FtF News #130 – 1st December 2021
Chinese emissions slow, the rise of eco-nationalism and fusion is looking feasible
Hello, and welcome to Forge the Future, your weekly rundown of the latest climate news.
Somehow, we’re in December already, and 2022 is already looming large in the near future. Time feels to be both racing past and stuck in standstill, with the second year of the 2020s rapidly approaching and yet the constant presence of COVID-19 keeps the world stuck in a form of limbo, with so many things still not back to normal even coming up to two years after we all donned masks and swore off all physical contact. Despite all the distancing, it does seem like climate progress continues apace – I’ll probably do my usual look back at the year as we cross into 2022, but it’s looking like whilst 2021 wasn’t a ‘we’ve cracked it’ moment, the urgency and pace of change is definitely encouraging.
State of the world
Climate research and findings, weather events and studies
A study has found a possible link between melting sea ice in the Arctic and the worsening fire conditions in the western US. The authors suggest that low sea ice levels between July and October cause atmospheric conditions that push the jet stream northwards. This in turn tends to bring hotter and drier conditions to the West coast the following autumn in a pattern known as a teleconnection. However, this link is incredibly hard to prove concretely given the scale and complexity involved, and whilst this study adds more evidence to the ‘there is a connection’ pile, we’re a long way from proving it definitively.
On the topic of forest fires, areas in the US hit by wildfires are increasingly not recovering as forest, but scrubland, as hotter summers prevent young trees from surviving. Adult trees can often survive the increasingly toasty temperatures, but once fires strip those out, the saplings can’t cut it. With the trees gone, landscapes are shifting markedly from that seen just a couple of decades before.
Organisms in the sea have been known for decades to be linked by the ‘rule of ten’, where the number of a creature and its size are inversely proportional. Move up by a factor of ten in size, and the number of creatures drops ten-fold. This holds from the smallest plankton all the way up to whales, or at least it used to. Recent studies show that amongst the largest sizes of fish and marine mammals, numbers have plummeted by nearly 90% since 1800, mostly due to industrial fishing. Fortunately, all is not lost – marine ecosystems are very resilient, but they need a chance to recover.
Climate Visuals
A picture tells a thousand words…
An exploration of the history of fossil fuel ads, charting their progress from obliviousness of climate impacts, through denial, and finally to modern greenwashing tactics.
Planet positives
Moving towards a greener and more equitable world
In with the new
Both Iceland and Germany have seen new governments come together in recent days, and in both cases, climate pledges have been strengthened. Germany’s new government wants to end coal use by 2030 – 8 years ahead of the previous schedule – and is also focusing on EVs, targeting 15m pure electric vehicles on German roads by the same date. In support of this, it’s rolling out 1m public charging points, and continuing a generous subsidy scheme that has boosted sales in recent months.
Meanwhile, Iceland’s new leadership is also focusing on climate, announcing that it will stop granting oil exploration licences, and will aim for a 55% drop in emissions by 2030 versus 2005 levels. The country already has a net-zero target of 2040, but is struggling to decarbonise despite relying mostly on geothermal and hydropower, and leading in experiments with direct-air capture. Iceland currently has some of the highest per-capita emissions in Europe, with waste management and landfills a particular issue. Transportation and decarbonisation of its large fishing fleet are also key focus areas, as both of these are large contributors to emissions.
Chinese growth finally cooling?
China’s emissions fell around 0.5% in the third quarter of 2021 – the first such fall since the country exited lockdown last year. The slowdown looks to be accelerating going into the end of the year, a stark contrast to the massive increases seen in late 2020/early 2021, which were some of the largest in a decade. The main causes of the emissions decrease are a slump in real estate prices as well as the ongoing electricity crunch in the country, both of which are impacting heavy industry, most notably steel and cement which both saw marked decreases in output. However, domestic and retail electricity demand continued to grow, indicating that the economy as a whole remains strong.
The real question is whether the government allows this current trend to continue, or decides to kickstart further growth, as it has done in the past. If the decline continues, this could be an early peak in China’s overall emissions, well ahead of the schedule it has set itself, but if further stimulus occurs, then emissions may well continue to grow for some years to come.
Adverse circumstances
Events that move the needle in the wrong direction
Eco-nationalism on the rise
Climate denial is certainly not gone entirely, but is increasingly shifting to the fringes, with few mainstream figures (the Republican party aside) seriously supporting it as a viewpoint. However, it is increasingly being replaced with an insidious form of climate nationalism, where environmental disaster is conflated with fears of rampant migration, pushing the argument that the only way to protect the environment is to close national borders. Such arguments often place the blame for environmental impacts at the feet of climate immigrants, despite the vast body of evidence showing that such people often face the worst impacts whilst contributing the least to the problem.
A not dissimilar pattern has emerged in China, where environmentalism is being increasingly associated with outside influence, and those attempting to raise awareness of climate issues are accused of spreading anti-Chinese sentiment. This is even extending to Chinese researchers who, as is common in science, wish to collaborate with colleagues and counterparts across the world, but instead find themselves pushed to insulate their work from foreign associations. This could cause the government issues, given one of the tasks on its official roadmap to peaking carbon emissions is raising public awareness of the climate crisis.
Long Reads
Interesting deep-dives into climate-related topics
One of the major steps forward made at COP26 was an agreement on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement – the section detailing how to form a global carbon market. It has remained resolutely out of reach in previous years, as if rules are not precisely crafted, the risk is that such an arrangement ends up enabling more emissions rather than helping reduce them. Even so, now that an agreement has been reached, many are still not happy, as offsetting and carbon trading are far from a universally accepted approach to emissions reduction, and previous iterations (such as the Clean Development Mechanism crafted at Kyoto in the 90s) have harmed indigenous communities and flooded the world with credits that largely have secured minimal benefits.
Conservation is often pitted as an exploitation versus nurture story, but as the highly endangered vaquita shows, it’s often more nuanced than that. The vaquita is a small Mexican porpoise frequently killed by gill nets used by local fishermen. Despite a ban, they continue to use the nets, but with little enforcement and no support to use alternatives, the fishermen have no other way to make a living. The result? An ongoing feud between fishermen and conservationists trying to protect the last few remaining vaquitas, whilst the state looks on in apathy.
Fusion is the eternal holy grail in the energy space, and like that fabled object, is always just out of reach. However, despite the huge timelines and vast complexity, there are real signs of progress in the field of late, with 30 or so private companies taking significant strides towards energy-positive fusion – the magic that will enable fusion to power the future. No-one should start holding their breath just yet, but it increasingly seems like fusion might actually happen, and whenever it does, it will be immensely useful, regardless of how far the world has progressed in transitioning to a green grid.
Quick Headlines
Some quick climate news nuggets to sate your appetite
Nissan has pledged a ¥2tn ($17.7bn) investment in EVs, aiming for 75% of its European sales to be electric by 2026.
The IMO has pushed back discussions on a global CO2-based charge on fuel to a future meeting, to little surprise.
The US has approved the first offshore wind farm to supply power to New York – a 130MW operation due to supply power from 2023.