Spooky AF (As Faust) Quick Cuts Edition.
Welcome back to?Wicked Problems. The climate tech newsletter and show some people are saying is almost as scary as seeing?Siemens Energy?shares down 39%?after seeking a?German government?bailout for its wind division, or the?Faustian aerosols bargain that?James Hansen’s pre-print?says we’re about to pay for.
The veil between this world and the next grows thin in this week. And in this liminal space, time itself becomes inchoate - at least for part of that week when the clocks have gone back here but not yet in New York. Which generally results in at least three messed up calendar invites.
Some #climatetech things for reading, watching, and listening:
1. Net Zero Heroes
No, not the?Centrica?campaign. Just. Just don’t. We’re trying to bring up the mood. We mean the seasonal gongs to pierce the gloom.?
Ahead of Tuesday’s?Net Zero Festival?in London,?James Murray's BusinessGreen released its?Net Zero Pioneers?- 50 companies in #carbonremoval, retail and CPG, energy, finance, transport, industry, built environment, energy, and food and ag
Congrats to BeZero Carbon , Imerys British Lithium Limited , Carbon Clean , CCm Technologies , GRIDSERVE , Highview Power , Ivy Farm Technologies , Kensa Group , Octopus Energy , Olio ? Share More, Waste Less , Naked Energy Ltd , Notpla , SatVu , Sustainable Ventures , UNDO , and Zedify Cambridge and everyone else who made the list.
Bloomberg last week also hailed 25 top UK startups to watch, including NatureMetrics , DEScycle , and BigSis (Insect control) .
And there's still two days to get your vote in for Mike Butcher ?? 's The Europas - in the Sustainability/Climate Tech category there's a strong field including some mentioned above, Thallo , and Concrete4Change .
2. It’s So, So Much Worse Than You Think: James Hansen
Way back in 1989,?NASA’s?James Hansen?was among the first to break through to the mainstream with warnings about global warming - which but for?Al Gore’s intervention might have been suppressed. You will hear his name a lot this coming week.?Oxford Open Climate Change?is due to publish the peer-reviewed version of Hansen’s latest paper,?Global Warming in the Pipeline?(pre-print). You might want to sit down.?
领英推è
tl;dr -
- climate models don’t properly account for the cooling effect of aerosols - which increase sunlight reflected back into space
- we’re taking them out of emissions
- that plus paleoclimate data means, per Hansen et al, that the?IPCC?and?IEAmodels and narratives showing tracks to 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees are nonsense and that’s why we’re seeing more extreme weather, ocean acidity, polar heating, etc decades faster than the models predicted
- that’s why Hansen is?all-in for carbon removal?and, if necessary, geoengineering
- holy shit
3. Michael Barnard’s Razor
The simplest climate solution is usually electrification. We caught up with?Forbes?and?Cleantechnica?author and climate futurist Michael Barnard . It’s a wild hour in which Barnard slices up MPs with the STEM literacy of newts, “bafflegabâ€, and names names from?Equinor?to?Exxon?to his grudging approval of?Fatih Birol’s slow, slow progress steering the?IEA. And, maybe surprisingly, why he thinks the?COP?process is still worth it.
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Django, Wicked Problems Chief Canine Officer and SpokesFrenchie, did get up to make sure we sent this for you.