THE BRIEF [Feb 20-26’23]
Climate migration is here, heat pumps way cheaper than green hydrogen, capturing heat waste can power the world and no excuse for not cutting methane emissions.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].
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This week I’m looking at contrails as a kind reader sent me a really cool resource that can be used to understand their climate impact a lot better. You can check that out before the paywall in the paid version of this newsletter.
‼️News you can’t miss
🙀 Think climate migration is only happening in countries far away? Think again
😻 Heat pumps 3x cheaper than green hydrogen
😼 Recapturing excess heat could power most of Europe
💩 There’s no excuse for not reducing methane emissions
This week’s highlights
[#elnino] — The weather phenomenon El Niño is expected to arrive later this year. The last four years was under the influence of La Niña which asserts a cooling influence on our climate still the last years have proven to be some of the warmest since recording began in the late 19th century. So El Niño which have a warming effect on the planet will likely show us what’s in store for us by the end of the century.
[#methane] — The IEA annual methane report was released last week and it speaks pretty bluntly that there is “no excuse” for the fossil fuel industry and other polluters to cut those emissions especially as alternatives are among the cheapest climate solutions out there.
[#insetting] — Here’s a new word: Insetting. Insetting is when a company is applying carbon removal “technology” (often trees more than machines) along their own supply chain and hereby remove some of the carbon their products emit. A new report that highlighted that these “insets” are little more than offsetting in disguise and that’s probably right. But at least IMO it seems like a better way to “remove carbon” than offsets with all the problems there are with offsets. But as the report rightfully highlights the issue here is the methodologies with which the companies uses to calculate the impact of the insetting projects that is both varied and in some cases not scientifically sound.
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋