THE BRIEF [April 10-16’23]
THE BRIEF [April 10-16’23]
Emissions from banned f-gases rising, why are taxpayers paying the fossil fuel industry trillions and new leaked fossil fuel memo.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].
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‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 Emissions from banned F-gases are mysteriously rising
😻 Fossil gas can’t compete with renewables.
😼 Why are global taxpayers propping up the fossil fuel industry?
💩 New leaked fossil fuel memo reveals how much the fossil fuel industry was expecting in terms of climate migration and more.
This week’s highlights
[#renewables] — A new levellised cost of energy assessment by Lazard confirms that wind and solar, even with battery storage, are cheaper than fossil fuels. The assessment shows that on pretty much any assessment, wind and solar win easily, without counting the carbon cost of their competitors. The study also notes that despite moderate to significant increases in the LCOE of new renewable assets in the last year, costs for so-called “best in class” renewable assets continue to decline.
[#electrification] — This article from The New York Times discusses the idea of electrifying almost everything in order to tackle climate change. The article explores the challenges of electrifying transportation, residential and commercial buildings, and industry, as well as the need for sweeping changes to the nation's power grids. But even though there are challenges, as Saul Griffith puts it: “How on Earth are we going to power the modern economy cleanly,’ nothing else makes sense”.
[#womeninagriculture] — A new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) highlights the inequalities faced by women in agriculture, which are compounded by climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. Women in the sector often work under worse conditions than men, taking informal, part-time, labour-intensive, and low-skilled jobs at higher rates, and earning 82 cents for every dollar men earn. The report calls for addressing these inequalities and empowering women, which would improve their well-being and that of their households, reduce hunger, increase incomes, and strengthen resilience. However, the authors warn that few national policies have specific targets to address women's inequalities in agrifood systems.
[#netzero] — I’ve been pretty vocal about what I think about net-zero goals and this excellent article does a good job of taking both sides that net-zero is anything other than greenwash and inaction. While the idea of global net-zero emissions is rooted in climate science, individual governments and corporations have been criticized for using carbon neutrality pledges as a "con" that allows polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gases. Critics argue that the carbon offset projects used to neutralize residual emissions are often questionable. Some activists are calling for a shift to a "real zero" approach that involves the rapid elimination of all fossil fuel production and greenhouse gas emissions without the use of offsets.
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋