FtF News #71 - 7th October 2020
Fires, fusion and a net-zero NHS
Hello, and welcome to Forge the Future, your weekly rundown of the latest climate news.
2020 is quite the rollercoaster year. Another week, and we’ve got more hurricanes, more fire, and Trump testing positive for COVID-19. Here in the UK, we’re in the midst of the Conservative Party conference, which means lots of bold promises for wind power and greening the economy. Not that these promises aren’t good, but on the other hand the UK just approved its first deep coal mine in 30 years. The world is a strange and contradictory place, especially now, but hopefully in aggregate things are improving.
State of the world
Climate research and findings, weather events and studies
Much of Western Europe saw massive rains over the weekend, with the area surrounding Nice receiving nearly a year’s worth of rain in less than 12 hours. On the Italian/French border, severe flooding trapped dozens and killed two in a situation that is still unfolding.
Hurricanes and storms continue to spawn out of the Atlantic at an unprecedented rate, with Tropical Storm Gamma sweeping through the Yucatan peninsula, killing 6 and requiring thousands to be evacuated. The region is bracing for worse as Hurricane Delta is bearing down fast. It is currently category 2, but could potentially strengthen still further.
California continues to suffer under the onslaught of fires. Over 4m acres have now been burned - twice the previous worst, with 5 of the top 6 fires occurring this year. The largest fire - the August Complex fire - has burned over 1m acres alone - more than the area burned by all recorded fires from 1932 to 1999 combined. That fire is still burning, as are many others, and the fire season could stretch for another month or more.
Yet another study of the ever-shrinking Greenland ice sheet has concluded that the scale of loss will be higher this century than at any other point in the past 12,000 years. However, perhaps more crucially, the rate of loss is highly dependent upon future emissions. If the world keeps to a path of 2°C warming, the rate of loss could be as much as four times less than if warming is unconstrained.
Further investigations of the ocean’s interactions with CO2 have found that stratification of ocean layers is happening more than it used to, meaning that the top layers of the ocean are becoming saturated with CO2 (as it is unable to dissipate down into the depths). This could affect the future take up of CO2 in the oceans, which would have significant implications for how emissions affect warming in the coming decades. This effect has yet to be incorporated into climate models, but doing so is a priority to fully understand the impacts.
Planet positives
Moving towards a greener and more equitable world
Net-zero for all?
This week has seen a series of UK climate pledges from a variety of sources. Cambridge University, after years of pressure from students and staff, has committed to divest its endowment from fossil fuels, and is aiming for net-zero GHG emissions across its portfolio by 2038. This is a big step, though it only covers the main university endowment, not those of its individual colleges, which collectively hold twice as much again as their parent institution.
The UK NHS (National Health Service) has announced a multi-year plan to become the world’s first net zero national health system. It has interim and final targets for both direct and supply chain emissions, zeroing out direct emissions by 2040, and supply chain emissions by 2045.
Nuclear dreams
An ambitious fusion project spun out from MIT has taken a step further forward this week with the release of a series of papers detailing the feasibility of the idea. This is a fairly standard step for such projects - once the initial idea has been proposed, it’s necessary to publish the key calculations that show how it might be possible. Nevertheless, the information shown is promising, and it will be worth following the project to see if it achieves its ambitious goal ahead of other longer-running fusion projects such as ITER.
Adverse circumstances
Events that move the needle in the wrong direction
Debate debacle
It’s hard to know whether the first presidential candidate debate was a climate positive or negative, with most concluding that the whole event was a mess. It was notable that questions were asked on the climate, despite that not being a listed topic, and it was one of the only times that Trump stopped interrupting constantly, possibly because he had nothing meaningful to say on the subject. Biden didn’t particularly excel either, but it shows that the climate could be a promising topic for future debates.
The US election is a topic that will undoubtedly overshadow most other topics in the news going forward, but it is undoubtedly a pivotal moment for the US, and indeed the world - perhaps even more so than 2016. Carbon Brief has put together a tracker for both party’s promises on energy and climate, and they will keep it updated as the election approaches.
An uphill struggle
Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to demonstrate why another term would be so dangerous. The Forest Service finalised its plan to open up a significant portion of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska to logging and road construction, despite it disregarding the agency’s own findings. The EPA finalised a rule that allows major pollution sources to be reclassified if they reduce their emissions, allowing them to avoid more stringent reporting and mitigation measures. This will result in up to 1,250 tons of additional lead, mercury and arsenic pollution per year, and has been labelled by environmental groups as ‘100% gratuitous’. Finally, the director of the USGS has blocked the release of his own agency’s report on the effect of drilling on polar bears for the past three months. This is part of a wider pattern by USGS leadership of delaying and blocking scientific results that has been ongoing for a couple of years.
Striking a similar tone is a report that found that elite law firms are overwhelmingly working for rather than against the fossil fuel industry. Firms in the Vault Law 100 list worked on 10 times the cases exacerbating climate change as combating it, and lobbied five times more often for fossil fuel firms than renewable energy companies. In an era where many climate decisions are being pushed into the courts, it’s damning that top lawyers are following the (dirty) money, writing fossil fuel project contracts, lobbying for weaker regulations, and defeating cases brought by environmentalists.
Long Reads
Interesting deep-dives into climate-related topics
HEATED took a look this week at the link between the Proud Boys, recently highlighted by Trump’s callout in the presidential debate, and climate change. More widely, the newsletter considers the link between traditional conservative masculinity and a view of the environment as something to be consumed for the betterment of mankind. As an aside, I’m very much enjoying the gay take over of the #proudboys hashtag on Twitter!
The IMF released a exploration of the potential economic value of endangered African forest elephants. The elephants are little known, but help natural carbon capture by helping only the strongest, largest trees survive in their native forests, which absorb far more carbon than the smaller trees that would otherwise proliferate. Collectively, they could contribute as much as $150bn in sequestered carbon, valuing each elephant at $1.75m. This may seem an odd way to value the creatures, but it highlights the clear importance of such species in a world that currently does not value them.
That’s all I have for you this week. As always, thank you for reading, and if you liked it, why not share it with a friend? If you’ve any thoughts, feedback or suggestions, I’d love to hear them - you can reach me at oli@forgethefuture.com.
Stay safe, wear a mask, and see you next week,
Oli