THE BRIEF [Oct 10-17’21]
THE BRIEF [Oct 10-17’21]
A Shell CEO walks in to a TED conference, what it’s like to fight one of the biggest fires in the US and IEA’s World Energy Outlook report.
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.
🙀 Shell’s CEO was invited to speak at a TED conference.
😻 Shell’s CEO got roasted at TED conference (yes same article, different views)
😼 Detailed look at what it’s like to fight one of the biggest fires in the US
💩 The IEAs annual World Energy Outlook report published last week
This weeks highlights
[#climatescience] — There’s so many climate science studies being published these days that trying to make sense of all of them is a gigantic task. So big that one team decided to use machine learning to try and learn more about more than 100.000 studies. Key conclusions are that climate change is impacting 85% of the world’s population and 80% of the world’s surface area. Their study also highlights that there’s an attribution study gap between global north and global south likely due to too little data for the global south.
[#labmeat] — This article does a great job at summing up the meat problem in relation to climate and it looks at one solution in particular: Lab-grown meat. It looks at the state of lab-grown meat and what other options are.
[#plantmeat] — One alternative to lab-grown meat is plant-based meat such as “meat” from Beyond Meat and others. Some of these plant-based meat products are being criticized for not being very sustainable or at the very least no being clear on how sustainable they are. A key point of criticism is that Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods don’t really disclose anything on their website in regards to their carbon footprint and this certainly seem weird for companies that are born out of the climate crisis.
[#TED] — A weird situation played out a TED conference in Edinburgh. The conference was held as a part of TEDs Countdown series, which focussed on solving climate change. For some weird reason TED had decided to invite one of the biggest polluters and greenwashers in the world to come and speak: Shell’s CEO. Needless to say this prompted not really the best reception by local activist groups (primarily from Stop Cambo aiming to stop an oilfield off the coast of Scotland), but to calm the waters TED gave the groups free tickets and invited one of their spokesperson on the same panel as Shell’s CEO. TED had curated what the spokesperson was allowed to ask Shell’s CEO (for some reason, which probably starts with “m”, is 5 letters and ends with “y”) but of course she didn’t exactly keep to the script. One can only wonder why TED would behave in such a way.
That’s it for this week folks!
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