Schlagwort: economics

Video: How to turn emissions into products (DW Planet A)

„Some companies are trying to make a carbon difference by manufacturing products made out of pollution. But is it really helping? What’s behind the fancy technology, and how does this bode for the planet’s—and consumer’s—future? We’re destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we’ll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.“

LINK

The Herald: Iain Macwhirter: Reasons to be cheerful about COP26

„There has been a lot of negativity about the COP26 climate summit, which kicks off in Glasgow a week today. Hardly surprising, with China boycotting it, petro-states frantically lobbying to reduce targets and nonsense being talked here about heat pumps which just inflame voter cynicism. There will be a lot of corporate mischief on the sidelines, a lot of fudging and obfuscation and a vast expenditure of hot air. One of the biggest rows will not be about greenhouse gases at all, but the paucity of Covid vaccines for developing countries. […] But before we dissolve into negativity and reach for the bottle, it’s worth remembering that the last big climate summit, in Paris in 2015, also failed to deliver. It too was supposed to agree legally-binding emissions targets, but only agreed, after frantic late-night horse-trading, on a legal obligation to report on emissions targets. There was no actual requirement to meet them. Donald Trump’s departure from the Paris Treaty was thus ineffably stupid since it didn’t actually commit America to anything concrete. But most economists still regard Paris as a success, if only because it concentrated the minds of politicians and accelerated a shift from fossil fuels that was beginning to gain momentum in the 2010s. The International Energy Agency believes that the recent spectacular reductions in the wholesale cost of renewable energy, especially offshore wind and solar, are down to Paris and the signals it sent to investors.“

LINK

Project: Puro.earth launches the Pre-CORC framework to unlock carbon removal scaling

„At Puro.earth, we aim to accelerate the pace of the voluntary carbon removal market by providing corporate buyers new ways to help grow the supply.That’s why today we launch the Pre-CORC Framework, a service to match early-stage high-quality carbon removal projects with corporate offtakers who want to secure their supply of negative emissions to fulfill net zero pledges.“

LINK

CTV News: B.C. facility aims to make vehicle fuel from carbon pulled out of the atmosphere

VANCOUVER – The B.C. government, a First Nation in the Interior and a pair of Squamish-based companies are working together on a project that they say could revolutionize the transportation industry by all but eliminating its carbon dioxide emissions. The province is providing $2 million from its Innovative Clean Energy fund to support the engineering and design work for the project, which aims to be the world’s first large-scale fuel production plant that uses carbon captured directly from the atmosphere.“

LINK

World Economic Forum: Why natural climate solutions are about much more than carbon

„The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that 23% of greenhouse gas emissions come from land use and land-use change. Any credible pathway to net-zero must include ending deforestation and the degradation of natural ecosystems plus reducing emissions associated with agricultural production and food systems. In fact, most net-zero scenarios include significant “removals” of CO2 from the atmosphere via reforestation and ecosystem restoration.The way we use land will be doubly important over the next decade; not only because it has an impact on greenhouse gas emissions, but also because we need to offset emissions from sectors in which carbon reduction is more difficult and requires long-term technological transformation. The task of transforming the energy and land-use sectors in tandem will require supportive economic and social policy frameworks.“

LINK

Gulf Times: What climate change requires of economics

„This summer’s record-breaking heatwave in the American northwest offered a reminder – as if it were needed – of what anthropogenic climate change will mean for living conditions now and in the future. Average global temperatures have already risen to 1.2C above pre-industrial levels and could increase by another 5C over the next 80 years. This warming is hastening the extinction of many species and rendering parts of the world less hospitable for human habitation. By some estimates, climate change may force more than 1bn people to migrate by 2050.
Confronted with such massive long-term risks, many of our long-held assumptions will need to be revised, and the economics discipline is no exception. If we are going to avoid misguided policy pathways such as those that would abandon economic growth completely (even though billions of people around the world are still in poverty), we need to adapt mainstream economics to new climate realities.“

LINK

Joppa, Lucas; et al. (2021): Microsoft’s million-tonne CO2-removal purchase – lessons for net zero

Joppa, Lucas; Luers, Amy; Willmott, Elizabeth; Friedmann, S. Julio; Hamburg, Steven P.; Broze, Rafael (2021): Microsoft’s million-tonne CO2-removal purchase – lessons for net zero. In Nature 597 (7878), pp. 629–632. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-02606-3.

„Strengthen markets, measures and definitions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to fight climate change. In January this year, Microsoft made a major announcement: it had paid for the removal of 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Among its purchases were projects to expand forests in Peru, Nicaragua and the United States, as well as initiatives to regenerate soil across US farms. […] Here we summarize the lessons learnt from Microsoft’s carbon-removal efforts, along with those from another early corporate procurement — the $9-million purchases of carbon removal in 2020 and 2021 by the US–Irish financial-infrastructure company Stripe. Although these are just two companies’ efforts, they are the first significant open solicitations focused exclusively on carbon removal. We write as a team composed of Microsoft staff working on the company’s carbon-negative programme and research scientists who analyse carbon reduction and removal strategies.“

LINK

Gasworld: Shell to use BASF Sorbead tech for CCS

„Major player in the energy industry Shell is to incorporate catalyst expert BASF’s Sorbead Adsorption Technology into its carbon reduction plan following a collaborative partnership. The collaboration involved working together to study the use of the Sorbead technology for pre- and post-combustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) activities.“

LINK