THE BRIEF [Mar 7-13’22]
Amazon becoming less resilient, moms are a growing force in the climate movement, baby steps in terms of climate justice and fossil fuel industry is (still) greenwashing.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].
If you’re only getting The Brief but want to get the full version of the newsletter be sure to upgrade your plan to paid. See a recent week’s full newsletter for details. If you’re getting both: Thank you so much for deciding to upgrade to go paid 🙏. And thanks to everybody for reading my newsletter regardless of which version you read 🤗.
‼️News you can’t miss
🙀 The Amazon is becoming less resilient and might be nearing a tipping point.
😻 Moms are a growing force in the climate movement
😼 The new IPCC report suggests we are making progress / taking baby steps in terms of climate justice
💩 Yet another report showing that the fossil fuel industry’s plan to decarbonize is bullsh*t.
This week’s highlights
[#gasstoves] — For the long time readers of this newsletter: Here’s your token regular “get rid of your gas stove now” article. You’re welcome. For new readers: You really should get rid of your gas stove this article goes through some of the reasons why. And here’s an even more detailed one (apparently NYT had it’s anti-fossil gas moment this week). And here’s another detailing how your gas stove emit methane even when it’s turned off. In fact a new study has shown that 75% of the unburned methane emissions that your stove emits occur while the thing is off.
[#carboncapture] — If you listen to political and fossil fuel words being said about what we must do to mitigate climate change one of the words you’ll here most often is carbon capture (recall that carbon capture is putting some equipment on top of a smokestack to suck the CO2 out of the smoke). Here Inside Climate News spills out pretty clearly or actually they take it from the recent IPCC report that relying on carbon capture (as politicians and the fossil fuel industry wants to do) is a ‘major risk’ and that the fossil fuel industry is using it as a diversion to stop phasing out their products.
[#russiangas] — EU is trying to accelerate it’s phase out of Russian gas as fast as possible. It’s clear that EU is footing a big piece of Russia’s war bill currently with our thirst for gas which for some reason we thought was a great idea to buy from someone like Putin. So it’s good that we’re waking up to that reality, but even though politicians are standing in line to say how fast we’re going off Russian gas (“lightning speed” is the latest formulation from Frans Timmerman of the EU Commission) it’s clear that with all the acceleration that it’s still going to take quite some time. Oddly enough, I think this rush to get rid of gas really shows how slowly we have been moving on climate. Did we really think that we could wait until 2030 to get rid of this stuff? And now we’re rushing towards getting rid of it at “lightning speed” what were we doing before the war? Snail pace?
That’s it for this week folks!
If you want more details or simply think my newsletter rocks remember that you can always go paid to get the full version of the Weekly Climate. But before you do, ask yourself this question: Does it provide you with 1.25$ worth of value every week? Obviously I think it does. In fact I really hope that just the time alone I save you should easily cover those 1.25$. Don’t hesitate to ping me on michael@weeklyclimate.com or comment below with any questions, feedback or comments regarding this.
Remember if you’re feeling down, angry or sad from some of the news in this newsletter one cure is to act. And one way you can always act that also happens to be one of the most powerful things you can do is to talk about it. That also works if what you just read made you hopeful or happy btw.
If you enjoyed this newsletter don’t forget to share it with your friends, coworkers or other people you think could benefit from getting it. If you got directed here by a friend or another link on the Internet don’t forget to subscribe!
See you all next week 👋