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- ⏳10-Second Climate
Climate & energy are changing everything.
This is the fastest way to keep up.
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What mattered this week
Wind & sun just paid £6bn of Britain’s gas bill
Paid? Yes. Wind and solar up 14%. Gas down a tenth, so £6bn of imports never happened.
Europe too? Wind and solar hit a third of EU electricity, more than fossils’ 29%. (Rosenow) That last 29% cost €100bn extra - this year. (AP)
Read more: Carbon Brief
Israel’s going to dim the sun
Who? Stardust Solutions: two ex-Israeli government nuclear physicists, $75m raised. A million tonnes of chalk-and-silica dust a year into the stratosphere, half a degree of cooling. $10bn a year. Annual top-ups needed. (CNN)
Under what rules? The only regulation is a UN moratorium (CIEL). Not sure these boys always follow the UN.
Catch? No one really knows if/how it’ll work. And most hate the idea.
Read more: The Conversation on scientists arguing
Ozempic is now affecting the climate
How? Take a GLP-1, grocery spend drops 5%, snacks 10%. (Cornell)
So what? Reduces beef (cattle), fizzy drinks (sugar), refined grains corn: Land. Morgan Stanley has 55m Americans on it by 2035, and the grain trade is already pencilling in less output. (Morgan Stanley; Milling and Grain)
Meaning? America’s best climate policy is… a jab.
One thing to really worry about
Look at the red line.
China’s forecasting 50-80% more rain. And talking about grain reserves. (Global Times; South China Morning Post)
The heat hits next year.
Nobody’s lived through one this big.
One thing to be optimistic about
“This thing is bad ass”
Adam Wingfield, an old-school trucker, drove lorries for thirty years and hated the Tesla Semi (an electric HGV).
Then he drove one. “I was totally wrong about almost everything. This thing is bad ass.” (FreightWaves)
The world’s already buying 90,000 electric trucks a quarter. Hydrogen trucks, the ones we were told would win, ain’t happening. (BNEF)
If you’ve got more time…
Soviet nuclear icebreaker “Lenin”, with SMR on board
Small nukes (SMRs) won’t work.
They’ve been tried for 70 years, and failed every time.
Paul Josephson has the history: SMRs: a short history of a nuclear pipe dream.
The army tried: a reactor under the Greenland ice, one at McMurdo the crews called Nukey Poo, a Soviet one on a tank.
The 700 that worked went into submarines, where cost is nobody’s problem.
Factory-built reactors have been promised since the 1950s. One factory got built, Russia’s Atommash. It was meant to make eight a year. By 2017: 14, ever.
NuScale, America’s flagship, was cancelled in 2023 before a spade went in: costs up 75% before construction.
Only two SMRs operate anywhere on earth.
Never worked, never will.
Given all this, the claims made for SMRs do not stand up to serious scrutiny. On the basis of no manufacturing experience and little operating experience, the industry claims that SMRs are more sustainable and more efficient than current NPPs. They remain, in fact, costly, with unique security problems, and with a large physical footprint.
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