In 2017, Dr. Ed Maibach began delivering presentations on communicating the costs of climate change. The most lasting information has been this set of statementsOK so I'm actually lying a bit. The actual presentation says - Experts agree: human-caused climate change is happening. - It's real. - It's us (human-caused). - It's bad (for people). - It's solvable. If people have these five core beliefs, they will also be more likely to support a societal response to climate change and advocate for political and consumer changes. But these five statements were fairly quickly massaged into the five statements below. that experts can easily share when talking about the science of climate change:
Thing is, there have been so many books and articles and movies written and recorded emphasizing the first four. Every IPCC report begins with an assessment of the physical science of climate change.This is Working Group I. Then, there is an assessment of the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change and options for adapting to it.This is Working Group II. It wasn't until the third IPCC assessment report in 2001 that the third section assessed any opportunities to limit climate change.This is Working Group III.
As I heard this message repeated time and again I came to wonder, Where is the hope? Soon, scientists even started to opine Repeatedly saying how bad things are and are going to be isn't prompting action. We have to change our message. Hope does not come absent of realism. Hope is a projection of what a future might look like. In climate change terms, hope is every departure from a 2010 or 2015 "business as usual" or otherwise "worst-case" scenario.
So, I'm aiming to aggregate articles and other sources I happen to see that show any evidence of hope.
Articles of Hope
4 March 2024 - EU's Nature Restoration Law - The European Environmental Agency says 80% of Europe's habitats are in poor shape. These habitats include forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, and coral beds. This law requires EU states to restore at least 30% of these habitats to a "good" condition designation by 2030, 60% by 2040, and 90% by 2050. How this will be accomplished alongside built infrastructure, farming, and industry remains to be seen, but the initial heart seems to be in a good place.
14 February 2024 - Major solar panel recycling deal announced in the US - You live in the US and your solar panels are damaged. One in three of solar panels are built by Qcells, a solar module manufacturer based in South Korea. The company has partnered with Solarcycle to extract 95% of the materials that give solar panels their monetary value - aluminium, silver, copper, silicon, and low-iron glass. Solar panel recycling is going well in general, and a big company with an agreement like this should continue the momentum.
13 February 2024 - Inside the EU's new directive granting consumers a "right to repair" their products - The European Union is working on a directive for its countries to make it easier to simply repair products than be forced to throw them away and fully replace them. It still needs to be fully adopted, but the direction and intention is good. It forces manufacturers to repair their damaged products for at least a reasonable price. This should reduce waste, reduce the need to mine for new raw materials, and reduce the need to transport new products.
8 February 2024 - I see some reasons for cautious climate hope. - This BlueSky thread from climate scientist Zeke Hausfather discusses how the flatlining of carbon dioxide emissions over the last decade has helped reduce our future from a modeled 4.7 degrees Celsius to 2.6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial average. Zeke notes we should continue to encourage mitigation policies worldwide, but it's good to see a potential rapid energy transition in our future rather than the darkest possible climate future being the only option.
7 January 2024 - World EV Sales Now Equal 19% Of World Auto Sales - Clean Technica. The number of worldwide brand new plugin vehicles purchased in November 2023 was 1,385,000. This is a new record for monthly worldwide new plugin vehicle sales. The article says sales of all car types are recovering still from the COVID era, yet the share of plugin vehicles over classic internal combustion engines (ICE) is growing. Full electric vehicle sales have grown 25% year over year, and plugin hybrids sales have grown 40% year over year. Together, plugins made up 19% of all new vehicles sold this month. Most of this is sales in China, even of top-selling Tesla models Y and S, but I'm still calling that a good thing. The next most popular EV models are the Volkswagon ID.4, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Audi Q4 e-tron, Kia EV6, BMW i4, and Skoda Enyaq.
4 January 2024 - Massachusetts Switches On Its First Large Offshore Wind Farm - New York Times. It's the US's second large offshore project to actually start producing electricity. OK, so only the first turbines are up and running right now, but the plan is for 62 turbines and 800 megawatts of capacity. The first such project to get going is off the coast of New York and itself only got going the previous month. It's a smaller project at 132 megwatts of capacity. The combined 932 MW pales in comparison to Europe's already installed 32,000 megawatts of capacity from offshore wind, but since recent inflation has killed projects near MA, CT, NY, and NJ, anything getting off the ground is good. While solar is taking off, installing wind turbines has not been as smooth sailing.
9 December 2023 - Tiny Electric Vehicles Pack a Bigger Climate Punch Than Cars - New York Times. We need to curb the amount of carbon from transportation, which accounts for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, we mostly think of 4-wheel cars and the trucking delivery dominating ground transportation. But for much of the world, the shift of transportation to electric vehicles is mostly about their 2-wheel and 3-wheel vehicles. Oil demand has reduced by 1.8 million barrels per day because of vehicle electrification, with 1.08 million barrels (or 60%) coming from the electrification of 2 and 3-wheel vehicles. There are of course details and nuances, and those are in the article.
29 November 2023 - Michigan installed a wireless charging roadway - State of Michigan. I haven't seen an article from what I'd call a "big, primary news organization," but Michigan would like to tell you all about its new road. The Michigan Department of Transportation tasked private company Electreon to create a road with "copper coils installed below the road surface" that can inductively charge electric vehicles who have receivers installed. The idea is your car's battery is charged while driving over the road. Kinda sounds like "qi charging" technology for phones, though the whole "installed receiver" part seems light on details right now. There's language about electricity only being provided to "approved receivers" and only to "vehicles that require it." Let's just say it's still being tested, but the idea has been out there for some time and charging while driving would be a neat feature that gas-powered vehicles can't do.
18 November 2023 - I'm a Climate Scientist. I'm Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore. - Dr. Kate Marvel, Project Drawdown, Fifth National Climate Assessment. I initially ignored this article thinking the title was pointing to an author in dispair. Instead, the author is hopeful, and is pointing toward the nation's premiere climate status publication as the source document of hope. Don't get it wrong, climate change is still a major issue. But we are no longer in a "business as usual" status, and there's hope our collective momentum will increasingly change our future away from the most disasterous of scenarios.
28 October 2023 - Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon: Second Edition - Jenny Chase, BloombergNEF, Switzerland. In a BlueSky thread, Jenny states Solar is the cheapest source of bulk electricity in many countries, and the quickest to deploy, and now you couldn't stop it being built if you wanted to. The limits to PV build in most places are grid access, permitting, and sometimes installation labour. We don't need a solar technology breakthrough. Today, solar developers just need a grid connection and permission to sell electricity, and then they'll be off building solar plants whether it's a good idea or not. The price of solar modules per Watt generated continues to drop and solar efficiency in 2023 is ~22.3%, up from 15.4% in 2012. Prices to install solar in the US is higher because we are using tariffs to favor buying from US solar manufacturers. Jenny Chase does say we need to be building more wind, though. We can use batteries to store solar energy from day to day, but not season to season. But the wind blows at night and in cloudy winters. The problem is business economics prioritizes for the cheapest energy sector development (solar!) and not for maximmizing clean power all the time ASAP. Finally, we should electrify transportation and not worry about biofuels. Dan Lashof is quoted saying, It would take about 300 acres of farmland to run a petrol car on corn ethanol, vs an electric car running on about one acre of PV.
26 October 2023 - Energy transition will require substantially less mining than the current fossil system - Joey Nijnens et al. Overall mining actually decreases substantially even when just accounting for coal. The mass of minerals for energy transition technologies is a fraction of the mass of coal produced in the current fossil-dominated energy system.
26 October 2023 - The world has made real progress in bending down the curve of future emissions. A combination of gas and renewables stopped the growth of coal in the mid-2010s. While we remain far from on track to meet our climate goals, the positive steps we've made should reinforce that progress is possible and despair is counterproductive.