[Dec 12-18’22] Big oil is still greenwashing 🙄

Arctic = warmer & wetter, record energy density of new solar tech, mapping carbon emissions to neighborhoods and big oils is still greenwashing.

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

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

Brief practical note: Some of you might have received an e-mail allowing you to gift a paid subscription of the Weekly Climate (I’m not in control of when these are sent out, Substack are, so if you haven’t you will very likely receive one soon), but I received reports from a kind paid member that the links weren’t working. However, this was in all likeliness due to the fact that I had disabled paid memberships last week due to my week “off”, so they should work now.

In addition: As per usual, next week is x-mas week so there won’t be any newsletter next week, this means that next issue will be on January 2nd 2023. I can already see this week that climate news seems to be ramping down a lot for the new year 😬.

See you all on the other side! Merry x-mas and happy new year! 🎄🥳

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‼️News you can’t miss

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

🙀 Arctic is getting a lot warmer and wetter

😻 New solar tech with 18x higher energy density is maturing

😼 New US project has mapped peoples carbon emissions by neighborhood

💩 Don’t believe big oil, new report reveals (again) that they’re doing nothing but greenwashing

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

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

[#neuroscience] — A new book on the neuroscience of climate change discusses how our brain are having trouble coping with climate change and can be (but probably shouldn’t be) dumbed down to the problem with climate change being a long term threat vs the short term gain of consumer pleasures. The book goes on to suggest ways for us to train our minds to deal with climate change. Sounds very interesting and definitely made my list.

[#arctic] — People some times forget that while 2C temperature increase on average doesn’t sound like much some regions are heating a lot more. One region is the Arctic which is heating at 4x that of other regions. Scientists now warn (again) that the region is becoming wetter and stormier, which is all not very good for global sea level rise and in general climate change.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

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

[#solartech] — New solar cell technology is thinner than a human hair and have an 18x higher energy density than regular solar cells. The researchers has also demonstrated that they can scale the production of these solar cells.

[#fusion] — There was a major breakthrough in fusion technology last week, in which scientists managed for the first time ever to extract more energy from a fusion process than they put in. This is major news, but that still won’t make fusion technology a climate change solution unfortunately because it’s still very far away despite this breakthrough.

[#battery] — US battery storage capacity is expected to grow from about 8GW to 30GW by 2025. The data comes from power plants owners and is likely a sign that battery technology have gotten cheap enough to pay off.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#ev] — Everybody should know by now that EVs have lower total cost of ownerships than ICE cars even and especially in these raging uncertain times where the time at which you charge your car is key to save even more money. Despite that, the IEA is making a tool that will allow anyone from 52 different countries that it is targeting to calculate the total cost of ownership of an EV.

[#urbanization] — A cool new project visualizes the climate impact of neighborhoods in the US — and the picture is pretty clear (and can probably be extended globally): People who live in urban centers pollute 2-3x less than people who live in the suburbs and further away because they use more public transport, drive less and in some cases shop less. The other part of the picture that’s clear is that rich people in the same areas pollute much more (but not as much as) people living in suburbs.