Ariel Liebman

Flying is getting better and also harder New technology is easing years of travel tedium just as flight shaming enters a new phase

Just 11% of the world flew in 2018.

A tiny group of very frequent flyers, 1% of world population, account for 50% of airline emissions. 

A French climate expert called for people to be limited to just four flights in their lifetime. 41% said they were in favour.

www.ft.com/content/36f5...

A year after it went up online, our paper on the limited effect of #climate considerations in decisions about air travel is finally formally OUT. TL;dr: it will take more than caring about the climate to get people to fly less...
Full paper is here: doi.org/10.1080/0966...

X Fossil Fuel Voice to Parliament ... theshovel.com.au October 15, 2023 THE SHOVEL Fossil Fuel Voice to Parliament to Remain in Place □ : A panel providing policy advice to the Government on coal and gas projects will remain in place, after being overwhelmingly endorsed by fossil fuel companies today. The advisory panel, which is made up of CEOs, lobbyists and other corporation elders, exists to provide secret advice on decisions which affect all Australians.

Australia will keep its globally recognised fossil fuel voice to parliament:

theshovel.com.au/2023/10/15/f...

This is a nonsense headline. The stated purpose is excising Hamas so it can't keep doing this. They aren't even the elected government of Gaza. That is still the Abbas govt in Ramallah.

I just don't get them, honestly. Do they like have zero imagination? They could make so much more money if they just invested all their profits and more into renewable energy infrastructure.

"Rebalance attention from global target setting toward national climate politics and policy" This is such a good piece by Navroz Dubash. Importantly, it doesn't just critique but also proposes alternatives and improvements:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I've got one still

To limit global warming to '1.5°C with no or limited overshoot', the decline in global CO2 emissions relative to 2019 are:
* 48% by 2030
* 80% by 2040
* 99% by 2050

It is 2023 & global CO2 emissions are still rising!

ipcc.ch/report/sixth...

As I sit here in a Tel Aviv hospital getting tests (all's fine) & arrived in #Israel day before the massacres, I keep looking for a helpful way to process things. An article quoting @EckhartTolle, a favourite secular “spiritual teacher” seems perfect:

t.co/nScaYcPvWR

Just like a good economist. Everything converges to equilibrium if you wait long enough. Just got to hope it's the equilibrium you actuality want 😂.

You doing like an economist

Hi #greensky! @ketanjoshi.co The CEC has released the Power Playbook, a strategic package of 45 recommendations to the Federal Government designed to ensure Australia is on track for 82 per cent renewables by 2030, and achieves its ambition of becoming a renewable energy superpower: zurl.co/XxuE

@tamarinsauce.bsky.social

There can be no *new* oil and gas drilling if we want a safe, habitable world.

Yet, a tiny club of wealthy countries – 🇺🇸US, 🇨🇦Canada, 🇦🇺Australia, 🇳🇴Norway and 🇬🇧the UK – are responsible for *51% of all planned oil and gas field developments* from now to 2050.

That's the real hypocrisy ahead of #COP28

Noah Smith @Noahpinion I keep telling you, EVs are just going to win. Here's Norway. Norwegian new passenger car sales by type: Monthly 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% Battery Electric 87% in September 83% so far in 2023 Plugin Hybrid Non-plugin Hybrid Petrol Diesel -4% so far in 2023 0% 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2016 2017 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 @robbie_andrew 2010 7:17 PM Oct Data: SVV/OFV 2, 2023 36.1K Views Through September 2023

Distance travelled (Source: SSB) It's one thing to have a high fraction of EVs in sales of new cars, but how much are those cars displacing travel in cars with internal combustion engines? Distance travelled statistics go some way to answering that question. Note, for example, that the average EV is driven further each year than the average car with an internal combustion engine.

This is from Robbie Andrew's great EV data page.

The 'new sales' data always gets picked bc it looks way more dramatic than the actual change in use of fossil vehicles.

Norway is currently on track to miss its 2030 transport sector decarbonisation targets.

robbieandrew.github.io/EV/

28 degrees here in Prague today. The historical average high for October is 12.5. And yet Twitter is still full of blue-tick accounts angrily screaming that this is all normal and nothing unusual is happening.

Chart showing coal use over time, 1965 - 2022. Coal use is at near record levels in 2022. Source: Our World In Data.

Chart showing oil use over time, 1965 - 2022. Oil use has almost returned to pre-COVID levels, and a near record. Source: Our World In Data.

Chart showing gas use over time, 1965 - 2022. In 2022, gas use was slightly below the all-time record set in 2021, but it was still the second highest gas use ever recorded. Source: Our World In Data.

Despite enormous progress on renewable energy worldwide, we simply aren't seeing the overall reduction in fossil fuel use that is the thing we really need to arrest the climate crisis.

It's time to ratchet up advocacy and campaigns against fossil fuel developments of all kinds. 🧪 🔌💡

Report claiming net zero will cost UK trillions retracted due to ‘factual errors’ Rightwing thinktank Civitas mistakenly cost onshore wind power 10,000 times higher than reality and claimed bill would be £4.5tn

Apparently the shambolic Civitas report will now be “peer reviewed” after it got ridiculed widely.

@drsimevans.bsky.social pointed out a number of errors prior to publication.

His comments were ignored, the report got published anyway and covered by the press.

"the oil and gas industry has used recent windfall profits to not invest in energy security: but to invest in corporate financial restructuring, pay dividends, lower debt and increase share buy-backs."

What was their social license to operate again?

carbontracker.org/stranded-str...

Words I did not want to know:
“ocean-bound plastic”
“photosynthetic failure”
“heat island”

That's the one. Simple 😊

This is massive, and great

Utterly incredible, massive new series from Carbon Brief. Personally looking forward to diving into the timeline and reading the full Q&A - I know this topic well but having scanned it have already seen whole bunch of fascinating new insights I had no idea about ---->>

What are carbon offsets? How are they supposed to work? How can things go wrong? Team Carbon Brief have answers in this brilliant in-depth Q&A, inc this handy diagram:

interactive.carbonbrief.org/carbon-offse...

September 2023, highest anomaly on record? September 2023, highest anomaly on record?

41 days since we last experienced day on Earth that wasn't the warmest of those days on record

One absolute fuck of a time for countries like Sweden and UK to be backpedalling on their already-insufficient climate plans

arctic-news.blogspot.com/2023/09/sept...

Place your thumb over Paul Simon's face to reveal the most impressive moustache in musical history

Bill Gates sees ‘a lot of climate exaggeration’ out there: ‘The climate is not the end of the planet. So the planet is going to be fine’

So many exhausting tropes from this group of guys but "Save the planet?? The planet will be fine!!!!!!" has to be among the most incredibly exasperating.

Something important to note about Oslo is that most vehicles are *not* electric. It's currently about 27% for the county, based off the latest data. Norway is ~15%

(Oslo is ~37% electric when you only count private passenger cars - electrification of vans is going slow)

www.ssb.no/en/statbank/...

a version history of Australia's emissions data

No major sneaky revisions that I can see, at least. The last one was a doozy. They could probably hit the 43% target through LULUCF revisions alone