THE BRIEF [Mar 27-Apr 2’23]
THE BRIEF [Mar 27-Apr 2’23]
Corporates watered down latest IPCC report, Vanatu in big win for climate lawsuits, economists are waking up and mining in fossil world is 535x worse.
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.
🙀 Corporate interest watered down the language in the latest IPCC report
😻 Vanatu scored a big win that could have a big impact on future climate lawsuits
😼 Economists appear to be waking up: Climate disasters are slowing down economic growth
💩 Mining in a fossil world is 535x worse than in a green one
This week’s highlights
[#GDPvsNature] — Here’s a video about an important report written by Partha Dasgupta, economics professor at Cambridge University which describes away of incorporating the loss of nature into our calculations of GDP. Because, as he puts it, only looking at GDP as a goal, is like a football team who only looked at how many goals it scored to determine whether it won or not.
[#carboncapture] — Here’s an article that states the obvious: If manage to put a unicorn technology on top of fossil smokestacks that can clean all CO2 and other pollutants from them then the electricity produced by a facility with such magical technology on it will be more expensive for the consumer. 1.5-2x more is the expected number when we have mature carbon capture technology (which we don’t).
[#economists] — A new report by the World Bank (who’s outgoing chief exec is not sure about climate change) published a report that states that economic growth might slow to a pace we haven’t seen in 30 years. Major effects are obviously the Russia-Ukraine war, but they also mention climate change. Obviously, everybody with a human brain can confirm that the Earth is in fact a finite system. But those adhering to the so called “decoupling” of financial growth from resources will say that we’ll just invent smarter ways to use the resources so effectively the Earth is thus infinite. Whereas the “degrowers” will refer back to the finiteness of the system. (In very very short terms) What the report is saying is that major disasters will be an inhibitor to future economic growth in a world where climate change is running rampant. Why this report is crucial is that now world leaders can actually say that they’re not introducing climate policies but policies to ensure the protection of their dear old economic growth.
That’s it for this week folks!
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