Hello, and welcome (back) to Forge the Future. The biggest climate story of the week is of course the Global Climate Strike, and the UN Climate Summit it preceded. I’ll cover both of these more later on, but suffice to say the strike was pretty massive - at an estimated 4 million people, across hundreds of cities, it’s easily the largest such protest yet. There’s also been increased climate coverage this week, thanks to a coalition of news organisations, who covered the environment and climate-related stories much more heavily in the week running up to the climate strike and summit.
State of the Climate
This week, CO2 levels are at 408.50ppm, versus a level of 405.67ppm a year ago. There’s been a lot of focus on CO2 levels and their implications, given all the talk of lowering them this week. I’d recommend this post from The Rate of Change, another excellent newsletter covering the science behind Climate Change, which explains the implications of doubling CO2, and how feedback loops play into the resulting temperature rise.
The NOAA released its latest Global Climate Report, which has shown that August was the 2nd warmest on record, as was the whole June-August period, globally. 2019 so far is the 3rd hottest year on record. That heat is having an impact - in Hawaii, coral is showing signs of heat stress and bleaching after sustained high sea temperatures, only four years after a previous heatwave wiped out nearly half of it.
The tropical storm season has truly kicked in, with a joint record of six named storms present at once in the Atlantic and Pacific. One of those, Imelda, dumped 40 inches of rain on SE Texas, flooding hundreds of homes. General sea level rise is starting to prompt an exodus from the Florida Keys, which will soon be underwater. Some are hanging on for government buyouts, but the US administration isn’t committing nearly enough cash to buy out everyone.
Meanwhile, in Asia, a huge outbreak of dengue fever is spreading across multiple countries. It’s killed more than 1000 people already, and infected hundreds of times that number. Experts say that climate change has made the disease worse - mosquitoes survive more easily, and erratic weather is making the outbreaks much harder to predict.
Visualisation of the Week
This week’s visualisation comes from Nature, who released a summary on how the world is doing in tackling emissions levels ahead of the climate summit. The answer? Not so good - emissions are increasing year on year, and whilst we’re adding more renewables than fossil fuels, our consumption of the latter is still enormous (and rising).
Striking for our Future
This week saw probably the biggest single period of focus on climate change and the environment, with the Global Climate Strike and the UN Climate Summit. The Strike itself was a huge event, with an estimated 4 million people turning out in 140+ countries, including a huge number of school children and young people. On the back of the strikes and ahead of the summit, a number of companies have made declarations of increased pledges, including tech firms like Atlassian and Cloudflare. Even Amazon finally agreed to start tackling their huge environmental impact (although they can and should do more).
Several large business coalitions agreed to align with the Paris goals of 1.5°C, including the ‘We Mean Business’ coalition - a group of companies with a combined market cap of $2.3tn - and a collective of more than 130 major banks.
However, the actual summit itself was a story of many words, and few actions. There were plenty of pledges - Antonio Guterres said he would only let countries speak if they had solid commitments to make - but we’re still a very long way from the Paris goal of 1.5°C of warming. Some highlights:
France and New Zealand won’t allow oil and gas exploration in their territory
There were lots of smaller announcements, but that’s mostly it. The overall sense was one of deflation, of let down. The anger and passion fueling the climate strikes just drifted away in a fog of vague promises and hand waving from world leaders.
In many ways, the summit was more about the youth climate leaders, who are stepping up where our political masters are not. If you haven’t already seen Greta Thunberg’s immensely powerful speech, I urge you to stop and watch it now.
Many of the political leaders said repeatedly that they heard the demands of the youth activists, but given the lukewarm commitments made, we have to ask - did they?
One telling moment came at the Intergenerational Town Hall, part of the Youth Climate Summit, held the day before the main UN Summit. The event was designed to be a forum to allow young people to ask unfiltered questions of high-level officials. Several activists cut straight to the chase, asking if the event was not just greenwashing, saying the day seemed mostly like a ‘photo-op’.
Greta Thunberg and 15 other young activists are suing 6 major polluters (Brazil, Argentina, France, Germany and Turkey) on the grounds that by polluting the environment, the countries are infringing on their rights as children. It will be interesting to see if the case succeeds - it’s not clear how much impact it will have, but legal mechanisms to force more action is definitely a route worth pursuing.
News highlights
USA versus the Climate
The Trump administration is now trying to revoke California’s ability to set its own emissions standards (which are stricter than the rest of the country), despite transport being the single largest source of emissions in the US. The EPA has informed California that it’s not been upholding its commitments to clean air (which the stricter emissions laws would, of course, help), so it’s threatening to withdraw Highways funding.
The administration is now threatening to reduce or suspend foreign aid to Guatemala over the influx of Guatemalan immigrants to the US. This is despite evidence from Customs and Border Protection, no less, that shows that the immigration is due to climate change-induced poverty and crop failures, something that the foreign aid was helping to tackle.
Democrats in the Senate have released a report detailing all of the suppressed/censored/minimised climate science from the current administration’s rule. It’s a huge list, covering the EPA and Department of Security, along with over 1400 studies from the Department of Agriculture.
Trump attended the UN Climate Summit… for 10 minutes.
There’s a movement from the right to ‘make dishwashers great again’. This is a pushback against the important business of eco-friendly dishwashers. Even the manufacturers think this one’s ridiculous!
Saga of Coal
China still has some 226GW of planned coal power plants, despite huge moves towards renewables.
However, Montenegro is scrapping plans to add a new coal power unit, instead looking to overhaul an existing one and push into wind and solar. This is a welcome shift for the region, which largely relies on Communist-era coal power.
South African coal exports are expected to drop as clean energy starts to eat into the coal market
US coal mines continue to fold steadily, causing many to fear for their jobs.
Other News
Major German car maker Daimler is to stop developing new combustion engines, and will focus its efforts on EVs instead.
UK offshore wind auctions have driven the price down basically to parity - the first subsidy free offshore wind in the UK will likely appear soon.
ACWA has bid a record low of $0.02526/kWh for a 250MW solar development in Ethiopia. It’s the lowest ever tariff for PV in Africa, and amongst the lowest in the world.
Air Travel is growing faster than expected, with new research suggesting that aviation is increasing at 1.5x the rate predicted by the UN aviation body. Airbus predict that commercial aircraft numbers will more than double by 2038.
Long Reads
This piece from Bill McKibben, the legendary environmentalist and writer, is well worth a read - it discusses divestment (apt in light of Bill Gates’ recent pronouncement that divestment is a waste of effort), and how if we change the money, we change the system.
California is trying to fight fire with fire, by setting smaller fires to prevent the uncontrollable wildfires that have caused havoc in recent years. It seems that utilising biomass burners to get rid of dead wood may go some way towards reducing the scale of future blazes.
The New Yorker explored the odd world of Jonathan Ledgard, who is on a one man mission to imagine his way out of the Climate Crisis.
End Transmission
It’s been a busy week, and one which feels like it marks a turning point in the popularity of the climate movement - something that is sorely needed given how little time we have to change the direction we’re headed.
As always, if you made it this far, thank you for reading, and please do share it if you enjoyed it! See you next week,
Oli