THE BRIEF [Oct 31-Nov 7’22]
Rethinking and reprioritizing adaptation, many uses of EV batteries, net-zero plans need more Earths, COP27 PR company has fossil fuel clients.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].
The next week I’m going away on a brief autumn vacation with my family so the newsletter and paid memberships will be paused until I get back. Since COP27 is starting next week I will try to do short recap on the news from that which will go out to all members. Depends a bit on my time and the outcomes from the first week there.
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‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 We need to rethink and reprioritize our adaptation efforts
😻 The many ways to reuse used EV batteries
😼 To make net-zero plans work we need more land area than available on the Earth
💩 400 climate scientists tells PR company running communication for COP27 to drop their fossil fuel clients
This week’s highlights
[#evbatteries] — There are many weird reasons for not liking EVs: Maybe people don’t like the nice gliding constant acceleration, maybe people don’t like cars that are almost silent, maybe people like getting asthma or cancer from air pollution, maybe people love to spend money and time on maintenance. But if there’s one argument that anti-EV folks keep on swinging (especially at climate conscious folks) it’s that EVs uses batteries, batteries are bad, which means EVs are bad. Not so fast. This article looks at the many ways that EV batteries can be refurbished into something new. Toyota (surprisingly, as Toyota seems to be THE EV laggard in the market) just turned on a grid-scale battery which consisted of used PHEV and BEV batteries.
[#peat] — There are 16.7M hectares of peatland globally. The peat in those areas hold a whopping 29Gt of carbon or 28% of the Earth’s entire carbon stock. Or to put that into the perspective those 16.7M hectares account for just 0.11% of the Earths land area yet they hold 28% of our carbon stock. Needless to say they need to be protected. This post looks into Congo’s peatlands and how these might be headed for tipping point. Peat dries out and loses it’s carbon when it dries out.
[#brazilelection] — Bolsonaro lost the presidential election to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (short: Lula). Importantly, Lula made climate a cornerstone of his campaign, and chief among these concerns are stopping deforestation in the Amazon. So what will this mean for the climate crisis and future of the Amazon?
[#f*cknetzero] — Hah (or I’m not sure why I’m “text-laughing” here because it’s not actually very funny) this is probably the best “take that carbon offsets” and “take that net-zero plans” article I’ve ever read. The current “master plan” of the world’s governments are the net zero plans, also known as the “we-continue-to-pollute-and-then-we-plant-some-trees-and-throw-money-at-carbon-capture-and-carbon-removal-tech”-plans. There’s now a Land Gap report which was released last week which unequivocally states that there’s not enough land on the planet Earth to make those net zero plans work. And that’s even if offsets were “working” to solve our problem in the first place. Remember that when you hear a bunch of net-zero pledges after COP27 next week.
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋