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⏳Polluters pay; Rain & Drought; Giving up booze
Farm insurance; US progress; Polluters Pay
Max Aitken
August 25, 2024
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What you need to know
Farm insurance to skyrocket, thanks climate
Why this matters? Other insurances up… now it’s crop insurance for farmers. As always, insurance see it before anything else.
Reason? Increased rainfall devastated crop yields in US, UK, Europe this year.
Read more: Inside Climate
A farm in Iowa earlier this year
US progress: 30% total power is clean; solar moving to second place behind gas
Great news? 97% new power generation is carbon-free. Solar growing so fast will be second largest source of power by 2027.
All good? No. US power sector emissions are up 1% this year due to economic growth and AI.
Read more: Canary Media; ReNews
Research: Polluting companies pay more for debt
Why this matters? New ECB research shows banks are charging polluters more interest.
Your challenge? Pay to go green; or just pay.
Read more: Net Zero Investor; ECB working paper
One thing to worry about
Water, water… not everywhere. Rain is in the wrong places: more droughts AND more floods.
Two maps to compare:
Droughts are increasing. Nearly 8% of the planet experienced extreme drought in 2023. (NOAA)
In other places, there’s too much rain Why? 1°C of warming means 7% more atmospheric water vapour. (X/ClimateReanalyzer)
Brown is increased drought (2023 compared to 1901-2023)
New record for drought (Source: NOAA)
Green and blue is excess rain water in the atmosphere (2024 compared to 1951-1980):
And what does all this mean? Look at last week (give it 15 seconds)
One thing to be optimistic about
Something extraordinary in Pakistan. Grid demand down, but the energy-intensive (manufacturing) economy expanded.
What’s going on? Off-grid solar. An incredible 13GW of solar imported so far this year 🤯. Officials say only <1GW was grid connected. (Bloomberg)
This is a decentralised energy revolution.
If you’ve got more time, read this…
Remember this word: Overshoot. Shoving too much carbon in the air and hoping someone else will bring it down again.
The Conversation published this warning:
The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.
This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.
We’re already past 1.5°C. Let’s not leave the next generation to clean up our mess.
An Australian man put the idea in context:
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