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- ⏳Butterflies; Pepsi; 485 million years
⏳Butterflies; Pepsi; 485 million years
Essential energy & climate intelligence
Max Aitken
September 22, 2024
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What you need to know
Losing half your butterflies in a year - more than just carelessness
What? UK’s annual Big Butterfly Count records lowest numbers, biggest annual drop
Our challenge? If a butterfly doesn’t flap its wings, does anyone notice?
Read more: Butterfly Conservation; Country Life
The wages of sin: Carbon pricing will kill you
What does it cost? A recent US Government paper reckons $1089/t. UK price today: $53/t.
Does it matter to me? Carbon pricing will come, be ready
Why so much? Warming has a real world impact: 12% GDP drop globally for each 1°C.
Read more: EPA: Social Cost of Carbon
AI already starting a nuclear war
What? AI is so power-hungry Big Tech is fighting for nuclear plants.
In the blue corner: Microsoft inked a 20-year/$1.6bn deal to restart the Three Mile Island nuke (yes, that one) for an AI datacentre.
In the red corner: Oracle’s Larry Ellison says they are building an 800MW AI facility with three nuclear reactors next to it 🤯.
Read more: Microsoft (Reuters); Oracle (DataCentreDynamics)
One thing to worry about
Did you ever visit the Mer de Glace in Chamonix when you were younger? You were lucky. Since 1990, the glacier level has dropped 130m.
One thing to be optimistic about
Pepsi has been running 89 Tesla electric trucks for over a year.
And? They work. Drivers passionate, won’t go back to diesel (Electrek). Great case study from the IAA conference here.
Tesla plan to produce 50,000/year from 2026. IT’S ON.
If you’ve got more time, read this…
Doubters say ‘the climate has always varied’. True.
But how much? How fast? When? What were the consequences?
This week, Science published an analysis of the last 485 million years (!).
Bill McKibben (Substack) has takeaways to frighten you:
Human civilisation developed with average temps around 15°C
The average over the past 500m years was 22°C, reaching 36°C max
Carbon dioxide has always driven the changes
Our current path could see 8°C of warming - back to 22/23°C - which is a civilisation ender
Earth has never warmed as fast as right now
“Now, you could look at those numbers and say: well, the earth has been hotter before, so life won’t be wiped out.
And that’s true—there’s probably no way to wipe out life… But these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced
They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations.”
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