad one due to the extreme heat and drought in the region.

[#bloodglacier] — Snow in the alps are turning red in what’s known as “blood glacier”. The cause: Algae blooms. It is believed that the increase concentrations of CO2 are making the algae bloom more than usual.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#zimbabwe] — Here’s how a seemingly simply thing as cellular coverage is causing trouble for drought stricken farmers in Zimbabwe. While cellular coverage is at 87% some rural farmers don’t get regular weather updates, which in a recent example has cost multiple farmers a ruined crops.

[#salad] — A very interesting look at various ways today to produce salad and what will happen to those in the future. From high-tech vertical farming to more traditional methods.

[#insects] — Inside Climate News look at the latest in the intersection between insects and food. It’s been awhile since I last heard about an insect food startup, but apparently, the space is getting hot again for entrepreneurs. It’s a sector that seeing increasing funding from VCs. Globally more than 200M$ was invested in insect startups in 2020.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#lawsuits] — The environmental lawyer who won the case against Shell on May 26 has prior to winning the case against Shell written a book on the exact strategy that he used to win the case. The book is called “Revolution Justified: Why Only the Law Can Save Us Now” and ranks pretty low on Amazons Kindle store, still sounds like an interesting book that most lawyers should probably read.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#ai] — This week’s 🎧Interchange podcast looks into how AI can support climate tech. AI’s powerful data analysis and predictive features are expected to help in a wide variety of applications ranging from building management to analyzing transition risk for companies. One thing though that’s important for AI companies to observe is their carbon footprint as GPUs used to train most advanced AI models are quite hungry when it comes to power consumption.

[#comms] — Heated raises a very interesting point which I myself was guity of. On Big oils bad day a couple of weeks ago almost all the headlines was framed as “big oils bad day”, i.e. as something negative for the fossil fuel industry (which it was). But the other angle is that it was a great day for everybody else, humanity, nature, the planet. Why didn’t anybody (apart from Heated) chose the framing?

[#environmentprize] — Goldman’s environment prize winners was announced last week. This article looks at who they are. Right from a coal fighter to a Vietnamese protector of pagolins.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#brazil] — In this profile Heated looks at the person with likely one of the highest amount of power over our climate: Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro. Heated looks at all the ways he’s supporting the deforestation of the rain forest from reducing Brazil’s environmental budget to encouraging slash and burning by farmers raising cattle.

[#biden] — A federal judge has blocked Biden’s attempt to stop new oil and gas drilling leases on public lands. This is the first legal roadblock that Biden has incurred so far. The ruling says that stopping such leases can only be controlled by the Congress.

[#g7] — The G7 meeting was held last week and probably the biggest disappointment from the meeting was that the group did not come to an agreement regarding when to end coal. The coal industry is expanding rapidly in China and the disagreement on this will make it much easier for China to not do anything about it’s coal use. In addition, G7 was a classic re-statement of goals, but according to experts, total lack of funds and action.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#oilaction] — Shell’s CEO recently went to LinkedIn to make it clear that cutting Shell’s scope 3 emissions to zero wouldn’t solve the climate problem because people would just buy their gasoline and diesel some other place. It’s a classic argument, that it’s up to you and me. So Akshat Rathi of Bloomberg examines what the oil majors can do to reduce the demand for oil and in short it comes down to the things they do the least.

[#pipelines] — The Keystone XL pipeline maybe buried for good, so which pipelines should we target next? An obvious choice seems to be the Dakota Access pipeline, which the article looks at.

[#pr] — Gizmodo looks at a new trend among fossil fuel companies, which is engaging and sponsoring instagram posts from highly popular instagram influencers, hereby creating a new horde of big oil instagram influencers. A similar tactic which have worked so well for the gas industry.

[#military] — NATO is highlighting the highly polluting nature of military opportunities by planning to go net-zero by 2050. The US, EU and UK military together accounts for 95Mt of CO2 emissions annually.

[#netzero, #twitter] — And we’re ending with an article that is very relevant for our discussion on Twitter Spaces about net-zero vs real zero. In it Salon reports how Shell triumphantly is transported a larger tanker ship filled to the brink with fracked fossil gas across the Atlantic from the US to Europe. That in itself is not newsworthy it happens every day, but what is newsworthy is that the ship is carbon neutral! You see according to the latest political plan if we all just go net-zero we can keep on burning this crap if we just buy the right amounts of offsets. Isn’t that great? Apparently this is not even the first time this has happened. This is as close to state-sanctioned greenwashing as you can possibly get IMO.

That’s it for this week folks!

Join us on Twitter Spaces this week to talk about offsets.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

As you know, when I’m launching new stuff I tend to try different things to see what works and next week we’re going to try Twitter Spaces instead of Clubhouse. Twitter Spaces is the same, just on Twitter. There’s a number of reasons why I wanted to try Twitter Spaces instead of Clubhouse

It’s where the climate discussion already is

You only need a Twitter account to join

A couple of people I’ve spoken too had privacy concerns regarding Clubhouse.

It’s f***ing hard to build a new community from scratch on a new platform and on Twitter I already have some following.

So it kind of makes sense to try it out. We’ll see how it goes.

Finally, I realized that Wednesday is too soon if I want to find somebody to interview, let alone find people who can join to listen. And it makes sense, people don’t just clear their schedule to be interviewed by or listen to Weekly Climate … yet. So these interviews will now be held on Fridays 3pm CET. So if you’re in Europe, bring your own beer after a long week of hard work and if you’re in the US bring your own cup of coffee and start your day right.

🦉Twitter Spaces topic of the week

Net-zero vs “real” zero 0️⃣ (Friday June 18 3pm CET unless otherwise noted)

In short, there’s been so much debate going on about what net-zero means and whether it’s adequate or not. There’s been contradicting reports and articles taking both sides. So on Friday June 18 3pm CET we’re going to settle it! Or at least try to 😬.

Click the link in this tweet to set a reminder:

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Here’s some scary/sad pictures from the drought currently hitting a big part of California.

😻 Keystone XL pipeline in the US cancelled!

😼 The climate crisis needs a feminist response.

💩 A new report argues that net-zero plans are b**t and a big con orchestrated by big fossil and friends.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#glacier] — A new study of the gigantic Pine Island Glacier reveals that it is breaking up which is causing it to melt faster. If the entire thing melts (which it’s still very far from) then that would mean a 0.5m global sea level rise.

[#co2] — NOAA just reported last week that CO2 levels are now 50% higher than before Industrial Revolution. Total concentration average for May was 419ppm.

[#landslides] — New machine learning model developed by NASA doubles the accuracy for predicting landslides, which annually causes thousands of deaths and billions in damages. This is especially true in areas that have been ravaged by mega wildfires or areas with high soil erosions as heavy rains has a huge risk of creating these landslides as has been seen in the past.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#floatingsolar] — If you ever wanted what a floating solar power plant looks like take a look at this. Albania just activated it’s first 72MW floating solar power plant which is floating in a big reservoir of a hydro power plant.

[#coalmines] — A new study looked at the amount of coal mines proposed globally and compares that to the 1.5C target of the Paris agreement and to no surprise concludes that they are incompatible with the 1.5C target. Global coal mine proposals will increase global coal output by 30% which also seems radical in a clearly falling industry.

[#energystorage] — California is going BIG on energy storage. Up until recently most grids with heavy renewable penetration had to rely on a lot of fossil gas power plants to prop up the demand when heat waves occurred or just to deal with the classic duck curve that happen every single day. But as California aims to go 100% renewable more and more battery storage is coming online. This article has the details on the plans.

[#nuclear] — Russia begins construction of it’s first fast neutron reactor (a regular fission reactor where the fission reaction is sustained by high energy neutrons). This reactor type has the benefit that it can reuse spent nuclear fuel, which provides an almost inexhaustible amount of fuel. The reactor will be 300MW and should start operation 2026.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#adaptation] — 25% of California’s population are threatened by wildfires. And one key reason seem to be how the state’s building permits work. When someone’s house have been demolished by wildfire they’re usually not allowed to rebuild it some other place and that puts the new house straight in the path of new wildfires. This article takes a deep dive into the problem.

[#ev] — One of the big challenges of EVs that few seem to be talking that much about is charging. And the reason is that charging is no problem in the major parts of the developed world today. If you’re in a large city you can always find a charger. But imagine 10 years from now, 5 years before a world wide ban of ICE cars. All ICE cars you see on the streets today, need to become EVs, how are they going to charge? This article looks at a few interesting ways to solve the problems for so called “garage orphans”.

[#energystorage] — Lithium batteries are going to be in huge demand in the coming years, so the US just released it’s “blueprint” for how it’s going to fix the country’s supply chain for getting access to these batteries.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#reforestation] — Startup Terraformation led by former Reddit CEO has raised a 30M$ Series A to expand their rapid reforestation technology. I was assuming it was just some drone machinegun seeding thing. But apparently they really studied the problem and identified three main bottlenecks to tree planting today which they’re solving with three different products. Apparently, using their products they can speed up tree-planting by 5x.

[#deforestation] — In a new exhibition artist Richard Mosse is showing the devastation in the Amazon in great detail using multispectral photography, which is normally used by scientists studying the Amazon to track exactly that: Damages to the Amazon.

[#biodiversity] — Very interesting report out last week that says that we have to solve both the climate crisis and the nature / biodiversity crisis or we won’t solve either. We can’t just plant big monoculture tree plantations as that will cause total wildlife deserts. As humans we may be at the top of the food chain but we’re still depending on the lower parts of the future chain to exist and thrive.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#renewables] — Here’s a look at how one progressive farmer in North Carolina has utilized all kinds of renewable technologies to reduce their carbon footprint. Everything from solar power to harvesting biogas from their manure lagoon.

[#foodemissions] — A study published last week has concluded that the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to food production is a lot higher than previous thought. The authors included everything that could be related to the food system from on-farm activities, to land use change, transportation, retail sale and so on and ended up with a number that corresponded to roughly 40% of all human emissions, up from a previously calculated 20% (which only included on-farm activities).

[#regenerative] — Highly related to last weeks Clubhouse discussion on agriculture and cow masks, this article looks at what a regeneratively-produced egg really means and how good it is for the planet. It’s a great discussion also highlighting some of the known greenwashing in the area.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#lawsuit] — Another climate lawsuit have appeared in Poland, where five citizens have filed a lawsuit against their government for failing to tackle the climate crisis. They say “the state has breached their rights to life, health and family life by delaying action to cut national carbon emissions and propping up the coal industry.”

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#ccs] — Ketan Joshi tears into the predictions made by the IEA in their recent netzero by 2050 report about how fast carbon capture needs to grow. And it does really look quite ... stunning. Even the amount of solar and wind power we will need needs to accelerate a lot. But the difference between solar / wind and carbon capture is that we know how to do wind and solar, but not how to do carbon capture.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#finance] — Denmark’s central bank has released the first in a series of reports on climate change. And the first report argues that the entire financial system is threatened by flood risks. The issue here is real estate. For Denmark alone 6.7B$ in loans (or 7% of all real estate loans) are threatened because the real estate become worthless. Just last week, UK banks was forced to start doing the same analysis as the Danish central bank has just done.

[#financialcrisis] — And related to the previous. A new report highlights that the 11 biggest banks in Europe have 532B$ tied up in fossil fuels which may soon have a value of 0. It seems like that fossil fuels will be Europe’s subprime moment.

[#startups] — Ok I was not sure I was going to post this article but here goes. Or I’m actually more going to post my comments on it that the article itself. TechCrunch writes up a piece on how founders must show investors they’re serious about sustainability and the advice it gives is utter garbage and borderline greenwashing: First startups must listen very closely to customers (how is that sustainable?), then they must publicly commit to sustainability goals (yay because commitments have helped us a lot so far), they must have a purpose driven culture (and that is related to sustainability, how?), they must have accountability (and that is related to sustainability, how?) and finally, they must have financial realism (and that is related o sustainability, how?). Seriously, TechCrunch. You can do better than recommending startups that they just greenwash and stay true to their customers.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#biden] — According to a number of articles this week, it looks like Biden’s infrastructure bill (which is at the core of his climate policy) is really deteriorating day by day, which is really sad. Critics say that the bill is seems more interested in getting bipartisan support than stopping climate breakdown. Which is really sad.

[#g7] — Just before G7 investors controlling 41T$ in assets sent a letter to the G7 governments urging them to stop supporting fossil fuels and to set emission targets that are compliant with Paris. There has been a lot of these, but 41T$ is quite a lot of assets.

[#feminism] — Here’s a very interesting post on the derived threats of the climate crisis. When many people think about the threats of the climate crisis they think sea level rise and more heat. But probably the most scary consequences are the derived effects from those, which in many cases hints at war. The climate crisis is at it’s essence a security threat and in many cases the knee jerk reaction to a security threat is a military response. This article argues that we must take a more feminist approach.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#divestment] — Maine becomes the first state in the US to pass a law that requires pension funds and state treasury to divest from coal, oil and gas companies by 2026. A total of 17B$ will be divested. Perhaps in the mean time they can use their influence to affect the boards at those companies.

[#exxon] — Here’s another deep dive into what exactly happened when Exxon lost 3 board seats to the tiny hedgefund Engine no 1. In short: Some how the small fund managed to convince some of the biggest investors: Blackrock, State street and Vanguard to vote for it’s board members. One can only hope that such collaborations between activist investors and investors with big holdings in fossil fuel companies are here to stay.

[#shell] — Shell’s CEO is speaking out after the Dutch ruling forcing the company to reduce it’s scope 3 emissions. Obviously critizing the ruling and insisting on the fact that Shell has been a frontrunner in reducing its emissions. He also calls for more government regulations (which is “funny” since the fossil fuel industry control legislation in most major economies) and vows to help it’s customers into helping them stop their emissions. Yes basically blaming the entire thing on you and me 🙄. Here’s a funny recap of the CEOs LinkedIn post.

[#keystonexl] — In a tremendous victory for all of us the big pipeline in the US known as the Keystone XL just got cancelled last week. The pipeline was supposed to carry dirty Canadian tar sands oil to Nebraska. Biden rescinded the construction permits and now the developer of the pipeline has decided not to build it anyway.

[#bolsonaro] — If there was a prison for climate deniers, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro would be rotting in his own cell right now, writes Rolling Stone. “Captain Chain Saw” as he’s also called have torched 10.000 square miles of rainforest since he took office and kind of like Trump was, he’s proud of his track record of killing the planet.

[#netzero, #twitter] — Another report is out this week scolding net-zero plans for not being enough. And the math kind of makes sense. How I understand it is that a net-zero plan basically says that we’re going to continue to pollute X and we just pay for that X using offsets. Not all offsets are … poor quality (to use a kind word), but a lot of them are. So what a net zero plan in effect means is that we’re just going to pollute more or at the very least pollute the same amount. And that argument sort of makes sense and is obviously bad. It does get quite a bit worse than this and it’s highly recommended to read the article and/or report to dive deeper.

That’s it for this week folks!

Join us on Twitter Spaces on Friday 3pm CET to talk about netzero vs real zero.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

Announcement: Deep dives & Clubhouse

Thanks to those who joined our Clubhouse event last week. I learned a ton from the interview with Betsy Middleton about how shareholder activism work and how it’s really a quite powerful way to force companies to change. That’s why I have decided to add another feature to this newsletter — well two to be exact but they’re related.

👋 Clubhouse: The clubhouse discussions are here to stay. I really believe the format provides a great way to get deeper into interesting topics from the past week. Each week I will announce a topic at the Monday morning newsletter and I will try to find a speaker to interview at the Clubhouse event during the week. After the interview, you can bring forward a topic that you think is interesting and we will all discuss it. It doesn’t have to be related to the topic I pick. I will try to schedule these at Wednesdays 3pm CET, but since I only know the topic during the weekend of a week the exact timeslot might move around to accomodate interviewee availability. Finally, we now have a club on Clubhouse called Weekly Climate. Be sure to follow it if you’re interested in these sessions.

🤓 Deep Dive Wednesday: I’m going to use the opportunity to interview an expert at the Clubhouse sessions to write a deep dive on a particular topic. These deep dives will arrive in your inbox on Wednesdays. The first one will therefore be about shareholder activism and will feature details from the interview with Betsy Middleton from Follow This.

What do you think about this? Let me know either by commenting below or pinging me on e-mail: michael@weeklyclimate.com.

👋 Clubhouse topic of the week: Cows 🐮

Search for #clubhouse below to see which articles is included in that. Here’s a link to the room on Clubhouse and don’t forget to follow the club Weekly Climate. I still have a few invites left in case anybody wants a freebie (e-mail me at michael@weeklyclimate.com).

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 A new report confirms that pesticides are literally killing the soils of our planet.

😻 Engine no 1 (the tiny hedgefund that led shareholder rebellion at Exxon last week) has declared that it’s not doing it for climate reasons alone but simply because it’s good business.

😼 Here’s a walkthrough of Big Oils Bad Month

💩 A new report shows that small oil and gas producers produce and outsized amount of methane emissions.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#arctic] — A new study has found that arctic sea ice is thinning twice as fast as we thought. This has a lot of complications. First of all, thinning ice means more heat absorption by the surface and it also means that gas and oil exploration becomes more easy hence likely increasing the ice thinning.

[#clouds] — A new study concludes that the cooling effects of clouds may be underestimated in the currently used climate models. This article over on Carbon Brief dives deep into the effects of this.

[#tippingpoints] — A new study seems to indicate that the known climate tipping points could topple like dominoes. The study seems to indicate that we may have a shorter time than expected to lower greenhouse gas emissions. So what are waiting for?

[#health] — A new study has examined heat deaths btween 1991 and 2018 and determined that climate is responsible for about half of them or about 15M people.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#fusion] — China’s EAST fusion reactor beat another world record last week. It managed to sustain a core temperature of 120 MILLION (!) C for 102 seconds. This is obviously not enough to do anything useful but it shows that fusion technology is developing at a rapid pace. But whether fast enough? Time will tell.

[#markets] — Remember the Texas Big Freeze in Feb? The big cold wave that causes widespread electricity outages in Texas? Here’s a deep dive into the electricity markets role in the outages. Short answer: Yes they definitely did play a role in the failure.

[#wind] — A company is designing beautiful and colorful wind turbines in order to help curb some of the NIMBYism (not in my backyard-ism) that are happening in regards to wind turbines. Their turbines are more silent and frankly looks nicer.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#electrification] — I’ve written many times about electrification before but usually from the perspective of Saul Griffiths great work at Rewiring America. But now the National Renewable Energy Lab just finished a 4 year project about the same topic and they just released their final report detailing how the US can do it and what it looks like. Details in the link.

[#fashion] — A new book called “Unraveled” dives into the fashion horror story. How the fashion industry today causes environmental harm and human rights abuses all over the world. So called fast fashion is the biggest enemy here.

[#heatpumps] — Thinking about getting a heat pump, but don’t have solar? Well what are you waiting for? This article by Reneweconomy are looking at how heat pumps are in fact great to have even though you don’t have solar. The article is focussing on the Australian market but I’m sure many of the findings apply to other countries. Also a new report in Germany has looked at heat pumps and how the chemicals used to harvest the energy has a high risk of polluting water.

[#realestate] — US real estate websites recently began adding climate risk data to their websites to give potential buyers and indication of how likely it is that a given house is to be subjected to flood risks. Not sure how this is in other countries but here in Denmark we have had that for quite some time.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#shipping] — As a part of an initiative which in the best “managementese” style is being called “Mission Innovation” the governments of Denmark, Norway and the US alongside Mærsk and the International Maritime Organisation launched an initiative to accelerate public-private partnerships to achieve zero emission shipping.

[#shipping] — ... and if you’re annoyed by my negative attitude in the previous item then this New York Times article explains why. In it they reveal that the International Maritime Organisation (which is a UN body) has repeatedly stalled and watered down any attempts to regulate the shipping industry. The reason being that many of the delegates selected are people with huge financial ties to the shipping industry.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#restoration] — A new report by the UN makes it clear that the world must restore 1B hectares of land by 2030 (or an area a little bigger than half the size of Russia). The problem we need to solve is not just a climate problem. Humans currently use 1.6 times the resources that nature can sustainably produce.

[#wildfire] — 10% of the world’s largest trees, the Sequoias, burned in last year in one fire named the Castle Fire. Usually Sequoias can live for thousands of years. In related news, YC startup Gridware has raised a 5.3M$ seed round to further develop their solution to prevent suburban wildfires. The startups solution is a box with sensors mounted to a telephone pole, which can analyze a lot of different data and report that back to relevant authorities.

[#lakes] — A new study has determined that the past 40 years there has been a 3-9x increase in the rate of decline of oxygen levels in lakes compared to periods before that. This is bad news for those of us that rely on fresh water to drink. Main cause: Climate change. Warmer water can’t hold as much oxygen as colder water can.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#pesticides, #clubhouse] — A new report confirms that pesticides which are used in the vast majority of farms around the world are quite literally killing the soils of the Earth. The report studies the pesticides’ impact on various parameters of soil health. There’s no reason to carry on doing this as all of us relies on healthy soils to live. Still I’m sure that the big agriculture lobby’s will kill any and all attempts at regulation just as they have done for many many years already.

[#cowmask, #clubhouse] — A startup in the UK called Zelp are developing a burping mask for cows that can cut up to 53% of methane emissions from the cows burps. The eye-opener for me in this article is that the authors state that 95% of cow-related methane emissions comes from their burps. Perhaps it could be very interesting to merge this mask with regenerative agriculture to truly remove cows carbon footprint.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#legal] — There are a couple of places where it appears that we’re making headway in the climate battle. Shareholder activism is one area and another area is via the law. Just the week before last Shell lost a landmark case on Big Fossils Bad Day and we’re seeing climate lawsuits pop up all around the world. This detailed articled by Inside Climate News goes into detail about the history and the workings of these lawsuits.

[#aid] — A new report by NGO Care Denmark points pretty strong fingers at the G7 for not committing enough money to support poorer countries in the climate fight. In their report they highlight that only UK and the US have put forth plans to increase climate finance in the last months. In 2009 G7 countries committed 100B$ a year to developing countries, which are not even close to have been met.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#greenbanks] — In this article Vox dives into a financial instrument apparently popular in the UK before 2017 called a “green bank”. From what I can tell a green bank launches using government funding, but then uses private funding to invest in various big green energy projects and are apparently good business, since the UK sold theirs in 2017.

[#hockeystick] — The IEA’s recent landmark report which stated that fossil fuel production must stop, gives quite a lot of credit to technologies that doesn’t really work at scale such as bioenergy such as biofuels. The problem is that the few biofuels available today at scale are mostly worse than their fossil fuel counterparts.

[#investing] — The European commission and Bill Gates has launched a 1B$ initiative to fund a host of technologies across clean tech. Everything from Long duration energy storage to sustainable aviation fuels.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#investing] — A new report has revealed that the G7 countries are spending way more on fossil fuels than on green energy. In total 189B$ is spent on fossil fuels and 147B$ on clean energy.I must admit that I wasn’t expecting anything else, and was actually expecting the gap to be larger. Still in a time where we’re supposed to be scaling down on fossil fuels this does look very silly.

[#biden] — One of Trump’s last and most signatory actions was to give out a bunch of drilling licenses in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to the fossil fuel industry. President Biden just suspended all those licenses. Kind of expected and great he pulled through with it. This is important as his 2T$ climate plan is being watered down according to many environmentalists. Biden’s 2T$ climate plan looks like a small green new deal but in reality it is lacking a lot of things to make it the climate bill that most had dreamed of. Key features that have been taken are things like requiring electricity to be produced by clean sources are clearly not a good sign.

[#subsidies] — Texas legislators has succesfully killed a 10B$ tax hand out program to the fossil fuel industry. With all the stuff that happened to the fossil fuel industry last week, this gigantic piece of news seem to have slipped under the radar.

[#cop] — If there are anybody out there who still believe the 26 COP meetings can achieve anything, here’s a good discussion of what it might take to make them more inclusive and in these COVID times it’s very wellknown technology: Digital communication technology. In this article an activist tells the story of how they managed to get their voices heard at the COP meeting in 2019 despite quite bad circumstances.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#bigoilsbadmonth] — If you just emerged from under your rock after staying there for about a month Amy Westervelt walks you through all the battles we won against the fossil fuel industry this past month.

[#activistshareholder] — Exxon ended up losing not 2, but 3 board seats to the tiny activist hedge fund Engine no 1. Very related to a question asked by a listener at our Clubhouse event last Thursday, Engine no 1 is not doing it for the climate’s sake (at least not publicly). But simply because having a strong climate strategy makes good business sense. Gizmodo took a deep dive in the 3 board members that the hedge fund managed to get elected and while it sure is a good development it’s not euphoric about all of them.

[#euemissions] — Is this? Good news? According to Europe’s environmental watchdog EEA, Europes greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 3.8% in 2019. Note 2019, not 2020 as a result of COVID. Thus bringing Europe’s total emission reductions to 24% compared to 1990 levels. While the article seem to indicate that this makes it highly likely that Europe will reach it’s 55% goal in the next decade. I don’t really get it why, since we spent 30 years getting to 24%, how can we do another 31% in 10 years?

[#gasstoves] — For those who need a “joky” explanation why gas stoves are bad here’s a pretty viral worthy video made by US comedian Samantha Bee. That also dives into how the gas industry paid instagram influencers and threaten US legislators with COVID positive demonstrations. I’m not sure anybody needs a joky version but just in case some of your stubborn friends didn’t like my other warnings about gas stoves and the gas industry then this might! #seductioninduction ... but that’s just one thing. Another is that new leaked e-mails prove that the gas industry is behind US legislators reluctance to ban new gas hookups.

[#methane] — … and staying on methane emissions. A new analysis by the US EPA has found that small oil and gas producers contribute more to the emissions of the sector when compared to their production. The 195 smallest oil and gas producers are responsible for 22% of emissions of the sector but only account for 9% of production.

[#amazonwatch] — Amazon Watch just released a report on how “the big three” asset managers (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street) are holding 46B$ in oil stock which actively contribute to human rights abuses, forest destruction, bio diversity loss and climate change. The report lists 5 actions that the big three must do which both includes divestment and being more active on pro-climate voting in the boards.

[#coal] — A new interactive tool was released by Ember which enable anyone to see global coal imports and exports. It shows a lot of interesting things such as emissions from Australia’s coal exports emits more CO2 than Germany.

That’s it for this week folks!

Join us on Clubhouse on Wednesday 3pm (unless otherwise noted) to talk about cows!

Remember if you’re feeling down, angry or sad from some of the news in this newsletter one cure is to act. And one way you can always act that also happens to be one of the most powerful things you can do is to talk about it. Which you can do at our Clubhouse event as well! What do you know! That also works if what you just read made you hopeful or happy btw.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

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Welcome to this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

Before we continue I have a quick announcement + an invitation and even an additional unrelated invitation!

First of all: Weekly Climate goes Clubhouse! I have toyed with the idea of using Clubhouse as a way to make sure that we leave no stone left unturned on some of the major news about the climate crisis. And also I wanted to give you my dear subscribers an opportunity to discuss and learn more about the most important news from the past week. And after being increasingly glued to the platform these past weeks I’ve decided that it’s time.

Update: Event is held on Thursday June 3 15:00 CET and not Wednesday June 2 as originally announced due to the fact that we’re thrilled to be able to welcome Betsy Middleton, Strategy and External Communications Manager @ FollowThis — the activist shareholder organisation that played a tremendous role in what happened to the fossil fuel industry this week.

Therefore on Thursday June 3 15:00 CET we’re doing the first Weekly Climate Clubhouse session. So what’s going to happen? There will be two agenda items:

We will discuss one major news items this week. Find it in the newsletter by searching for “#clubhouse”. Hint: It’s got something to do with Big Fossils Bad Week, hence why we got Betsy to join.

I will open the floor to anyone that want to discuss another piece of news. It doesn’t have to be from the newsletter. In fact I would love it if it weren’t. I have to exclude so many things each week that I would love to see what I have missed.

I hope you want to join. As I don’t have a club yet (due to some kind of funny club creation criterias) I host a room from my own profile @reibeldore. So give me a follow and you should see it or simply click this link (or both!). Also if you don’t have Clubhouse yet I’m putting 5 invites up on a first-come-first-served basis. Simply send me an e-mail at michael@weeklyclimate.com with your phonenumber and you will receive an invite and be sure to show up 15:00 CET on Thursday. If I don’t reply on your e-mail it means that you haven’t got the invite. Sorry.

👋 Here’s the link to the Clubhouse event be sure to click the alarm bell in the app or get it in your calendar!

Ok that’s it for Clubhouse. Secondly, you’re all cordially invited to the Demo Day of the other climate project I’m running: Massive.earth. We’re just in the final week of our very early stage acceleration program and we want as many as possible to see the pitches of our 3 best teams as well as couple of cool keynotes. The event is online and held in the afternoon CET so it should be kind of friendly to most timezones. Here’s the link to get a free ticket and learn more.

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 What hermaphroditic frogs can tells us about attacks on “inconvenient” science”.

😻 Big fossils bad day (read on for more details)

😼 Energy Gang interviews Saul Griffith on his plan to electrify America.

💩 The “green energy” that might be ruining the planet. Yes it’s biomass (not quite fossil, but still an important polluter item this week).

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#glaciers] — Greenland’s melting glaciers are polluting coasts around Greenland with a lot of mercury. In fact it’s so bad that the concentrations measured are only worse one other place on the Earth and that’s in the rivers of Industrial China. Mercury is a natural element that are released by things like volcanic eruptions and are passed on from organism to organism and that’s where the mercury concentrations are coming from.

[#heatwave] — Temperatures hit 30C in the Arctic. Last week. In May. That’s 20C warmer than normal for this part of the year. A good thing our world leaders are convening in Iceland to talk about climate change...

[#netzero] — If you’re as confused as I am about whether net zero matters then this article adds more that. 3 climate scientists write here a long piece about why netzero is a deceiving trap. Again the key message here appears to be that the net zero is dangerous because it promotes the “pollute now, pay later” mentality of things like offsets, technological salvation and hockeysticks.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#enegystorage] — The Hornsdale battery (also known as the Tesla big battery) in Australia stepped up when a coal plant exploded in Queensland on Tuesday. To protect the grid and reduce the number of customers that had their power cut the battery tested out a feature called “synthetic inertia” in which the battery helps slow down the rate of frequency change on the grid. It’s a crucial grid service that this big battery demonstrated that it is now able to do as well.

[#solar] — New research could potentially boost existing solar cell designs performance by 5-10%. Normally a solar panel has grids in it that are key to harvesting the power at all, but these grids are also deadzones. Light that hits those areas aren’t converted to power. But a new light collector design that can be incorporated into existing designs could direct the light to the active areas of the solar cell.

[#wind] — As an engineer like me floating wind turbines are as close to the hottest thing on Earth you can get and as this article makes it clear why, imagine balancing a bus on a pole and making it float in the ocean. The article dives into GEs efforts to design these things that are as high as the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument combined.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#sewage] — In the UK a recent study determined that the UK is at a big risk for having their rivers polluted by sewage due to climate change. In fact in 2020 UK water companies discharged sewage into rivers more than 400.000 over 3.1M hours.

[#highways] — As cars became a more prevalent means of transportation in the US the highway system was expanded heavily in the 50-60s destroying dense neighborhoods of in particular black people as well as making everybody more dependent on cars. Now some cities in the US are taking back the streets, but not without complications.

[#4dayworkweek] — A new report has looked at what reducing the work week to 4 days would mean for the UKs emissions. The conclusion: A 20% reduction in annual emissions or the equivalent of taking all of UKs cars off the road. Primary drivers of this reduction are lower energy use at people’s place of work, reduced emissions from commuting and finally, more low-carbon activities performed by people.

[#electrification] — 🎧 The Energy Gang podcast discusses Saul Griffiths “war-time” plan for decarbonizing en US electricity grid and electrifying everything. As you know we’re big fans of Saul and if you haven’t heard him talk about his Rewiring America initiative it is hugely inspiring and well worth a listen.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#privatejet] — Flying in a private jet is just about the most emitting action an individual can take. 4 hours of flight time in a private jet pollutes as much as one average European citizen does in a year. Flying in a private jet pollutes 5-14 times per passenger than flying in a commercial jet. A new report suggests to have these wealthy fliers to pay a tax of up to 325M€ every year to fund development in zero emissions aviation.

[#aviation] — The aviation industry is under a lot of pressure. Not only did the pandemic stop airline travel very effectively, but the industry’s carbon emissions are also coming under increasing scrutiny. And they have no solutions right now. This article looks at the state of the aviation industry in terms of solutions from electricity to hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuels and even offsets.

[#airships] — Here’s a look at how airships (think Hindenburg, but without the disaster) can cut emissions from short distance air travel by as much as 90%. The carbon footprint of a passenger on an airship is about 4.5kg compared to 56kg on a conventional jet. It is slower though... It would take 6.5hours to fly from Oslo to Stockholm (which could be completed in an EV in a little more than 7h (according to the ABRP app)) or 4.5h from Seattle to Vancouver (which could be done in ~4h in an EV).

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#investing] — In a new UN report, the organization states clearly that the world need to quadruple our investment in nature to avoid breakdown of ecosystems and thus increasing the level of “ecosystem services” such as clean water, food and flood protection. Quadrupling means investing 0.1% of global GDP in solutions such as regenerative agriculture, forests and pollution management.

[#mangrove] — A new community project in Kenya provides women with loans (250GBP to be paid back over 10 months) and training to help restore Kenya’s vast reserve of mangrove forests. Once the women have paid back the loans they can apply for more to help build even bigger businesses focussing on mangrove restoration.

[#banks] — New research has shown that UK banks supported firms involved in legal and illegal deforestation with 900M GBP in 2020. The study hope to put pressure on new legislation aiming to prevent banks from doing that.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#australia] — This detailed article looks at what Australian farmers are doing to fight climate change creeping into their lands. It’s a situation where severe frost is not uncommon as well as rains, both destroying crops and making life harder for the farmers. What shocked me in a good way was that the article writes that “like most Australian farmers they have adopted a no-till system” 🤩.

[#foodwaste] — Here’s an article dives into food waste and from the perspective of a number of newer apps that have seen a lot of success in recent days. Among them Danish (and French apparently) Too Good To Go. i was really happy to read that an app like this considers a variety of factors to make sure that the food weren’t going to be donated hereby having the store sell food they would otherwise donate. I think though that it’s missing the crucial question of food waste which is the fact that food waste moves around. If you buy a bagel via Too Good To Go some supermarket might throw one out instead. The article is missing that discussion. Would have loved to learn about this effect.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#australia] — Another climate lawsuit (apart from the one about Shell) this week this time in Australia, where a ruling make it clear that the Australian environment minister has a duty to secure young people and future generations future by acting on the climate crisis.

[#guyana] — The citizens of Guyana have filed a lawsuit against Exxon who wants to expand fossil fuel operations and production off the Guyanese coast. The lawsuit is citing right to a healthy environment as the core argument of the case.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#mentalhealth] — A new report looks at the connections between the climate crisis and mental health and determines that we’re not accounting for those at all. Heatwaves are increasing rates of suicide, extreme weather are leaving people traumatized, loss of food security, homes and livelihoods are resulting in stress and depression. Mental health is gravely overlooked when studying climate change. In papers on health and climate change from 2010 to 2020 the authors found mentions of mental health in 1% of them.

[#scienceunderattack] — When science is threatening the bottomline of giant companies thats when the vilest face of capitalism shows. Inside Climate News looks at the case of a scientists who published a lot of papers about how are commonly used weed killer called atrazine is turning male frogs into hermaphrodites and how he was attacked by dark industry powers.

[#pope] — Apparently, the pope means action when it comes to climate change (sort of). In 2015 the Vatican launched the landmark Laudato Si plan to protect the environment and it is now following that up with an action platform that will help bring the Catholic community together around climate action. I think it’s great to see a religious faith being used for things like this.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#biden] — President Biden’s first pro-fossil fuel decision is making a lot of environmentalists angry (and probably for good reason) as the Biden administration are allowing a drilling project in Alaska to carry on. The anger by the environmentalists is being followed up with a lawsuit.

[#eu] — This is another great example of how much lobby organizations control our policies today: And yes it’s related to the big new EU taxonomy that aims to define what can be considered a “sustainable investment”. The two biggest points of debate whether gas and nuclear can be considered sustainable investments. Germany wants nuclear out, but gas in. Which makes no sense whatsoever. I don’t understand why this is even a debate.

[#california] — California was ravaged by wildfires last year and the year before that... and so on. And now the state is increasing the wildfire prevention spending by 16 times this year compared to last year. Severe drought has hit the state with normal river flows at 2% the level that is normal for this year. The Heated newsletter also had a detailed issue out last week on the wildfire problem on the west coast.

[#crime] — Brazil’s environment minister is being investigated for an illegal logging cover up. Basically the minister is being investigated for covering up criminal deforestation activities. Apparently, the guy is known for derailing climate negotiations already.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#bigfossilsbadweek, #clubhouse] — The biggest news item(s) by far last week was big fossils very bad week and consequently and amazing day for all life on Earth. We will spend a bit more space than usual on these three items. Here’s what’s happened:

Exxon: A hedgefund called Engine No 1 who owns just 0.02% of Exxon shares managed to get two very climate positive board members elected. Hopefully these two members will be able to put a lot of climate positive pressure on Exxon.

Chevron: 61% of Chevron’s shareholders voted against the board of directors wishes and now wants Chevron to reduce their scope 3 emissions (i.e. the burning of their products) something that looks very hard to do unless they abandon fossil fuels.

Shell: Shell lost a landmark case put forth by Dutch NGOs which forces Shell to reduce emissions by 45% over the next 9 years.

There was a lot of news items about these. Here are a few notable ones: Grist gives an overview, New York Times about Exxon, The Guardian on Chevron and Exxon, DeSmog on Shell.

🙏 Thank you so much to all the great folks at FollowThis (Chevron (& Shell last week)), Engine No 1 (Exxon) and Friends of the Earth Netherlands (Shell). You are the true heroes of the week! But also if you want to know more be sure to join us on Clubhouse on Thursday 3pm CET (update: Changed, see note at the top of the newsletter).

Ok, moving on:

[#coalcountry] — Many countries and states around the world are heavily dependent on the fossil fuel infrastructure to provide a livelihood. In the future without the fossil fuel industry these people need to be taken care of. And one such plan is to turn these industries from mining coal for instance to mining for rare earth minerals whose demand are expected to increase a lot. This article look at the heart of coal country in the US: Wyoming. A new podcasts series called 🎧 Carbon Valley is looking at Wyoming from the other angle: A gigantic market for carbon capture projects.

[#biomass] — A great and detailed article about why biomass really isn’t the climate solution that EU politicians claim it to be through logic that appear to be as close to fantasy as one can get (according to the article). First, you cut down a tree, then you put it on a boat, ship it across the Atlantic, burning bunker fuel all the way, then you light it on fire in a European country and by pure magic all the CO2 that usually is emitted from burning some how disappears! What do you know! The biomass industry is a 50B$ industry and here in the EU we like it so much that we’re using it way more than wind and solar.

[#banks] — A new report by WWF shows that UK banks helped finance the production of 805Mt of CO2 emissions every year, which is almost 2x that of UKs annual carbon footprint. The finance sector in the UK is therefore one of the biggest UK contributors to the climate crisis and if it were a country it would rank as the 9th highest emitter in the world.

That’s it for this week folks! Remember if you’re feeling down, angry or sad from some of the news in this newsletter one cure is to act. And one way you can always act that also happens to be one of the most powerful things you can do is to talk about it. That also works if what you just read made you hopeful or happy btw.

Remember to join our first Clubhouse session on Wednesday June 2nd 15:00 CET.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 The world’s biggest iceberg came into existence. A 4320 km2 behemoth.

😻 30% of Shell’s shareholders voted for a resolution that calls total b**t on Shell’s climate “plan”.

😼 A look at climatarianism or eating according to how carbon intensive the food is.

💩 IEA: “No more fossil fuel expansion now! From this year”.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#antarctica] — Antarctica just created the worlds largest iceberg. A gigantic 4320 square km one just broke of Antarctica. That’s approximately 10% of the area of Denmark or ~50% of Corsica. That’s a big iceberg. This article discusses how much this is due to climate change or how much this is due to how ice shelves work.

[#lanina] — After many of the hottest years in a row 2021 is off to a colder start which in a new study is deemed to be primarily because of a strong La Nina. 2021 is still expected to be one of the hottest since the 1800s, just not as hot because the La Nina.

[#attribution] — This post in CarbonBrief looks at how the field of extreme weather event attribution (the field of figuring out how much a particular extreme weather event was fueled by climate change) has developed and how scientists are able to attribute specific weather events to climate change. Last week one such study was published about 2012’s big hurricane Sandy in the US. That study calculated that 8B$ worth of extra damage was due to climate change.

[#greenland] — A new study looks at evidence that the Greenland ice sheet are on the brink of a major tipping point. If all of Greenlands ice were to melt, then we would be in for a 7 meter sea level rise. So nothing near the doomy 59m if Antarctica melts but still pretty serious.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#iea] — This is without a doubt the single most important news item last week. IEA (who’s known for being very fossil fuel friendly) published their flagship Netzero by 2050 report last week which surprised everyone by being extremely clear in it’s language: If we are to solve the climate crisis governments globally must stop funding fossil fuel expansion, now, from this year. Any government that is not banning fossil fuel cars by 2035 is unambitious and not compliant with being net zero by 2050. In other words, the report calls out on the gigantic gap between political rhetoric and reality. There was a lot of news stories this week about this report. Here I just posted the Guardians. Google yourself to find other views on this report. One article is worth highlighting which looks at how conservative the IEA is in predicting the growth of solar and wind and their conclusion is that they’re still too conservative. Also it quite hilarious to read an fossil fuel industry lackeys desperate attempt at explaining the IEA report. Read at your own peril.

[#vietnam] — In Vietnam, banks are increasingly shunning coal which has led to an amazing increase in rooftop solar installations growing more than 10x in a year. From less than 1GW to 10GW in 2020.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#ev] — 20% of people who have bought an EV goes back to ICE for their next car. 70% of those does it because of charging troubles. Either they switched back because they couldn’t charge at home or because charging infrastructure at a new location they were moving to was not adequate. Here’s an interview and study of those people in the 20% group.

[#china] — During the first half of 2021 China’s carbon emissions have grown by 15%. That’s the fastest in more than a decade. I wonder when if ever China will start living up to it’s promises...

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#plastic] — A new study reveals that just 20 companies are responsible for more than half of all single-use plastic. And just 100 companies create 90% of all plastic waste.

[#shipping] — Shipping has a lot of problems when it comes to climate change. But also “just” in terms of pollution. There’s regulation in place that ensures that ships have to burn low-sulfur fuel OR put on a scrubber that will reduce the amount of air pollution. The problem then is that the so called “wash water” — the polluted water left after the scrubbing process — is dumped in the ocean. You know, as you do.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#reforestation] — A really interesting project which builds upon a mix of indigenous knowledge and high-tech is being kicked off in Canada, where the project aims to “Seed the North” by planting a lot of trees and plants on areas that has been degraded either by wildfire, industry or similar.

[#biodiversity] — Earlier this year it was revealed that the world managed to hit exactly 0 biodiversity targets established 10 years ago. In response to that Germany just launched a 1B$ biodiversity fund with the aim to protect and conserve natural areas and species.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#climatarianism] — Here’s a New York Times article about “climatarianism”, i.e. a diet in which you eat according to how carbon intensive the food is. This means that the Danish guy they’re intervieweing is eating primarily locally sourced fruits and vegetables as well as pizza.

[#poolution] — In North Carolina residents are worried about a different type of pollution: Pig poo-lution. The coming hurricane season is likely to flood vast hog waste lagoons which not only releases a lot of methane, but will also flood nearby regions in pig poo and the associated harmful bacteria.

[#beef] — This article looks at the state of the general discussion about meat and how it is fast becoming the new coal. We’re seeing a lot of trends that seems to indicate that this is the case. Such as gourmet restaurants swearing off beef.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#displacement] — Despite the pandemic climate change caused more internal displacement than war in 2020. In total 30m people got displaced because of weather related events and 10 million got displaced due to conflict.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#art] — One topic that I find myself drawn to these days is how art can help us make the transitions necessary to solve the climate crisis. We must not forget that many of the high-tech solutions require emotional solutions to be deployed. And this is one area where art communicates in a different way than the usual: WINDTURBINES! SOLAR! NO COWS! MORE COWS! NO FLIGHTS! ELECTRIC FLIGHTS! and so on. Recently there was a great and interesting 🎧 How to save a planet episode that tried to find a climate anthem by looking at music’s influence on big social shifts like the Civil Rights Movements in the US. But this weeks article (linked to at the top), looks at the role of fiction and how it might be able to reach people which scientists cannot reach.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#g7] — This weeks G7 meeting produced an interesting result which was that the G7 nations has agreed to end support for coal production overseas in an attempt to make life even harder for the coal industry. Great! Main problem is that IEA’s report this week calls for that to happen today and not in the 2030s...

[#spain] — Viva España! Spain passed a new law that bans all new oil and gas exploration and drilling licenses, prohibits sale of fossil fuel based cars by 2040 and makes it illegal to produce fossil fuels in the country 2043. Furthermore, it targets 74% of renewable energy on Spain’s grid by 2030. Again great, but the IEA report says this year..

[#france] — A new climate law is passing through the French government. Critics say that it has been watered down so much that it’s hardly climate law and that it wouldn’t be compliant with the Paris agreement. The president Emmanuel Macron is facing re-election next year and really needs a climate bill to strengthen his environmental credentials.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#activistshareholder] — A significant share of Shell shareholders made history last week by being the first to reject the company’s net zero plan which by climate scientists are being called “a defence of the company’s current gas and oil exploration”. In fact 30% of the company’s shareholders voted for a resolution to limit the company’s carbon emissions. That’s a big chunk of shareholders calling total b**t on Shell’s so called “plans”. The same organisation (the amazing folks at Follow This) that targeted Shell is going after Chevron next.

[#health] — A new report in the US puts a price tag on the health impact of climate change: 820B$. Everything from air pollution, airborne diseases, extreme heat, extended allergy seasons. All of that adds up.

[#climateguilt] — Last week we brought the news of a new report that looked at how the fossil fuel industry has used marketing campaigns to make us all feel guilty of the climate crisis. Here Drilled brings an interview with one of the authors of that report.

[#climatedenial] — A new study looks at the who’s funding climate denial in the US. Funding of climate denial has risen by 3.4% per year over the past two decades. And it’s mostly anonymous donors who’s doing it. Most of them are anonymous because the donor companies are structured in a way such as to hide who the owners are.

[#fossilsponsors] — The Science Museum in London is about to open a big exhibition “on climate change” called Our Future Planet. And it is heavily focussed on carbon capture for some reason. Ahh. Shell is one of the sponsors ok I see. This article goes into the embarrassing details that let to the museum taking fossil fuel money to sponsor an exhibition on climate change. It’s like having the fossil fuel industry pay politicians to introduce … wait a minute… YOU 👏 DON’T 👏 TAKE 👏 MONEY 👏 FROM 👏 THE 👏 ORGS 👏 THAT 👏 ARE 👏 CAUSING 👏 THE 👏 PROBLEM!

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6]

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Failing to meet Paris targets could ultimately lead to 59m sea level increase just from Antarctica ice melt (albeit in the next several hundred years).

😻 Tesla has decided to stop taking bitcoin for vehicle purchases citing environmental damage caused by bitcoin.

😼 A group of researchers are calling for net zero targets to split in two: One target dealing with actual emission reductions and the other dealing with negative emissions.

💩 A new study by the great Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran goes in great details about Exxon’s climate misinformation machine.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#sealevel] — A new study joins the choir of sea level rise reports from last week by concluding bluntly that if we don’t stay below 3 degrees C nothing will stop the ice in Antarctica from melting completely. This will lead to 59m sea level increase. This point of no return is expected to be reached around 2060. From 2100 and onwards we would see 0.5cm of sea level rise every year. This would mean a 5m sea level rise 2200 just from Antarctica melting. So it’s not happening fast, but clearly fast enough to warrant action.

[#spacejunk] — Are the problem with space junk (leftover dead satellites orbiting the Earth) and climate change connected? Why yes indeed. Here’s how: Usually space junk burns up in the upper atmosphere. But increased levels of CO2 is lowering the density of the upper atmosphere, which reduces the heating effect when stuff passes through the atmosphere. This is a problem because space junk that comes in contact with the upper atmosphere may now no longer burn up hence in the worst case scenario this effect could make the space junk problem 50x larger.

[#athens] — In this case study, The Guardian looks at Athens’ trouble with heat and how that problem will only get worse. It’s not rare that temperatures reach 40C in the Greek capital during the summer and according to the latest climate models those temperatures are expected to increase by a further 2C over the next 30 years.

[#archaeologists] — A group of 200 archaelogists are pushing climate scientists to improve their climate models. One reason for this is that they’re saying that many climate models today are superficial and doesn’t adequately model whether an area of land was altered by humans or not. The group has created the first archaelogical climate database that among other things contains information about which areas were developed by humans.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#renewable] — For a brief time last month California generated 95% of it’s electricity from renewable energy. Very nice!

[#renewable] — And more good news on the renewable front. 6 months ago the IEA published a report that forecasted growth for wind and solar. Now it updates the forecast by another 25% of growth in solar and wind. When it forecasted the growth of wind and solar for this year last year, it is now forecasting 40% more than that old estimate.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#adaptation] — A new study has found that while 90% the 800 cities studied will face serious risks from climate change 25% of all cities can’t afford protection from these risks. Furthermore 43% of those don’t have any plans at all for how to adapt to these. 🎧 The Interchange podcast this week also look at climate resilient cities.

[#trash] — Here’s a question to Grist’s Umbra mailbox that gives some tips about how to get your neighbors to recycle more. Great input in an important debate.

[#repairability] — The French recently introduced a ranking of all big tech’s hardware devices in terms of repairability and now a US agency is looking into the same. People need to have a right to repair their devices. There’s a lot of counter arguments to that and a lot of counter arguments to the counter arguments. This article provides a good overview.

[#recycling] — In a new report a group of experts calls for mandatory recycling of all products containing rare earth minerals such as lithium, cobalt, indium and more. Right now there are no requirements to recycle equipment containing these materals but this needs to change. Remember from the last newsletter that lithium demand (which is being mined with child labor) is expected to increase by 42x by 2040.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#aviation] — A company developing all-electric airplanes is getting one step closer to realizing that dream after taking delivery of it’s first electric propulsion units. After many test flights with it’s first airplane — an 9-passenger one — the time has now come to add an electric propulsion system.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#forests] — We hear a lot about deforestation, but here are some good news (at least a positive angle on a story 😬). A new study has found that forest area the size of France has regrown since 2000. This area is able to sequester approximately 5.9Gt of CO2. However, although this is a large area it is important to note that global forest area is still shrinking so this also says something about the massive deforestation that is occurring the fact that an area the size of France is not enough to keep up.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#soil] — Here’s a great discussion of that “infrastructure” should also entail the ground beneath our feet. The reason: Healthy soil is an excellent protector against flooding. It’s not so great then that traditional agriculture does everything they can to make sure all our top soil disappears and the fact that our politicians just let them keep on doing it.

[#bigmeat] — Big oil copied big tobacco’s strategies to stay alive and now big meat is copying big oil in how it is fighting climate action. This article looks at the different strategies and compares them.

[#wine] — Climate change is shifting the production of food around. On the luxury side, the state of Michigan may be the next great wine hub as rising temperatures makes it possible even attractive to grow wine in this area.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#vulnerablecities] — All top 99 cities that are most vulnerable to environmental hazards (included in this definition are climate change related, air pollution etc) are in Asia. 80% are in India or China. The rest is spread out over Asia. Indonesia’s capital Jakarta is number 1.

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#carboncapture] — A big carbon capture project has been greenlighted in the Netherlands. The port of Rotterdam is responsible for 14% of the Netherlands carbon emissions. And now a big carbon capture project will capture emissions from a range of refineries located there and pump the CO2 under the ground. Tax payers in the Netherlands are footing the 2.6B$ bill to keep on burning fossil fuels in the form of a government subsidy. I’m not sure this is a good news.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#opera] — It has been a tough year in general for the music industry due to COVID. But that doesn’t stop some from acting on climate change. The La Scala opera house in Milan has shaved off 630tons of their annual carbon emissions since 2010 and are now taking one step further by adding solar on their roof.

[#health] — Here’s a comprehensive look at how hospitals in the US (and around the world, but it focusses on US) needs to change and adapt to climate change. Not only is climate change making it harder for hospitals to serve their communities, but hospitals also create tremendous amounts of waste that could be made a lot more sustainable.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#netzero] — The debate about net zero is a heated one nowadays (see the past two newsletters for instance). And now a group of 300 experts are calling for governments to split net zero targets into two. A carbon emission reduction one and one focussing on negative emissions (such as carbon removal via direct air capture and similar). This will make it much clearer what we’re actually achieving. And right now net zero targets rely on unattainable high amounts of carbon removal.

[#canada] — If you don’t believe that fossil fuel lobbyism is alive and kicking then look no further than this article. The Canadian Climate Law Initiative have selected 26 climate champions to do their best to make COP26 the climate victory we need. And guess who got selected: None other than an executive from an oil company who’s wrecking havoc with Canada’s tar sands.

[#eu] — A new plan by the EU to limit pollution in cities is being welcomed but is lacking details on exactly how to bring down the pollution. Goals are great but needs implementation and execution.

[#us] — Following a four year Trump break the EPA has now updated it’s data on climate change’s impact on Americans and the conclusion: Everyone no matter where you live in the US are being impacted by climate change one way or another.

[#australia] — A UK expert says that Australia stands completely alone among it’s country peers in not having a climate plan. It’s expected that Australia will be put under heavy pressure to develop one during the G7 meeting next month.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#propaganda] — A new report by Harvard researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran goes into great detail about how Exxon has used propaganda and PR to blame the entire climate crisis on all of us. This article has all the details.

[#jpmorgan] — The biggest fossil fuel financier in the world JPMorgan Chase releases it’s 2030 climate targets. Which is being ripped to shreds by the Rainforest Action Network (the authors of the annual Banking on Climate Change reports) who highlights that JPMorgan Chase funds 59 out of 75 of the fossil fuel companies that are expanding the most in terms of production and provides a total of 317B$ in lending and underwriting of fossil fuel assets.

[#bitcoin] — And now some great news. Tesla has decided to stop taking bitcoin for vehicle purchases due to the environmental harm that bitcoin and other proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains are causing our planet. I must admit that I was positively surprised by this! See Elon Musks tweet and Tesla’s statement about it in the tweet below. Also this article features an interview with a researcher who is tracking the carbon footprint of bitcoin where they discuss that it would make no sense to take bitcoin (or any PoW crypto) even if PoW blockchains switched to renewable energy.

[#facebook] — A new report highlights that there’s “overwhelming evidence” that Facebook is failing to tackle climate misinformation spreading on the platform. The report argues that although Facebook claims to be net zero in it’s operations the fact that climate misinformation are being spread so much on Facebook should probably be counted on the bad side of it’s carbon footprint.

[#heartattacks] — A new study links fracking (the method used to get fossil gas out of shale rock formations) to heart attacks. The study concludes that middle aged males that lived in Pennsylvania close to fracking sites had a 5% higher risk of heart attacks and also found a general increase in heart related hospitalizations.

[#banks] — Don’t be fooled — investment bankers still love the fossil fuel companies. On average 40% of investment banks revenue came from fossil fuel investments.

[#media] — Here’s a detailed look at how Exxon Mobil and other parts of big oil have influenced US media at least since the 80s. The piece argues for how this work influence the medias editorial decisions.

[#shell] — Here’s a great in-depth look at what Shell is doing to help us solve the climate crisis. Here’s a full list: Expand fossil gas extraction, keep producing fossil fuels and invest in carbon capture. 🤬

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6]

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Bitcoin miners forced a coal power plant in New York online.

😻 A really cool startup is making pollinator friendly solar farms.

😼 A great article by Amy Westervelt that shows us why we’re continuously failing to find the right solutions for the climate crisis.

💩 A new study shows that deaths from biomass now outnumbers those from coal and gas due to the phase out of mainly coal.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#guide] — The director of Project Drawdown Dr. Jonathan Foley attempts to cut through the noise and provides a brief guide to the climate crisis in three graphs and where we. can do the most. Personally, I think he’s lacking one graph (or maybe two graphs) and that is how far we are from a technological, political and society standpoints from reducing the emissions from those sources.

[#sealevel] — New climate models suggest that if we manage to keep warming between 1.5C and 2C sea levels are expected to rise between 6-11cm by 2100. Going beyond 2C and we dramatically risk unstoppable sea level rise. Another study published the same day goes as far as saying if we keep current policies we will be in for 25cm of sea level rise by 2100.

[#zombiefires] — A new kind of zombie fire has been discovered. Those still burning from last years California wildfires inside trees — a giant sequoia to be precise. Siberia is already on fire and we’re only May largely due to there underground zombie fires.

[#netzero] — Here’s an article that’s a few weeks old which I missed the first time around but I think it’s an important addition to the picture of the global climate crisis, especially if held together with the article about net-zero from last newsletter. In this article a group of climate scientists warns about the concept of net zero and how it is a dangerous trap, primarily because it leads us to believe that we can just burn away now and pay for it later in terms of offsets and other stuff. That is just not how it works at the timescale we’re at right now.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#coal] — A study published last week looks at what the energy transition from coal to gas and biomass means for air pollution. And turns out that biomass is making air pollution worse than coal and gas were. (Note air pollution here doesn’t mean CO2 emissions but particulate matter which causes health issues).

[#coal] — A new report by a US think tank concludes that most US coal power plants cannot compete with local solar and wind installations and is uneconomic to continue to operate. A total of 182 out of 230 coal power plants are uneconomic and/or scheduled for retirement.

[#hydrogen] — Yep this confirms pretty much what I’ve saying the whole time. Why do we want to use hydrogen in cars or to heat homes? Why go through the hazzle and the enormously electricity hungry task to convert water into hydrogen and then burn that hydrogen in a furnace or your car? Makes no sense why you just wouldn’t use the electricity directly in the first place for much higher efficiency. In addition, the only way to produce hydrogen in a more efficient way is to, you guessed it, convert it from methane. So this presents a big risk of us not killing off the fossil fuel industry. Let’s use hydrogen for the things it makes sense to use it for. And read this article if you don’t want to read my ramble :).

[#heatwaves] — Last year California’s grid got into big troubles due to a heatwave which I covered extensively here. New research suggest that California’s woes are a warning of what’s to come for many US cities. The study shows that many US cities are simply not ready to deal with these heat waves.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#gas] — Just in case you’re not sick of me bashing gas stoves here’s a WSJ article that does just that. Citing multiple top chefs who attempts to kill the myth that gas is better to cook with than induction. It goes through all the usual arguments about why you should get rid of your gas stove (if you can).

[#ai] — Here’s an interesting article about how one startup is using AI to improve energy efficiency of buildings. The startup is using AI to control heating and cooling and are reducing buildings energy consumption by as much as 20-25%.

[#urbanization] — In a new book, Toronto’s mayor showcases a number of cities and how they’re helping to solve the climate crisis. He also explicitly highlights the importance of the mayor and city government. Many of these changes that needs to happen can happen very fast with just the right support.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#aviation] — A new study by the Guardian and Greenpeace concludes that airlines must reduce emissions instead of offsetting as the study has found several problems with the offsetting schemes that the airlines are using. And here’s another article by The Guardian that goes a bit deeper. And here’s another one that goes into offsetting in general.

[#fgas] — A new rule proposed by the US EPA aims to phase-out HFCs by 85% over the next 15 years. This is expected to reduce emissions by 4.7Gt CO2eq before 2050 (or about 3 years of the US power sectors current emissions).

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#nature] — Inside Climate News looks at natural climate solutions and highlights the fact that natural solutions will be critical to solving the climate crisis, but before nature can help us do that we must help restore and protect nature from us.

A startup, Navisun, from Massachusetts are building pollinator-friendly solar farms. It’s really pretty cool. The company has worked closely with experts to setup it’s small community owned solar farms to be friendly towards pollinators in areas that have seen rapidly decline in pollinators.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#gourmet] — One of the best restaurants in the world New Yorks Eleven Madison Park which has been closed since March last year is going meatless and will open with a plant-based menu. It’s great to see big name restaurants like this one take the lead.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#activism] — Here’s a great couple of profiles of some of the young heroes of the climate movement. From wellknown faces such as 19-year old Jamie Margolin to 15-year old Saul Cantoral.

[#environmentalracism] — An image from last years DAVOS got a lot of attention for what it didn’t show: A 24-year old Ugandan activist. Her reaction on Twitter as well as the clear and in some way expected show of racism from A.P’s side prompted a world wide response that fortunately had the opposite effect, catapulting her and environmental racism into the spotlight.

[#covid] — If we look at the way the COVID vaccine crisis is being handled globally it doesn’t exactly bode well for the global south in terms of how the climate crisis will be handled. The differences between rich and poor countries in terms of vaccines is staggering. If we compare that to the already gigantic support gap there is in terms of support for climate adaptation in the global south well… Then it really doesn’t look very good. This article has the details.

[#refugees] — If you want a western look at what a climate refugee situation might look like, then look no further. A group of homeless people (who got homeless after a wildfire in California that destroyed the town of Paradise) is being chased around by police in Northern California.

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#dac] — According to Bloomberg, Direct Air Capture capacity is expected to increase 150 times before 2024. Current capacity is just around 6400tons of CO2, so a 150x increase equals 960.000tons out of the 34.000.000.000tons we currently emit. Or 35.000 times to little. Nature is currently in the lead as it captures about 20.000.000.000 or about half of our emissions every year.

[#keepitintheground] — Probably the best carbon capture technology (note, not removal) on offer right now:

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#esg] — BlackRocks former Head of sustainable investing calls ESG investing a distraction with absolutely no measurable impact. He’s also not a strong believer in the whole divestment movement, which is interesting as I think we’re starting to see this working now as it puts more pressure on the banks to stop funding the fossil fuel industry.

[#mining] — A new report by IEA concludes that we’re not mining nearly enough minerals to be able to keep up with the worlds climate goals. To give an example Lithium demand is expected to increase by 42x in 2040 compared to 2020 levels. This is not very good as some mining techniques employed by for instance Lithium miners are not exactly environmental friendly.

[#climatesolutions] — I think this is the most important article I’ve found this week. Written by the amazing Amy Westervelt she talks about how most climate solutions fail to go deep enough and deal with the underlying cause of the problems. As an example she takes the transition to fossil gas and the European love for biomass. The climate crisis is complicated yet so obvious why it’s there. Why aren’t we dealing with the “why”? Why do we keep on thinking that we can just continue to do as we have always done?

[#siliconvalley] — This podcast is actually from the week before last, but I only became of it this week. It’s a 🎧 great episode of Hot Take by Amy Westervelt, Mary Annaïse Hegglar and Maddie Stone who talks about Silicon Valley (both TV series) and their climate pledges and what Silicon Valley should be doing instead of what they are doing currently.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#ambition] — According to Climate Action Tracker recent increases in political ambitions will (if implemented) decrease expected global warming by 0.2C down from 2.6C to 2.4C. That is IF implemented. And it’s still incompatible with the Paris agreement. And here’s The Guardian’s comment on that.

[#germany] — After last weeks court ruling in Germany, where the German government were ordered to do more about the climate crisis, the German finance minister together with the environment minister has increased the ambition of Germany’s goals to a 65% CO2 reduction by 2030 and 88% reduction by 2040 (based on 1990 levels, which are the correct levels to measure against).

[#progressive] — Here’s a blogpost from a climate policy advisory that analyses the policies implemented by 2 “progressive” nations (Sweden and UK) and compares them to the pathways needed to be taken to be compliant with the Paris agreement. And they both fail.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#gaslobby] — According to newly leaked documents the gas industry “secretly” fights electrification. TBH it’s not very secret. We have reported on several instances where attempts by cities to ban has been foiled by the gas lobby. So this article confirms what we already know.

[#bitcoin] — Just in case you’re not yet tired of well-researched anti-bitcoin posts here’s another one: A coal power plant in New York had to be taken back into operation after being shut down in 2011, due to excessive bitcoin mining in the area. The power plant was shut down in 10 years ago because the plants cost couldn’t be justified for the low demand. But thanks to bitcoin, it is now spewing delicious carbon dioxide again.

[#methane] — A new report by the UN finds that cutting methane emissions may be the fastest and simplest way to slow global heating. If we did that before 2030 they calculate that we we reduce expected global warming by 0.3C.

[#coal] — The state of Wyoming is known as a big coal state. And it has found an interesting solution to the problems facing coal these days: Just suing other states that are not taking its coal. cough desperate cough Seriously though, there’s a just transition issue here that needs to be dealt with but this is not the way.

[#banks] — Apparently, UK banks are placing their money, all 30B GBP of them, on the fact that the Paris Agreement will not have any impact on the coal industry. In fact, they must believe so strongly in this that their support of the coal industry has risen since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. Fortunately, it does appear that banks that are dealing in this stuff are bound to loose a bunch of money on it as the coal industry is unquestionable caught in a death spiral.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

Refterences: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 EU decided to include fossil gas as fundable clean energy.

😻 Big win for activism this week in Germany as the government is being ordered to do more to ensure the future of future generations.

😼 We The Power shortfilm released by Patagonia detailing the benefits of community owned energy.

💩 Shell is fooling us.. again..

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#glaciers] — A new study reveals that meltwater from glaciers over the past two decades are responsible for 21% of sea level rise. I’m curious what the remaining 79% comes from. This is likely getting worse as a new comprehensive study published last week uses recently declassified satellite images to determine that glaciers are melting faster than ever. Glaciers today are melting 31% faster than they did 15 years ago.

[#tippingpoints] — Grist made a short video about climate tipping points and a more in-depth article go to along with it. From permafrost to ocean currents and ice albedo. It’s interesting if you haven’t heard about these before.

[#netzero] — When we reach net-zero emissions will global warming stop? I must admit that I thought that it wouldn’t — that we had “locked-in” further global warming due to delays in the way the climate responds to emissions. But a new study makes it clear that when we reach net-zero global warming should stop. However, with the usual caveats and uncertainties and the big question as to whether it can be achieved at all and in time.

[#earth] — Last week I posted a story about how climate change is changing the axis of the Earth and asked the question: I wonder what this means. And here’s the answer. This problem alone will cost 27T$ every year according to one insurance company. So there’s that.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#wind] — A new report calculates the exact carbon footprint of windpower. On average it’s around 11 g / KWh of CO2 emissions. But that number depends on the size of the wind turbine. A giant wind turbine such as GEs new 14MW monster goes as low as 6g/KWh. These numbers make wind power the lowest of the clean electricity portfolio, second only to nuclear which comes in at 9 g/KWh. Furthermore, developments within cleaning steel production could reduce those numbers even further.

[#wind] — A few weeks ago I posted an article here about a design for vertical wind turbines. Now a team of researchers have done the math and concludes that these vertical wind turbines might be more efficient than the classic propeller based ones. The reason is that the propeller ones creates more turbulence which is detrimental to the efficiency of wind turbines that is not in the front row.

[#denmark] — Denmark is being used as a case study and promoted by Inside Climate News for our plans to build a wind island - yes, an island that generates 10GW of electricity. And sure, we’ve done some great things in the past but let’s not forget that our current government was elected on a climate mandate and so far have been mostly approving gas pipelines and this wind island.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#ev] — Lawmakers in New York passed a law last week which requires all vehicle sales to be zero emissions by 2035.

[#plastic] — As you know if you’ve read previous newsletters, plastic recycling is largely not happening, because it’s too expensive. But that is changing right now in the US as scrap prices have falled over 60% over the past two years. This price drop makes plastic recycling more affordable and competitive. Certainly a good development, but let’s not increase our plastic usage just because of that.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#industry] — This weeks 🎧 Interchange podcast dives into how to decarbonize heavy industries. It looks at the current hot technologies and where to go from here.

[#hydrogen] — This article by Inside Climate News dives into hydrogen as a future clean fuel for shipping. But it has plenty of problems. Hydrogen’s energy density is much lower than the heavy fuels used today and current storage means keeping it in big tanks that needs to cool the fuel down to -253C rendering it not a fit for cargo ships.

[#aviation] — Sustainable jet fuels (SAF) currently are between 2.5 and 8 times more expensive than their fossil fuel counterparts. Currently, only SAF are the near-term alternative to long distance hauls. What we can change about this is the price of carbon. And the carbon price needs to be about 252$ pr ton for SAF to compete.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#rainforest] — 4 months into 2021 and the Amazon has already lost about 30 times the area of Manhattan to deforestation. This is very bad although a new study in Nature reveals that contrary what probably most people think, it’s not deforestation that is driving carbon emissions from the rainforest, but rather forest degradation. Forest degradation releases 3x more carbon than deforestation.

[#death] — Human composting may soon be legal in Colorado. The governor is looking at making it legal for people to decide that they want to be turned into compost when they die. A company (Recompose, which we have mentioned before) have developed a way to do this.

[#offsets] — The Californian carbon offset program has been caught in a pretty gross overestimation of their offset assets. An NGO specializing in evaluating carbon offset programs have determined that as much as 30% (or almost 400M$) of the carbon offsets sold by the carbon offset program shouldn’t have been issued.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#cows] — We’ve all read the stories about how seaweed can reduce methane emissions from cows almost completely. However, at this point most of these new types of feed are still very far from the scale that they need to. This article on Earther looks into what else cows are eating that might help. Turns out that cows stomachs are excellent for getting rid of all kinds of things and they’re not very picky either with what they eat. A completely different way to go is to simply stop eating beef. The food website Epicurious just made their move this week deciding not to publish any future recipes with beef.

[#robots] — Cleantechnica looks at new technology for helping farmers control weed without the use of chemicals. A duo of two robots (Tom and Dick) and a cloud platform (Wilma) gets the job done.

[#geothermal] — A 90-year old Nebraskan farmer is growing citrus fruits sustainably all year round thanks to geothermal and now he’s helping other farmers doing the same.

[#foodwaste] — Who would have thought that I would have two news items from Nebraska in one newsletter, but here you have it. University of Nebraska is using a mechanical stomach to digest food waste hereby eliminating about 95 tons of CO2 emissions from the food waste the university generates every year. This seems really neat, although the energy used to produce the food is still wasted...

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#banks] — A large group of NGOs wrote a letter to US banks urging them not to fund the chemical plant in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” (we’ve mentioned this plant multiple times in the past). It’s being called a clear case of environmental racism.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#shortfilm] — Patagonia published a short film (38 minutes) that highlights all the amazing benefits of community-owned energy. It’s well worth a watch!

[#music] — As it looks like COVID lockdown measures across the world will soon start to be lifted the music industry is increasing the push on doing things differently this time around by urging musicians across the world to reconsider flying as well as donating a percentage of their revenue to climate friendly projects especially one’s focussing on the music industry such as A Greener Festival, Music Declares Emergency and Julie’s bicycle. This is cool because it gives you a direct way to help by listening to artists who supports this (which I’m sure they will publish soon).

[#climaterisk] — How does one calculate risks from multiple interacting climate change scenarios? This guest post on CarbonBrief dives deep.

[#book] — If you haven’t read Michael Mann’s new book “The New Climate War” you’re missing out but this article in Cleantechnica examines some of the key points of it.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#activism] — Montana is about to become the most dangerous place in the world to have a climate protest as legislators are about to pass a law that can give protesters upto 150.000 USD in fine and 30 years in prison. Insane.

[#california] — The governor of California (home to the third largest oil production in the US) issued an executive order which means that the state should start drafting a complete ban of fracking by 2024 and ending oil extraction by 2045. More of that, but faster please.

[#germany] — A few months ago France’s government got ordered by it’s court system to act on climate and this week Germany’s High Court orders Germany’s government to do the same. The basic ruling was that Germany’s government need to update a 2019 law with more ambitious targets to ensure that future generations are protected.

[#billgates] — Bill Gates was invited to speak at the Leaders on Climate Change hosted by President Biden. And well. You can read his speech here. And then Michael Mann who’s not exactly thrilled about it. Bill Gates speech is very technology focused as you would expect and here The Verge dives into all the lovely hockeystick technologies (and some real ones) that were presented at the summit.

[#eu] — Remember last week when I was happy that the EU Parliament decided to include nuclear in the group of technologies that they fund? Well now they decided to include fossil gas too 😫.

[#greenwashing] — An alliance led by UK and Canada to end coal power plants called “Powering Past Coal” is being called pure greenwashing by an expert NGO in the space. But it doesn’t actually take an expert to see this is true as many of the members of this “alliance” are still producing coal power plants.

[#beefpolicy] — Lots about cow-products this week. But this one from a political angle. There’s been a lot of US conservative propaganda this week about how Biden will ban cow meat. This article in Heated looks at that as well as how the meat industry is actively working against climate policy to regulate it.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#banks] — A new study shows that banks emit 700 times (total: 1.04 Gt CO2) more emissions from their financial activities than from their offices. But these numbers should be taken with a cliff sized grain of salt. Because only 25% of the banks studied actually reported financial emissions and of those 25% only half of their portfolios were reported. But its good to know that banks world wide are at least responsible for 3% of the worlds global emissions.

[#shell] — Ketan Joshi dives into Shells many attempts at “making a climate plan” which is little more than shuffling of numbers with plenty of wiggle room to not really keep to those numbers. It’s disgusting and they’re very good at it.

[#orphanedwells] — This Desmog article looks at the growing problem with orphaned oil wells in the US. Here they look at Louisiana. A guy with his own plane has taken matters into his own hands and are documenting the orphaned wells from above. (An orphaned oil well is an oil well for which the owner is not known or bankrupt).

[#canada] — This is ridiculous. Developers of a Canadian oil sands pipeline have won the ability to keep their insurers names secret because “insurers could reasonably be expected to prejudice its competitive position in its dealing with potential insurers”. The good news is that it would appear that funding and insuring fossil fuel infrastructure is fast becoming a tabu and something good banks and insurance companies just doesn’t do.

[#bitcoin] — In case you hadn’t had enough here’s another article on why bitcoin is bad for the environment by the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert. Please don’t equate bitcoin with blockchain though. There are blockchains out there that uses less wasteful mechanisms.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 A Yale Climate Connections video discusses the rampant disinformation ecosystem that’s hurting everything we do as humans.

😻 Worsening climate change is causing Sahara dust storm to appear less frequently.

😼 Here’s 10 things (good and bad) that we’ve learned about the Earth since last Earth Day.

💩 New documents shows that Shell has been planning most of what’s happening right now since the 90’s. To use their business terminology, we’re in a scenario called “People Power”.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#earth] — A new study has shown that melting of the ice and glaciers has caused a shift in the Earth’s axis. This is due to the billions of tons of ice that are now distributed as melting water all around the globe. Since the 1980 the poles have shifted about 4meters in distance. Exactly what this means is unclear but it definitely demonstrates that humans are changing the planet on a massive scale.

[#icestorm] — An Inside Climate News case study looks at Galveston, Texas, which was hit hard by the heavy icestorms this February and the fact that these storms will become even more likely in the future. Rainstorms in the area contain 3x more water than they used to.

[#420] — On 4-20 day (google it) we just passed 420 ppm. We’re at 421.21 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere.

[#duststorms] — If you’re looking for some good climate news take a look at this. In June 2020 a gigantic duststorm named “Godzilla” was moving through Sahara. And if this was your regular run-of-the-mill climate news item you would expect me to write next that these things will happen more often due to climate change. But turns out the opposite is true! NASA has analyzed climate data and it appears to be the case that these storms will occur less as the planet heats up.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#investing] — IKEA announced last week that that they intend to invest 3.4B GBP in renewable energy by 2030. It’s a great example of how companies that aren’t even in the energy business can grab the opportunity that the climate crisis provides.

[#book] — Renowned Stanford professor Mark Z Jacobson has released a new book which is an extension of his work on figuring out how the world can go 100% renewable. It’s a fulltext book 450pages explaining all aspects of implementing renewable energy on the grid.

[#island] — The 🎧 Interchange podcast looks at a case study of how the small Atlantic island of Graciosa (close to the Azores) is going 100% renewable. But it wasn’t always like that. Before 2018 the island was heavily reliant on fossil fuels and in particular diesel generators. But that all changed.

[#iea] — The IEA published its Global Energy Review report 2021, which looks at how different sources of energy production have moved this past year. If you’re looking for data on the energy transition this would be one key place to look (but remember their historic love for fossil fuels).

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#urbanization] — The author Kim Stanley Robinson envisions what the future of cities is and looks at current trends. Both EU and US are targetting to make 30% of their landmass people-free. Which means that more people needs to move the big cities. In this article he dives into what that means.

[#electrification] — Grist provides a great overview of why we must electrify everything and why this is a crucial step in solving the climate crisis.

[#fashion] — OK here’s insane idea of the week. Solve all of the fashions industry problems with nuclear? Yes. There’s a project trying to do that. And it is facing quite some roadblocks. Everything from factory safety to just the general apathy and propaganda campaigns against nuclear. But it just might be one (not the one) solution to some of the fashion industry’s problems.

[#fashion] — It looks like the fashion industry is starting to realize that it needs to find sustainable sources for it’s products. So some major brands are beginning to invest in regenerative agriculture.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#hydrogen] — A Japanese research team has invented a catalyst and a method that can increase the efficiency of clean hydrogen production from water by 30x.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#rainforest] — Brazil was one of the countries that stepped up to the plate in Biden’s call for international collaboration on solving the climate crisis. However, it came with a catch. Bolsonaro promises to stop torching the rainforest if he gets 20B$ to help in the conservation efforts.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#foodsector] — This weeks 🎧 Energy Gang podcast dives into our ways of producing food and how to decarbonize. Highly worth a listen.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#solar] — An interesting obstacle is emerging in the strong push for solar and that is the fact that China is totally dominating solar panel manufacturing (as we highlighted in a previous newsletter). And there’s reasonable doubt about the working conditions of the workers in some of the factories.

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#solargeoengineering] — Michael Mann and an Oxford Professor named Ray Pierrehumbert wrote a comment in the Guardian attacking solar geoengineering as a climate solution. The argue that even the thought of doing it is a big problem because it takes focus and money away from what we really should be doing: Stopping greenhouse gas emissions.

[#offsetsremoval] — Here’s an article about the difference between carbon offsets and carbon removal. Which are very different. And it also examines the case for carbon removal.

[#CCS] — Techcrunch (and Exxon 😒) looks at the state of startups working in the carbon capture, removal and sequestration field. There’s some interesting one’s in there such as Charm Industrial, which converts biomass into an oil-like substance and inject that underground hence locking it away forever (hopefully).

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#activism] — A new documentary highlights what’s like being a climate activist. And just the article about the move alone makes me want to join the nearest XR chapter.

[#economy] — Just in case you need another argument to act on climate change, here’s one for you. 23T$. That’s how much the world economy will be cut by climate change by 2050 on our current path.

[#guide] — A great visual introduction to kids or anybody who hasn’t really sat down and understood the scale of the problem we’re facing and what’s causing it. It’s a little doom and gloomy at places, but I love the way it takes that and shows what an amazing opportunity this crisis also is.

[#guide] — In the same line as the kids article this one takes a grown up approach. If you have anybody border climate denier or climate apathetic send them this. It’s a great in-depth article that explains all the basics of climate change.

[#disinformation] — Here’s a video on Yale Climate Connection that discusses the rampant “disinformation eecosystem” that are affecting people globally. How sites like Facebook fuels it and how it makes people oppose action on anything from COVID to climate change. The video features prominent experts and journalists on this topic such as Emily Atkin and Amy Westervelt. It is seriously scary.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#biden] — Biden held a climate change change summit last week which urged the big economies and big emitters to increase their ambitions. The US did no pledging to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030. Other countries were more modest and/or unspecific. This Vox article goes in detail on the summit and lists 4 winners and 4 losers at the summit.

[#uschina] — The U.S. and China published a joint statement based on a meeting between the countries two special envoys where they appear to join forces in addressing the climate crisis. Very important, but also just words so far. Looking forward to see some action!

[#canada] — All countries in the developed are increasing their emissions year after year. But if you for some reason only look at territorial emissions i.e emissions done within each individual country and not emissions that countries are “responsible for” due to trade etc then Canada is the only developed country whose terrioritial emissions have increased since the Paris Agreement. Why? They insist on harvesting their dirty oil sands.

[#nuclear] — Last week I bitched about how the EU commision was kicking the can down the road on whether nuclear should be included in their definition of clean energy. And right now it looks like it will include it anyway. Good news.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#us] — In a new article series CarbonBrief looks at the major emitting countries and what they’re doing to stop emitting. This one goes into detail about the US. It’s deliciously detailed and a highly recommended read for this week.

[#china] — A new study confirms that China’s 2060 pledge is consistent with the 1.5C goal. However, we’re still lacking crucial details as to how China will achieve those pledges. But its good to know that if they manage to do it 1.5C is within reach. And it’s not a small task. China will need to reach 90% carbon emission reduction by 2050.

[#shell] — This is disgusting. A new report has been unearthed written by Shell which examines in great detail what the company should do in case of two scenarios. One where growth in energy demand continues on abated and a so called “people power” scenario where-in an uprising of NGOs and activists causes major disruptions in fossil fuel markets. They have been planning what we’re seeing now since the 90s (at least)!

[#fracking] — An in-depth look at a dieing industry, fracking, and how the companies engaged in it become increasingly desperate for getting rid of the poorly performing assets. It’s essentially a game of fools, where investors are buying up the assets in the hope that a bigger fool will come around and buy it from them.

[#bitcoininfluencers] — This is sad. Jack Dorsey and the CEO of ARKInvest has written a white paper wherein they argue that all we need to do to solve the climate crisis is just to turn on all our devices all the time and use as much power as we possibly can all the time. That will then encourage more renewables to get on the grid. And thus the climate crisis has been solved. Oops I see I made a mistake there. Replace “devices” with bitcoin mining rigs. It’s laughable and frankly crazy dangerous that big time influencers such as these two engage in this kind of pseudoscience. This article tears the white paper to pieces. Oh and the side note in the article about the small fact that “mining bitcoin is not very clean” right now? Read this article. Apparently 1/3 of the bitcoin mining network was taken down due to a coal power plant failure in China.

[#greenwashing] — After DeSmog recently uncovered how the fossil fuel industry are increasingly using their non-existent green credentials in their marketing campaigns ClientEarth have filed lawsuits against many companies in the fossil fuel industry for deceptive advertising. Read the great work of their PR groups here.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 76% of California are currently in a drought which does not bode well for the 2021 wildfire “season”.

😻 France is moving closer to banning all national airline travel for which a <2.5h train ride exist

😼 A very detailed post about how high-resolution climate models work.

💩 An incident at a refinery in LA in 2015 almost caused a release of a “terrorist-grade” poisonous gas.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#drought] — This time last year 27% of California was in drought. Last year was a record setting wildfire season. This year 76% of California is in drought 😬. This doesn’t bode well.

[#climatemodels] — This very detailed post looks at how high-resolution climate models is helping Europe prepare better for extreme weather. Very interesting and nerdy read about climate models.

[#temperature] — The numbers are in. March 2021 was the 8th warmest March ever recorded.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#china] — A new report highlights that China must shutdown 600 coal power plants during the next 10 years in order to hit their 2060 net zero climate target. That’s quite a lot especially when you also consider that 85% of the new coal capacity the past year was built in China.

[#nuclear] — The old environmental orgs have been quick to jump at yet another opportunity to bash nuclear power as Fukushima and the Japanese government has announced that it will release treated water from the failed nuclear power plant into the Pacific ocean. It sure sounds bad, but here’s the thing: All around the world there are limits to how much radioactivity foods can contain and it’s measured in Becquerel / kg. In Europe and US the limits are around 1200 Bq/kg. In Japan, they’re 100 Bq/kg. The radioactivity in the water is 50 Bq/kg. This appears to be a complete non-issue that some environmental groups are getting themselves worked up over. Please convince me otherwise.

[#wind] — A new report looks at the potential for using offshore wind to decarbonize the US electricity sector and concludes that offshore wind can cover 90% of the country’s needed electricity production.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#paint] — Researchers have created the whitest ever paint. The paint reflects 98% of sunlight and in test has been shown to lower temperature by 4.5C of the surface below ambient temperatures.

[#ambulance] — Soon you can buy an electric ambulance. Companies Lightning eMotors and REV Group have joined forces to build one based on an electric van built by Lightning eMotors that just launched this December.

[#garbage] — This article dives deep into EUs love for incinerators. Some countries such as Denmark like incinerators so much that we’re apparently importing waste from other countries and burning it. Fortunately, politicians seem to have identified the problem so we can only hope that plans will be taken to stop this practice. The challenge is though whether landfills are any better...

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#fgas] — A U.S. coalition of industry and environmental groups is pushing the EPA to phase-out the super polluting F-gases faster. They’re basically asking for EPA to provide some regulatory certainty.

[#aviation] — One of the big news this week was France’s decision to introduce a ban on domestic flights for which trains are available. All flights for which there’s a less than 2.5h train journey available will be banned. While some MPs in France voted for the limit to 4h, it is still a start and France looks to take a serious leadership position here. Great job!

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#humans] — Humans have altered or (in the words of this Earther article) destroyed 97% of Earth’s ecosystems. Only 3% of Earths’ ecosystems are untouched by humans.

[#wildfire] — In 2004 forest fires in Alaska burned an area the size of Massachussets. Scientists were expecting these forests to take a long time to grow back and “resequester” the lost carbon dioxide. But a new study published in Science is more hopeful. Because what appears to be the case is that birch and aspen trees are growing back in the burnt areas which grows faster and thus sequester more CO2 than the trees that were burnt in the fire.

[#soil] — As the UN prepares for their soil biodiversity summit this article sums up why soil is one of the most important carbon sinks we have as well as how poorly we (meaning the agricultural sector mainly) is treating it.

[#apple] — Interesting move by Apple who have just launched its 200M$ Restore Fund which together with Conservation International will support forestry projects around the world.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#soil] — A new study has found that the Corn Belt in the US (an area spanning roughly from Ohio to Nebraska) has lost 1/3 of it’s top soil due to mainly “regular” agricultural practices that are highly damaging to the soil. Eroding soil is not just a problem due to the lost soil carbon, but it costs the agricultural industry an estimated 3 billion dollars every year.

[#lavender] — As drought is repeatedly causing trouble for Indian farmers they are repeatedly switching to non-food crops such as lavender to make a living. Lavender can grow on poor quality soil and require very little water. This article looks into this movement.

[#seaspiracy] — Just in case you’re not done reading about Seaspiracy here’s another critical article about it which has a marine biologist explain what’s wrong with it.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#chemicalweapons] — The horrifying story of a near miss, where an explosion at a refinery in LA caused a risk of releasing a highly deadly chemical. A chemical so deadly that’s it’s on the list of highly controlled substances due to dangerous use in terrorism attacks.

[#solar] — A new report shows that, as expected, dropping rooftop solar costs are making it accessible to lower income households. This is great news for the climate.

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#carboncapture] — Care must be taken to distinguish carbon capture from carbon removal. Carbon capture is attaching a device to the smokestack of a power plant and capturing “most” of the CO2. Where as carbon removal sucks it from the ambient air. This article deals with carbon capture and it looks at the many many failures of carbon capture projects where carbon capture equipment has been attached to coal power plants and similar. They fail mostly because they’re very difficult if not impossible to monetize. And those that are successful are only monetized because the captured CO2 is used in Enhanced Oil Recovery to pump up even more fossil fuels 😒.

[#carbonremoval] — And here’s a deep dive by Grist on how carbon removal (or direct air capture) really works.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#law] — New Zealand becomes the first country to introduce a law that requires financial institutions to disclose the climate risks to their businesses as well as how they will mitigate those risks.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#eu] — EU has decided to kick the can down the road regarding whether gas and nuclear can be considered a green investment. 🙄

[#fracking] — California’s attempt to ban fracking has died before really getting out the gate due to the lack of Democratic support. Sad...

[#civilianclimatecorps] — This article envisions what the US proposed Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) could look like taking inspiration from the 1940s Civilian Conservation Corps. In this case citizens enrolled in the program would help install solar power plants, retrofitting homes, maintain public transit systems and many more climate related tasks.

[#dirtyeconomy] — A new report by the OECD highlights the dirtiest economies around the world (i.e. CO2 emissions per capita) and urges these countries to change. The top 2 are Iceland and Australia.

[#subsidies] — Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar introduces the “End Polluter Welfare Act” (great name btw) that aims to stop all US fossil fuel subsidies. Great move, but I would be surprised if the fossil fuel lobby doesn’t manage to shoot this one down.

[#bigtech] — A new campaign called ClimateVoice is trying to get BigTech to spend 1 in 5 lobbying dollar on lobbying for climate action instead of other stuff. That’s a great idea as long as they don’t stop there.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#coal] — A new book casts a pretty scathing light over Europe’s coal imports. 41% of EUs coal imports come from Russia where the coal is being mined in poor and marginalized regions of the country where the environmental and human impacts of the practice are horrifying. From winds blowing coal dust into villages coating everything to explosions day and night.

[#lies] — Here’s a new Cambridge research paper arguing that the fossil fuel industry is full of s**t when it comes to their decarbonization plans.

[#strandedassets] — Typically, when fossil fuel companies are trying to get rid of assets that are close to being stranded they sell them off with a clean break. Meaning that whoever buys them also have the responsibility to clean them up when they’re done with them. That is now getting tougher and tougher.

[#nft] — If you’re following tech media you will probably have stumbled upon this Non-Fungible-Token (NFT) madness that appears to be taken over the art world right now. In short: Artists can basically turn their artwork into an NFT, which proves that whoever purchases it owns the only copy and will always be able to prove that it’s THE copy. One digital artist calculated that if he were to convert all his art (300 pieces) into NFTs he would have polluted as much as a European does in a decade. That’s insane. So the question, can you do the same in a less polluting way? Yes. It’s a called a certificate of authenticity and is a piece of paper with a signature on it. Trust me, I’m a record collector I have a few of these.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Carbon omissions: The amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions that a country emits but “forget” to count.

😻 A team of Swedish researchers have had a major breakthrough for making “massless” batteries.

😼 Great cartoon series on the most common tactics employed by the climate delayers.

💩 US banks are soaked in fossil fuels despite pledging divestment.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#antarctic] — A new study looks into what happens to the Antarctic ice shelves at 1.5C, 2C and 4C of warming. While it’s not surprising that melting increases with higher temperatures, what may be surprising is that warmer temperatures will add more snow (because warmer air holds more water) which will have the opposite effect of the melting.

[#methane] — Despite the pandemic methane emissions are rising faster than ever. In 2018 and 2019 emissions rose by 8.5 and 10.7 ppb respectively. But in 2020 the increase was 14.7ppb. Scientists are not sure yet where the spike comes from. Some hypothesize it could be natural ecosystems, while fugitive emissions from fossil gas plants for sure are also to blame.

[#hurricanes] — Weather forecasters are predicting an above-average hurricane season is in store for us in 2021. They’re expecting 17 named storms, 8 hurricanes and 4 intense hurricanes. For the past 40 years the averages have been 12.1, 6.4 and 2.1 respectively.

[#anthropology] — This article dives into a newly released study that investigates how humans have adapted to the changing climate for the past 2000 years. You may have heard the tales of Mayas or people of the Easter Island and how they were wiped out due to climate change. However, according to this new study that is just not the full story. Yes climate change created challenges and much human suffering, but the challenges were overcome.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#energystorage] — A new report looks at how New York regulators have effectively accelerated the state’s energy storage market by making it easier to deploy storage. The report concludes that this support has helped get approximately 1.2GW of battery storage on to the grid.

[#biden] — Heated looks at Biden’s newly announced 2T$ infrastructure plan and how it still supports the fossil fuel industry. Direct subsidies comes in at 20B$ and indirect subsidies at 82B$.

[#china] — Another look at China’s booming coal industry and what’s driving it. China is responsible for 85% of the worlds newly added coal capacity and is therefore the primary reason why global coal share of the power production last year went up.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#repairability] — A french law requires manufacturers of electronic devices to give their products a “repairability” score. Recently big tech started to comply with this law and let’s just say nobody is surprised nor impressed by the scores. Apple scores 7 out of 10 for their iPhones and Microsoft has no products that score higher than 5. You can see lists of scores in the article.

[#milk] — A challenge for smallholder dairy farmers in India is that they need to transport the milk to a place where it can be refrigerated fast. Typically, this is done using polluting dieselgenerators but a new collaboration is using batteries powered by renewables to keep refrigerators running.

[#infrastructure] — Politicians like to build freeways. Just here in Denmark the climateminister proudly announced a new freeway despite the fact that we’re one of the most well-connected countries in Europe. In the UK they’re doing the same. The problem though is that the climate impact has been underestimated by a whopping 100x.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#battery] — Swedish researchers have made a breakthrough in making “massless” batteries. They’re of course not completely massless, but the batteries they have demonstrated to work are for sure a lot lighter than the wellknown types, which could make batteries available to more applications than believed so far.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#seaspiracy] — Seaspiracy. A new Netflix documentary is garnering a lot of positive and good attention. Here’s a review by George Monbiot who’s balanced. And here’s a harsher one from Brian Kahn, whom I also respect. He’s claiming gross factual problems as well as other pretty critical sounding issues with the film. I’m not sure what to think here.

[#peat] — Peat is one of the biggest carbon stores we have, yet it is currently being dug up and used in gardening on a big scale. This is something we should stop doing.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#locusts] — 2020 saw some of the worst locust swarms in East Africa since the 1950s. A big swarm of locusts may contain as many as 15M insects per square mile. Such a swarm can consume as much food as 13.000 people. This article looks at various technology approaches to fight them.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#ecocide] — Here’s the first in a five part series about the rise of the ecocide movement. A highly interesting read.

[#systemicrisk] — Here’s a detailed article in the New York Times about how rising debt in the global south and climate change poses a systemic risk to the entire world economy. The issue is that many of these countries owe so much to wealthly western economies, while they’re being pummeled by COVID and also being the most climate vulnerable.

[#zimbabwe] — Cleantechnica looks at a female-owned electric scooter delivery in Zimbabwe that was started during the pandemic.

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#geoengineering] — A few issues ago I posted an article on a geoengineering experiment that had run into headwind. The experiment was mainly a test of key equipment and no actual geoengineering would be performed. Still the experiment was cancelled due to the public uproar created around the experiment.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#cartoons] — A brilliant cartoon series displaying the biggest tactics used by the fossil fuel industry and others to delay action on climate change.

[#ev] — A British adventurer will drive an EV from South to North Pole to raise awareness of climate change as well as EVs as a solution. He has done a couple of climate change awareness adventures before such as being the first to participate in and complete in the Mongol Rally in an EV. Sound interesting but also a bit of a hassle and frankly, a polluting affair given all the logistics that are planned for the trip. One might hope that this will erase people’s range anxiety issues for good though..

[#podcast] — I just discovered a great new podcast (new, ahem, it’s 50+ episodes in) that profiles the people behind interesting solutions to our climate crisis. Check it out!

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#omissions] — Here’s a simple video showing what’s true in most parts of the western world that although our country by country emissions have gone down, if you count imported emissions as well we’re not emitting less but more. It’s taken from a UK perspective but probably applies all over.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#banks] — US banks may be pledging to help the Biden administration to fight the climate crisis yet their boards are soaked in fossil fuels. 77% of board members in the top 7 major US banks have current or past ties with “climate conflicted organizations”.

[#jobs] — One lie that the fossil fuel industry keeps on telling is that it stands for job! If we get renewables no more jobs! Or something like that. But a new study has found that the fossil fuel industry is likely better than any to cut jobs. As new technological developments are expected to cut 20-30% of fossil fuel industry jobs. Even without a transition to renewables.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

View Details

Welcome to this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].

Let’s start this one off with by far the saddest April Fools, a tweet by Greta Thunberg. Imagine if this was actually true and not a joke. And if you want to read on what happened during IEAs summit click the tweet below.

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 #BigAgricultureKnewToo, like big oil big meat and dairy companies have spent millions in lobbying efforts to curb climate action.

😻 Bike infrastructure added during COVID has increased bike traffic by up to 48% in some cities.

😼 An interactive and detailed look at how so called proxy data is used to calculate temperatures 1000s of years ago.

💩 A great video by The Verge that once again tells the truth about gas stoves and fossil gas.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#greenland] — A group of scientists have observed that lakes on the Greenland ice sheet are draining through cracks in the ice into the Atlantic ocean which in turn acts as a lubricant hereby increasing the speed at which an ice shelf can move.

[#anniversary] — It’s been 10 years since the esteemed research journal Nature launched their Nature Climate Change section and in this article past editors of that look back at the papers that stood out.

[#temperature] — Ever wondered how we can know what the temperature was 1000s of years ago? Look no further. Carbon Brief has done an excellent interactive deep dive of how so called “proxy data” is used to reveal details about the climate of the past.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#solar] — The US Department of Energy has set an ambitious goal of halving the cost of solar by 2030. If they do that unsubsidized solar power in the US will cost 2 cents / KWh. The goal is being called ambitious but not impossible by a number of experts.

[#nuclear] — The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commision (NRC) is looking into allowing some nuclear power plants to run more than 100 years. Currently there are two plants in Pennsylvania and Florida that has been given the permission to run for a total of 80 years. That’s quite stunning, very few electricity production technologies can do this.

[#chinasolar] — Here’s a detailed look at China’s booming solar industry. China’s market share of global PV production went from 14% in the early 2000s to 66% in 2013. Quite impressive.

[#gasstove] — Michael, are you back at hating on gas stoves again? Yes indeed. Here’s a video by The Verge summing up all the problems that fossil gas is causing in your home, for your health and for the climate crisis. It’s great to see major tech news media picking up on this stuff ❤️.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#biking] — A new study has revealed that cities that have added bike lanes and other bike infrastructure has seen bike traffic increase by up to 48%. Build it and they will bike.

[#heathrow] — The UK is looking to expand Heathrow Airport. But that is currently being challenged in courts due to the fact that goes directly against the Paris Agreement. The problem is that the Supreme Court of the UK ok’ed the expansion. And this has now caused 150 lawyers, academics and policy makers around the world to urge the court to reverse their ruling.

[#hemp] — A detailed look at how Paris is using hemp when building green public housing — and no they don’t smoke it. But use it as insulation. This creates a much better indoor climate as well as is good for the climate.

[#fashion] — Here’s a look at the waste generated by the fashion industry and it’s quite enormous. The fashion industry produces 150 billion items every year. And if you wonder where all of this goes — people buy it and they buy more. Average clothes consumption is up 60% in the past 20 years and they throw away more. Since 2002 the average number of times an item is worn before it is tossed has dropped by 33%

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#hydrogen] — A new research project looks at retrofitting a 9 person aircraft with a hydrogen powered engine and will be a worlds first to be using hydrogen.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#deforestation] — In 2020 we cut down the same area as Netherlands in tropical old growth forest. The WRI and Global Forest Watch have calculated that this amounted to 2.6Gt of carbon emitted. It’s a 12% increase from 2019 to 2020.

[#coralreef] — Even the EU is concerned about the climate threat faced by Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The EU is hoping that Australia will sign a pledge to do a green and just recovery from COVID19.

[#book] — A new book examines what we call “the natural world” and claims that it doesn’t really exist. There’s just about no square meter left on the Earth that hasn’t in some sense been touched and polluted by humans.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#productivity] — A new study has analyzed the top 10 food crop production in the world in terms of productivity and confirms that increased heat due to global warming is having a big impact on productivity. Especially in the global south. We already need to increase food production by 70% by 2050 to account for the rise in population and this task will be much harder due to decreased productivity due to global warming.

[#deforestation] — A new study has calculated that the average citizen in the developed world’s food intake (beef, palm oil, chocolate, coffee etc) leads to the loss of four trees every year. Many of these in wildlife rich forests.

⬇️ Engineered drawdown and geoengineering

Protecting our planet and species one way or another

[#carbonremoval] — Shopify has purchased the removal of 10.000 tons of CO2 from a plant to be constructed by Carbon Engineering in Texas. The CO2 will be injected into a rock formation and will over time be turned to stone.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#eu] — It appears that EU policymakers are making little progress on the new EU climate law that is supposed to be done by mid-april. The 2030 target is apparently the big problem and it’s not even very ambitious or compliant with the Paris Agreement (as has been discussed multiple times in this newsletter).

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#law] — A lawyer who took on Chevron can now mark his 600th day in house arrest. This article has some of the details but if you want more, I can highly recommend Drilled Podcast on the same topic from earlier this year.

[#investing] — Carbon Tracker has released a new report that looks at the performance of energy stocks and notes that fossil fuel stocks have lost 123B$ in value in the past decade. They are doing 52% worse than a key world equities index. On the other hand stocks in utilities that are focussed on renewable energy generation has increased 111B$ in value.

[#lobbyism] — And we finish with probably the most important piece of news this week: A new study has found that meat and other agriculture companies have behaved more or less exactly like big fossil and spent millions in lobbying efforts to curb climate action and spread doubt about the agricultural sectors carbon emissions 😾.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

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This is the final episode for now that will go out to major podcast publishing platforms. The reason is that nobody seem to notice that I forgot to publish an episode last week. I won’t go through fighting with Anchor.fm every week if nobody really cares 😅. So if you want to listen you can still do so in the newsletter itself. Just go to weeklyclimate.com and listen. AFAIK you can even add the stream to your podcast app.

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Welcome to this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

Reference: Drilled News

This week I decided to mix up the climate numbers with a quote. I will do this every now and then whenever there’s something that’s so important it deserves it. This one is crucial to understanding what BP is doing right now. Of course I will dive deeper on this one below.

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Nothing this week is as scary as the evidence mounting against BPs attempting to pull another Beyond Petroleum

😻 A new tool in fighting “zombie fires” have been found.

😼 Bladeless windturbine anyone?

💩 Big fossil has known since the 60s about the health risks posed by their products.

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#wildfire] — Siberia and other parts of the world was ravaged last year by so called “Zombie fires” which is a type fire that has burned underground for the entire winter, but only resurfaced as summer temperature allows it to. A research study looks into various kinds of materials that can be used by fire fighters to more quickly control the zombie fires and that effort has landed on a particular plant-based material that is biodegradable.

[#greenland] — Plant fossils taken from a deep ice core from the Greenland Ice Sheet indicates that Greenland might have been green million of years ago. This hereby sends a warning to the rest of us that Greenland was once ice-free.

[#louisiana] — I just finished Elizabeths Kolberts excellent book “Under a white sky” last week too and then this article dives into one of the stories she dives into. The troubled case of Louisiana. This article recaps the problems Louisiana is facing with sea level rise and the plan to stay above water.

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#wind] — A group of researchers have looked at the available land for onshore wind turbines in order to figure out all the places that they could be placed to use onshore wind effectively. The research highlights 3 different paths which depending on local legislation may come true.

[#wind] — I bet those researchers weren’t taking this into account: A startup named Vortex Bladeless has invented a new type of wind turbine that can harness the power of the wind without the classic rotating blades. The benefit? The low area of the wind turbine might allow it to be deployed in a residential setting. The company is looking for an industrial partner to build a 140m high windturbine with the power output of 1MW.

[#energystorage] — Energy storage is ripe with interesting innovations. This article interviews CEO of Zinc8 Energy Solutions, which develops Zinc-air batteries, which compared to lithium-ion batteries are lightweight, more compact and made of less-flammable materials than other batteries.

[#solar] — Operators of a large solar farm in Australia has managed to tune their inverters (a crucial component for converting DC power produced by the solar panels to AC) so much that they can avoid adding extra equipment such as spinning reserves to their grid. This just goes to show how much new technology can still help in this still pretty old industry.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#decarbonizehome] — Here’s a story about one homeowner’s struggle with decarbonizing his own home. The fossil fuel industry is everywhere..

[#ban] — A new report reveals that the US is the country in the world with the most city-wide bans on fossil fuels. This could be for instance banning new gas hookups and similar. I wonder why this is not more prevalent around the world.

[#construction] — After a number of local governments in the US had been championing greener building codes the organisation overseeing the codes have removed the governments right to vote. This looks like yet another successful campaign by the fossil gas industry to derail attempts at killing it.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#plastic] — Have you microwaved your plastic today? Well you shouldn’t. Really. Don’t do it. But a company named Pyrowave has invented a technique to basically use high-powered microwave ovens to increase the yield of plastic being recycled.

[#blackcarbon] — Here’s a look at what the International Maritime Organisation are doing and what shipping companies can do to limit the the temperature increase in the Arctic. It’s quite simple. Switch to another fuel. Even a different fossil fuel based one is better than this crap that many ships uses today. The problem is the so called black carbon which lands on top of the ice and thus causes it to warm faster.

[#foodwaste] — A new paper looks into so called wet waste to be used for net-zero sustainable aviation fuels. The paper even highlights a method with which to make these fuels that would be carbon negative. How? By using food waste, which is a huge source of carbon emissions.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#sink] — A new study indicates that the so called CO2 fertilization effect (how much CO2 plants capture) are dropping. The reason, the increased levels of CO2 is not in sync with other key nutrients that the plants need to grow, hence even if the plants enjoy the increased levels of CO2 they can’t use the additional CO2 to grow even further, thus limiting the effect of carbon sinks on the planet.

[#ghostforest] — A new report looks into the rise of ghost forests. A ghost forest is forest which have been inundated by salt water, which causes the trees to die. With increased flooding comes more ghost forsts.

🍽 Optimize food

Without the lower impact of food or drink the hero doesn’t work (modified old danish proverb).

[#agrisolar] — A new paper on so called “agrisolar”, where farm land is interspersed with solar panels, claims that farmers doing that will help solve grid access problems in Australia. I for one am really psyched about agrisolar.

[#cows] — This article takes a sobering look at the idea of using algae in cow feed to limit their methane emissions. While true that algae in cow feed can limit their methane emissions by as much as 80%, the problem is that we need to scale that algae feed to feed 1.5 billion cows on the planet. If you’re interested in reading more about the algae feed, take a look at this Grist article. It’s weird. Normally it would be Wired that posts the techno-optimists stuff and Grist that shoots it down, but this time it’s the other way around.

[#fishing] — Bottom-trawling, which is the practice of dragging big fishing nets across the ocean floor, releases as much carbon dioxide as aviation every year. This new report is the first time the carbon dioxide emissions of this type of fishing is studied and it makes one think about how many other activities we are performing today that have not yet been measured.

[#farmland] — Techcrunch continue their foray into writing about farming. This time about how farmers are using an online platform known as AcreTrader to raise money for agricultural development projects.

⚖️ Climate Justice

Without justice there’s no future.

[#lawsuit] — A new lawsuit against a company handling fracking waste has been opened in Argentina. The company has for years been handling fracking waste illegally to the detriment of the natural ecosystem and the nearby poor inhabitants.

📦 Other / catch-all

All the other stuff that I couldn’t fit into any of the other categories, than the other category.

[#activism] — A really engaging portrait of Jane Fonda’s long career in fighting for our future. The world could sure use many more of her.

[#music] — When I’m not working on climate via this newsletter or Massive.earth and I’m not spending time with my family I love playing guitar and piano. So it’s great to see some debate in the music industry as well about what to do about climate change. In this article Massive Attack’s “3D” bashes the music industry from not doing enough while simultaneously discussing what not do to. He argues that culture is important and bands shouldn’t stop touring (as Coldplay recently declared to do), but instead act in other ways. 3D himself is working on a project with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research that helps map the emissions from the music industry.

⭐️Special Topics

🎩 Global and local policy

We have a special interest in covering the major global and local policies regarding climate, whether good or bad.

[#china] — This article dives deeper into China’ recently announced new 5 year plan and hints that China seems to have a big cognitive dissonance between wanting or at least pledging to do something about climate change and still building a lot of new coal power plants.

[#canada] — The Canadian Conservative party (current opposition) have voted and proclaimed that they are all climate deniers. The party got new leadership and that leadership tried to gather the party around an ambitious climate agenda. That failed apparently spectacularly.

⛽️Major Carbon Emitters

We have a special interest in covering the moving of the major carbon emitters as these are the key roadblock to climate action.

[#bp] — The “highlight” (or rather lowlight) of the week: Drilled’s Amy Westervelt looks at BP’s actions over the past year as well as some internal strategy documents and concludes loud and clear: BP is not going to drive the energy transition no matter what it appears to say. It’s litterally “Beyond Petroleum” all over again. The arguments: The CEO says loud and clear the BP will be in the oil and gas business for decades to come and that he’s proud of that. Furthermore, in the document it’s clear that “energy transition” for BP means fossil gas, which is not really the transition we need.

[#health] — New fossil fuel industry internal documents that The Guardian have seen shows that the fossil fuel industry has been aware of the dire health risks related to air pollution yet have fought rules to limit the right to clean air for 50 years 🤕.

[#greenwashing] — Chevron is being taken to court for greenwashing. NGOs such as Greenpeace, Earthworks and Global Witness filed a complaint with the US judicial system last week. It’s the first time this particular kind of lawsuit has been filed.

[#investing] — A new report determines that investing in renewable energy is far, far better than investing in fossil fuels. The report concludes that over 10 years, returns on fossil fuels have been 60%, where renewable energy has reaped 420% average return. An unfortunate side-point: Although 420% beats 60% clearly, no-one would probably complain from a 60% return.

[#finance] — This article in the Guardian dives deep into Wall Streets transformation from backing polluters to ... doing so less. It recaps all the initiatives of 2020 such as the Science Based Targets Initiative.

[#activistinvesting] — I love activist investors. In a letter last week, Exxon warns that activist investor “Engine no. 1”’s plan will threaten Exxon’s dividend. The Engine no 1 is a hedge fund that owns 0.02% of Exxon’s share and is known for it’s aggressive stance on climate action and has called out Exxon for poor returns and poor environmental stewardship. This is great.

See you all next week 👋

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.weeklyclimate.com/subscribe

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

I’m trying out a new recording app this week, so the episodes have a lot fewer sound effects and other stuff. I had a minor leveling issue with one part of the recording, so please bear with me while I use this otherwise much better app.

This is a podcast version of the newsletter The Weekly Climate. It is meant to be your monday morning news overview of the most important climate crisis news from last week. Each podcast episode comes with a detailed newsletter wherein you can dive deeper into each news item.

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

News you can’t miss:

🙀 Be careful if you try to buy an F-gas free fridge, you may still get one that contains F-gases.

😻 YoY increase in wind capacity installed was 59% in 2020

😼 A look at the roadmap for virtual power plants and what’s needed for this technology to truly make a difference.

💩 Big “green” PR firm Edelman caught with its pants down for taking fossil fuel money

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

NB! Due to a bug in Anchor.fm that I’m using to record this podcast, a bug that has been persisting now for multiple months this episode might be missing the final “goodbye” sequence. If that is the case I apologize. I’m actively looking for other tools to use as they don’t seem to want to fix this bug.

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

News you can’t miss:

🙀 The world pledges emissions cuts, then how come we do not expect to lower emissions by more than 0.5% by 2030?!We should be at 50% there.

😻 Marine sites all across the world lock away a total of 5Gt of CO2

😼 A new study has calculated the difference in life-cycle material use between an EV and an ICE car.

💩 Japan, US and Germany was singled out by Antonio Guterres in a speech recently, because these countries have no plans to phase out coal by 2030.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate! This is a podcast version of the newsletter The Weekly Climate. It is meant to be your monday morning news overview of the most important climate crisis news from last week. Each podcast episode comes with a detailed newsletter wherein you can dive deeper into each news item. For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com News you can’t miss: 🙀 Did you know that supermarkets (in the US alone) emit 2.6Gt of CO2eq into the atmosphere due to F-gas emissions? 😻 Mining giants are saying goodbye to coal. Hopefully for good. 😼 CarbonBrief goes deep into what health benefits we can expect if we decide to solve the climate crisis. 💩 Texas suffered a lot of blackouts from the recent extreme cold caused by the polar vortex. The cause: Mainly fossil gas outages, but also other sources.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

News you can’t miss:

🙀 Did you know that supermarkets (in the US alone) emit 2.6Gt of CO2eq into the atmosphere due to F-gas emissions?

😻 Mining giants are saying goodbye to coal. Hopefully for good.

😼 CarbonBrief goes deep into what health benefits we can expect if we decide to solve the climate crisis.

💩 Texas suffered a lot of blackouts from the recent extreme cold caused by the polar vortex. The cause: Mainly fossil gas outages, but also other sources.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

News you can’t miss:

🙀 Updated numbers suggest that fossil fuel based pollution kills 8.7 million (up from 7.5M) every year.

😻 Surprisingly, a NASA-based study has shown that economic growth in Africa is not followed by a corresponding increase in emissions.

😼 A detailed look at what the average consumer can do with the pension plan to help solve the climate crisis.

💩 Shell has joined the peak oil gang and has come with a rather unimpressive planfor how to get to net-zero.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

News you can’t miss:

🙀 If you’re wondering about the negative effects the climate crisis has on your health, New York Times has a detailed list.

😻 Some things are actually going better in the fight to solve the climate crisis than the worst predictions laid out.

😼 Steel plants have a big footprint and this week Grist looks at the paths that steel plants have to decarbonize.

💩 The fossil fuel industry is busy pushing propaganda using their favorite PR companies about what Biden’s climate action really means.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

News you can’t miss:

🙀 A new study has found that the annual rate of ice loss has increase 57% since 1994.

😻 Renewables (wind and solar) generation overtook coal generation just barely in 2020 in the EU.

😼 An interesting worldwide overview of different climate risks.

💩 Alberta is similar to China trying to scare journalists away from reporting on their environmental “crimes” against their own territory.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate! This is a podcast version of the newsletter The Weekly Climate. It is meant to be your monday morning news overview of the most important climate crisis news from last week. Each podcast episode comes with a detailed newsletter wherein you can dive deeper into each news item. For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com News you can’t miss: 🙀 50.000 lives would be spared every single year in EU if we stopped polluting our air with fossil fuels and other pollutants. 😻 Best news this week is that the U.S. Democracy managed to remove a deadly tumor. And Grist tries, perhaps a bit too soon, to make us all laugh at the ridiculous things that tumor said. 😼 Author, David Wallace-Wells while known for his quite doom and gloomy book, The Uninhabitable Earth, he wrote a quite balanced review of 2020 on the climate side in NYMag. 💩 Amy Westervelt kills the often-used argument by fossil fuel proponents that stopping fossil fuel production will kill jobs.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

News you can’t miss:

🙀 The next major IPCC report goes to governments for acceptance without pointing fingers at the fossil fuel industry. Why?

😻 A new startup is offering a cheaper alternative than kerosene for lighting in non-electrified regions in Sub-Sarahan Africa: Solar powered battery packs run by women in the local community.

😼 A Danish journalist was harassed by Chinese authorities for looking into the explosion in the number of coal power plants being built in the country. (Unfortunately, article is only available in Danish, see below for more info).

💩 Total has decided not to renew it’s membership to the biggest US fossil fuel industry lobby citing disagreements over climate policy. Hey! This is not bad!

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

We go back to the original news focussed format this week but augments the newsletter with a blog that describes which actions to take based on the news items you read.

News you can’t miss:

🙀 Only 31 out of 190 countries have submitted more ambitious NDCs at the deadline of Dec 31 2020.

😻 Sale of EVs in Norway passed 66% in December 2020.

😼 Satellite look at how the climate crisis (and a few volcanoes) have changed the surface of the Earth.

💩 The Darth Vader of PR companies, FTI Consulting, are also behind the pro-hydrogen push in EU.

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

We go back to the original news focussed format this week but augments the newsletter with a blog that describes which actions to take based on the news items you read.

News you can’t miss:

🙀 A new study is showing that large part of the ground on the Earth is literally sinking mostly due to groundwater depletion and it seems likely that sea level rise will exacerbate this problem.

😻 7 major EU truck makers have decided to stop making diesel trucks by 2040 a full decade before prior plans.

😼 A detailed look at two fertilizer plants, one in Uzbekistan and one in the US. One of them emits as much nitrous oxide as 430.000 cars. Guess which one.

💩 Exxon is trying to downplay a Bloomberg article I also highlighted last week about how they hid emissions from investors and the public. And they’re doing this by buying ads on SoMe’s in yet another propaganda play.

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

We go back to the original news focussed format this week but augments the newsletter with a blog that describes which actions to take based on the news items you read.

News you can’t miss: A part from the excellent Exxon ad above, there’s more Exxon news such as the fact that it doesn’t want to tell anybody about how much it’s new projects are going to pollute. In fact it sells some of them as climate-beneficial. Former Exxon CEO, Lee Raymond steps down from the biggest fossil fuel supporter in the world, JP Morgan’s, board — yay! And shipping-gate may be underway aaand finally, the worlds ecosystems may not be sequestrating CO2 as fast as it used to. 🐙 ... also octopusses have been found guilty of punching its fish hunting buddies out of spite. The videos are adorable in some way. But also it’s kind of bullying. 🤨

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

We go back to the original news focussed format this week but augments the newsletter with a blog that describes which actions to take based on the news items you read.

News you can’t miss: The IEA releases its first Electricity Market report and it has some interesting numbers, some of which can be seen in the Weekly Climate Numbers. The UN Climate Ambition Summit was held last weekend and it led to number of companies upgrading their ambitions. A new UN report finds that 39% of all emissions are related to buildings. That’s close to 2x that of all modes of transportation. And the fossil fuel industry is caught in another ugly propaganda scandal (that nobody seems to care much about except those of us who are obsessed with seeing the industry die).

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

We go back to the original news focussed format this week but augments the newsletter with a blog that describes which actions to take based on the news items you read.

News you can’t miss: This week saw the release of two important reports: (1) The UN’s Emission Gap report for 2020 and (2) the Global Carbon Projects Carbon Budget for 2020. None of the reports are particularly happy reading. As Greta says, we’re still speeding as fast as we possibly be can in the wrong direction. But there’s hope. If countries chose to incorporate a green recovery plan into their COVID response and recovery plan then 2020 will mark the year where the world started taking the climate crisis serious. This week also marked the 5 year anniversary of the Paris Agreement and let’s just say there’s good and bad news surrounding that one too. Finally, a big U.S. offset company is being blamed for protecting trees that doesn’t really need protection and therefore selling useless offsets.

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

We go back to the original news focussed format this week but augments the newsletter with a blog that describes which actions to take based on the news items you read.

News Summary: The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres held a fiery speech at Columbia University on the State of the Planet where he cited just about all the recent major climate science news such as the Production Gap report 2020 (out this week), the news that this year is on track to be the top-3 hottest ever and Brazils deforestation of the Amazon hit a 12-year high. To fill the gap that the cancelled COP26 has left, youth activists held their own Mock-COP26 and agreed on a treaty which was submitted to the real one. Finally, an interesting study has shown that replacing fossil fuel power plant in the US might be easier than thought as 73% of all fossil fuel power plants needs to retired before 2035 anyway and much much more.

For the full shownotes please go to https://www.weeklyclimate.com

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

We go back to the original news focussed format this week but augments the newsletter with a blog that describes which actions to take based on the news items you read.

News Summary: Hybridgate is rolling, Joe Biden picked John Kerry to be special climate envoy who will now go on to sign the Paris agreement for the second time. The drop in CO2 emissions this year represents a tiny blip that’s hardly measurable in the atmospheric levels of CO2. So it’s “great” that we keep up wasteful games such as Bitcoin which starves entire cities in developing countries of electricity and, you know, buying tons of stuff that we don’t need at Black Friday. And the EU has gotten a series of well-deserved bad press this week such as for running an ad that urges people to become ‘beefatarians’ and much much more.

For the full shownotes please go to https://weeklyclimate.substack.com

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Just a brief episode announcing that I’m going back to a more news focussed newsletter and leaving the action items for a different blog. You can learn more about why by reading or listening to the next newsletter

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

This one features a new format in which we go into detail about one particular theme or news item from last week at the cost of making the news section shorter but with the same amount of news (just less comment on them).

News Summary: New initiative to stop PR and agencies from working with big fossil, climate scientists debunks “point-of-no-return“ paper, EU targets 300GW offshore wind by 2050, Agrivoltaics is the new hot topic, Bezos announces first recipients from his 10B$ fund, 1% of people responsible for 50% of aviations emissions, court gives the government of France 3 months to act on climate change and much much more.

One Action Summary: Help yourself and your friends to an EV

For the full shownotes please go to https://weeklyclimate.substack.com

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

News Summary: Climate change threaten great tits, US Central Bank acknowledges climate risk for the first time, deep dive into the consulting company that led the fossil fuels industry assault on humanity, leading climate scientists urges political leaders to do more, Korean palm oil company buys rainforest just to burn it down and much much more.

One Action Summary: Ged rid of your gas stove

For the full shownotes please go to https://weeklyclimate.substack.com

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

News Summary: Biden won, electrifying a fossil-heated US home will reduce carbon footprint by 44%, Shells total twitter fail, a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, why falling LCOE is not causing electricity prices to drop in EU and much much more.

One Action Summary: Talk talk talk

For the full shownotes please go to https://weeklyclimate.substack.com

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

News Summary: Investigation revealed Big Auto‘s (Ford & GM) work to stop climate action, US Election is next week 😱, the sleeping giant is starting to release methane, 100.000 left over oil wells threaten the entire planet, Asian countries pledges carbon neutrality, while they’re stopping EU action against fossil fuel and much much more.

One Action Summary: Put pressure on your politicians

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

News Summary: Arctic Sea is not freezing at the latest date ever, divestment trends shows oil and gas will soon follow coal, ExxonMobil is attacking the authors that revealed everything about how they have misled and manipulated the public and EU voted to continue with our good old fashioned dirty agriculture and much much more.

One Action Summary: Personal divestment from fossil fuels

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

Summary: Recycling plastic is largely a con perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry, letter from a waorani woman in the Amazon, Atlantic is the hottest in 2900 years and climate change has already cost over 1million lives and over 3 trillion $, and more asset managers increase pressure on their portfolios and much much more.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

Summary: Greta et. al calls bullshit on EUs climate targets, September was the hottest month on reecord, California gets its first gigafire, the Amazon is turning into a savannah and Facebook climate denial ad gets 8million views despite the company’s ”crackdown” on misinformation and much much more.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

Summary: Lots of major carbon emitter news this week, as well as deeper dives into China’s 2060 carbon neutrality pledges and California’s ban on ICE cars.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

Summary: 2.5m of sea level rise is coming regardless of 2C is reached or not, Facebook is in the midst of a gigantic climate change scandal, China pledges carbon neutrality, California bans ICE cars in 2035 and hurry up and join Heated’s bookclub on the ”All we can save” and much much more.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

Summary: We follow BPs moves extremely carefully, wildfires are releasing records amounts of CO2, hydro + solar is a match made in heaven, more big asset managers decarbonizing, and we discuss perhaps the only benefit of COVID19. And we also look at the two main strategies for solving the climate crisis.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

Summary: Fire and water everywhere, 33 trillion € moving out of fossil fuels, more damning evidence of fossil fuel lies, and a new climate refugee report. And we also get to look at our planet from the outside.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

Summary: A number of lawsuits, fracking bankruptcies and their impact on the climate (despite them being gone), lots of startup funding news both IPOs and venture funding and anti-solar panels! Oh, and solar getting so cheap that if you looked at getting solar on your roof 5 years ago, then you may need to look again.

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

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Welcome this weeks edition of The Weekly Climate!

Summary: A couple of major news items has filled this week. First of all, Californias woes with blackouts and wildfires, the U.S. presidential election following Bidens Climate Change betrayal and later retraction and a lot of debate and articles about green hydrogen. There was a also number of developments surrounding sustainable investments, both good (from the EU) and bad (from the U.S.)

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The inaugural Weekly Climate podcast episode. This is a podcast version of the newsletter The Weekly Climate. It is meant to be your monday morning news overview of the most important climate crisis news from last week. Each podcast episode comes with a detailed newsletter wherein you can dive deeper into each news item.

Summary: It has been a week full of good, bad and weird news. Among the good news are the $89B of stranded assets recently reported by seven of the oil majors, a UK solar company beats the world record in solar panel efficiency, and a report shows that renewable energy deployment have doubled over the past 5 years. On the bad side, the week saw the death of a famous climate scientist (due to an accident), the second hottest month ever recorded on the planet and the melting of Greenland ice sheets may have reached a point of no return. Among the weird were BPs announcement of winding down oil production and the following environmental movements applause.

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This is a brief introduction to what The Weekly Climate is all about. Checkout weeklyclimate.com to learn more and, if you want, sign up to the newsletter.

The Weekly Climate: Recent Episodes

Michael Reibel Boesen