🔝 10 Climate Bites to Read this Week

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⚡ Carbon & Energy

Selected Quote:

[7:12] “We live in a world where fossil fuels have […] a near monopoly on most of our energy needs. And that's particularly apparent in things like road transportation, where oil is king. And I think it's in the nature […] if things really haven't changed for 100 years or so, any sign of that changing is worth headlines […]. The other side of the equation, though, is that if the incumbent system is enormous, and by any measure the incumbent energy system is enormous, then it's quite easy to look at any change and say, okay, that's noteworthy, but let's compare absolute raw numbers here. And from that perspective, it's quite easy to say, sure, we sold 6.5 million electric vehicles last year, but in the grand scheme of things, 1.2 billion passenger vehicles on the road around the world today, it's a drop in the ocean. That's a long way of saying, when you're in the middle of a transition, it's quite easy for both sides to portray themselves as either upsetting the applecart or keeping the applecart broadly stable.”

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Podcast: The Interchange
Episode: “The World Of Geothermal”
Host: David Banmiller
Guest: Carlos Araque | CEO | Quaise Energy
Category: ⚡ Renewable Energy
Apple | Spotify | Google | 🕰️ 52 min | 🗓️ 02/04/2022

Selected Quote:

[3:05] “The idea for [Quaise Energy] really is to unlock geothermal at the terawatts scale. […] Geothermal hardly plays a role in today's energy transition pathways. But geothermal is the most abundant clean energy source on Earth by far. The amount of thermal energy in the earth is much greater than all of the fossil energy, all of the nuclear energy and all of the renewables. So why are we not looking at geothermal? And the answer is that it's just hard. We need a technological breakthrough, to drill deeper and to unlock this energy source.”

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Selected Quote:

[5:29] SL: “There's just not enough lithium to make all the batteries we need. In 2021, prices surged over 400%. And demand is expected to increase fivefold over the next decade. There's only one active lithium mine in the US. The vast majority is mined in Australia and South America and processed in China. The lithium beneath the Salton Sea could change everything. California Governor Gavin Newsom called the Imperial Valley the Saudi Arabia of lithium. 600,000 tons of lithium could be extracted from the Valley every year, enough to completely transform the global supply chain.”

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Selected Quote:

[14:44] “Generally the whole chemical industry consumes about 11% of global energy. And with that, they emit 7.5% of global greenhouse gasses, and that's about 4 billion tons of you know gasses. And it's insane, because it's also going to become the largest driver of global oil consumption by 2030. So if you imagine how much fuel all the cars in the world take and how much fuel all the flights in the world take, the chemical industry is going to use more fuel in 2030 than both of those things.”

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Selected Quote:

[14:41] EL: “Extreme positive incentive for change sounds complicated, but it's really, really simple. If you look at what the Norwegians have done with electric vehicles, they've said we're actually going to make […] the electric vehicle is going to be the cheaper alternative. And not only that they have like a 50% rule, which is big. That everything that you do with your car, whether it's parking, whether it's taxation, whether it's tolls will be 50% cheaper. […] And lo and behold, 95% of car sales […] in December last year were electric vehicles in Norway.”

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💧 Food & Water

Selected Quote:

[6:54] “I was focused on industrial stormwater compliance at the beginning, because that was my background. But then once I started talking to cities, they said […] what they needed, was to understand how much water is moving through their sewer and storm systems. And I was like, what do you mean, you don't know how much water is moving? They're like, we have no idea. […] If your sensors are accurate within 30% or so that would be great.”

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Selected Quote:

[4:08] “At Prime Roots, we're […] making meat from koji. And koji is a beloved traditional Japanese fungi. If you've had miso or soy sauce, you've had koji before. It's actually what is used to biotransform the soy into umami rich paste or umami rich sauce […]. We've said okay, so koji can power transform these materials, what about in and of itself, so pure koji. […] Koji grows this mycelium that is really fibrous and well textured, identically to the texture of animal muscle fiber. It also obviously produces these umami rich compounds that are also found in meat. And so what we do is we grow the koji in a liquid culture […] [to get] this texture of chicken breast. So from there, it's really this building block to build any type of meat and any type of seafood. […] So whether it be bacon or lobster, it's just a matter of tuning the fat, the flavor, and the color to really get it to a place where it resembles the meat that we know and love.”

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Selected Quote:

[16:53] “Greenland has approximately six meters of sea level locked up in its ice. Antarctica has 60 meters. […] We're not going to melt all that ice, but you start melting even a fraction of that ice and you get to catastrophic numbers that for the cities along the major cities on the coasts would be really bad news.”

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Selected Quote:

[2:22] SL: “Nearly 50 million gallons of water are being piped in to serve the Beijing Games, possibly setting reserves in this water stressed region back by hundreds of years. This year's Olympics were supposed to be China's chance to brand itself as an environmental champion on the world stage. But not everyone is buying it.”

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Selected Quote:

[9:42] “We have a high population of residents within the Navajo Nation that don't have pipe water. And it's important when you're experiencing a pandemic to be able to have water especially when there are recommendations given to be able to mitigate COVID-19 challenges by being able to wash surfaces more often or washing our hands more often. And when you begin to think of water haulers who have limited water available for their uses, […] then you begin to understand some of the challenges that we within the Navajo nation have. […] In addition to that we have some challenges associated with unresolved water rights.”

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🏆 Top 10 Climate Bites to Read this Week

⚡ Carbon & Energy

💧 Food & Water

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