[Feb 27-Mar 5’23] New global emissions record!

Germany wants to keep ICE cars alive, green lawyers receives ammo, emissions changes for the top 10 polluters and fossils pioneers of studying health risks of fossil gas in homes.

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

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

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‼️News you can’t miss

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

🙀 Germany threatens to block the EU green deal over the phaseout of fossil cars

😻 Green lawyers get a boost from a court opinion

😼 Here’s how emissions in the top 10 most polluting countries change

💩 The fossils were also pioneers in studying the harmful effects of fossil gas in homes

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

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

[#IEA] — The IEAs report on global emissions was released last thursday and it concludes that yet again 2022 beat all records for the most polluting year ever. The energy sector alone reached an all new high of 36.8Gt. Two things to note: While certainly depressing to learn of yet another record, 2022 emissions grew a lot less than 2021s whch grew a fullblown 6% from 2020 and secondly, extreme cold in 2022 likely caused a higher requirement for heating which increased greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. As an add-on to that here are some sexy graphs that show how emissions are changing in the top 10 highest emitting countries.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

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

[#southafrica] — South Africa is the world’s 14th most polluting country and here’s an interesting look at its struggle with ridding themselves of coal. It’s interesting because on the one hand there’s a strong push toward switching to renewables but on the other hand the country is facing daily blackouts due to faltering coal power plants that the government also focusses on restoring those coal power plants, which obviously presents a bit of a financial conundrum if the country also wants to get rid of the coal plants it is restoring.

[#china] — China just approved the biggest expansion on coal since the Paris Agreement in 2015. A whopping 106GW of capacity which means that China has doubled coal capacity every year the past two years.

[#hydrogen] — There are some early promising studies that seem to indicate that there may be reservoirs of hydrogen hiding under the Earth’s crust. Hydrogen is in general not believed to be free flowing and should we find it it may still be uneconomic to recover (you know like a certain other kind of gas extraction, ahem, fracking) but the prospect is certainly interesting.