- 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:
— ? keithalexander (@keithalexander) May 31, 2019
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.
- 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 🙂
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