[Sep 19-25’22] Enough fossil fuels for another industrial revolution

Patagonia founder donates company profits for climate, new database of fossil fuel projects and documents reveals more about Exxons role in misinformation.

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

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

I’m back from a nice EV-based vacation in the Southern part of France 🏖🍹🍷.

To my paid members who may only read this version I just wanted to tell you that since I left we got a pretty big influx of new members - 15% increase in a month, which is pretty huge for me! I think a big part of that was a kind article in EU Startups titled “15 of the best Startup and VC newsletters you should subscribe to”. Thank you so much who was kind enough to plug that in there 🙏.

Also I’ve re-enabled everybody’s paid memberships from today. Thank you so much for being a paid member of The Weekly Climate.

---

‼️News you can’t miss

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

🙀 Fossil fuel industry pushed Biden for favorable policies because of war in Ukraine

😻 Patagonia founder and family donates future profits of Patagonia to climate action

😼 New database of global fossil fuel projects goes live

💩 New unearthed documents reveals more details about Exxons climate lies since the 90s

---

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

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

[#arctic] — This years Arctic sea ice summer minimum for 2022 was the joint 10th lowest on record (together with 2018 and 2017). Still the last 16 years have seen the 16 lowest Arctic sea ice summer minimums.

[#greenland] — As the summer comes to and end so does the annual Greenland ice sheet melt season. Overall this marked the 26th year in a row where the Greenland ice sheet have sustained a net loss of ice. In total, Greenland lost 84Gt of ice.

[#volcano] — The eruption of the volcano Tonga in January of this year might have cause a short but fortunately, temporary, spike in global warming. It spewed 55Mt of water vapor in the stratosphere where the water vapor will deplete the ozone layer faster as well as water vapor is actually a quite potent greenhouse gas. The 55Mt of water vapor corresponds to a 5% increase in total water vapor already in the stratosphere.

---

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

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

[#record] — Last week solar and wind power generation met 10.5% of total global power generation for the first time in 2022. After the 2021 surge in coal power this is a good thing.

[#v2g] — EVs can play an important role in decarbonizing the grid due to the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. In V2G you basically utilize the battery in a car to help feed electricity into the grid (or modulate when to charge) whenever the grid needs it. adding just a 50KWh battery (which is probably around average what’s in an EV these days) to the 1400B cars on the road would give you a giant 70.000TWh battery. Currently we use 23.900 TWh of electricity globally. So EV suppliers are arguing that the trend to put larger batteries in EVs is actually good because it in the end will help making this giant vehicle battery even bigger.