Hello, and welcome to the 5th edition of Forge the Future. This week has been both a good and a bad week for climate related news and developments, with some great policy proposals from New York state, but also new evidence of the level of fossil fuel subsidies coming to light.
I’m looking at the regularity and the length of the newsletter at the moment - these mails are getting longer as I find more and more stories to share - I’m leaning towards either a more editorial-style weekly overview, or shorter daily mails with more stories but less words. If you have a preference on one of these two, please do let me know!
State of the Climate
This week, we’re at a level of 413.55ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. This continues the trend down from the annual peak in May towards the annual low in October.
Weather
As a follow-up to the story from last week about Greenland melting faster this year - this shot was taken by a research team traversing melting sea ice. Whilst the ice under them is still solid, the level of meltwater meant that the dog teams look to be running through the sea.
A new study based on 40 years of satellite data has found that the Himalayas are melting far faster than previously thought, with glaciers in the region losing 1.5ft of ice per year since 2000.
Chennai, India’s 6th largest city, has run out of water. The cause appears to be a combination of late rains, rapid growth and poor water management, heavily exacerbated by climate change, which has caused Chennai’s average temperature to rise by 1.3 degrees Celsius in the last 60 years.
Visualisation of the Week
This week’s visualisation is a little different, in that rather than a depiction of the state of affairs over time, it shows how CO2 spreads across the atmosphere. Dating from 2006, the visualisation by NASA models the movement of carbon dioxide and monoxide across the globe over a year.
Ed Hawkins has turned his Climate Stripes visualisation into a movement, with a #ShowYourStripes hashtag on twitter for remixes and regional variants, and a website where you can find one based upon data for your city/region.
News
Let's take a quick look at what's been going on around the world this week.
Political Affairs
UK
Energy investors have called for an overturn of UK policies that effectively ban on-shore wind, arguing that it could reduce electricity costs by 7%, and treble the jobs supported by the wind power industry. The policies were rushed through in 2015 with no assessment of the consequences, and put such serious barriers in the way of on-shore wind that virtually all development of such projects has halted.
The UKERC has told businesses to brace for the government to start disrupting or phasing out business areas that don’t fit into a zero-carbon economy as time goes on. This makes sense, but there’s often a sense of ‘business as usual’ when it comes to climate change.
USA
New York has approved a state-level version of the Green New Deal, and is in the process of signing it into law, even as the national government does little on climate change. This puts NY on the most aggressive timeline of any state, more so than even California - pledging to be carbon neutral on power by 2040, and to have an 85% reduction in economy-wide emissions from 1990 levels by 2050. More of this, please!
The WSJ has a good long-form article on how hard it is to build large-scale energy infrastructure (particularly for renewables) in the US - well worth the read.
Norway
Norway is pledging to cut shipping emissions in half by 2030. This is a major deal as Norway relies on shipping a lot for domestic traffic (due to its geography) as well as owning a substantial amount of the international shipping fleet.
Ireland
Ireland is to become the first country in the EU to introduce a ban on plastic microbeads in cleaners and cosmetics. It only covers a subset of such products, but is a major step forward. For context, the plastics industry spends €2bn/year lobbying against bans on single-use plastics.
Carbon Negative
MIT Technology Review took a look at sequestering carbon in soils this week. As with trees, it’s a complex topic, and whilst there are benefits, it’s very hard to quantify, and there’s a danger that it distracts from other, easier targets for reducing emissions.
Swiss CO2 sequestration company Climeworks have launched a CO2-into-stone subscription service, where individuals can pay to sequester regular amounts of CO2. I suspect we’ll see more of this sort of monthly offering by businesses in the area, at least until government policy starts directly taxing carbon.
Technology
Israeli electric plane manufacturer Eviation has shown off a demo of its first production aircraft at the Paris Airshow. They say it can can fly 9 passengers up to 650 miles at 276mph, and is expected to enter service in 2022. This is a game changer in terms of range, as whilst the energy density of batteries means electric won’t dent long haul flight for a while, a 650 mile range will be enough to start tackling a number of domestic and short haul routes.
The Ocean Cleanup has redeployed its giant plastic-catching device into the Pacific after a round of improvements. They performed an initial trial last year, which didn’t catch much plastic and involved the boom breaking, but they’re hopeful for better results this time.
Powering Ahead
Scottish Power is to install a 50MW lithium-ion battery, the largest in Europe, to help balance out growing volumes of wind and solar power. Scottish Power has sold off its existing fossil fuel plants to other power companies to become the first major energy supplier to be entirely renewable in the UK.
China has opened the world’s largest CSP/molten salt power plant, producing 100MW 24 hours a day. This is early days, so hard to say how continuous it actually will be, but more facilities combining renewables with storage is only a good thing.
REN21 has published their Renewables 2019 Global Status Report on the state of renewable energy and investment around the world in the past year. It’s a lengthy read (I’m still working through it myself!) but Vox have a good summary of many of the key findings from the report. Tl;dr we’re making progress on renewables, but are still pushing forward far too hard with fossil fuels.
On that note, this week it was revealed that G20 nations have tripled coal power subsidies in recent years, despite pledging to cut all fossil fuel subsidies over a decade ago. Whilst coal is (generally) falling in use in the developed world, many developed countries are still funding coal and other fossil fuel technologies in the developing world, exacerbating the problem.
Finally, a major inquiry by the RSE into the future of Scotland’s energy suggests that the country will need to invest in nuclear power to hit its climate goals. It comes as part of a broad swathe of suggestions including more wind power, hydrogen production and much tougher building efficiency regulations.
Forge the Future
There’ve been minimal changes to the Forge the Future site this week, as I’ve been focusing on research into a battery storage concept that I hope to take forward further. I am trying to work through a backlog of new entries to add to the site, so expect to see a few of those pop up over the next week or so!
Endgame
If you’ve made it this far, well done! If you've been sent this by a friend and would like to subscribe, please click the big purple button below (if you’re browsing the archive, you’ll find it in the top bar). Every new reader helps spread climate news further, which stops this being a movement that anyone can ignore. Thanks!
Finally, if you come find interesting articles or resources, please do send them my way, via email or Twitter - I’m always on the lookout for new information and sources!
Until next week,
Oli
Notes from the community
If there's anything going on that you'd like to tell the community about, please do let me know. This could be a new project, a blog post, an event - anything goes!