The Macrocosm Climate News Update is a curated weekly review of important news about the climate, renewable energy technology, and policy.
Format Update
This is early days here at Macrocosm Climate Report and I’m experimenting a bit with the format. I’m going to split out a weekly curated news update as a separate regular feature, and do more journalistic/essay style writing separately.
Any feedback on content or format is highly encouraged - please share any thoughts you have in the comments below! My goal here is to be useful to you, so please let me know.
Climate
UK’s Drax Power cutting old-growth lumber for “renewable” firewood
A few weeks ago we looked at a disturbing in-depth New York Times article on protected forests in Central Europe that are being heavily logged for firewood. In a perverse twist, these trees and the ovens that burn them are being subsidized by EU renewable energy incentives, which were not created with this use in mind, but there you go. We need to be very careful with the exact incentives we set up.
Now the BBC reports that the UK power firm Drax is doing something similar in Canada - cutting down rare, old-growth forests for firewood, subsidized by the British government’s renewable energy provisions. Several initial claims Drax made to the BBC were misleading or false, such as when Drax claimed it “had not cut down the forests itself and said it transferred the logging licences to other companies.” Further investigation by BBC Panorama confirmed that Drax still holds the relevant license.
Bitcoin causes significant environmental damage relative to its value
We recently had cause to celebrate when Ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, moved to a proof-of-stake model and immediately lowered its enormous energy usage by more than 99%. Unfortunately, the same is not true of the world’s largest and best-known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, which continues consuming more electricity for technically-unnecessary work than many medium-sized countries. It’s all to do with creating artificial scarcity for the currency, and is not necessary for creating the blockchain ledger.
A recent study has found that the environmental harm of Bitcoin relative to its value is on the order of gold mining. According to The Guardian, “the climate damage of producing the digital currency has averaged 35% of its market value over the past five years, peaking at 82% in 2020.”
One might almost ask if it’s worth the cost, but hey, how else are hackers going to get their ransomware payments? Also smart contracts or something.
Our days of extreme drought are coming to a middle
According to a new Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center report, chances of extreme drought in the northern hemisphere are now twenty times greater than they were a century ago. From the New York Times coverage:
For the Northern Hemisphere region, the scientists found that, because the planet has already warmed by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 Celsius) since the late 1800s, this summer’s low moisture levels in the first few feet below the soil’s surface, where many plants’ roots draw water, had been at least 20 times as likely to occur compared with a hypothetical world with no burning of fossil fuels.
In related news, the last three years in California have been the driest on record and the drought shows no signs of abating. Heavy rains in October reportedly did little to relieve pressure, as they do not replenish the water table as effectively as mild rains, but tend to cause run-off and increased erosion instead.
The New York Times recently ran a long article on the changing shape of the monsoon and described some regional adaptations, where I learned that some Indian farmers are digging trenches as a response to the issue of water absorption, to give the water more time to be absorbed by the ground before it runs off - I would think this could be tried in California as well.
Methane flaring may not be as effective as previously believed
Oil extraction often produces methane gas as an unwanted side product. In a common practice called “flaring,” the excess gas is burned off so it can’t escape into the atmosphere - this is why you sometimes see oil refineries with flame jets. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas roughly 80 times the strength of CO2 for the first 20 years.
It is widely claimed that flaring is 98% effective at neutralizing the gas. However, that figure has never been empirically validated, until Genevieve Plant and other researchers measured the efficiency of actual gas flaring at major oil sites in the United States. Their findings, recently published in Science, found the effectiveness to be closer to 91%. Talking to co-author Eric Cort of the University of Michigan, Ars Technica reports that if we can actually get to 98% percent combustion figure, “the reduction in emissions could mean as much as removing 2.9 million cars from the road every year.”
Renewable Energy and Technology
Germany’s largest power firm moves to dump coal by 2030
RWE, Germany’s largest energy utility, has reached an agreement with the government to move its timeline for phasing out coal from its previous target of 2038 up to 2030. This is good news, in part because RWE is the only German company engaged in lignite coal mining in the populous state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Lignite coal produces more CO2 and sulfur when burned than other forms of coal, and is considered particularly harmful.
RWE has been in the crosshairs of environmental activists recently for restarting three brown coal power plants as a stop-gap measure intended to help get Germany through the winter’s looming energy crisis.
Deutsche Welle: Germany's largest power producer to ditch coal by 2030
Climate scientists leaving academia for startups
In an article that’s making some waves in climate circles, Protocol reports on an apparent exodus of many researchers, who are leaving the ivory tower of academia for climate startups and renewable technology firms, which some perceive to be the frontline of climate action. Laura Lammers, who left a solid position at the University of California, Berkeley, told Protocol “In academia, you have the luxury of asking a question for a decade. We don’t have the luxury to sit around for a decade. We need to be implementing solutions.”
Politics and Policy
Should the US be rebuilding devastated housing in hurricane zones?
Hurricane Ian caused tens of billions of dollars and a tragic loss of dozens of lives, and we have to face the painful fact that the increased frequency of high-intensity hurricanes is not likely to go away any time soon. This has led some to raise questions about how, or if, we should rebuild homes and communities devastated by storms in regions where they are likely to recur.
New York Times (Opinion): To Save America’s Coasts, Don’t Always Rebuild Them
New York Times: Three Ways to Build Back Smarter After Hurricane Ian
Washington Post: More Americans are moving into hurricane zones even as climate risks mount
Brazil’s election: a matter of life and death
The rate of deforestation in Brazil’s rainforests, legal and otherwise, has more than doubled during the tenure of President Jair Bolsonaro, surging to more than 13,000 square kilometers in 2021 alone. Conservationists around the world are watching the national election unfolding in Brazil with bated breath as Bolsonaro heads into a tight runoff with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Manuela Andreoni wrote a moving and relevant piece for the Climate Forward newsletter of the New York Times (unfortunately paywalled) titled Where defending nature can be deadly. Andreoni tells the harrowing story of booming cooperation between drug cartels and illegal mining operations in the rainforests of Brazil:
One of the main reasons is that, in recent years, the Amazon has become an important drug route…. The cartels running these routes are professional, heavily armed and extremely violent.
The areas they need to dominate to make these routes work overlap with regions where illegal logging, mining, land-grabbing and other environmental crimes are rampant. Officials say they think overlapping interests are generating alliances between these different criminal groups.
A tragic part of this story is the deaths last year of the journalist Dom Philips and indigenous expert Bruon Pereira, who were killed in a campaign that was persuasively described by Philips’s colleagues as a war against nature.
New York mandates zero-emissions vehicles in 2035
Following California’s recent announcement that the state would be banning the sale of new internal-combustion engine cars beginning in 2035, the state of New York has followed suit, announcing that all new cars sold that same year must be emissions-free.
Don’t believe the hype
Finally, in two topically-related stories about greenwashing, we get a reminder that you have to look carefully at what people and organizations actually do, not just what they say. This is increasingly true as consumers are going green in record numbers. This incentivizes companies and institutions to claim green credentials, whether they’re deserved or not.
First, the Trump-appointed head of the World Bank David Malpass is under more climate pressure this week after Oxfam released a study showing that 40% of the World Bank’s claimed spending on the climate crisis cannot be independently verified. Just last week, Malpass came under heavy fire when he refused to publicly affirm the settled science on climate change.
The Guardian: World Bank criticised over climate crisis spending
Second, the Sierra Club released a report demonstrating that many utility companies are long on talk but short on actual plans when it comes to phasing out coal. From the report’s key findings:
We assigned a score to each utility based on its plans to retire coal, build new clean energy, and not build new gas plants. The aggregate score for all companies studied this year was 21 out of 100 - or a D - up just 4 points from the previous study.
For parent companies with a climate pledge, the aggregate score in our analysis was 23 out of 100, only 2 points higher than the overall aggregate score. This suggests that most utilities’ corporate pledges are not translating into action.
Related to this last piece, the German environmental organization Urgewald reports on nearly 500 companies globally that are still developing new coal assets, even though coal is the most polluting major energy source by far.
Join the conversation!
Any thoughts about this week’s newsletter? Something you’d like to add, or that you disagreed with? Something you’d like to see more or less of, going forward? Please let us all know in the comments below! Managing climate change is first and foremost a conversation.