Hello, and welcome to Forge the Future, your revamped and (hopefully) improved guide to all things going on in the climate world this week.
I’m going to experiment with format a little over the next few weeks. One of the difficulties of climate topics is that they tend to defy easy categorisation, whether by geography, subject, or domain. This week, I’m trialling a simple ‘climate-positive’, ‘climate-negative’ and ‘state of the world’ split, but I may iterate on that if it feels like too much is falling through the cracks.
I’m also working on focusing on specific areas rather than covering absolutely everything, in the hope of bringing a little more context to stories. As with all of these tweaks and changes, I’d love your feedback and thoughts on things you liked, things you don’t, or indeed anything else that comes to mind! You can reach me at oli@forgethefuture.com, or on Twitter.
State of the world
Climate research and findings, weather events and studies
NOAA and NASA findings this week suggest that 2020 may be the warmest year on record, even without the boosting effect of the El Niño. Another study found that the enormous Siberian heatwave this year would have been basically impossible without anthropogenic climate change, which made it as much as 600x more likely. Such attribution is tricky, as shown in Carbon Brief’s explainer on how wildfires are affected by climate change, but increasingly the links are so strong that they are hard to refute.
Making those links is next to impossible without reliable data - the number of heatwaves reported in sub-Saharan Africa is vastly less than in Europe, meaning that the growing impact of global heating in that part of the world is hard to assess. Without reporting, authorities tend not to put in much-needed preventative measures.
Heavy rain in both India and China is continuing to wreak havoc. The rains in China have pushed the Yangtze to a record high, and with more rain expected in the coming days, the country is bracing for further floods. Two weeks of heavy rain in Assam have caused the Brahmaputra river to overflow, displacing more than 2m in India, and a further 1m in Bangladesh, with 77 killed.
Planet positives
Moving towards a greener and more equitable world
It’s Electric
Vehicle electrification is doing better than ever, with vast amounts of money flowing into startups in the space. Even the US is announcing EV grants, and subsidies in Europe are cutting the lease costs of some EVs to near zero. Massive deals in the battery space, including BMW with Northvolt, and Tesla with CATL, suggest a wider confidence in the market. Europe in particular is expanding rapidly, with both native and Chinese battery makers in the process of building out facilities there. Supporting infrastructure such as charging still needs improvement, but with the EU green recovery plan looking to push large amounts of money in this direction, the signs are positive.
In the rail sphere, Hitachi have signed a memorandum of understanding with UK battery company Hyperdrive Innovation to develop battery trains. Electrification of trains is usually dependent on rollout of electrification on lines, but this offers opportunities to significantly cut emissions even without significant infrastructure upgrades. Trials of similar technology are taking place in the US, which has a relatively low electrification rate across its vast rail network.
Fossil Fear
The shift against fossil fuel companies is proceeding apace. Akshat Rathi wrote this week about an increasing pressure on companies to start acting on the climate ahead of what’s seen as an ‘inevitable policy response’ - basically when government feels it has no choice but to act much more strongly than it has done. Their biggest fear is being caught behind the curve, and it definitely feels like the Overton Window on fossil fuels is in flux right now - the spate of rulings around pipelines in the US being a prime example. Morgan Stanley announced this week that it will begin reporting the climate impacts of its investments and lending - the first major US bank to do so. Is this all just performative, to avoid harsher climate policy? Time will tell.
The Rise of Renewables
BNEF has released its analysis of clean energy investment for the first half of 2020. To the surprise of many, despite COVID-19, investment is up 5% on the same period last year. Almost all of that came from offshore wind, which was up 319% year on year, with the total for 1H 2020 ($35bn) more than the entire of 2019 ($31.9bn, a record at the time). Most other forms of renewable energy saw a hit this year versus last, but overall spending is up significantly in China and Europe, with drops in a number of other markets, including the US.
A related, but fascinating result has come out of a new study from California, looking at the ‘effective load carrying capacity’ of renewables versus existing technologies. Basically, if you install a 200MW gas plant, it can produce 200MW 24/7, whereas that number will be significantly lower for a 200MW wind or solar farm. Wind came out at 19%, and solar was even worse, with residential scale solar at just 4% (so that 200MW capacity could support just 8MW of load). However, the study found that with four hours of storage, solar carrying capacity goes up to 99.8%, which not only validates renewable + storage installations, but shows that they offer a meaningful alternative to gas peaker plants.
Adverse circumstances
Events that move the needle in the wrong direction
The unveiling of Facebook’s… questionable approach to fact-checking climate misinformation continues. The latest information suggests that complaints from those being fact checked cause these issues to be escalated to the highest levels of the company, before the fact checks are quietly removed. The issue of how (mis)information spreads across social media and the internet is immensely complex, but given how dominant these platforms have become in shaping the discourse on so many issues, it is an area to watch carefully.
Canada is being accused of ‘creative accounting’ when it comes to emissions from logging in its boreal forests. The forests make up 25% of the world’s remaining forests, and represent a significant store of carbon, not to mention a carbon sink. The government currently touts the logging as carbon neutral, whereas environmentalists put the cost at around 100m tons of CO2 per year. A recent study in northern Ontario also found that 14% of clearcut areas simply don’t regrow, even decades later.
That’s all I have for you this week. As always, thank you for reading, and well done if you made it all the way through! As I mentioned at the beginning, this is a bit of a change of tack for this newsletter, so I’d love to know your thoughts - do you like the changes? Hate them? Let me know!
Stay safe, and see you next week,
Oli