[Jun 20-26’22] Gas Anxiety

Germany to increase coal power production, gas station bans are coming to your city, IEA World Energy Investment report out and the future of fossil fuels in 5 charts.

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

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

First of all, sorry about the delay for this newsletter. Being a father of now two has messed up my schedule quite a bit. I used to be able to finish the newsletter at night or during nap times in the weekend but since there are now two kids who definitely don’t sleep at the same time - like AT ALL - I can’t do that anymore. That’s why there going to be a small change to the way the newsletter will be published in the future. The newsletters will now cover news from Friday to Friday instead of Monday to Sunday and the reason for that is that I can then finish the newsletter during work hours on Friday. The newsletter will still be sent out Monday morning 6am as Friday evening is a poor time to send out e-mails to people going home on weekend (let me know if you disagree). So next newsletter will be out as planned on Monday July 4th but it will cover June 27 - July 1, the next one after that will cover July 1-8. I hope that makes sense and doesn’t screw things up for anybody.

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‼️News you can’t miss

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

🙀 Germany is going to increase coal power production due deal with the gas crisis.

😻 Gas station bans are coming to your city, hopefully soon.

😼 IEAs World Energy Investment analysis 2022 was published last week

💩 The future of fossil fuels in 5 charts.

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

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

[#heatwaves] — Summer only just started and we’re already seeing heatwaves all over the world from US to Europe to China (“advertisement”: not in Denmark though where it’s been cold and rainy AF since the beginning of June except the past two days). These heatwaves are not normal when looking at past averages but are fast becoming the new norm of heat domes: Or vast amount of heat that is trapped and only very slowly moving anywhere.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

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

[#iea] — IEA released one of it’s major reports last week, it’s World Energy Investment 2022 analysis. A few numbers have been reported in the weekly climate numbers but it’s important to stress a few details. First of all, while investment in renewables is increasing it’s still nowhere near the level necessary to stay below 1.5C and other bad news for renewables is that the rampant inflation has brought the first increase in cost of renewables in more than 10 years.

[#solaremissions] — Really great article that goes into detail about solar powers carbon footprint (which isn’t perfect but surely one of the best we’ve got) and how some companies are going the extra mile of cleaning it up. A recent study showed that if the world decides to rapidly deploy solar power then it would lead to 25-30Gt of CO2 emissions by 2050 which is roughly 10% of the budget we have left to hit 1.5C.

[#japancoal] — Japan has decided to pull funding from two big coal projects in Bangladesh and India. Japan provided more than half of the funding for the billion dollar projects. The interesting question here becomes what about climate justice then. Does this mean that millions of people will be without power? Nope at least in the Bangladesh case they decided to build a fossil gas plant instead. Not optimal of course but better than coal.

[#diablocanyon] — California’s last nuclear power plant is currently a hot topic. Diablo Canyon is said to close in 3 years but California’s struggle with keeping it’s climate goals are making it an attractive option to keep open for as long as possible.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.