Top News of the Week, July 22 - 26

New York Times: Kamala Harris plans to protect the climate

As she runs for the White House, Ms. Harris is widely expected to try to protect the climate achievements of the Biden administration, a position that could resonate with voters during a summer of record heat, reports Lisa Friedman in 纽约时报 .

According to a May survey by the Pew Research Center, a clear majority of Americans, 65 percent, want the country to focus on increasing solar, wind and other renewable energy rather than fossil fuels.

Vice President Kamala Harris has for years made the environment a top concern, from prosecuting polluters as California’s attorney general to sponsoring the Green New Deal as a senator to casting the tiebreaking vote as vice president for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate investment in United States history.

Read more - Here’s Where Kamala Harris Stands on Climate - Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, July 22, 2024

Axios: Earth had its hottest two days in thousands of years

On Sunday and Monday, Earth saw its warmest two days on record globally since at least 1940, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service in Europe.

"We are now in truly uncharted territory, and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years," Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said.

The records, which exceeded the old milestone set last July, very likely stand as the hottest day in thousands of years, based on tree ring records, ice cores and other so-called paleoclimate data, reports Andrew Freedman of Axios .

Read more - Earth likely just had its hottest two days in thousands of years - Andrew Freedman, Axios, July 24, 2024

Latitude Media: Despite flagging EV sales, Tesla’s battery business is doing well

Tesla ’s latest earnings report, released this week, outlined the “difficult operating environment” for electric vehicles, underscored by a 7% year-over-year decrease in automotive revenue. Looking ahead, the EV giant predicted that this year’s vehicle volume growth rate may be “notably lower” than in 2023.?

But Maeve Allsup of Latitude Media finds that buried in the numbers was some good news for the company: Tesla saw record deployments of its Megapack and Powerwall storage offerings, totaling 9.4 GWh in the second quarter. That jump — 158% year over year — doubled the company’s revenue for that part of the business.?

According to Latitude Intelligence director Matt Casey , Tesla’s energy storage boost is essentially the result of the company “finding itself in the right place at the right time, given the market developments on the net metering and VPP fronts.”?

Read more - The quiet success of Tesla’s energy business - Maeve Allsup, Latitude Media, July 24, 2024

Scientific American: The Olympics are a sustainability nightmare

The Summer Olympics began in Paris against the backdrop of heat waves and drought throughout much of Southern Europe.

Jules Boykoff in Scientific American notes that the organizers of the games say that in light of climate change, they’ve made sustainability a centerpiece of their enterprise. Channeling their inner Greta Thunberg, they promise that the event will be “historic for the climate” and “revolutionary Games like we’ve never seen before.”

Yet in the city where global leaders signed a landmark agreement in 2015 to limit post-industrial global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we’re getting a recycled version of green capitalism that is oblivious in its incrementalism, vague with its methodology and loose with its accountability.?

It’s too late for Paris, but if the Olympic organizers truly want to be sustainable, the Games need to reduce their size, limit the number of tourists who travel from afar, thoroughly greenify their capacious supply chains and open up their eco-books for bona fide accountability, says Boykoff. Until then, the Olympics is a greenwash, a pale bit of lip service delivered at a time when climatological facts demand a systematic transformation in splendid Technicolor.

Read more - The Paris Olympics Are a Lesson in Greenwashing - Jules Boykoff, Scientific American, July 24, 2024