THE BRIEF [Sep 26-Oct 2’22]
THE BRIEF [Sep 26-Oct 2’22]
177 countries late with UN climate plans, the Clean Energy Acceleration, carbon emissions = carbon pollution, more methane emissions unaccounted for.
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.
🙀 Only 23 out of 200 countries submitted updated climate plans to the UN in time.
😻 Post-Ukraine: The Great Clean Energy Acceleration
😼 Carbon emissions = carbon pollution
💩 The fossil fuel industry’s emissions of methane is even larger than their already misreported numbers
This week’s highlights
[#nordstream] — We humans have a tendency to take notice of big events. Plane crashes makes us irrationally afraid of flying even though flying is much safer than driving and a big methane release from a sabotaged pipeline (Nord Stream) makes us think this is a massive release. When truth be told the Nord Stream sabotage is responsible for a tiny fraction of the fossil fuel industry’s total annual accidental release of methane and other greenhouse gases. Even though that may be true the climate risk from this event is not to be taken lightly as the estimated methane release from the event is estimated to be the same as driving 1.3M cars for a year.
[#naturerinsing] — Here’s a new term you’d better get used to: Nature-rinsing. It’s when a polluting company uses beautiful images of nature and animals to make their dirty products look cleaner. Airlines and companies making SUVs are really good at this.
[#lossdamage] — Last week we mentioned that Denmark was the first country to put aside an amount of money to pay for “loss and damage” as a result of climate change for vulnerable nations. But what is “loss and damage” actually? This Carbon Brief article goes much deeper. And here’s a timeline of the “loss and damage” topic in UN climate talks also produced by Carbon Brief.
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋