• Bill Gates-led investment group to start European clean energy fund in order to get innovative green tech startups off the ground.
• From the IEA: why industry is so hard to decarbonize. A quote that stuck out: “…industrial production facilities tend to have long lifetimes and a slow turnover of capital stock; capacity for fuel switching in industry is limited as a change in fuel often requires a change in process; high temperature heat (important across most energy-intensive industries) can require significant changes to furnace design and is currently costly and not economically attractive; and the highly integrated nature of industrial processes means that changing one part often requires changes to other parts of a given process.” Having laid out the problem, the piece then lays out a number of potential solutions. Do read it.
• Could algae solve the climate crisis? Indeed, say scientists from Cornell:  “Think of it this way: there will no longer be pressure to deforest the Amazon for soy or to deforest Indonesia for palm oil. We can actually lead to an emissions reduction of about 13 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2040, and that’s roughly a third of our current CO2 emissions.”
• This tweet on the EPA’s clean power plan reminded me of most sober analyses of the Paris Agreement:

The US power sector is on track to meet the goals of the EPA Clean Power Plan next year, which is two full years before it was supposed to be enforced. pic.twitter.com/6sAIIJ0zeP

— Richard Meyer (@RichardMeyerDC) May 29, 2019

• The Paris Agreement was an important milestone, no doubt. It established the process of regularly updating climate goals, a huge step forward. However, were any of the signatories’ initial goals actually *binding*? In other words, it seems that all of the goals would have been achieved absent the agreement. For example, all of the countries chose their reference year (i.e. “we pledge to lower our CO2 emissions by x% compared to year y) as the year with the highest CO2 emissions in their history. Germany chose 1990, the US chose 2005. This was done deliberately to make the goals as painless as possible. Another example: the US (prior to withdrawing from the agreement, of course) set out to lower its carbon emissions, not its greenhouse gas emissions, quite obviously due to the fracking boom. All of the goals were set out to appear more noble than they actually are.
• It never really occured to me how much more carbon emissions can be attributed to flying first class rather than economy:

Back of napkin sums, but:

Flying first class return London to LA (~10,000 miles) contributes about the same to global warming as *manufacturing* a Citroen C1 and then driving it for 27,000 miles.

— 🐟 keithalexander (@keithalexander) May 31, 2019

• But obviously, there’s a lot more wasted space in first class, which means way more carbon emissions per person. Now I can argue this is why I’ve never flown first class 🙂

• This one speaks for itself, so I’ll just throw it out there: US Department of Energy officials refer to methane as “freedom gas.”
• Can the intermittent nature of wind and solar be alleviated by simply building way more wind and solar? Arguably, yes. Especially if storage tech doesn’t get cheap enough fast enough, the gaps could be filled in by massively increasing renewable capacity. Clearly, this strategy would involve wasting a lot of energy in times of high production. However, no technological development would be necessary to implement it.
• Still trucking along: Britain has gone almost two weeks without coal.

Since 1950, the number of vehicles in operation in the U.S. has grown three times as fast as the overall population. (via @ben_geman) https://t.co/T2YhcVS6pz pic.twitter.com/Jt74YfeFIK

— brad plumer (@bradplumer) May 30, 2019

• In a new report, the IEA estimates that widespread nuclear phaseouts would likely result in an increase in carbon emissions. In other news, the sky is blue.
• While it has been well-publicized that electricity prices in Germany have been rising for the last decade, perhaps it is less well-known that power has gotten cheaper for industrial consumers:

Ja, Haushaltsstrom ist teuer (auch weil Deutschland die #Erneuerbaren angeschoben hat, wovon jetzt die Welt profitiert). Aber die Industriestrompreise sind günstig, für Großverbraucher sogar einer der billigsten Preise in Europa. Die deutschen Bürger subventionieren die Industrie pic.twitter.com/8pr0oFW7pg

— Stefan Krauter (@solarpapst) May 29, 2019

• Although this piece from Carbon Brief is a few weeks old, I thought it was important to share. In summary, while the lifecycle emissions from EVs is largely dependent on the local electricity mix, they are very likely to be greener than conventional vehicles.
• Siemens sees a future for electric trucks powered by overhead lines.
• Drax, Equinor and National Grid Ventures aim to develop UK’s first zero carbon cluster in Yorkshire.

• In the latest of a string of anti-environmental behavior from the White House, the director of the US Geological Survey, a Donald Trump appointee, has ordered that the computer models used to assess the impact of climate change only model the climate out to 2040. Previously, the impacts had been modeled until 2100.
• A statistical analysis of US climate policy lobbying records suggests that lobbying by firms expecting losses from the policy was more effective than lobbying by firms expecting gains. In other words, firms with something to lose were more successful at lobbying than those with something to gain from a particular policy.
• The Bank of Canada’s 2019 Financial System Review has listed climate change as a major financial vulnerability. While other central banks have issued statements and published research on the impact of climate change on financial regulation and monetary policy and vice versa, the BOC publication listed climate change on the same level as traditional risks such as household debt.
• Fishing yields have been affected by warming waters.
• Study suggests that Australia is set to achieve 50% renewable energy consumption by 2030 without government regulation.