Hello again, and welcome to the 6th edition of Forge the Future. Welcome to the new subscribers who’ve joined us over the past couple of weeks - thanks for signing up! Right, without further ado...
State of the Climate
This week we’re at 413.76ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. As a reminder, the general limit that the IPCC is aiming for is 450ppm maximum by the end of the century, to keep us at or under 2°C. To hit 1.5°C cooling, we need to keep atmospheric CO2 somewhere around 430ppm or less. To put that in context, we’re currently putting around 2ppm a year into the atmosphere. At that rate, we have 10 years until we hit an average of 430ppm, and 20 years until we hit 450ppm.
Visualisation of the Week
This week’s visualisation comes from Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, by David JC MacKay, and shows average pollution rate per year per person, divided up by country. It’s a nice way to contextualise both emissions and the responsibility of developed nations. It’s easy to say ‘China’s emitting way more than us’ - but per person either currently or historically, developed nations emit/have emitted far more. For those that haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend the book - it’s published free online.
The Weather Forecast
EU
A massive heatwave has hit Europe this week, with France hitting an all time record of 45.9°C, 4 degrees above historical averages for June (the hottest months in France are normally July and August. Germany and Austria have also hit new June records, with roads melting and train tracks buckling in the heat. Schools were shut down, and many major cities in Paris temporarily banned older cars from entering city centres to combat pollution. Spain was no better off, with Catalonia hit by the biggest wildfire in 20 years. This reddit post from the dataisbeautiful subreddit illustrates how European temperatures have been steadily increasing over the past two decades.
USA
A heatwave in California has caused the largest die-off of mussels seen in 15 years, with mussels literally cooked in the heat along 140 miles of coastline. Mussels are a foundation species, so there’s likely to be a knock-on impact on the entire coastal ecosystem.
MEXICO
A freak hailstorm in Guadalajara has buried sections of the city in ice up to 2 metres thick, even as summer temperatures in the region hover around 31°C.
Political Affairs
I’d thought I’d start this week by looking at the various commitments and pledges to net-zero emissions made by countries, regions and cities around the world. Such pledges are growing in number week on week, and as of mid-June, cover around 16% of global GDP. It’s easy to get discouraged that the pledges made are not good enough, but a couple of years ago, pledges were very rare, and now they’re happening more and more. Movement is happening, albeit slowly. Much of Western Europe (including France this week) have targets either in law or as proposed legislation.
Quartz are keeping track of new and existing pledges with a well-updated list here.
USA
Republicans in Oregon have returned to work after a week long walkout where they fled the state to deny quorum for a vote on a major climate change bill. The governor authorised state police to find the senators and bring them back, as lawmakers shut the state capitol after receiving threats from militia groups supporting the fleeing Republicans.
The Trump administration finalised plans to roll back the Clean Power Plan, one of the only US regulations to tackle emissions from coal- and gas-fired power stations. In an interview that touched on the subject, vice president Mike Pence repeatedly refused to acknowledge that climate change was a threat.
The first democratic candidate debates have now happened, and a major talking point was the lack of climate change debate - limited to a few minutes on each day. Almost every candidate has made some form of significant pledge to the climate, but the debate really wasn’t much of a chance to see how many are really serious on this.
JAPAN
Japan is coming under increased scrutiny over its plastic use, after it failed to sign a G7 plastics charter last year, which would have forced it to collect, reuse or recycle all plastic products by 2030. Japan is currently the second highest waste producer per-capita after the US (which also failed to sign the G7 charter). However, some big chains in Japan are making moves themselves to cut waste, with 7/11, Family Mart and Ohsho all introducing initiatives to reduce plastic usage.
Activism
SPAIN
Thousands have taken to the streets of Madrid to protest the removal of the Madrid Central anti-pollution scheme. The scheme was rolled back by the new mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida soon after he took office on 15th June. A report in May found that under the scheme, nitrogen oxide levels in the city were at the lowest levels since records began in 2010.
FRANCE
French police have come under criticism for their heavy-handed tactics in dealing with a peaceful climate protest in Paris. Video of the police spraying mace into the faces of sitting protestors and dragging them along the street have been shared widely on the internet, and the French Interior Minister has asked for an explanation from the chief of police. The protests occurred on the same day as temperature records were broken across France in the heatwave.
GERMANY
Hundreds of climate protestors occupied one of Germany’s largest lignite (brown coal) mines to protest the lack of action on climate change. The protest comes as Germany is considering introducing a carbon tax to combat emissions, which would even cover areas like transport and construction that aren’t covered by the EU-wide Emissions Trading Scheme.
UK
Around 12000 people marched on Westminster for the ‘The Time is Now’ protest, to call on their MPs to do more about climate change and the climate emergency.
Power
KENYA
Kenyan judges have called a temporary halt on plans to build a Chinese-backed coal plant in the Lamu archipelago - a major tourist attraction containing a UNESCO heritage site. Protesters and residents of the area have fought the plans for the last 3 years. Kenya currently generates around 60% of its energy from renewables (mostly Hydro and Geothermal), and has aims to run entirely on green energy by 2020. The halt that has been called is not yet permanent, so there is still a chance that the plant goes ahead.
UK
A survey has shown that Tory party voters have a high support for onshore wind farms, and a number of MPs are urging for the current defacto ban to be lifted. Onshore installations of wind power have fallen by 80% in the UK after subsidies were slashed and onshore wind was barred from the UK’s second Contracts for Difference (CfD) auction.
USA
The USA generated more energy from renewables than coal power for the first time in April. The newly published figures show renewables supplied 23% of the energy demand versus coal’s 20%.
A gas power plant in California is being shut down 20 years ahead of schedule, as it can’t compete in the state’s rapidly changing energy market. It’s worth noting that faster-starting gas turbines are still viable as peak-demand power, but slower starting power stations such as this one aren’t competitive in a heavily renewables-based energy market.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Fusion startup out of MIT, have raised another $50 million in funding for their small-scale fusion reactor plans. CFS look to be one of the most exciting players in the heavily-funded fusion space, and unlike projects like ITER, their plans are small enough and cheap enough that they hope to have a reactor built by 2025.
Technology
UK
Jaguar Land Rover are to start making electric cars in their main UK factory at English Castle Bromwich, a much needed piece of good news for the flagging UK car industry.
Tata Chemicals is to build a 40000 ton/year Carbon Capture plant in Cheshire, to capture emissions from the company’s nearby power plant. So far, the UK has been slow to adopt Carbon Capture tech - in 2015, the government cancelled a £1bn program to fund new carbon capture tech - so it’s good to see new developments in the area.
CANADA
Carbon Engineering, the Canadian Direct Air Capture startup, are pairing up with Occidental Petroleum to build the first large scale DAC plant in the world to capture CO2 and use it to extract oil. Yes, it is still fossil fuels, but I think this partnership is interesting nevertheless - we’re still going to be using oil for a while yet, even if other technologies scale up incredibly fast - but if we can reduce the carbon impact of that oil, that’s definitely a good thing. Not to mention that the investment is helping to mature and productionise DAC technology.
FINLAND
A Finnish startup has announced a new high-protein food produced using clean energy and microbes, that they hope to make into meals and sell in the next two years. The flour-like product can be made into bread or meat substitutes or used as an ingredient when cooking.
Research
Wired highlighted this week the lack of data on many aspects of climate change. Of the 93 indicators that the UN uses to measure the environmental aspects of sustainable development, we have little to no data on 68% of them. This is one area tech can really help - ML, satellite imagery and more will all help fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Once we can track it, we can tackle it.
Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has suggested that human rights will likely get worse as the climate crisis intensifies. He criticised governments, NGOs, businesses and the UN itself for not responding adequately to the scale of the problem.
A new study predicts that the radiative forcing effects from aircraft contrails will triple by 2050 from 2006 levels if aviation patterns do not change. Contrails form when moisture condenses and freezes around soot released from engine exhausts, and the resulting clouds prevent reflected heat from escaping the atmosphere.
The Met Office have updated their main record of ocean surface temperature, and it shows that the oceans are 0.1°C warmer than previously thought. The HadSST4 is a significant update to the SST (sea surface temperature) record, which is used in many models of climate change. The increase, though small, is likely to mean many models revise down the time we have left before we reach a 1.5 or 2°C global temperature rise.
Interesting things
Here’re a couple of interesting projects I’d like to highlight this week:
The Climate Fixathon: a climate-focussed hackathon run by Impact Makers. Registration opens on July 10th!
Open Climate Fix: A non-profit R&D lab focussed on reducing GHG emissions as quickly as possible.
Endgame
That’s all for this week. If you've been sent this by a friend and would like to subscribe, please click the big purple button below (if you’re browsing the archive, you’ll find it in the top bar). And if you liked this, please share it with others - the more people we can reach, the better - thanks!
See you next week,
Oli
Notes from the community
As always, do let me know if there's anything going on that you'd like to tell the community about. This could be a new project, a blog post, an event - anything goes!