Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The global energy system is in a state of flux. Renewables are experiencing rapid deployment and steep pricefalls. A growing portion of global energy is provided by electricity. There’s a slow, but apparently inexorable move away from coal in China. And there’s a surge in natural gas and oil production in the US.
As world leaders prepare to meet in Germany to negotiate climate action at COP23, activists are putting words into action by blockading a nearby coal mine. Their message is that leaders need to grasp the urgency of keeping fossil fuels in the ground, right here and right now. With an increasing frequency and intensity, such direct actions and the associated demands for climate justice are unfolding on every continent.
We sometimes refer to the emissions while a building is functioning as the operational carbon, and all the other emissions across its life cycle as the embodied carbon. Focusing on one and not the other is puzzling to say the least – we’re effectively trying to take the carbon out of our energy bills while paying no attention to the carbon in the buildings themselves.
The evidence is overwhelming that natural gas has no net climate benefit in any timescale that matters to humanity. In fact, a shocking new study concludes that just the methane emissions escaping from New Mexico’s gas and oil industry are “equivalent to the climate impact of approximately 12 coal-fired power plants.” If the goal is to avoid catastrophic levels of warming, a recent report by U.K. climate researchers finds “categorically no role” to play for new natural gas production.
So, is mineral depletion an existential threat to human civilization? Or is it just a marginal problem that can be fixed by some technological improvements? This is truly a fundamental question for the future of humankind. An answer is provided by the latest report to the Club of Rome that was published in 2017, “The Seneca Effect.”
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t just stay up north. It affects the world, as that region is the integrator of our planet’s climate systems, atmospheric and oceanic. At the moment, the northernmost places on Earth are warming at more than twice the global average, a phenomenon whose impact is already being felt planetwide. Welcome to the world of climate breakdown — and to the world of Donald Trump.
Clean shipping advocates plan to spotlight the sector’s emissions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which opens today in Bonn, Germany. Known as COP23, the gathering marks two years since the world agreed in Paris on a landmark climate accord — one that the Trump administration plans to abandon. The agreement, however, excluded pollution from international shipping and aviation in its targets to limit global warming. Officials had argued that those industries don’t easily fit into national or regional emissions schemes — and so they were left to regulate themselves.
The electric utility sector’s top lobbying group is teaming up with fossil fuel trade associations as part of an effort to intensify the industry’s campaign against citizen and environmental groups opposed to fracking and new natural gas pipelines.
“Can the airlines be run on biofuels?” As it often happens, this simple question doesn’t have a simple answer. First of all, it is a question that makes sense only in terms of a “sustainable” plane, that is one that doesn’t run on fossil fuels. That’s a major technological problem.
How do we know at what level our consumption is sustainable, and when we’re in planetary overshoot? How do we quantify what the planet’s capacity is to meet human demands, and how much of that capacity is renewable, and how much of it is just being permanently depleted? And once we had a way to quantify that, what would we do with that information?
But these numbers are surely one of the most spectacular examples of how dysfunctional our world can be. Passing The Test does not require re-engineering the world according to some theoretically perfect model. It merely involves making it a little less dysfunctional.
It has been almost a month since Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Since then, most of the island’s 3.4 million residents have been without electricity or running water. The power grid was effectively destroyed, with only 7 percent back online to date. This means that the entire system, from generation to distribution, will need to be rebuilt. The question now is: how?
