THE BRIEF [Mar 28-Apr 3’22]
THE BRIEF [Mar 28-Apr 3’22]
After 1.5C there’s no going back, what green energy is doing for communities, deep dive into permafrost and banks shovels cash as fossil fuel industry.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3] and [4].
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‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 Can we just shoot past 1.5C and reverse the damages? No.
😻 Here’s a classic story about what green electricity can do for a community in Africa
😼 Permafrost: What do we know about how it will impact the climate crisis?
💩 Banks have thrown 4.6T$ after the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement.
This week’s highlights
[#ev] — Cars.com has made a list of the 10 most efficient EVs. They drove 100 miles and measured how many KWh the car used. On top is 2022 Tesla Model 3 RWD. It’s also among the cheapest on the list (with the very cheapest is a 2022 Chevy Bolt). But I think what’s even more interesting than which cars are in the list is which cars aren’t in the list: Where are the big Germans (VW, BMW, Mercedes)? Where’s Volvo / Polestar?
[#1.5v2C] — The great Emily Atkin of Heated came out of hiatus last week to publish a great deep dive in GQ magazine about the places that are on the line when/if we go from 1.5-2C. As Emily writes in her tweet about the article, what’s really important about the article is that it’s in the GQ Magazine, a magazine that reaches a seldom reached group of people for climate news.
[#trees] — Plant trees, save the climate, right? Well there’s a complicated answer to that question. But the simple answer is no. Planting trees will never be enough to solve the climate crisis. But it sure can help. How much though is still up for debate as science becomes better and better at understanding how trees work and how they lock up carbon. And unfortunately, sometimes some of these studies aren’t in trees favor.
[#nft] — A possibly well-meaning new startup called Nemus is selling parts of the Amazon rainforest it owns via NFTs. According to this article it’s just another more problematic way of greenwashing blockchain applications. Remember from the article last week that one blockchain operation (from a blockchain using proof-of-work) consumes 2000KWh, which is enough to power a US home for 73 days. A lot of NFT fanatics are seeing NFTs as the perfect solution to handle these kinds of carbon offsets. But as we have seen time and time again the whole idea of carbon offsets is completely flawed as a lot of them just went up in smoke in California and you know, paying to pollute is still pollution (just to mention a few reasons). And with just about all blockchain apps I’ve ever seen I have to ask the standard question: Why use blockchain at all for this?
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋