FtF News #154 – 1st June 2022
Pollution is causing obesity, putting a price on pickups and the complexities of mining more lithium
Hello, and welcome to Forge the Future, your weekly rundown of the latest climate news.
I was pleased to see coverage in the last week or so of a senior consultant for Shell who quit after 11 years, citing the company’s ‘disregard for climate change risks’. I think there’s a real risk that those who work for oil companies end up feeling trapped, that they’re damned if they stay and damned if they leave, eternally tarnished with the fossil fuel brush. This hopefully further normalises being able to walk away, and erodes even more the companies’ social licence to operate. Not everyone grew up an environmentalist, but there’s no time like the present: after all, as the saying goes:
“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is now.”
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
It doesn’t seem that long since the last hurricanes, but already weather analysts are gearing up for this year’s Atlantic season, which is expected to be another overactive one. Current predictions suggest up to 21 named storms could form, which would make 2022 the seventh consecutive overactive hurricane season.
California’s water board has passed emergency measures around water use as the drought gripping the US West continues to deepen. Agencies were told to put in place contingency plans for water shortages, and all watering of ‘non-functional’ grass at non-residential properties has been banned. The state governor has been urging people to reduce water usage for several months, but to little effect.
A major review suggests that chemical pollution could be worsening the obesity epidemic. Evidence for so called ‘obesogens’ is now considerable – various chemicals found in plastics, pesticides and air pollution can change how the body deals with excess weight, making it easier to gain weight and harder to lose it, with some effects even passing down over generations through genetic changes. Whilst far from the only cause of increasing waistlines, some put the impact of obesogens as high as 15-20% of the overall obesity crisis.
A report released during the WEF in Davos puts the economic impact of not tackling climate change at a staggering $178tn over the next 50 years (for context, total world wealth is estimated at around $500tn). However, rapid climate action could flip that around, increasing the global economy to the tune of $43tn over the same time-frame. The report quantifies a much wider range of effects than many previous analyses, and found that costs and benefits fall very unequally across the globe, with the Asia-Pacific region likely to see the biggest impacts from ignoring climate (and thus economic benefit from action), whereas in Europe and North America the benefits are smaller and will take longer to realise.
Planet positives
Moving towards a greener and more equitable world
Baby steps
The G7 group of wealthy economies has finally collectively agreed to stop funding fossil fuel projects overseas, after a host of false starts. Various nations amongst the seven have made such pledges individually, but this is the first time they have all come together in agreement. However, whilst a big step forward, the agreement still comes with a host of caveats and loopholes that mean that projects already underway may well escape the ban, including many so-called ‘carbon bomb’ projects – major polluting projects that simply should not be completed.
Truck Tax
In what might be a first in the US, the District of Columbia has proposed a massive hike in vehicle registration fees for heavy and oversized vehicles. The change would lift vehicle registration fees for vehicles over 6,000lb (2.7t) to seven-fold in an attempt to discourage the ownership of pickup trucks and large SUVs, which are growing more popular year on year, despite terrible fuel economy, and being more polluting, damaging to roads and deadly to pedestrians and other road users. This might be the first such US law to address the considerable negative externalities of these giant vehicles, though a few similar regulations have started appearing in Europe.
Adverse circumstances
Events that move the needle in the wrong direction
Eyeing up the bill
A new study has estimated that the full cost for South Africa to transition away from coal could be as much as $250bn over the next 3 decades. The cost includes not only shutting down the country’s existing coal power plants and building out renewables to replace them, but also ensuring a just transition for the tens of thousands employed by the coal industry at present. Much was made of an $8.5bn package of grants and loans last year from developed nations to help South Africa move away from coal, but it’s clear that the true cost of shedding the fuel is much, much higher.
Nothing for free
The UK’s chancellor has, in a now unsurprising u-turn, finally decided to implement a windfall tax on the outsize profits of oil and gas companies. The firms will face a 25% tax on energy profits that will scale back in line with fuel prices, bringing the UK more in line with other European countries. However, as part of the same deal, Rishi Sunak also announced a massive multi-billion pound tax break for those same companies that will return somewhere between £2.5-5.7bn back to them over the next three years. For context, that’s enough money to improve the energy efficiency of over 2m homes in the UK, which would save each of those households around £350/year in energy bills, permanently. UK energy bill caps are due to rise again in October, leaving households facing a doubling of bills in just one year and pushing a third of households into fuel poverty.
Long Reads
Interesting deep-dives into climate-related topics
Lithium is one of the cornerstones of the coming electrification of everything, being a key ingredient of the batteries being churned out in ever-greater volumes across the globe. However, the metal is in increasingly short supply, with prices up 500%, and more rises predicted in the coming months. So why isn’t supply rising? In short, mining is a big, time-consuming and capital intensive industry, and even with vast demand, it takes time for the cogs to move. As always, startups are starting to nip at the heels of incumbents, promising better yields and cleaner technologies, but even they can’t escape the inevitable ponderosity that comes with entering such a huge industry.
There are a number of darker sides to the environmental movement, and one long-running facet is that of concern over population growth. Whilst on the surface a reasonable enough argument, it almost always boils down to worries over other groups of people (often poor and of colour) growing in number, and conveniently glosses over the highly emitting suburban lifestyles of many of those worrying about population growth.
Quick Headlines
Some quick climate news nuggets to sate your appetite
The UN Secretary General told graduates not to work for ‘climate wreckers’ in a recent speech.
Australia’s largest polluter, AGL, has abandoned plans for a ‘demerger’ of its coal power plants after a concerted campaign by Atlassian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes.
The US Supreme Court has shot down an attempt by Republican states to overturn Biden’s social cost of carbon calculations.