THE BRIEF [Sep 18-25’22]
Patagonia founder donates company profits for climate, new database of fossil fuel projects and documents reveals more about Exxons role in misinformation.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].
I’m back from a nice EV-based vacation in the Southern part of France 🏖🍹🍷.
I just wanted to say welcome to the pretty big new influx of new subscribers! Since I left for vacation the newsletter subscribers has increased by 15% 🤩 and I think a big part of that was a kind article in EU Startups titled “15 of the best Startup and VC newsletters you should subscribe to”. Thank you so much who was kind enough to plug the Weekly Climate in there 🙏.
In the light of this new influx of members I have decided to offer a 15% discount to everybody that subscribe to the annual paid version in the next two weeks. Remember that this is the free version of the newsletter, the paid version provides a much more comprehensive overview of news over the past week divided into the all important 7 grand challenges of the climate crisis: Decarbonizing electricity, Reduce impact of urban and rural areas, clean non electrifiable activities, protect and grow nature, optimize food, climate justice and engineered drawdown and geoengineering as well as climate & science and a few other sections that change every now and then.
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‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 Fossil fuel industry pushed Biden for favorable policies because of war in Ukraine
😻 Patagonia founder and family donates future profits of Patagonia to climate action
😼 New database of global fossil fuel projects goes live
💩 New unearthed documents reveals more details about Exxons climate lies since the 90s
This week’s highlights
[#urbanization] — Here’s a great example of one of the most powerful techniques that city planners can use to help solve the climate crisis and that is to utilize a city’s under-utilized spaces for new homes and buildings. This will increase the population density and thus increase the populations use of public infrastructure and as well as reducing the use of cars.
[#fossilgas] — The war in Ukraine certainly have put a focus on fossil gas like never before. And while most developed countries are at least on the paper trying to hurry away from it some countries (like countries in Africa) argue that they should be allowed to mine and sell the gas now while the prices are so high. This article does a good job of trying to unpack that debate.w
[#russia] — In the middle of Putin’s war it’s hard to see how we’re ever going to get Russia onboard with any meaningful climate action. Unfortunately, that’s really necessary as Russia is currently the 3rd most polluting country in the world, it’s the world’s top fossil fuel exporter and it currently only have 0.4% renewables on it’s grid. Fossil fuels today still make up the vast majority of Russia power generation. This article looks in great detail at Russian climate action.
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋