Newsletters
April 2024
This newsletter starts with something different, namely translation of an
interview with Jens Beckert, Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study
of Societies and Professor of Sociology in Cologne.
On the brighter side, it also includes a number of items on positive actions that
are helping improve people’s lives, and on technologies that can, or have the potential to contribute to reducing future emissions.
CONTENTS
– “How can we just go on living like this, even though we have known for three decades what is threatening us?”
– Ocean heating 2023
– Our reliance on fossil fuels
– “Plastics producers have deceived the public about recycling”
– How Burkina Faso builds schools that stay cool in 40C heat
– The African tree-planting project making a difference
– The ‘15-minute city’ has taken off in Paris
– UNSW team creates synthetic methane using only sunlight
– Printed solar cells
– Acqueous metal-ion batteries
– Energy storage using salt, air and bricks
February 2024
CONTENTS
– COP28’s potential impact on climate change
– Human ‘behavioural crisis’ at root of climate breakdown, say scientists
– Carbon released by bottom trawling
– India rebuilds coal stocks to ensure electric reliability
– World groundwater levels showing ‘accelerated’ decline
– Short extracts from Reuters website
– French farmers
– Solid state batteries update
– Information from Energy Source and Distribution magazine, Jan/Feb 2024
– Some recent statistics
November 2023
CONTENTS
– Some environmental statistics
– Global warming rate
– China and India struggle to curb fossil fuels
– Renewable hydrogen takes flight with octocopter
– Space-based solar power
– New Scottish blade a ‘step change’ for tidal energy
– Power grids investment needed
– World’s tallest wooden tower to be built in Australia
August 2023
CONTENTS
– Tracking Clean Energy Progress: IEA Report
– Selected charts tracking how countries are meeting their commitments to reduce GHG emissions
– China’s Climate Priorities
– Exxon Mobil 2023 energy outlook
– Calls for crackdown on fossil fuel company greenwashing
– Solar power cell innovations break key energy threshold
– Mining giants trial world-first hydrogen pilot for alumina
– South Korea’s Kepco joins Western Australian hydrogen hub
– Prospectors hit the gas in the hunt for ‘white hydrogen’
– $4.6 billion plant in South Africa will make ‘the fuel of the future’
– Farmers on frontline as Dutch divided by war on nitrogen pollution
– World’s largest ‘wood city’ to be built in Stockholm
– Attending ESR Committee Meetings – A request for feedback
June 2023
CONTENTS
– The clean energy investment boom (pictured)
– Rock flour from Greenland can capture significant CO2, study shows
– The path to radically lower emissions
– Global Energy news
– L.A. and other cities are recovering, but not their downtowns. Why?
– Asia’s largest timber building
– A review of the book “What we owe the future”
March 2023
– ESR 2023 AGM
– Global Energy News
– First electric car with sodium ion battery
– Why Roman buildings have survived so long
– Study finds climate crisis worsened extreme weather
– Eight ways to attempt to stay within 1.5OC increase
– Global fresh water demand to outstrip supply by 40% by 2030
– Pollution leaves New Zealand wetlands badly damaged
– Cities looking to work with rather than against water
– Peak human population may not exceed 8.8 billion
– The origin of time?
December 2022
– Kicking our economic growth addiction
– Humans versus nature: our long and destructive journey
– Arctic permafrost
– UK tidal-stream energy development
– Boosting wind farm energy output
November 2022
– The Treeline, Ben Lawrence, 2022
– Diet for a hotter climate: five plants that could help feed the world
– Floating wind turbines
– Information extracted from IPCC AR6 WG III Final Government Distribution Technical Summary, November 2019 Draft
July 2022
– Dutch group targets hydrogen-fuelled commercial flight in 2028
– How Orkney is leading a tidal power revolution
– How to turn your garden into a carbon sink
– EV Battery Technology: The road to a breakthrough
– Kiwi electric bus conversion
– Australian company secures $700,000 deal for carbon capture and storage machine
– Methane may be much more sensitive to global heating than previously thought
May 2022
– New Zealand’s 2020 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Report & Domestic LongTerm GHG Reduction Targets
– Solid State Battery Development
– Six things you should know about the new IPCC report (AR6)
– UN says up to 40% of world’s land now degraded
– Sharp cut in methane now could help avoid worst of climate crisis