THE BRIEF [Jan-10-16’22]
THE BRIEF [Jan-10-16’22]
Third costliest year ever in the US due to extreme weather, renewable + energy storage works 24/7, battery recycling industry is exploding, EU carbon price scheme ignores fossil fuel service ships.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].
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‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 Last year was the third costliest ever in terms of extreme weather damage in the US
😻 New study (like many preceding it) reveals that renewables plus energy storage can handle electricity loads 24/7/365 with no problem.
😼 Battery recycling is one of the new industries that are expected to undergo explosive growth.
💩 EU’s new carbon price scheme exempts ships that service oil and gas fields for some fossil reason to the tune of 25Mt CO2 annually.
This week’s highlights
[#nuclear] — This excellent Grist article dives into the thorny issue of nuclear power. It’s kind of simple (and then nothing is really..): Nuclear is clean (carbon emission wise) but generates dangerous waste which can be handled safely and future generation of nuclear power can take care of. It’s also expensive. Way more so than solar and wind and it takes a long time to deploy. But what about already operating nuclear power plants? It makes little sense to shut those down.
[#fashion] — Here’s an interesting article about how we can all move the fashion industry towards a more sustainable future. This article looks at a couple of companies in the space and I also have to namedrop one of my favorite initiatives in this space and that’s United by Zero who have developed a scientifically-driven way of helping you select clothing that aligns with your values (they won our 2021 Massive.earth Challenge #1).
[#firemicrobes] — Here’s an interesting article about a completely new field of science: Pyroaerobiology, which is the study of life in smoke. A few years ago a high school science fair project accidentally discovered that smoke from wildfires are alive with fungi and bacteria. This has turned into this new field which is seeing a lot of research these days as increasing number of wildfires and the resulting smoke are leaving especially firefighters vulnerable to a range of infections from these bacteria and fungi.smoke/
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋