What mattered this week

China’s oil demand properly dropping

Really? Down 9% or 1.5 million barrels a day, double what the IEA expected (E&E) 😱

Why? EV charging up 60%. Electric trucks: 30% half of new sales 🤯 (Reuters)

A blip? Nope. Sinopec, China’s biggest refiner: demand “very likely” peaked last year. IEA: the lost ground “will not be recovered”. (Bloomberg)

Read more: Carbon Brief

Sitting comfortably? Half your oil comes from or through a war zone ⛽

Half? Well, 43% - Iran, Russia, Libya, Venezuela or Kazakhstan (US News).

Meaning? Same lesson as Cuba: if you need your fuel daily by ship via people with guns, someone else owns your switch.

Read more: IEA Oil Market Report; ECIU on the £190m a week; Bloomberg on Thailand (£)

The world just gave up on 1.5C

Gave up? Well, using a weasel word: “overshoot”. Every new scenario crosses 1.5C this decade. Best case now 1.8C.

Make it worse? ETH Zurich checked the climate models against satellite heat data. The accurate ones run hot: 25% more warming per tonne. Today’s 2.6C track becomes 3.25C.

And the plan? The best idea: go through it, come back later with carbon removal. The problem is, that tech doesn’t currently work.

Read more: New Scientist; the ETH paper; UNEP, Limiting Overshoot

One BIG thing to worry about

Global warming is vague. Extreme heat in your own city isn’t. Read City of Sweat, by Ishan Tankha about living in Mumbai.

Humidity 90%. Pavement 53C, tin roofs 64C. 49C inside a one-room home with no air-con. Wet bulb (level humans can’t survive) within 7C.

Twenty million people, 0.12 sq m of green space each: the size of a sheet of baking paper.

How long are these cities liveable?

One thing to be optimistic about

Scotland’s first wind farm, Hagshaw Hill (1995), has been taken down (and new turbines put up).

Essentially zero went to landfill. Recycled or reused.

So much for “the blades get buried” 😀 (ScottishPower, via New Civil Engineer)

If you’ve got more time…

We’ve known about global warming for a very long time.

Just done nothing.

Jonathan Cook’s “Thatcher Warned in 1989 of a climate crisis. She did nothing. Nor will her successors…” is worth a read

• Theoretical concerns go back to 19th Century

• 1938: Guy Callendar measures the effect of CO2. It’s clear: Humans are warming the planet.

• 1958: Frank Capra (that one) makes a movie to tell audiences CO2 is “unwittingly changing the world’s climate” (his film is here).

• 1982: Exxon’s own scientists accurately forecast effects. Their 415ppm and 1C forecasts 2019 would be bang on. Exxon buries it.

• 1989: Thatcher warns the UN. Same year, Exxon, Texaco and BP quietly bankroll the Global Climate Coalition.

No leader lacked the facts.

They lacked the appetite to take on the money.

Dieter Helm said the same about Burnham this week: politicos “push the choices beyond the next election.”