Climate
AM Briefing: Another Win for Wind
Orsted’s Sunrise Wind farm, crazy cocoa prices, and hydropower trends
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create a Free Account
Unlock your free articles
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey , you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
Login
To continue reading login to your account.
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Orsted’s Sunrise Wind farm, crazy cocoa prices, and hydropower trends
America should eat more chicken. But how many is too many?
On insurance and extreme weather, Nissan’s new business plan, and paint that cools
On a $6 billion federal investment, solar geoengineering rules, and restoring nature
On Biden’s big legal challenge, the Ukraine war, and sea levels
On a startling new warning, drought in Vietnam, and Coke’s recycled bottles
Current conditions: Much of the Northeast will be cold, windy, with a chance of snow today • Rio de Janeiro remains under an excessive heat warning • It is 45 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Seoul, South Korea, where the MLB kicked off its regular season.
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization is “sounding the Red Alert to the world” on the urgency of the climate crisis after publishing its annual State of the Global Climate report yesterday. The report paints a dire picture of the state of the planet in 2023, with record high greenhouse gas levels, temperatures, and sea level rise. “Climate change is about much more than temperatures,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “What we witnessed in 2023, especially with the unprecedented ocean warmth, glacier retreat, and Antarctic sea ice loss, is cause for particular concern,” she said. A few key findings:
WMO
The report came on the same day that climatologist Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, penned a commentary in Nature explaining that the planet warmed 0.2 degrees Celsius more last year than climate scientists expected, and nobody knows why. “Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened,” Schmidt said. He suggests new regulations on sulfur emissions in the shipping industry could be playing a part, but said “if the anomaly does not stabilize by August ... then the world will be in uncharted territory.”
The CEO of Chinese EV maker BYD predicts electric and hybrid vehicle sales could make up 50% of auto sales in China within the next three months, Electrekreported. New energy vehicles (which include fully-electric cars as well as hybrids) hit a 48.2% share last week, “and if it continues at this rate, I estimate that the penetration could cross 50% in the next three months,” Wang Chuanfu said over the weekend. That’s a dramatic shortening of the time frame compared to a month ago, when Wang said the 50% mark could be reached by the end of the year. Last year, NEVs accounted for 35% of China’s auto sales. In the U.S., hybrid vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and fully electric vehicles rose to about 18% of total new light-duty vehicle sales in 2023.
The EPA is expected to announce its new tailpipe emissions rules for cars and light-duty trucks “as soon as” today, so be on the lookout for that. The rules have likely been softened to give automakers more time to ramp up electric vehicle sales, but still with the expectation that EVs will make up two-thirds of all new car sales by 2032 (last year EVs accounted for about one-tenth of sales). A similar standard for heavy-duty trucks is expected in the next few weeks, E&E News reported. Yesterday the Energy Department issued a new formula for calculating the fuel efficiency of electric vehicles “that’s meant to better reflect the real world and is likely to further drive sales of emission-free cars,” Bloombergreported.
A part of Vietnam known as the country’s “rice bowl” is threatened by encroaching salty sea water after an unusually long drought. The rice fields in the Mekong Delta feed the country’s 90 million people, but the lack of rain over the last month has left rice paddies and fruit farms parched. Meanwhile salt water has been creeping into the ground more as sea levels rise. One recent study finds the delta could see crop losses amounting to $3 billion a year because of salinization. Vietnam is the world’s fifth-largest rice producer, and the third largest exporter.
Starting this week, 20-ounce Coca-Cola beverages sold in the U.S. will come in plastic bottles made from 100% recycled plastic. The company claims this initiative (which excludes bottle caps and wrappers) will reduce 83 million pounds of plastic from its supply chain, but it hasn’t impressed environmentalists, CNN reported. One watchdog group, Break Free From Plastic, called the new design the “bare minimum.” “Plastic recycling is never going to make a dent in the plastic pollution crisis — plastic was never designed to be recycled, and it cannot be recycled indefinitely,” Emma Priestland from Break Free from Plastic told CNN. “Coca-Cola needs to urgently and dramatically reduce its use of plastic — full stop,” she said. In 2023 the group named Coca-Cola the world’s top plastic polluter for the sixth year in a row.
Coca-Cola Company
A new study finds that homes see on average a 1% reduction in value after a wind turbine is constructed within view, but that this drop in value diminishes as the years pass.
On air quality, Ford’s pivot, and solar geoengineering
Current conditions: Flash floods inundated parts of northern Iraq • Fire weather watches are in effect across several states, from Iowa to Maryland • Today marks the official start of spring.
A region’s air should contain no more than 5 micrograms per cubic meter of the dangerous pollutant known as PM2.5, according to World Health Organization recommendations. In Bangladesh last year, the average concentration was 79.9 micrograms, making it the most polluted country in the world. Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, and Burkina Faso also had alarmingly high levels of PM2.5, which comes primarily from burning fossil fuels and is linked to 4 million premature deaths every year. The findings come from Swiss company IQAir, which uses 30,000 air quality monitors to understand pollution levels across the world. “The number of countries and regions with air quality monitoring has steadily increased over the past six years,” the company said in a press release.
IQAir
IQAir
In 2023 just seven countries had air quality that met the WHO guidelines: Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland, Mauritius, and New Zealand. Average PM2.5 concentration across the U.S. was 9.1 micrograms, and Columbus, Ohio, was the most polluted major city in America.
A report from the Department of Energy projects geothermal energy deployment in the U.S. will grow dramatically by 2050, so long as developers can bring down costs. The DOE says geothermal could account for up to a third of the additional clean energy the country will need by 2050 to hit President Biden’s emissions targets and meet growing electricity demand, E&E Newsexplained. Geothermal energy harnesses the heat from beneath the Earth’s surface for around-the-clock clean energy. Innovations in drilling technology are expected to bring the price of geothermal power down from $100 per megawatt-hour to as low as $60 per megawatt-hour by 2030, which would put it roughly in line with other energy sources, the DOE said. And new geothermal sites will need to be tapped: The report said 18 states will likely have geothermal operations by 2050, up from seven now.
Ford is reportedly “pivoting” from big electric vehicles to smaller, cheaper EVs in an attempt to keep up with Chinese manufacturers like BYD. Bloombergreported the company has put together a team to work on a new electric platform for its small EVs, with the first vehicle slated to arrive in 2026 and cost around $25,000. “Plans for an electric three-row SUV have been delayed,” Bloomberg added.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
In case you were wondering how things are going at CERAWeek, the big oil and gas conference taking place in Houston this week, Reutersreported that “top oil executives took to the stage … to vocally oppose calls for a quick move away from fossil fuels.” “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas, and instead invest in them adequately,” said Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco. His remarks were reportedly met with applause and echoed by leaders from Shell, Petrobras, and Exxon Mobil. Petrobras CEO Jean Paul Prates warned rushing the energy transition will create a “crisis that we will never forget.” Meg O’Neill, CEO of Woodside Energy, said the debate had become too “emotional,” and claimed the market for clean fuel technologies is some decades away. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm pushed back, pointing to projections showing oil and gas peaking demand by 2030, and called the transition “an undeniable, inevitable, and necessary realignment of the world’s energy system.”
Researchers at Harvard have abandoned a plan to conduct what would have been one of the first solar geoengineering experiments in the stratosphere. Solar geoengineering – also known as “solar radiation management” – involves reflecting sunlight back into space by spraying aerosols into the stratosphere in an attempt to cool temperatures on Earth. It has long been a somewhat fringe idea among scientific circles – a sort of option of last resort – but interest has grown as global emissions climb and the Earth gets hotter. While most solar geoengineering research has happened in labs, Harvard’s Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) was going to launch a high-altitude balloon to release aerosols and observe their behavior. But the project was controversial from the start and encountered multiple delays. In the end its lead investigator walked away. “The platform developed for SCoPEx is expected to be repurposed for basic scientific research in the stratosphere unrelated to solar geoengineering,” the university said in a statement.
A new study suggests using virtual reality to depict worst-case environmental scenarios like mass coral bleaching events can help motivate people to support climate policies.
© 2024 Heatmap News Inc. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy
(Your California Privacy Rights) and Do Not Sell My Personal Information.
Heatmap News Inc. may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.