THE BRIEF [Feb 27-Mar 5’23]
THE BRIEF [Feb 27-Mar 5’23]
Germany wants to keep ICE cars alive, green lawyers receives ammo, emissions changes for the top 10 polluters and fossils pioneers of studying health risks of fossil gas in homes.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].
If you’re only getting The Brief but want to get the full version of the newsletter be sure to upgrade your plan to paid. Check out the preview that you will receive to see why more than 30 people think it’s worth paying for. And see a recent week’s full newsletter for details for why I decided to go paid.
If you’re getting both: Thank you so much for deciding to upgrade to go paid 🙏. And thanks to everybody for reading my newsletter regardless of which version you read 🤗.
‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 Germany threatens to block the EU green deal over the phaseout of fossil cars
😻 Green lawyers get a boost from a court opinion
😼 Here’s how emissions in the top 10 most polluting countries change
💩 The fossils were also pioneers in studying the harmful effects of fossil gas in homes
This week’s highlights
[#IEA] — The IEAs report on global emissions was released last thursday and it concludes that yet again 2022 beat all records for the most polluting year ever. The energy sector alone reached an all new high of 36.8Gt. Two things to note: While certainly depressing to learn of yet another record, 2022 emissions grew a lot less than 2021s whch grew a fullblown 6% from 2020 and secondly, extreme cold in 2022 likely caused a higher requirement for heating which increased greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. As an add-on to that here are some sexy graphs that show how emissions are changing in the top 10 highest emitting countries.
[#electrification] — Following up on the non-controversial news item I posted from last week that heatpumps also works in the cold, here’s Rewiring America’s newsletter from last week which busts 4 other electrification myths like electrification will break the grid and that it’s more expensive.
[#coal] — Even though coal power plants capacity are dropping in the US (but beating out records in China as reported earlier here) they’re still causing a lot of premature deaths due to the so called PM2.5 pollution. A total of 3800 people die prematurely every year in the US because of this. That number is >9M globally and as activist Rebecca Solnit writes for the Guardian, that is a staggering a number — a staggering number that we’re letting our politicians continue to subsidies with trillions every year.
[#rich] — We hear a lot about how the richest people are responsible for a lot more carbon emissions than the poorest. And that is of course true no matter how you look at it, but how much really depends on where in the world that person is rich. In the US the 10% richest emit about 55t CO2 annually, in EU it’s closer to 25t, in China it’s 30t and in India it’s about 8t.
That’s it for this week folks!
If you want more details or simply think my newsletter rocks remember that you can always go paid to get the full version of the Weekly Climate. But before you do, ask yourself this question: Does it provide you with 1.25$ worth of value every week? Obviously I think it does. In fact I really hope that just the time alone I save you should easily cover those 1.25$. Don’t hesitate to ping me on michael@weeklyclimate.com or comment below with any questions, feedback or comments regarding this.
Remember if you’re feeling down, angry or sad from some of the news in this newsletter one cure is to act. And one way you can always act that also happens to be one of the most powerful things you can do is to talk about it. That also works if what you just read made you hopeful or happy btw.
If you enjoyed this newsletter don’t forget to share it with your friends, coworkers or other people you think could benefit from getting it. If you got directed here by a friend or another link on the Internet don’t forget to subscribe!
See you all next week 👋