September 2022
Crucially, the vast majority of the international community agrees on global climate…
Category: Curated Climate News
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August 2022
The IRA’s tax breaks and other incentives will greatly improve the ability to manufacture clean energy in the United States, leading one investor to say…
April 2022
“The thing about climate is that you can either be overwhelmed by the complexity of the problem or fall in love with the creativity of the solutions.”
– Mary Heglar,
Climate writer and co-host of Hot Take podcast
March 2022
“We must become independent from Russian oil, coal and gas. We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us.”
February 2022
As we review the news of the last month, we’d like to shine a light on something that is too often ignored by the prognosticators…
January 2022 Climate Change News
Dear Friends,
In January the biggest front-page, top-of-the-hour news of the natural world was the undersea volcano eruption near the Tongan islands and the subsequent tsunamis, falling ash, and devastation. Unlike some past eruptions, this one does not appear to have sent enough reflective material into the upper atmosphere to cool the planet and give us even a short reprieve from rising temperatures.
As for man-made news, tensions between Russia, Ukraine, and their allies are erupting as well. Not that he’s asking us, but perhaps President Vladimir Putin might do well to focus on the threats coming from the northeastern part of his country, not neighbors to the west. We aren’t foreign policy experts, but what is happening to his country’s permafrost could be far more unsettling – over the long term – to the country’s economy and stability than the sovereignty of Ukraine.
While not as visually arresting as an explosion in the South Pacific or the amassing of armed forces, the thawing permafrost is very bad news. Two-thirds of Russia’s landmass is considered permafrost – land that never thaws even in the summer – but climate change is causing it to thaw rapidly. This makes the ground soften and buckle, threatening critical infrastructure like roads, cities, and oil and gas pipelines across Siberia. And to top it off, vast stores of greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane – that used to be frozen in the ground – are being released, joining man-made emissions in the atmosphere.
Eruptions, conflict, and a 24/7 news cycle make it easy to get distracted, and depressed. But we need to keep our focus on the long term trends as well: not only the slow-rolling threat of our warming planet but also the growing supply of creative and sustained solutions.
Like crocuses poking through the snow, climate and energy innovations are coming. We remain determined and hopeful, and know that you will too.
Warmly,
The C-Change Conversations Team
Notable Quote
“Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world. The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?”
-Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO, Blackrock in his annual letter to investors
News of Concern
2021 clocked in as the sixth warmest year ever measured according to three reliable monitors of atmospheric temperatures (NOAA, NASA, and Berkeley Earth). That might sound like improvement – we missed the top five, after all. But scientists tell us there’s no good news here. To the contrary, the sixth hottest year ever was replete with a slew of countervailing record-setting events we’d rather not have seen.
For starters, ocean temperatures broke all time heat records for the third year in a row with grim consequences for today and tomorrow. Marine heat waves threaten ocean species, contribute to sea-level rise, and fuel stronger hurricanes and other extreme weather events.
Indeed, heavy weather was a hallmark of last year and 2021 witnessed a relentless series of climate disasters all across the globe. From last June’s asphalt-melting heat wave in America’s Pacific Northwest to triple digit temperatures in the Arctic, some two billion people experienced unprecedented local temperatures.
The financial pain of these and other records is being felt right here, right now. Last year ranked number two for the U.S. in the number of billion dollar climate disasters we endured.
In light of all this, it’s distressing to see that our CO2 emissions reversed years of incremental decline to surge back in 2021 toward pre-pandemic levels. A report by the Rhodium Group says the cause was freight transportation (primarily on roads) and coal-fired power generation, which jumped 17 per cent – the first increase in coal-fired power generation since 2014.
News of Hope
January, however, brought other cyclical reports, too – notably the annual letter to investors from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. The influential money manager has focused on climate change for quite some time. But this year he made one of the strongest free-market cases to date for private sector leadership in addressing rising global temperatures. His letter stressed that long-term returns rather than politics motivate his company’s investment agenda and asked others to consider the costs of lagging behind. “As your industry gets transformed by the energy transition,“ he wrote, “will you go the way of the dodo, or will you be a phoenix?”
It’s increasingly clear that Fink represents an emergent consensus among the most future-focused finance and insurance industry planners. In November we told you about the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero – a coalition of 450 financial institutions from 45 countries that are mobilizing assets to fight climate change. In January, a new consortium of 19 large banks, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Royal Bank of Canada, announced it is developing consistent frameworks and standards for climate risk management.
Other sectors are feeling the heat, too – though from more defensive postures. Public relations and advertising firms that have helped spread climate disinformation faced calls in an open letter from 450 scientists this month to drop their fossil fuel clients and stop greenwashing their businesses.
On the technology front, we’re intrigued with thinking about electric vehicles in a whole new light. A story in Vox reminds us that EVs are really just large batteries with wheels that can be used “to help prevent blackouts, stabilize the grid, and make solar and wind more reliable sources of energy.”
And one last bit of hopeful – and fun – news: designers around the world are creating windows, shingles, lampshades, tables, jackets, and even purses that can convert the sun’s energy into electricity. The world’s first Solar Biennale will showcase these and other recent inventions in Rotterdam, Netherlands this fall.
Solar energy! It’s not just for panels any more.
Test Your Climate Knowledge
Speaking of the sun, here’s a way to “warm up” no matter where you live. Take this 9-question quiz from our trusted friends at NASA.
December 2021
Dear Friends,
All of us at C-Change Conversations wish you a very happy, healthy holiday season.
What does C-Change Conversations want for 2022?
Peace, goodwill, and a world that finally gets serious about tackling climate change. So if by chance you cross paths with a vacationing member of Congress or the Administration, we hope you’ll hold their feet to the yule log over global warming!
As we saw at COP26, and recently within the U.S., forging smart policy around climate change is tough. But we’ve got to keep trying to find a way because nature doesn’t take a recess. To the contrary, there is growing evidence that global warming and its negative effects may be more apparent in 2022 than we might expect.
Here’s our monthly roundup of recent news that makes us both concerned and hopeful as we greet the new year. Be sure to read to the end and play a fun game, suitable for tweens and older.
Best,
The C-Change Conversations Team
Notable Quote
So ho-ho-ho and all that. Tis the season to be green. But in the words of Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs executive and a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England:
“We can’t get to net zero by flipping a green switch. We need to rewire our entire economies.”
News of Concern
Let’s start with the latest science which, fittingly for the holidays, comes from the Earth’s pole – albeit the Southern one.
A highly-regarded international research team announced this month that a cracking Antarctic ice shelf could disintegrate within 3-5 years, starting a chain reaction that would drop a glacier the size of Florida into the Southern Ocean and elevate sea levels as many as two to 10 feet. The increase will happen slowly, beginning in the next decade and accelerating over centuries, but it is a visible reminder we are setting something into motion that we can’t pull back and will change the contours of our coastlines forever.
What would 10 feet of sea level rise mean for the U.S.? Previous surveys have calculated that it would swamp more than 28 thousand square miles of land that is home to over 12 million Americans, including large parts of New York, New Orleans, Miami, Boston, and dozens of other major cities.
Rising sea levels, even at smaller levels, will create a very different world for our children and grandchildren. Climate Central’s ‘Picturing Our Future’ interactive graphics show projected sea level rise in iconic places like the Lincoln Memorial and the Sydney Opera House, demonstrating the likely outcomes if we stay on our current emissions trajectory to a 3℃ increase (5.4℉) by the end of this century or pivot to meet international goals of limiting the rise to 1.5℃ (2.7℉). The differences are stark, underscoring how every degree of increase matters.
The devastation would ripple far beyond the sunken acreage. For the first time, the annual report of the Financial Stability Oversight Council warned that climate change is an ’emerging threat’ to the U.S. financial system [paywall]. It spells out how the growing frequencies of fires, floods, and hurricanes will cascade through the entire economy, threatening the welfare of us all. And The Wall Street Journal became just the latest business-focused entity to warn of trillions of dollarsof stranded assets [paywall] due to rising tides of all kinds – elevated sea levels, to be sure, but also growing demands from investors, insurers, consumers, employees, and regulators for urgent action (see more below).
The drip, drip, drip of melting ice and bad news goes on. Another new study projects that mountainous U.S. states may be nearly snowless for multi-year stretches [paywall] after mid-century if warming doesn’t slow. The resulting loss of snowpack will profoundly disrupt the water supply of much of the American West. Despite all this – and despite all the net-zero pledges we told you about last month – the coal industry is set to experience record highs in 2022, according to the authoritative International Energy Agency. Coal, of course, is one of the dirtiest and most carbon intensive fossil fuels in our energy portfolio.
And, at the risk of overplaying the holiday theme, we’re dropping that coal right into the Christmas stockings of the younger generation – in more ways than one. Yet another new study concludes that children born today are statistically likely to experience seven times more extreme weather events [paywall] than their grandparents.
News of Hope
Is there a silver lining in any of this? Possibly a little. Those stranded assets that we mentioned above are expected to be partly caused by surging demand for change from stakeholders of all kinds. Morgan Stanley reports that interest in sustainable investing has reached new heights despite the economic uncertainty posed by COVID. A staggering 99% of millennials expressed interest in aligning their investment decisions with environmental values. And a new survey shows that 43% of oil and gas company workers want to leave the sector with more than half – 56% – saying they’re considering employment in renewable energy.
It seems they can hardly move fast enough. This month New York – America’s largest city – became the latest urban area to ban natural gas in new buildings. The move is part of a growing push by municipal governments to drive down carbon emissions.
And in other incremental but far-reaching developments, a new executive order is driving the federal government toward carbon neutrality [paywall] by phasing out gas-powered vehicles and using only renewables to fuel its buildings. Also this month, United Airlines made history by flying a passenger aircraft from Chicago to Washington, DC with 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) – renewable biomass or, effectively, recycled cooking oil.
These trends – on top of a range of other phenomena related to climate, economics, and politics – have added up to heavy headwinds for the gas industry. Whereas gas was until recently considered an important ‘bridge’ fuel to a net-zero energy sector, the impetus to move straight to renewables across the entire economy is growing fast.
Notable Game
C-Change urges all of us to call on our elected officials to act. But just how hard is it to get to net-zero? What are the political, financial, and environmental costs?
See for yourself in this fun game. If you win, you’ll go down in history as the most popular carbon-neutral leader of all time. Lose, and you choke on a cloud of smog.
Good luck!
