THE BRIEF [Feb 13-19’23]
THE BRIEF [Feb 13-19’23]
Wood burning biggest cause of PM2.5 pollution in UK, EU formally bans gas and diesel car sales, how quick we need to phase-down fossils and greenwashing in large companies.
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.
🙀 Biggest cause of PM2.5 air pollution in UK is burning wood for heating
😻 EU formally bans gas and diesel car sales by 2035
😼 How quickly do we require “phase-down” of fossil fuels?
💩 New report looks at the degree of greenwashing in the 24 biggest companies climate plans
This week’s highlights
[#phasedown] — Even though UN language around what we must do to fossil fuels was recently weakened from phase out to phase down the question can still be asked: How fast must these fuels by phased down? That question then becomes quite complicated because as it turns out developed nations “only” rely about 19% on coal for instance, where as low-middle income developing nations rely on it for 54% of their electricity generation. This means that these countries must phase down / out much faster than rich nations, who are the one’s that are accountable for the problem in the first place, that is obviously not fair. Still it must happen, so how?
[#aviation] — New EU investment rules will greenwash 90% of Airbus’ future produced planes as they are about 15-20% more fuel efficient than current models. Apparently, that is strong enough to be labelled sustainable.
[#poverty] — A new study has shown that soaring fossil fuel bills may push up to 141 million people into extreme poverty world wide.
[#gridreliability] — One of my favorite new newsletter discoveries is Distilled, who have a great article this week on the myth that fossil fuel power plants are more reliable than renewables. This was largely started during the big blackouts in Texas two years ago where the fossils used the opportunity to spam propaganda everywhere, despite the fact that the official conclusion was that it was the fossil fuel power plants that caused the blackouts and not renewables. Apparently, fossil fuel power plants are indeed not very fond of extreme weather.
That’s it for this week folks!
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