FtF News #137 – 26th January 2022
Polar nanoplastics, orphan oil wells and Finland’s bid to create a circular economy
Hello, and welcome to Forge the Future, your weekly rundown of the latest climate news.
"Never underestimate the power of the human mind to rationalize its way out of reality"
– Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change
In my run-through of the week’s climate news stories, I came across one in particular that didn’t really fit neatly elsewhere, but I felt was worth sharing anyway. CNN took a thorough look at the reasons why more people aren’t concerned about climate change, despite the ever more pressing nature of climate disasters. There are some great insights in there, including how climate change is still presented as a ‘polar bear problem and not a people problem’ – I’d definitely recommend giving the piece a read.
Once again, this week’s issue was ably assisted by Syuan Ruei Chang, who contributed a number of the articles and stories featured this week.
State of the world
Climate research and findings, weather events and studies
Nanoplastics have been found at both of the Earth’s poles for the first time. They, like the slightly larger microplastics, are tiny particles of various plastic materials, and were found in ice samples taken from Greenland’s ice cap as well as from sea ice in the McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. The Greenland ice core in particular showed that nanoplastics have been present in the air over the ice sheet for at least 50 years, showing just how long we’ve been spreading plastic into the environment.
Scientists have used photos of Svalbard from the 1930s to create more accurate digital models of how the region’s glaciers are melting due to climate change. The Arctic is warming far faster than the global average, but with field measurements and especially satellite data only stretching back a few decades, it has been hard to predict long term behaviour. The new approach uses digital reconstructions along with painstaking matching of features to track how the ice has shrunk in the past century, and it’s hoped the technique can be used in other regions worldwide.
A new analysis of UK energy bills has found that an infamous bid to ‘cut the green crap’ has actually added at least £2.5bn to bills through axing key green policies including energy-efficiency subsidies, an effective ban on on-shore wind in the UK, and ditching a zero-carbon homes standard. The results come as the government proposes more cuts to environmental policies to tackle an expected 50% rise in bills.
Ozone pollution from the burning of fossil fuels is not only bad for human health, but is causing major impacts to the health of plants, with an estimated $63bn impact on crops in East Asia. The effects of ozone on crops are thought to be comparable or worse than other better-understood stressors such as heat, drought or pests.
In a more positive note, researchers came across a group of more than one thousand fin whales near the South Orkney islands. The whales were hunted almost to extinction in the 20th century, but have made a resurgence in recent decades. They were long thought solitary, but it seems as the memories of mass whaling start to fade, these incredible animals might be more gregarious than we previously understood.
Climate Visuals
A picture tells a thousand words…
A new reef (above) has been discovered in deep water off the coast of Tahiti – a another positive in the often grim climate news landscape.
This collection of Creative Commons charts from the Global Carbon Budget 2021 is a treat for anyone into climate data visualisations.
Planet positives
Moving towards a greener and more equitable world
Fighting Fire with Fire
The Biden administration has proposed a new plan to improve wildfire planning and mitigation, returning to more traditional forest management approaches after years of ‘no-fire’ policies. The proposals include aggressively thinning forests around key ‘hot-spots’ where humans and nature collide, as well as ramping up controlled burns to reduce the amount of dry material building up. Given the area the plan covers, the total cost could be as much as $50bn, but if it reduces the severity of wildfires, it will likely be worth it.
The US has also seen huge spikes in the number of abandoned oil wells reported by states. Whilst at first this might seem like purely bad news, it seems likely that this is in response to a substantial pot of federal money that has been allocated for well clean-up. With a reason to report the wells, states are now investing the time and effort to track down and register wells that were previously ignored, resulting in the number of orphan wells reported nationwide doubling since 2019. Treating such wells is important, as they often leak substantial quantities of methane, and tend to fly under the radar otherwise when reducing emissions.
Adverse circumstances
Events that move the needle in the wrong direction
Exacerbating Inequalities
A new study has found that nearly half of the most climate-vulnerable nations have not received any funding from the UN Green Climate Fund. Whilst 54% of funds in the first round of the GCF went to projects in ‘particularly vulnerable’ nations, a number of those countries have missed out entirely. The main reasons identified for the gap were the bureaucratic processes for applying for project funding, with some of the most vulnerable countries lacking the infrastructure and resources to apply. Many have to apply through the World Bank as they lack the national institutions to access funds directly. There are extensive rules in place to protect against misspending of the fund’s resources, but as always, there’s a balance between those protections and locking out those who need the money the most.
Ice to see you
Beijing will shortly be hosting the Winter Olympics, its second Games in the last two decades. The event this year is seen by China as a major chance to promote Xi Jinping’s environmental agenda, and as such, has been marketed as the first ‘fully green’ Olympics. However, many are dubious of how environmentally friendly the event can truly be, as the area around Beijing is already water-starved, and all the snow for the Games is being generated artificially. Assessing the impact of the Olympics is tricky, and each successive year host nations proclaim their Games to be the greenest ever, but with no independent verification, it’s very hard to take those claims seriously.
Long Reads
Interesting deep-dives into climate-related topics
The concept of a circular economy has been gaining support gradually in recent years, and one of its strongest proponents has been Finland. The country adopted a national roadmap towards a circular economy in 2016, and has been incorporating reusability and recycling into everything from education to entrepreneurship and more. Results are still thin on the ground though, but public sentiments are changing as children brought up with these concepts move into the workforce and take a new, more systemic view on climate change and circularity.
Over to a very different country and a very different set of problems: The Maldives are one of the lowest-lying nations in the world, and probably will be one of the first to be swallowed by rising sea levels. The country is struggling to adapt, trying to move people to new artificial islands built higher, but that means leaving behind many of the features of the Maldivan lifestyle and heritage. Meanwhile, the nation is also facing many more familiar challenges, from wealth inequality, waste management to over-consumption and destruction of the rich maritime environment around the islands.
Finally, a look at the tricky job facing Eugenia Kargbo, Africa’s first heat officer, in charge of figuring out how to manage and adapt to the ever-increasing threat of heat in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The country is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, and has rapidly urbanised in recent years, driven by civil war, climate change-induced crop failures and rural poverty, leaving huge numbers of people in vulnerable situations in shanty towns.
Quick Headlines
Some quick climate news nuggets to sate your appetite
Preliminary estimates suggest that EV sales have overtaken those of diesels in Europe for the first time in December, and now total over 20% of new car sales.
The world’s first commercial-scale carbon capture facility has emitted 50% more CO2 than it captured between 2015-19, in another blow for the technology.
After record expansion this year, China now has the largest rooftop solar capacity in the world, at 108GW.
US car brands quadrupled their spending on national TV ads for EVs in 2021, though they still lag majorly behind ICE ad spending for almost all brands.