[Jan 16-22’23] This insanity belongs in science fiction
Banks still investing in fossil fuels, 100B$ to be invested in EV chargers this year, rain in drought is good right? and propane industry splurging on propaganda this year.
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.
🙀 Banks still investing heavily in the fossil fuel industry despite pledges
😻 100B$ expected to be invested in EV chargers this year
😼 Surely lots of rain in an area affected by drought must be a good thing, right?
💩 Propane industry to spend 12.8M$ this year in propaganda for pushing propane as a climate solution
👩⚕️ Status: Climate & Science
Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!
[#2022] — Here’s CarbonBriefs annual state of the climate, where they look at how the climate change throughout the past year. You really got to read at least the intro, but a few highlights. Oceans: Warmest year on record. Surface: Between 5th-6th warmest on record. Warming over land: Hottest year ever in 28 countries. And much more stats inside.
[#dust] — A new study has determined that dust in the atmosphere is likely hiding some of the effects of climate change. The study concludes that temperatures could be up to 8% warmer if the dust weren’t there.
📰 The 7 Grand Challenges
⚡️Decarbonize Electricity
Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.
[#windturbine] — One of the often used arguments in fossil fuel propaganda against wind turbines is that “Oh no!! USED BLADES ARE PILLING UP EVERYWHERE!!” (as opposed to, you know, vomiting invisible gigatons of CO2 in to the air ever year killing us and many other species on the planet). But it is actually a problem that might as well be sorted as well as an opportunity, one that Danish startup Continuum founded in 2021 has decided to focus on by building 6 wind turbine blade recycling facilities throughout Europe.
🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas
Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.
[#ev] — In 2023 annual investments in EV chargers is expected to reach 100B$ - almost a doubling since last year. There’s a big focus among automakers on rolling out ultra-fast chargers for instance Mercedes announced last week a global program of 10.000 ultra fast chargers.
[#gasstoves] — If you’re tired of all the talks about gas stoves (which you may be if you’re reading this in the US - but if you need a quick refresher check this video out) then Heated presents a very good and important line of arguments as to why gas stoves actually matter even though their carbon footprint is crazy significant. And then again it does indeed matter since gas stoves comes with a leaky fossil fuel infrastructure. Emily draws an interesting line between people against plastic straws and gas stoves that follows a similar line of reasoning.
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