FtF News #94 – 24th March 2021
The challenges of EV rollout, overreliance on forests, and a potential Indian net-zero target
Hello, and welcome to Forge the Future, your weekly rundown of the latest climate news.
Whilst reading an article on EVs for this week’s post, I came across this incredible chart, which shows that over 75% of the US car market is now SUVs or pickup trucks. SUVs are responsible for zeroing out basically all of the impact of EVs in the UK, and market share is still increasing. It’s good that they’re shifting to electric, but I wonder how much extra raw material and energy goes into fueling our continuing addiction to oversized cars. Even icons such as the Ford Mustang have somehow morphed into strange bloated crossovers in recent years (although Charge have made a proper electric Mustang that makes my inner car nerd very happy).
State of the world
Climate research and findings, weather events and studies
This year sees an alarming threshold breached, as the Met Office predicts that 2021 will see atmospheric CO2 rise over 50% above pre-industrial levels for a sustained period. It took over 200 years for humanity to raise CO2 by 25%, but has taken just 35 more to double that increase.
A more positive 50% statistic comes from the UK, where emissions were 51% below 1990 levels last year – halfway to the target of net-zero by 2050. Whilst things were undoubtedly assisted by COVID lockdowns, the UK has made serious progress in decarbonisation of the power sector. However, now comes the hard part – decarbonising industry and transport, as well as emissions from homes and offices. The government released its strategy for decarbonising industry this week, and whilst it’s rather sparse on concrete targets, it’s clear that a lot of rapid change is needed to get to net-zero.
A new study has found that bottom trawling releases up to a gigaton of carbon each year by disturbing seabed sediment – roughly equal to the entire aviation industry. More safeguards are needed to prevent such practices, though the paper’s authors suggest that alleviating 90% of the risk of carbon disturbance would only require protecting around 4% of the world’s oceans, mostly within national waters.
Australia is currently suffering its worst floods in decades, with much of eastern Oz seeing huge amounts of rain. Some places saw 3ft of rain in just five days – a once in 50 or 100 year event. Nearly 20,000 Australians have been forced to evacuate, and one city, Windsor, is currently 30ft underwater, with waters still rising. Experts say the links to climate change are undeniable at this point. The last six months has seen some 10m people displaced by climate change-linked disasters (versus 2.3m displaced by conflict), and that number is increasing rapidly as time goes on.
Planet positives
Moving towards a greener and more equitable world
Scaling up the electric revolution
It feels like the momentum around EVs is growing week on week, with enough news to justify a newsletter all of its own. Major US carmakers are tooling up for the coming battle over the electric pickup space. With 1 in 5 new vehicles and 1 in 4 dollars spent on pickups, it’s a huge market, and currently Ford, GM and Stellantis (the combination of PSA Group and Fiat-Chrysler NA) own 94% of gasoline pickup sales. Whilst the incumbents have been slow to move, they have some serious advantages in their maturity and existing facilities – whereas new startups are having to learn how to scale and build out facilities, the bigger companies have done this many times over, albeit not for electric.
The New York Times published an excellent interactive piece examining the role of fleet turnover rates in EV targets. Due to the slow speed of vehicle turnover, the US would need all new vehicles to be EVs by 2035 to ensure most vehicles on the roads by 2050 are electric. That’s a huge ask, requiring some 350m new EVs. However, if US cities reduce the need for cars through investment in walking, cycling and public transport, then that number could drop to around 200m. That’s still a lot of vehicles, but significantly more achievable.
India’s net-zero ambitions
Rumours are floating around that India is considering a net-zero goal of 2050. Nothing official has been confirmed as yet, but if this occurs, it would be incredibly ambitious, leaving China’s 2060 goal in the dust. India is under pressure to increase its climate commitments ahead of COP26 in December.
However, it remains to be seen if it’s even possible for India to decarbonise that fast. It would be easily the most ambitious goal of any large country, and would require monumental change. It’s worth bearing in mind that even if India didn’t reach net-zero until 2090, it would still have cumulative emissions less than the EU, the US or China. In fact, if India peaks emissions around 2030, it’s peak per capita emissions would be just 1/10th those of the US at its peak. There’s no doubt that such a rapid decarbonisation would bring huge health benefits for the country, but the question of equitable transition is an important one.
Adverse circumstances
Events that move the needle in the wrong direction
If a tree falls in a forest...
Forestry is a recurring theme in the climate crisis, and unfortunately it’s rarely good news. CDP analysed 553 companies who deal in various key commodities such as soybeans, cattle and rubber, and found that they could face up to $53bn in costs from deforestation. The good news? It would cost $6.6bn to address the forest loss – hardly pocket change, but peanuts compared to the damage. However, just 1% of the companies analysed were found to be demonstrating best practices around forestry and forest loss.
A number of nations are leaning very heavily on nature-based solutions for their climate goals, amongst them Chile. The country is relying on forests for up to 50% of its emissions reductions until 2050, but such reductions are wildly uncertain, and plantation forestry, which dominates, is far less effective than native forest in storing carbon.
Russia announced this week that it wants to use vast tracts of forest in its far eastern regions as a carbon offsetting marketplace, perhaps to assuage concern over its otherwise terrible climate record. It is looking to monetise an area twice the size of India, but the value of this forest isn’t even clear, with much of the area poorly managed, and forest inventories decades out of date (aside from the many other complexities and nuances of offsets).
Long Reads
Interesting deep-dives into climate-related topics
HEATED (an excellent climate newsletter you should totally subscribe to if you haven’t already) is currently covering the protests around the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. The project has been ongoing for years, and riding roughshod over the concerns of local native communities. Enbridge’s lobbying budget has skyrocketed in recent years to overwhelm any coverage of the protests, and they’re even bankrolling local police to harass those participating in the demonstrations. Line 3 has had significantly less attention than the Keystone XL pipeline, but it’s hoped with the recent involvement of well known figures such as Jane Fonda, the status of the pipeline will be more thoroughly evaluated.
Quick Headlines
Some quick climate news nuggets to sate your appetite
A Spanish startup has invented a novel bladeless wind turbine that generates power by vibrating.
A group of researchers has come up with a new economic index based upon ‘Years of Good Life’ to take account of climate impacts.
The Biden administration has said it won’t enforce the Trump era rules banning use of ESG metrics for 401k investments.