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Daily Briefing |

TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES

Briefing date 17.07.2020
Pandemic shows climate has never been treated as crisis, say scientists

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News.

Pandemic shows climate has never been treated as crisis, say scientists
The Guardian Read Article

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and some of the world’s leading scientists, campaigners, actors and musicians have written to EU leaders demanding they act immediately to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, reports the Guardian. The letter, which was sent ahead of a European council meeting starting today, says the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic shows that “the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, neither from the politicians, media, business nor finance. And the longer we keep pretending that we are on a reliable path to lower emissions and that the actions required to avoid a climate disaster are available within today’s system…the more precious time we will lose”. The letter also criticises the EU’s net-zero emissions target of 2050, warning that it “equals surrender”, notes the Guardian. The letter argues that the climate and ecological emergency can only be addressed by tackling the underlying “social and racial injustices and oppression that have laid the foundations of our modern world”. The Times reports that the letter also advocates for making “ecocide” – the mass damage of nature – “an international crime at the International Criminal Court”. Such a law could make company bosses and government ministers responsible for funding, permitting or causing severe environmental harm, the paper adds. Speaking to Reuters, Thunberg said: “We need to see [climate change] as, above all, an existential crisis. And as long as it’s not being treated as a crisis, we can have as many of these climate change negotiations and talks, conferences as possible. It won’t change a thing.” Thunberg also said that the world needed an economic overhaul to have a chance of tackling climate change and that countries should be prepared to tear up old deals and contracts to meet green targets, Reuters adds. She said: “So that means that if we are to stay below these targets, we have to make it possible to tear up and abandon valid contracts and deals. And that is not possible within today’s system…So, yes, then obviously we need to think differently. And, yes, we need to think outside the box.” A separate Reuters “factbox” piece carries more quotes from Thunberg.

Battery start-up selects Welsh site for UK’s first gigafactory
Financial Times Read Article

A start-up company has chosen a site in south Wales for what would be the UK’s first largescale “gigafactory” to supply batteries for electric vehicles, reports the Financial Times. It continues: “Britishvolt intends to start construction at the former RAF base at Bro Tathan, near Cardiff airport, early next year, after signing a memorandum of understanding this week with the Welsh government to work jointly on developing a ‘commercially viable’ project. It aims to open the manufacturing facility in 2023 alongside a new solar power farm.” Britishvolt’s chief executive Orral Nadjari says the company is seeking to raise funds for the £1.2bn factory through equity, debt and possibly government grants, reports the Guardian. It adds: “The UK government and car companies have called for the establishment of a gigafactory to ensure the sector holds on to the 168,000 manufacturing jobs as the global automotive industry moves towards electric cars. However, no company before Britishvolt has chosen the UK to build lithium-ion batteries on a large scale.”

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that German carmaker BMW has signed a €2bn contract with the Swedish battery cell manufacturer Northvolt, “to secure supplies for its upcoming electric models as competition for core components heats up”. The Scandinavian company, which was founded by two former Tesla executives, will make the cells using only renewable energy at a new facility in the north of Sweden, adds CityAM. In the Daily Telegraph, motoring correspondent Andrew English criticises the UK government for focusing on electric vehicles at the expense of hydrogen power: “So, while the rest of the world gears up for hydrogen as well as battery-electric, our government and its messianic advisors are, for the most part, chanting ‘La, la, la’ with their fingers in their ears.”

Global recovery unlikely to be v-shaped, says Shell chief
Reuters Read Article

Royal Dutch Shell’s chief executive Ben van Beurden has warned that the global economy will not achieve a v-shaped recovery after the coronavirus pandemic, which will curtail oil and gas demand for years, reports Reuters. Van Beurden said: “Energy demand, and certainty mobility demand, will be lower even when this crisis is more or less behind us. Will it mean that it will never recover? It is probably too early to say, but it will have a permanent knock for years.“ He added that the rapid growth in consumption of natural gas and liquefied natural gas in recent years has also been stalled by the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that oil prices steadied yesterday, “weighed down by an agreement from OPEC+ to ease record supply curbs, but buoyed by tightening global inventories as economic activity picks up”. It continues: “The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, known as OPEC+, agreed on Wednesday to scale back oil production cuts from August. They will reduce their cuts to 7.7m barrels per day through December from the 9.7m bpd cuts in place since May.” Axios looks the “repercussions for the battered US oil industry”. The Financial Times “energy source” column warns that “something does not add up” about the OPEC+ decision. It says: “Looking beneath yesterday’s headlines, it seems increasingly plausible that having brought the market to balance so quickly, OPEC+’s cuts will end far sooner than its current long-term plan envisages.” In his Reuters column, market analysis John Kemp says “US refiners and the OPEC+ group of oil producers are both walking a tightrope, trying to raise output while remaining alert to the downside threat to consumption from further economic shutdowns”. Reuters also reports that the Russian energy minister says he expects global oil demand to recover significantly in August and improve to 10% below the levels seen prior to the coronavirus crisis.

In other oil-and-gas news, the Financial Times reports that California Resources Corp, the state’s biggest oil-and-gas producer, has filed for bankruptcy, “becoming the latest US energy group to buckle under a crash in crude prices triggered by the coronavirus pandemic”. And the FT also reports that French oil major Total has secured $15bn in financing to develop liquefied natural gas in Mozambique, “with banks signing up to the biggest private debt-raising in African history despite the pandemic and turmoil in oil markets”. Reuters reports that a federal judge in California has blocked a rollback by the Trump administration of a rule on cutting methane emissions from oil and gas operations on federal and tribal lands. Lastly, the New York Times has an in-depth report on how “Iraq is the rare country that imports gas but also burns natural gas from oil wells into the air”. The “wasted gas is enough to power three million homes”, the paper says, and “burning it is making people sick”.

Summers could become 'too hot for humans'
BBC News Read Article

Millions of people around the world could be exposed to dangerous levels of heat stress under future climate change, reports BBC News. It continues: “Many live in developing countries, and do jobs that expose them to potentially life threatening conditions. These include being out in the open on farms and building sites or indoors in factories and hospitals. Global warming will increase the chances of summer conditions that may be ‘too hot for humans’ to work in.” The broadcaster speaks to doctors in hospitals in Singapore and India, where the heat and humidity are already hitting levels that the US military would say “strenuous training should stop because the risk becomes ‘extreme’”. As global temperatures rise, “more intense humidity is likely as well which means more people will be exposed to more days with that hazardous combination of heat and moisture”, BBC News says.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports that climate-change resilient blackcurrants have been harvested in the UK for the first time, after they were bred to adapt to warmer temperatures. It adds: “Blackcurrants require a ‘winter chill’ in order to bear fruit in the summertime, in a process known as vernalisation, and are therefore particularly susceptible to the UK’s warming winters.” MailOnline also has the story.

Princess Anne blasts Prince Charles's views on climate change
MailOnline Read Article

An interview to mark Princess Anne’s 70th birthday next month has revealed she holds “wildly differing opinions” from Prince Charles on environmental issues, reports MailOnline. “Enthusing about genetically modified crops and dismissing the effects of climate change and veganism”, Princess Anne joked that her conversations with her brother are by necessity “short”, the outlet adds. Speaking to Women’s Weekly magazine, Anne said she would not “go down the climate change route” when looking for causes of Australia’s devastating bushfires, reports the Press Association. She said: “I think the way people manage ground is part of the discussion…Climate changes all the time. It has done so throughout the globe’s history, so there’s nothing new under the sun. Somehow, we’ve got to learn that our kind of life is changing. We’ve got to remember to respect what’s out there and how to live with it.” [As Carbon Brief’s recent in-depth article on wildfires explains, climate change made the conditions for Australia’s unprecedented 2019-20 bushfires at least 30% more likely. And Carbon Brief analysis also shows why scientists know that humans are causing 100% of observed warming.] The Daily Express also has the story, while an accompanying editorial says that the revelation that Anne disagrees with Charles on climate change “is a refreshing example of a family that can talk about issues and exchange opinions in a healthy way”.

Comment.

Are we overreacting on climate change?
Joseph E Stiglitz, The New York Times Read Article

In a piece for the New York Times, Joseph Stiglitz – Nobel laureate in economics, university professor at Columbia University and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute – reviews the new book from climate sceptic Bjorn Lomborg. The central argument of “False Alarm”, explains Stiglitz, is that “activists have been sounding a false alarm about the dangers of climate change. If we listen to them, Lomborg says, we will waste trillions of dollars, achieve little and the poor will suffer the most”. Lomborg “draws heavily on the work of William Nordhaus of Yale University”, says Stiglitz, whose work suggests that the cost of meeting the 1.5C or 2C warming limits would be “enormous”. Stiglitz disagrees, noting that his own work with Lord Nicholas Stern “concluded that those goals could be achieved at a moderate price”. Stiglitz outlines some of the “mistakes” in Lomborg and Nordhaus’s methods, including “underestimation of the damage associated with climate change” and “not taking due account of risk”. Stiglitz says he “typically decline[s] to review books that deserve to be panned”, but he “felt compelled to forgo this policy”. He concludes: “Written with an aim to convert anyone worried about the dangers of climate change, Lomborg’s work would be downright dangerous were it to succeed in persuading anyone that there was merit in its arguments. This book proves the aphorism that a little knowledge is dangerous. It’s nominally about air pollution. It’s really about mind pollution.”

China's v-shaped rebound is built on Leninist industrial excess and ecological vandalism
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Daily Telegraph Read Article

“China’s return to its worst industrial habits is an environmental disaster,” writes the Daily Telegraph’s international business editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, warning that “China’s roaring  recovery must be taken with heapings of salt”. He continues: “Global Energy Monitor says China is developing 250 gigawatts of new coal-fired plants – twice the entire existing coal power capacity of the EU. It has proposed another 41GW this year and has relaxed its ‘traffic light’ system for limiting permits.” The excuse is that the latest plants will displace dirtier facilities, but “this technology curbs local air pollution much more than carbon emissions”, Evans-Pritchard says, adding: “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that China is thumbing its nose at the world and is giving up any serious effort to wean the economy off coal, still generating two-thirds of the country’s power.” One reason that China clings to coal is that “its grand plan for 400 nuclear plants has run aground”, he says: “Japan’s Fukushima meltdown led to a Chinese moratorium on new reactors (to assuage public opinion). This has since been lifted, but safety standards are tougher and that has changed the cost structure. The reality is that large nuclear plants are no longer viable without exorbitant subsidies, disguised or otherwise. Plans by China’s CGN [China General Nuclear Power Group] to build a reactor in Essex do not make any commercial sense unless British consumers are fleeced to pay for it.” Renewables offer an alternative, explains Evans-Pritchard: “Offshore wind farms will be generating power at less than half of nuclear cost by the mid-2020s, and they will come on stream rapidly, with negligible safety risk. The intermittency problem of renewables will be solved by cheap energy storage for weeks at a time long before CGN’s Bradwell project ever produces a single volt.”

Science.

Response of surface shortwave cloud radiative effect to greenhouse gases and aerosols and its impact on summer maximum temperature
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Read Article

Shortwave cloud radiative effects (SWCRE) have been reported to play an important role in influencing the Earth’s energy budget and temperature extremes. This study uses a set of global climate models to examine the SWCRE responses to CO2, black carbon (BC) aerosols, and sulphate aerosols in the summer over the northern hemisphere. They found that CO2 causes positive SWCRE changes over most of the northern hemisphere, and BC causes similar positive responses over North America, Europe, and eastern China but negative SWCRE over India and tropical Africa. When normalised by effective radiative forcing, the SWCRE from BC is roughly three-to-five times larger than that from CO2. The SWCRE response to sulphate aerosols, however, is negligible compared to that for CO2 and BC. Mean daily maximum temperature (Tmax) increases by around 0.15C per watt per square meter increase in local SWCRE. Overall, the contribution of SWCRE change to summer mean Tmax changes was 10 %–30 % under CO2 forcing and 30 %–50 % under BC forcing, varying by region, which can have important implications for extreme climatic events and socioeconomic activities.

Pervasive warming bias in CMIP6 tropospheric layers
Earth and Space Science Read Article

It has long been known that previous generations of climate models exhibit excessive warming rates in the tropical troposphere. The paper provides an updated comparison with CMIP6 climate models. They find that 38 CMIP6 models over the 1979‐2014 period warmed faster than observations in the lower and mid‐troposphere, in the tropics and globally. On average, and in most individual cases, the trend difference is significant.

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