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”
Building For Climate Change
Current scientific advice indicates the key design requirement for the safety of all humanity’s infrastructure and the wellbeing and sustainability of natural ecosystems and species is an 80% reduction of fossil fuel production within two decades.
To meet social & economic needs while phasing out this energy source, we will need to consider the consequential issues of a sustained decline in energy supply and material consumption in all sectors of the economy.
Read MoreMeeting The Net-Zero Challenge
The Government’s current proposal is to broadly accept the Climate Change Commission’s budgets from their 31 May 2021 final report, with minor changes related to forestry emissions. But based on the available information, the Commission’s emissions reduction targets for 2030 are far weaker than is required for New Zealand to do its part in meeting the key goal of the Paris Agreement to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees C.
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Submission on Measures for Transition to an Expanded and Highly Renewable Electricity System
We recommend to commence work on a vision of how New Zealand will look without fossil fuels and then to develop a pathway how to get there. This consultation document assumes a great manufacturing effort over the next decades of power lines, power pylons, windmills, PV panels, electric cars, rail tracks and other infrastructure. This will all be done predominantly by using fossil fuels with associated emissions. It will also be done on the backdrop of diminishing resources of raw materials including crude oil. In terms of energy we are also dealing with a reduction of the ratio of Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROI) while aiming to produce new infrastructure and trying to maintain or replace existing infrastructure all built with fossil fuels at a high EROI ratio.
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Watch video: The framing and reframing of public policy in New Zealand
The way in which we describe any major social problem largely determines the kind of policy we eventually consider for dealing with it. In this webinar, Michael Hanne explores the ways in which two issues, Poverty and the Housing Crisis, are generally “framed” in public discussion in New Zealand. He offers critiques of that framing and asks how they might usefully be “reframed” in a socially more responsible way. He ends by inviting the audience to talk about other issues they feel need to be reframed.
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The Legacy of Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (first published in 1962) is an environmental science work that documents the harm caused by indiscriminate use of pesticides.
Dr Howell’s presentation identifies implications in the legacy of Rachel’s “Silent Spring” for Engineers for Social Responsibility.
Submission to Draft Advice of Climate Change Commission on 2nd Emissions Reduction Plan
The advice document subscribes to the economic growth paradigm in assuring the economy “would continue to grow under the recommended emissions budgets”. On the other hand, it has been established, that economic growth brings with it emissions’ growth, because an absolute decoupling of the two has not been achieved yet. It is therefore timely to start a discussion of “degrowth” to make a real and required impact on gross emissions. Degrowth of the economy means a planned reduction of the material throughput through the economy and the associated emissions, while focusing on a just transition and wellbeing indicators. Worldwide there is an increasing amount of literature generated and some of our members are contributing to the domestic discussion.
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What it takes to be a climate prepared city
Adapting to the many and various challenges of global warming, from an urban development perspective, requires an understanding of the hydrological landscape that underlies the city so that a master plan can emerge that increases green space and public space, encourages biodiversity, and reduces flooding and the possibility of flood-water contamination.
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