THE BRIEF [Nov 21-27’22]
THE BRIEF [Nov 21-27’22]
More junk offsets, 10% drop in UK electricity usage, detailed COP27 recap and how the fossils influenced COP27
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].
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Lots of post-COP27 analysis this week and of course we mourn the loss of Mary Annaïse Hegglar and Amy Westervelts wonderful greentrolling fake twitter account BPDeezNuts. May it rest in peace🪦🙏.
‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 Here’s another group of offsets that might actually make the problem worse
😻 Great (and a bit scary) news of a 10% drop in household electricity use in the UK.
😼 In case you missed COP27, this article covers pretty much everything that happened
💩 How the fossil fuel industry influenced the outcome at COP27
This week’s highlights
[#lossanddamage] — The new loss and damage fund that was agreed upon at COP27 might face a problem which is that climate scientists have warned that there may not be enough data from countries in Africa to be able to conclude that a certain catastrophe was related to climate change. This is interesting in a number of ways: First of all, it’s a great loop hole that will be exploited by politicians world wide. Secondly, why aren’t we tracking climate change detailed enough on one of the continents in the world that are bound to be hit hard by climate change?
[#offsets] — Aaah carbon offsets. The great idea that we can solve the climate crisis by continuing to do as we’ve always done as long as somebody plants some trees or put up a wind turbine. Here’s a great investigation by Akshat Rathi into some of these junk carbon offsets in particular offsets and credits in relation to renewable energy and how they might actually make the problem worse.
[#cop27fossils] — I wrote a pretty scathing and perhaps a bit doomy review of COP27 last week. Here we have a very detailed explanation of what happened and why countries didn’t agree on any stronger anti fossil fuel language. It is more or less exactly as I was fearing that the fossil fuel industry in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE had a big role to play here. 80 countries called for phase-down/out of fossil fuels including a lot of developing countries. Egypt and its fossil fuel buddies had the nerve to argue that the reason why they couldn’t support fossil fuel phase-out was because developed countries weren’t providing enough funding for it. Tuvalu, one of the smallest island states were among the 80 countries. It’s so disappointing and next year the COP meetings are going to another fossil buddy: UAE, so yeah. We need to find a different way to stop fossil fuels. And if you need another report on this here’s one of my favorite climate writers perspective on the same topic.
[#oilnations] — Here’s a deep dive into how Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries are doing what they can to keep the world hooked on oil for decades to come. It is quite appalling and what’s even more scary: How can we even begin to stop them?
That’s it for this week folks!
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