[Oct 31-Nov 5’22] Net-zero plans need more land area than available on Earth
Rethinking and reprioritizing adaptation, many uses of EV batteries, COP27 PR company has fossil fuel clients.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].
The next week I’m going away on a brief autumn vacation with my family so the newsletter and paid memberships will be paused until I get back. Since COP27 is starting next week I will try to do short recap on the news from that which will go out to all members. Depends a bit on my time and the outcomes from the first week there.
‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 We need to rethink and reprioritize our adaptation efforts
😻 The many ways to reuse used EV batteries
😼 To make net-zero plans work we need more land area than available on the Earth
💩 400 climate scientists tells PR company running communication for COP27 to drop their fossil fuel clients
📰 The 7 Grand Challenges
⚡️Decarbonize Electricity
Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.
[#euemissions] — The EUs CO2 emissions from energy use fell 5% in the past three months compared with the same months in 2021. One could expect that both the post-COVID surge and the war in Ukraine would make emissions from energy use increase as countries scramble to fire up old coal power plants. But surprisingly this doesn’t seem to be the case.
[#chinacoal] — On the dark side of what’s apparently happening in EU, China is aiming to burn more and more coal. And that effort is threatening to ruin all other efforts make to stem the tides against climate change.
[#solarwaste] — I find it quite amusing that some people can be concerned about solar panel waste that will be generated when panels near retirement age especially when you’re comparing it with the 50.000.000.000t of CO2 waste that the fossil fuel industry is pumping into our common atmosphere. But let’s leave that comparison for a bit and pretend that we’re very worried about solar panel waste. Well a new paper suggests that we shouldn’t be. Great, let’s not talk about this anymore then.
[#fossilpeak] — For those who want to dive deeper into IEAs historic World Energy Outlook report from 2 weeks ago, here’s CarbonBrief’s detailed analysis of the report which (as you may remember) predicts fossil fuels will peak in 5 years.
🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas
Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.
[#evbatteries] — There are many weird reasons for not liking EVs: Maybe people don’t like the nice gliding constant acceleration, maybe people don’t like cars that are almost silent, maybe people like getting asthma or cancer from air pollution, maybe people love to spend money and time on maintenance. But if there’s one argument that anti-EV folks keep on swinging (especially at climate conscious folks) it’s that EVs uses batteries, batteries are bad, which means EVs are bad. Not so fast. This article looks at the many ways that EV batteries can be refurbished into something new. Toyota (surprisingly, as Toyota seems to be THE EV laggard in the market) just turned on a grid-scale battery which consisted of used PHEV and BEV batteries.
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