THE BRIEF [Jun 20-27’22]
Germany to increase coal power production, gas station bans are coming to your city, IEA World Energy Investment report out and the future of fossil fuels in 5 charts.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].
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First of all, sorry about the delay for this newsletter. Being a father of now two has messed up my schedule quite a bit. I used to be able to finish the newsletter at night or during nap times in the weekend but since there are now two kids who definitely don’t sleep at the same time - like AT ALL - I can’t do that anymore. That’s why there going to be a small change to the way the newsletter will be published in the future. The newsletters will now cover news from Friday to Friday instead of Monday to Sunday and the reason for that is that I can then finish the newsletter during work hours on Friday. The newsletter will still be sent out Monday morning 6am as Friday evening is a poor time to send out e-mails to people going home on weekend (let me know if you disagree). So next newsletter will be out as planned on Monday July 4th but it will cover June 27 - July 1, the next one after that will cover July 1-8. I hope that makes sense and doesn’t screw things up for anybody.
‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 Germany is going to increase coal power production due deal with the gas crisis.
😻 Gas station bans are coming to your city, hopefully soon.
😼 IEAs World Energy Investment analysis 2022 was published last week
💩 The future of fossil fuels in 5 charts.
This week’s highlights
[#solaremissions] — Really great article that goes into detail about solar powers carbon footprint (which isn’t perfect but surely one of the best we’ve got) and how some companies are going the extra mile of cleaning it up. A recent study showed that if the world decides to rapidly deploy solar power then it would lead to 25-30Gt of CO2 emissions by 2050 which is roughly 10% of the budget we have left to hit 1.5C.
[#ebikes] — Very interesting discussion on how good e-bikes are for the climate. The big thing here is whether or not they can actually take cars off the road. And apparently a Norwegian study from 2020 suggested that they can at least make people drive less. But is that really the most important metric to look at? In the future with a 100% renewables (and some nuclear) grid then the driving won’t matter that much but likely rather the production. So the real question to ask is whether e-bikes can stop people from buying cars? Not saying e-bikes are bad, driving less today with our dirty grids are still important, just saying that there are more parameters to consider.
[#rainforests] — Here’s a look at two rainforests in Brazil and Congo. While both have rampant issues with illegal logging only one of the countries appear to be politically engaged in stopping that and that is Congo. Congo wants to be a climate leader in Africa and therefore also wants to make sure the illegal logging of it’s rainforest stop.
[#blackrock] — BlackRocks virtue signaling from CEO Larry Fink about getting off the fossil fuel bandwagon looks like it’s more a case of hypocrisy and marketing than anything else. So in this article David Wallace-Wells asks the relevant question: What’s actually worse: Climate denial or climate hypocrisy?
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋