Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
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This week
West Antarctic melt ‘unavoidable’
LOCKED IN: New research by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), covered by Reuters, found that melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet will continue, irrespective of any reductions in emissions. The decline of the ice sheet is “one of nine global climate ‘tipping points’…identified in 2009”, Reuters said. The study added that governments must “prepare for several metres of sea level rise over the coming centuries”, New Scientist said.
‘RECORD EXTREMES’: A separate study found that “20 of the 35 planetary vital signs [the authors] use to track the climate crisis are at record extremes”, the Guardian reported. Previous records for global air temperature, ocean temperature and Antarctic sea ice extent were all “broken by enormous margins in 2023”, the researchers said, adding that “by 2100…3-6 billion people may find themselves outside Earth’s livable regions”.
CAUSE FOR HOPE: The BAS report authors wrote in the Conversation that “we are now committed to rapid ocean warming in the Amundsen Sea until at least 2100”. Nevertheless, they said: “The future will not end in 2100…Our simulations of the 1.5C scenario show ice-shelf melting starting to plateau by the end of the century, suggesting that further changes in the 22nd century and beyond may still be preventable.”
Global CO2 could peak in 2023
CO2 PIVOT: Global CO2 emissions from energy use and industry could peak as soon as this year, according to Carbon Brief analysis of figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2023 shows coal, oil and gas each peaking before 2030, the first time this has been expected under current policies – with fossil fuel use peaking in China next year and globally in 2025. The report once again boosted the outlook for solar (by 69% in 2050) and electric vehicles (by 20% in 2030) compared with last year’s edition, Carbon Brief’s in-depth coverage found.
RISING RENEWABLES: In its coverage of the World Energy Outlook, BBC News reported that the findings show that the global uptake of renewable energy is now “unstoppable”. The IEA expects that more than half of the world’s electricity in 2030 will come from renewable sources, it added. This may be “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era”, the Times quoted the report saying, with demand peaking before 2030.
Around the world
- FUNDING FRACAS: Talks in Egypt on how to develop a loss and damage fund for climate-vulnerable nations collapsed due to “discord over who should fund it, where it should be based and who would be eligible for support”, the Financial Times reported.
- HURRICANE OTIS: The “rapid” transformation of Hurricane Otis into a Category 5 storm before making landfall in Mexico “highlighted what climate change, combined with weather and climate variability, can do to a storm”, Axios reported.
- POLISH POLITICS: A coalition of “climate friendly” political parties won the general election in Poland beating the right-wing ruling party, but may “struggle to agree on policies”, the Guardian said.
- HUMAN IMPACT: TheCable in Nigeria reported on a Carbon Brief investigation that found up to 15,700 people in Africa have died in extreme weather events so far this year.
- FOREST LOSS: The 2023 Forest Declaration Assessment report found that the world is “moving too slowly” to meet deforestation targets, according to Reuters. Some 66,000 square kilometres (km2) of forest were destroyed in 2022.
- EV LAG: Bloomberg reported that there is only one electric vehicle charging connector per every 4,000 users in Japan, compared to one for every 500 people in Europe, 600 in the US and 1,800 in China.
21
The number of myths debunked in Dr Simon Evans’s epic factcheck for Carbon Brief of common misperceptions about electric vehicles.
Latest climate research
- New research in Science Advances identified how the impact of an ocean phenomenon known as the “Atlantic Niño” on the tropics remains high, despite having decreased in strength since the 1970s.
- A decline in groundwater recharge of around 3.8mm per year in Iran is primarily driven by “unsustainable water and environmental resources management” and is “exacerbated by decadal changes in climatic conditions”, according to a new analysis in Nature Communications.
- A new study in Nature Water found that the temperatures of surface waters in lakes across the world are generally increasing more slowly than global air temperatures, mainly due to an acceleration in evaporation rates.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
China’s exports of solar panel cells grew five-fold between 2017 and 2022, and stood at 147 gigawatts between January and August 2023, according to data compiled by climate thinktank Ember. Earlier analysis noted that, between January and June 2023, China’s solar exports were “going through the roof” and had already exceeded the equivalent of total US installed solar panel capacity. Meanwhile, Cao Yue, a researcher at the thinktank Overseas Development Institute, told Caixin that the low cost of Chinese solar panels made it “no surprise that…exports have shot up”, adding that he expected growth to continue.
Spotlight
What does China’s uptick in Russian fossil-fuel use mean for its climate goals?
This week, Carbon Brief explores the implications of a recent uptick in China-Russia energy cooperation for China’s transition to carbon neutrality by 2060.
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2023 has lowered projections for gas consumption, particularly of Russian gas, and forecast declines in oil and gas consumption in China after 2030 and 2040, respectively.
This stands at odds with the fact that China imported record amounts of Russian oil in the first half of 2023 and that China’s president Xi Jinping recently called for “substantial progress” on the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline linking the two countries.
By increasing its imports of cheap Russian fossil fuels, the FT stated, China receives “a double benefit of cheap [fuel] for itself and the opportunity to boost exports”.
Concerns in Beijing around energy security make Russian fossil fuels attractive, as diversifying its energy suppliers mitigates “other vulnerabilities to its imports”, according to the Interpreter, a media outlet managed by the Lowy Institute. Trade with Russia also shores up the “stability” of a key political ally, wrote Sergey Vakulenko, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
However, China has concerns about the pipeline. This has slowed progress, Dr Michal Meidan, head of China energy research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) told Carbon Brief. It could “bind the two countries” and create an outsized dependency on Russia, she explained.
Nevertheless, increased imports of Russian gas may support China’s decarbonisation efforts, Meidan wrote. This is because gas is “very much part of the country’s energy transition away from coal”.
Vakulenko added that “the high capacity of gas import pipelines would allow China to increase the share of wind and solar in its power system without investing too much in costly energy storage, using gas generation for balancing”.
Gas currently makes a “relatively small” direct contribution to China’s emissions, the IEA said, and using gas over coal has drastically improved air quality, which is a key metric for evaluation of local official’s efforts around environmental protection.
However, the IEA added, these benefits could be offset by methane released from burning gas. Russian production of gas is “highly methane-intensive”, which could exacerbate negative environmental impacts.
And how China then weans itself off gas to meet its 2060 target for carbon neutrality remains an open question, Meidan told Carbon Brief.
While oil is likely to peak soon, Meidan said, “we do not have solutions yet” for operating several key Chinese industries without fossil fuels. Developments of carbon capture, utilisation and storage technologies could open pathways for continued use of fossil fuels after 2060, she said. “Certainly for the next 20-30 years China will need oil and gas”, she added.
Forecasts are also dependent on China’s economic performance, according to Vakulenko:
“If [it] beats expectations, that will accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources and gas consumption will decrease. If it performs worse than expected, cheaper coal will continue to account for a significant proportion of the energy balance.”
Nevertheless, in his view, “the gas trade between Russia and China is likely to end by about 2060 or even earlier as a result of the global energy transition…Within a few decades, Power of Siberia 2 will become obsolete.”
Watch, read, listen
BROKEN PROMISES: Project Syndicate featured a commentary from the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon calling for better regulation of carbon offsets to avoid “exaggerated emissions-reduction claims” and exploitation of Indigenous communities.
‘DINNER DIPLOMACY’: Politico recounted how US climate envoy John Kerry held an “exclusive dinner” in March for COP28 president-designate and oil boss Sultan Al Jaber.
NOT TOO LATE: Dr Jane Goodall spoke on CBC about habitat destruction, saying that she believes we “still have a window of time” to slow down climate change and loss of biodiversity.
Coming up
- 29 October: Oman parliamentary elections
- 30-31 October: Pre-COP28, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- 30 October-8 November: 28th annual session of the International Seabed Authority (3rd part), Kingston, Jamaica
Pick of the jobs
- Local Storytelling Exchange, storytellers – climate communication | Salary: £64,000. Location: Kent, Sussex and East Anglia, Scotland
- Greater London Authority, principal policy and programme officer | Salary: £60,394-£65,371. Location: London, UK
- The Lifescape Project, senior lawyer – climate and nature litigation | Salary: £40,000-£43,000. Location: Remote
- Coral Future, climate change associate | Salary: Unknown. Location: Malaysia
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 27 October 2023: Antarctic ice melt ‘unavoidable’; EV factcheck; China-Russia fossil fuel trade appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.
City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.
Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders
Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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‘Completely delusional’: UN climate chief warns against fossil fuel push after Iran crisis
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition
Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
Parts of the Southern and Northeastern U.S. faced tornado threats this week. Scientists are trying to parse out the climate links in changing tornado activity.
It’s been a weird few weeks for weather across the United States.
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