🔝 10 Climate Bites to Read this Week

👋 Welcome to this week’s roundup of PodSnacks.
🎙️ Discover selected quotes from 10 recently covered episodes.
✅ Save 5 hrs 56 min of listening by reading these entire PodSnacks.

Supported by:

⚡ Carbon & Energy

Podcast: TED Climate
Episode: “How to Realistically Decarbonize the Oil and Gas Industry”
Host: Bjørn Otto Sverdrup
Category: ☁️ Carbon Reduction
Apple | Spotify | Google | 🕰️ 14 min | 🗓️ 01/26/2022

Selected Quote:

[2:21] “I lead an organization called Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, OGCI. It brings together 12 of the largest companies in the world, and their CEOs. The members, household names, are actually producing every day nearly 30% of the world's oil and gas production. Even if some of you would like these companies to just disappear, what they are doing matters to all of us everyday. Changing the energy system is going to be hard. We need to turn from a 80% fossil fuels-based system to a completely zero emission system. That would require massive investments, radical policy shifts, and us changing behavior. We need to balance that transition with the needs of nature, fairness, and also to avoid shortage of energy and economic dislocations. And time is very limited.”

Read Entire PodSnacks

Selected Quote:

[24:12] “Hydrogen is not the new oil. And we wanted to make it very clear that even […] if [hydrogen was] limited just to these oil producing countries, fossil fuel economies, it still [would be] a lot less than […] having oil and gas. And secondly, it's gonna be a lot more competitive, because a lot more countries will be able to produce it. Anybody with sufficient renewable energy potential and suitable infrastructure will be a competitor. […] So I think we wanted to convey a message that it is […] an important avenue and an immediate one to diversify the economies of countries who heavily rely on fossil fuel. But it's not the panacea and it will not replace what they have today. So they really have to look at broader strategies for diversification.”

Read Entire PodSnacks

Selected Quote:

[9:06] “People often talk about [how] we don't have good long duration energy storage. And of course you can take any shorter duration energy storage, like a lithium ion battery, and just discharge it really slowly, and it will discharge over a long period of time. So there's nothing fundamental about discharging slowly that is hard to do. When people talk about long duration energy storage being a difficult problem, what they're really talking about is cost. They're saying, can you have something that can discharge for 100 plus hours, but it still has a cost per kilowatt, a cost per power capacity that is competitive with other types of power capacity on the grid?”

Read Entire PodSnacks

Selected Quote:

[8:16] NM: “I think what Verdox brings to the table is something that could be potentially […] game changing, or a paradigm shift in carbon capture technology. Because they […] use this electro swing technology, as opposed to […] a typical heat swing technology that you typically see in many direct air capture technologies. So when I visualize direct air capture energy requirements, I can compare DAC to a sponge […] that's collecting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And eventually that sponge gets saturated and you need to squeeze out the sponge. The process of squeezing out the sponge requires a lot of energy. So for many companies, that's applying a high degree of heat to […] the sponge that was used to capture CO2. And that requires more heat than renewable sources of energy, like solar or wind can deliver. And so these companies might need to use waste heat or fossil fuels to power that stage of the process and that can be a bottleneck to deployment. So when you can, like Verdox, use this electric swing adsorption technology that uses electricity to trigger a chemical reaction that makes it possible to use renewables like solar and wind energy input, [it] can really bring down the cost and make technology more scalable.”

🎁 Access Entire PodSnacks 🎁

Selected Quote:

[13:41] PG: “[If] there's a large supply of carbon removal that's being created inside the US, but then those are being sold at some percentage to international buyers, that means that the ones that are sold to buyers and other countries won't get to count towards US reduction targets. And so we could find ourselves in a scenario where leaders of the federal government say there's too much export happening, we're not meeting our goals, therefore, we're going to limit the amount of carbon credits that could be sold to international buyers. And then you can actually see that happening down at the individual state level as well. […] That would be bad, because […] we support free trade, the notion of being able to find the best buyer and the best price for the product and good that you're trying to sell. And so if there are export controls being put in place by the US, then you can bet your bottom dollar that other countries will follow suit. And so we could find ourselves in a deeply mercantilist future, where carbon is only being sold inside national borders and not across borders. And that would necessarily limit the size and scope of how much economic activity could actually happen.”

Read Entire PodSnacks

🙏 PodSnacks currently has 719 total subscribers, including 11 premium subscribers. We will cover more sectors when PodSnacks reaches 1,000 total subscribers. You can support PodSnacks by forwarding this newsletter or upgrading to a paid plan.

Upgrade for only $5/month

💧 Food & Water

Podcast: Business Casual
Episode: “Navigating the Plant-Based Meat Biz”
Hosts: Nora Ali & Scott Rogowsky
Guest: Ethan Brown | CEO | Beyond Meat
Category: 🍏 Sustainable Food
Apple | Spotify | Google | 🕰️ 42 min | 🗓️ 01/27/2022

Selected Quote:

[8:18] “If you look at whether it’s human health, whether it's climate, whether it's general environment, land, energy, and water, or even welfare, I had never seen anything in my career and I still haven't today, just focusing on one thing, which is to replace animal protein […] with plant based protein, you can affect all four of those global challenges.”

Read Entire PodSnacks

Selected Quote:

[4:16] “Eliminating single use plastics and improving waste management infrastructure is going hand in hand. And we absolutely […] highlight reusables as best practice […] and really reducing waste of all kinds, because replacing one single use item with another may alleviate some impacts. Paper is recyclable, it's compostable in some cases, whereas plastic, it's less likely to be recovered in that way and more likely to be a long lasting pollutant and environmental and human health harm. That said, paper will still require resources. […] If we're switching our enormous plastic consumption footprint over to paper, where we already have a large consumption footprint, then we'll be putting stress and pressure on areas that are suffering deforestation, communities that are losing their land. There's a lot of human rights and public health and justices that are taking place within that industry, in addition to the environmental costs of deforestation and not only that, but the packaging, transportation processing of the wood […], including threats to human health in some of those facilities and facilities, depending on the regulation. […] And the same can apply to almost every material. Aluminum has many of the same and in fact more severe impacts on communities and the environment too. So thinking from single use to single use is not going to be the solution if we take a more holistic approach.”

Read Entire PodSnacks

Selected Quote:

[13:08] NR: “Digitalization is really changing the domestic water market. […] And when we think about the opportunities for monitoring, or to have those improvements [in water management], […] the top of my way is just water quality monitoring. For example, there's a US startup and it's called […] Spout and they've been targeting lead detection for in-home drinking water. So basically, they just combine the hardware and the software, there is a small disposable cartridge, you fill that with your tap water, and then you insert it into a reader. And with your smartphone app, you're able to actually see real time results.”

Read Entire PodSnacks

Selected Quote:

[17:08] “One thing to […] keep in mind for everyone is when everyone's talking about climate change, they're really talking about ocean change. […] The oceans are climate and climate is the oceans. Every drop of precipitable water comes from the oceans. The heat waves that we experienced are rooted in the oceans. The strength of hurricanes is driven by how warm the oceans are. And that's one of the things that most people don't realize that the essence of living, crops, water access, the security of your home, the security of coastal urban cities, all of these things are fundamentally tied to a healthy ocean. And the oceans are indeed changing.”

Read Entire PodSnacks

Podcast: (don't) Waste Water!
Episode: “Groundwater Trading in California” (Original Title: "Can Groundwater Trading help California save $580 million per year?")
Host: Antoine Walter
Guest: Ellen Bruno | Extension Economist | UC Berkeley
Category: 🔬 Research
Apple | Spotify | Google | 🕰️ 47 min | 🗓️ 02/02/2022

Selected Quote:

[26:14] “Part of the reason why economists like talking about markets as a solution to achieve an allocation that is best for everyone, is because regulators who are trying to manage this resource don't have perfect information about how individuals value the resource. And not to mention that those valuations change over time. And we live in a very dynamic environment […]. So in theory, you could imagine an allocation of water across the water users that was perfectly right for each individual person, that maximizes the value of that water to society. But it's unlikely that the regulator would know that or be able to get to that. And so […] that's where the market mechanism comes in. We can give any allocation and if we could facilitate trade, and every individual knows how badly they want the water, or how much they are willing to sell it for, then we can arrive at that allocation.”

Read Entire PodSnacks

🏆 Top 10 Climate Bites to Read this Week

⚡ Carbon & Energy

💧 Food & Water

Comments

Related

Latest