THE BRIEF [Jul 4-10’22]
THE BRIEF [Jul 4-10’22]
Fossil gas IS GREEN?!, the downfall of gasoline, cool solar project solving housing and solar problem, why fossil fuels are hard to kill.
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.
🙀 Fossil gas voted “green” by EU politicians
😻 The downfall of gasoline in five charts
😼 Cool solar project in the US combines solving the housing crisis with solar power
💩 Why fossil fuels are hard to kill? Tax revenues, look at Norway or this small county in California.
This week’s highlights
[#hydrogen] — I spend quite a bit of time in this newsletter on yelling at articles that talks about hydrogen and cars for the simple reason that the math makes absolutely no sense at all. But we must remember that it’s not hydrogen that I’m mad at just the application of it to cars. Here’s a good overview by Bill Gates (and FuelCellsWorks) that shows that clean hydrogen is very important to decarbonize a lot of other industrial sectors - especially in the heavy industries. Heavy industries need heat and that heat can’t come from fossil gas anymore (even though an investment in such a factory burning gas would now be considered a green investment by the EU) so it much come from some place else. But it’s just so damn important that it’s green hydrogen and not blue hydrogen. In fact much of Canada’s “climate policy” relies on so called blue hydrogen (hydrogen produced by fossil gas which emits a lot of greenhouse gases) which does little more than keeping the fossil fuel industry in business. That’s why hydrogen is a complicated topic: It has to be green otherwise it’s just more money spent killing people with air pollution and climate change.
[#adaptation] — With the summer comes what the Union of Concerned Scientists calls “Danger Season” - ‘tis the season of wildfires, flooding, hurricanes etc. Here’s a good article about what you can do to prepare for such events if you live in disaster prone areas.
[#fossilgreengas] — Without a doubt the worst news this week as the European parliament has decided to label nuclear AND fossil gas as green. I mean seriously 🤬😖😡🫠🤮☠️. Nuclear is obviously fine if you can get the costs and schedules down but gas. In a time where many countries around the world are actively helping consumers with gas burners getting off that shit how in the world can they do it? Oh I know why. Germany is in trouble and lobbyism of course. Biggest act of greenwashing in history is pretty spot on.
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋