FtF News #103 – 26th May 2021
The G-7 cuts international coal financing, China’s emissions sky-rocket, and Australia fudges the numbers
Hello, and welcome to Forge the Future, your weekly rundown of the latest climate news.
It’s always a bit of a ride putting these newsletters together each week. The news cycle is hardly the most positive of places to spend significant time. After all, as they say, ‘bad news travels fast’, and headline writers, especially when it comes to the climate, love their doom and gloom. Despite this, there are some weeks where things feel more positive, even without resorting to the climate equivalent of ‘man rescues kitten from tree’. Last week is a good example – the release of the IEA’s net-zero by 2050 scenario, whilst changing nothing explicitly, offers a route forward despite the direness of the climate crisis, that showed that it is still possible (though extremely hard) to extricate ourselves, and indeed we can still change the world for the better, even through purely economic lenses.
This optimism may not last – this week’s news cycle certainly saw a turn back towards the grimmer side of things – but it’s important to keep those positives in mind. The climate crisis is a vast and near unparalleled situation, one that will take decades to reign in, and never truly be solved. But we can make progress in tackling it – few if any problems are truly intractable. Have a great week.
State of the world
Climate research and findings, weather events and studies
A new study has tried to analyse the incidence of so-called ‘zombie fires’ – fires in Arctic regions that slumber rather than go out fully, restarting the next year. Whilst only compromising around 1% of fires in Alaska and Canada on average between 2006-18, in one year they made up 38% of all recorded fires. More study is needed to understand how these fires occur, and what the impact of such fires burning year round might be. One thing seems likely – zombie fires are only going to become more likely as the Arctic warms.
The Greenland ice sheet is on the brink of a major tipping point, locking in further melting even if warming slows. As ice levels lower, the ice is exposed to warmer air at lower altitudes, creating a feedback cycle that accelerates melting. However, a number of scientists who study the ice sheet warn that the mechanisms affecting melting of the ice sheet are complex, so it’s hard to say for sure whether or not any particular tipping point has definitively been reached.
Subsidence under Mexico City could cause parts of the city to sink up to 65 feet over the next 150 years, causing massive ongoing damage to houses and critical infrastructure. The city sits atop a former lake that was drained by the Spanish, and has been further dried by constant water extraction ever since. That dry soil is now steadily compacting, causing some areas to sink by 1.5 feet a year.
A new report by the NRDC and two major medical bodies estimates the medical cost of climate change at $820bn annually in the US alone. The report includes premature deaths, medical care (both physical and mental) after natural disasters, lost wages due to climate-inflicted health conditions, and prescriptions for those conditions. Even in a developed country like the US, lack of granular data and clear attribution makes determining the exact price tag extremely difficult, meaning the calculated figures are likely still an underestimate.
The Indian province of Uttarakhand is well known for its terraced farms, with 71% of people in the state relying on rainfed agriculture, largely practiced via such techniques. However, a study of the impacts of climate change has found that higher altitudes will be worst affected, potentially making such farms a thing of the past. The region will be 1.6-1.9°C warmer by 2050, and is already experiencing severe climate impacts, including more erratic rains, shifting cropping seasons, receding glaciers and more sporadic snows.
Planet positives
Moving towards a greener and more equitable world
Cutting coal (financing)?
The UK has negotiated an agreement amongst the G-7 group of nations to phase out international financing of coal projects this year. There’s also agreement to reduce fossil fuel subsidies, although the specifics of that appear less clear. Japan was initially reticent to agree, given it was responsible for more than half of the $6.6bn in G-7 coal support in 2019, but eventually came around. Unfortunately, the agreement doesn’t cover domestic coal use, which remains high among at least some members.
Adverse circumstances
Events that move the needle in the wrong direction
Fueling the fire
China’s emissions have grown at their fastest rate in a decade, as the country rebounds from COVID-19 lockdowns at the start of 2020. Emissions were up nearly 15% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2021, reaching a new high of nearly 12Gt of CO2 for the year ending March 2021. This is partly a bounce back from lockdowns, but also the result of a growth strategy prioritising emissions intensive steel, concrete and construction. If emissions continue at this rate through 2021, there will be little room for any further growth to 2025 under China’s latest 5 Year Plan. Much of the emissions growth came from coal – either providing power or used directly by industry, particularly steel production. China’s steel industry has an aggressive decarbonisation strategy, but it relies on a wider move away from constant GDP increases and using construction and industry to fuel growth.
The numbers don’t lie
Australia’s PM Scott Morrison has repeatedly stated that Australia has made emissions cuts of 19% in recent climate meetings, using this as reason to avoid implementing climate positive policy changes or stricter emissions targets. However, recent analysis of the emissions reductions has found that most of the reductions came from drought and the COVID-19 pandemic. Australia has thus actually done much less to reduce emissions than many comparable nations, such as the UK, the US and various EU member states. Pressure is increasing on the Australian government to take more serious climate action, but they currently show little sign of bowing. With a potential UK-Australia trade deal in the offing, it will be interesting to see if the UK government uses it to strongarm the Aussies into making climate commitments (I suspect not, but we can hope!).
Long Reads
Interesting deep-dives into climate-related topics
China’s Gansu region offers a microcosm of the wider climate transition in many ways. The region is the epicentre of the country’s Great Green Wall program, with extensive tree planting to hold back the encroachment of the Gobi Desert. However, the region is also an excellent wine-growing region, presenting a dilemma – vineyards make money, but supplant the trees needed to hold back the desert. This is both a question of money but also differing priorities between local governments keen for revenue and the central government’s climate goals.
Taiwan is often in the news of late due to its massive role in the currently bottlenecked semiconductor industry. However, the country is also facing an increasingly precarious climate situation, with ever higher demands for water and power, and ever more uncertain weather. In particular, the country has struggled with drought for much of the past year, and this year’s rains have been less than half what normally falls.
Quick Headlines
Some quick climate news nuggets to sate your appetite
The world’s largest iceberg has calved from Antartica – nearly four times the size of NYC.
The UK has officially launched its Emissions Trading Scheme after finally departing the EU at the start of the year.
Lamborghini plans to make all models plug-in hybrids by 2024, with a full EV to follow by 2030.