[Mar 6-12’23] Fossil gas.. fossil gas everywhere!

Eco-anxiety, international treaty to protect the oceans, a story of western climate migration and EU gas lobby hard at work to stop gas heater phase-out.

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

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

This week was big on fossil gas news for some reasons. From leaked gas lobby activities in the EU to a deep dive into a major fossil gas leaks to wastewater plants. And if you’re new here (as many of you are) you may have noticed that I call natural gas for fossil gas instead since that is what it really is.

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‼️News you can’t miss

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

🙀 Eco-anxiety is a real thing, and not just because of doom-and-gloom rhetoric

😻 The world got an international treaty to protect the world’s oceans

😼 A story of western climate migration

💩 EU gas lobby hard at work in stopping gas boiler phase-out

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

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

[#grid] — One of the things that’s might at some point hold the green energy transition back is the fact that we need to build out the grid. In the US Bloomberg estimates that the size of the grid needs to double by 2050. I must admit that I was a bit puzzled by why we need to do that since renewable energy is far less wasteful than fossil fueled sources. But it must be because the energy density is lower, hence we need more individual power plants? But then again there would also be more local production (solar on roofs etc) so that would seem to indicate less transmission? The article is not very clear on the why here..

[#USgreenenergy] — Here’s a list of the states in the US that are ranked by the amount of renewable energy they produce — and to many people’s surprise, the winner is not California, but Texas mostly due to a lot of wind resources.

[#superconductor] — The first room-temperature superconductor may have been discovered (although it’s being met with a bit of skepticism). A superconducting material would allow the transport of electricity between two points without resistance, meaning no loss. This would obviously be a big deal as we’re transporting electricity around a lot.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#efuels] — As you may have read from last week Germany withdrew support from a landmark EU proposal that would ban ICE cars in EU by 2035. They wanted to add that ICE cars can remain if they run on e-fuel. Hereby providing yet another loophole for the fossil fuel industry to exploit which is so silly since this (and many articles and probably all scientists in the world) agrees that e-fuels makes no sense in cars.

[#wastewater] — A new study has found that wastewater plants emit twice as much methane than what was previously thought. This makes wastewater plants a very relevant decarbonization target to fix.

[#apartmentbuildings] — Apartment building owners in New York is struggling with the cities bold climate laws which aims to cut carbon emissions by 40% by 2030. The main issue is that owners are facing tough and very expensive decisions like for instance, choosing to put solar on a roof now just to comply with the regulation. And then take it all down again soon because the roof needs to be replaced. But here is one creative solution to actually use carbon capture. Some buildings have started experiments with that.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

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