THE BRIEF [Nov 22-28 ‘21]
THE BRIEF [Nov 22-28 ‘21]
Shallow company climate pledges, the insurance industry to the rescue, 5 pieces of COP26 homework and UN shipping body kicks the can down the road.
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.
🙀 How deep are companies climate pledges? Not very deep.
😻 Here’s an interesting deep dive into how the insurance industry is trying to help fight the fossil fuel industry.
😼 5 pieces of homework for the world for 2022 after COP26.
💩 UN shipping body decides not to even set a target for when to go netzero.
This week’s highlights
[#agromining] — Here’s an interesting idea: Agro-mining. We all know that plants contain minerals, which one of many reasons why we eat them. But can plants be used to mine minerals which can then be used in a commercial setting to produce goods? Studies into this would seem to indicate yes. Sounds exciting, but still it’s important to realize that any plant-based solution will need to not compete with food production for it to be truly sustainable.
[#cropland] — Here’s a look at a trending farm product: Carbon offsets. It looks at how carbon offsets are actively helping farmers switch to a more sustainable production. And while surely great we must remember that offsets are not a solution to the crisis (as was debated at length in our recent net-zero deep dive.
[#eu] — The EU introduced it’s new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which aims to take imported emissions into account by making things such as electricity, steel, cement etc cost more when imported depending on their carbon footprint. The hope is that such a policy will push businesses and countries to focus more on importing greener versions of those products.
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋