Take Five - 5 Positive climate stories to end the week on
Yup, there's gloom sadly, but there is also flickering lights of hope too - here's five lights against the darkness
As with most weeks, it has been a long week of negative climate stories which I’m not going to repeat here, not because they are not important, but because they are covered elsewhere in detail. My personal remit here is to focus on hope - hope as a motivator for action but also hope because hope exists! So five stories in the last couple of months that I have found both interesting and inspiring:
Hopium 1 - How a fracking site became a source of renewable energy - Sky News’ podcast covered this interesting story about a site in North Yorkshire (in the UK) that was the location of protests against the dirty extraction of shale gas but is now a renewable geothermal energy site. Bonus hopium - one of the protestors now works at the site itself! (Image below is the Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Plant in Þingvellir, Iceland, via Wikipedia)
Hopium 2 - How plummeting oil sales in Norway shows the brittle nature of the carbon bubble - So in the last substack I reported on the fact that the carbon economy is a bubble; its wealth (and so political power) is based on the assumption that they can extract fossil fuels and we’ll use what they extract. But if either of those assumptions fails, the bubble pops. This story shows how that works in reality: In Norway, as EV car sales rose so petrol car sales crated and oil demand dropped too!
Norwegian statistics agency SSB released its latest numbers on motor fuel sales today, showing a whopping 9% decline in motor fuel sales year-over-year for the month of September. This is a result of Norway’s world-leading EV sales, with over 90% of new vehicles in the country having some sort of plug and vanishingly few having no electrification at all. The country has exceeded its own high expectations, virtually ending fossil vehicle sales years ahead of schedule.
Hopium 3 - I didn't think I’d be writing a positive word about the World Bank, but here we are. The institution that has for decades been the subject of harsh criticism is now using its leverage to get governments to stop subsidising fossil fuels.
Hopium 4 - Could basalt rock be used for carbon capture? If it could that would be a potent tool. (Note, I’m aware that carbon capture has often, and will often be used to obfuscate those not really wanting to change, but at this stage I’m personally open to anything that works!) There’s a feasibility study underway to test the idea. If that works, they move to a demonstration project.
Hopium 5 - Energy company sets first ‘Green Gasmill’ live. Ecotricity, the UK based renewable energy (and for transparency is my home energy supplier) is now making herbal leys (a mix of grass and herbs) as what they hope will be both a greener and more scalable method of getting a greener gas supply.