THE BRIEF [Sep 20-26 ‘21]
THE BRIEF [Sep 20-26 ‘21]
The climate impact of wildfires and what fire weather is, China finally signs the Kigali amendment and a new podcast on fossil fuel propaganda in schools.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].
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Aaaaand we’re back. I hope you missed my weekly newsletter. I can tell you though that I really needed to disconnect for a few weeks there. But now I’m back and are hitting the ground running. Here we go!
‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 Here’s a detailed look at the climate impact of wildfires
😻 China has finally joined the Kigali amendment in order to stop it’s rampant emissions of F-gasses.
😼 A detailed look at so called fire weather which are weather conditions that are ideal for wildfires.
💩 A new podcast series by Drilled and Dharna Noor looks at fossil fuel propaganda in schools.
This weeks highlights
[#china] — China took one crucial step last week to help the world finally bury coal. At the UN General Assembly, China announced that it will stop financing and building coal power plants abroad. Exactly what the impact of this will be is still questioned a bit, since the message left a few question unanswered. First of all, there was nothing about domestic production of coal power plants, which can thus be assumed to be unaffected by this. Secondly, it is unclear whether the financing stop only applies to government projects or also affect private companies in China. China is currently building a lot of coal power plants around the world.
[#wildfires] — California’s wildfires from June to August has released 75Mt of CO2, that’s 2x the amount for the same period last year, which was also a pretty bad wildfire year. Total emissions from wildfires in the west totals 130Mt of CO2. These numbers, though, are dwarfed by Siberia’s wildfires, which comes in at 750Mt of CO2 for the same 3 months. If we include wildfires in the Arctic that will equal just above 1Gt of CO2 emissions for 3 just 3 months of wildfires.
[#propaganda] — A new report this week highlights that Exxon is one of the biggest ad spenders on facebook on climate issues and it uses those ads to target Biden’s climate initiatives. If people click on one of the ads they’re taking to petitions against some of Biden’s actions like cancelling the Keystone XL and others. And yes Exxon is of course getting help by a one of the world’s biggest PR firms: Edelman. Shame on you.
[#mortgage] — More and more people and organizations seem to wake up to the impending climate crisis, most recent on the list are US mortgage bankers. Mortgage bankers in the US (and probably at least to some degree similar around the world) right now continue to approve lenders who buys homes that are directly in harms way of the coming effects of global warming. Ultimately, the costs of which will be shouldered by tax payers. I must admit that one of primary sorting criteria when I recently bought a house was flood risk as well as how high above the ocean it was (even though we don’t get much height here in Denmark).
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋