THE BRIEF [Oct 4-10’21]
Shady fossil economists, Google bans climate misinformation, Microsoft to improve repairability, IMF report reveal insane fossil fuel subsidies globally.
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 shady economists helped launch the idea that we can’t pay for solving the climate crisis.
😻 Google has decided to stop serving ads and content that contains climate misinformation.
😼 Microsoft bowed to shareholder activist investor pressure and will (likely) introduce better ways to repair their devices.
💩 5.9T$, 11 M$/min is what the fossil industry is getting in subsidies for running nature and civilization into the abyss.
This weeks highlights
[#nuclear] — Japan has decided to restart some of it’s nuclear power plants in order to cut emissions. This is very interesting because Fukushima is being used by people who are opposed to nuclear power plants as an example of why we shouldn’t use nuclear, but now the country in which that disaster happened has decided to use it anyway. This will definitely be a win for the climate. While Japan just decided to reboot their nuclear power plants other countries are more hostile towards nuclear. In the US for instance nuclear power plants are being shut down as never before. This article looks into the development of nuclear power generation in the US.
[#agriculture] — There’s has been a lot of talk about a just transition for people and countries who are knee-deep in the fossil fuel industry. But we mustn’t forget that there are other industries that will be subjected to a large transformation of their own and a major one is the agricultural industry. This excellent Carbon Brief article looks at what a just transition for agriculture looks like.
[#misinformation] — In what’s probably going to be controversial move for freedom of speech zealots (I’m a big fan of freedom of speech but not when it comes to lies that are literally killing us and our planet, climate change is not an opinion anymore) Google just announced that they won’t show content that spreads misinformation about climate change. IMO this is a great move and key to solving the climate crisis. The lies and fossil fuel propaganda has to stop but it won’t unless it is banned. In this way the fossil fuel industry no longer can’t pay influencers on Google’s platforms to spread their misinformation and propaganda.
[#economists] — One of newest arguments politicians fling at not doing anything about the climate crisis is that doing so will be prohibitively expensive so we’re much better off letting millions die and the world turn into chaos. Stanford researcher Benjamin Franta decided to investigate where this idea came from and his new findings are pretty stunning and not really shocking based on everything else we know about the fossil fuel industry.
That’s it for this week folks!
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