[✔️] Dec 14, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | COP summary, Tzeporah Berman, New battery, Wind news, Opinion enormity, Finance attention,

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 14*//*, 2023*/

/[ Best summary of COP28 - "massive shift" ]
/*WHY THE COP FAILS Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty Chair, Tzeporah 
Berman*
Nick Breeze ClimateGenn
Dec 13. 2023  ClimateGenn #podcast  produced by Nick Breeze
Listen to Tzepora Berman explain why over 30years of COPs, emissions 
continue to rise and the problem gets worse. Also why we need civil 
society to demand a plan for rapid decarbonisation right now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJRNnI5pT1I

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/[ She spoke in November ]/
*Quitting Fossil Fuels with Tzeporah Berman*
GreenBiz
Nov 28, 2023
Addressing climate change isn’t just about deploying climate tech. We 
also need to stop expanding and wind down our fossil fuel production and 
use. In this talk Tzeporah Berman, an award winning strategist, policy 
expert and climate activist who has also worked with oil companies on 
climate policy, takes a sober look at our progress in phasing out fossil 
fuel use and what is needed to get on track for climate progress.

This session was held at GreenBiz Group’s, VERGE 23 -  the leading 
climate tech event accelerating solutions to the most pressing 
challenges of our time. Learn more about the event here: 
https://buff.ly/3slOXZ6
GreenBiz links:
Website: https://www.greenbiz.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KshaYZkRWbU

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/[ IM = Influence Map - an important web site ]/
*An independent think tank producing data-driven analysis on how 
business and finance are impacting the climate crisis*
Latest Reports
The Corporate Sector and Biodiversity Policy  December, 2023
Corporate Advocacy on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) December, 2023
“Net Zero Greenwash”: The Gap Between Corporate Commitments and their 
Policy Engagement November 2023
https://influencemap.org/



/[ Great positive news on battery innovation ]/
*Panasonic’s New Powder-Powered Batteries Will Supercharge EVs*
A company working with Tesla’s main US battery supplier has 
silicon-based tech that could soon give electric cars 500-mile ranges 
and charge refills in just 10 minutes.

Sila, a Californian company cofounded in 2011 by Tesla’s seventh 
staffer, is going to supply Panasonic with a US-made silicon powder for 
EV batteries that could banish range anxiety, slash charge times, and 
even reduce reliance on China.

Panasonic’s main US customer is Tesla, and produces around 10 percent of 
EV batteries globally. Last year, Sila signed a supply agreement with 
Mercedes-Benz for its new long-range G-class electric SUV, expected to 
debut in 2025. (The German automaker led Sila’s Series E funding round 
in 2019.)...

Sila’s Titan Silicon anode powder consists of micrometer-sized particles 
of nano-structured silicon and replaces graphite in traditional 
lithium-ion batteries. This switch-out for EVs could soon enable 
500-mile nonstop trips and 10-minute recharges. What’s more, the anode 
swap doesn’t require new manufacturing techniques. The black powder 
already powers the five-day battery life of the latest Whoop 
activity-tracking wearable.

“It took us 12 years and 80,000 iterations to get to this point,” said 
Sila’s cofounder and CEO, Gene Berdichevsky. “It’s sophisticated 
science.” Berdichevsky started his career at Tesla, becoming the seventh 
employee in 2004. He was the lead for Tesla’s Roadster battery system, 
leaving when the company had about 300 employees. After further study, 
he cofounded Sila with Tesla colleague Alex Jacobs and Gleb Yushin, a 
materials science professor at Georgia Tech.

Swell New Battery Tech
Compared to graphite, silicon stores up to 10 times more energy, so 
using silicon instead of graphite for anodes—the part that releases 
electrons during discharge—can significantly improve a battery’s energy 
density. However, the material swells during repeated charging, with the 
resulting cracks radically reducing battery life.

Sila’s technology allows for this expansion by using nanoscale carbon 
“scaffolding” to keep the silicon in check. “Titan Silicon is a 
nanocomposite material,” says Berdichevsky. “It’s like raisin bread, 
where the raisins are the silicon, and there’s the squishy matrix around 
the raisins with a big outer rind on the particle itself. The rind holds 
the space, and the bread moves aside when the raisins expand. The 
scaffold is not holding the silicon—it’s accommodating the expansion.”

The patented scaffolding process involves silicon-derived silane gas 
infiltrating custom carbon lattices. The resulting micron scale powder 
is shipped to battery makers.

https://www.wired.com/story/panasonic-powder-powered-silicone-ev-batteries/

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/[  wind news -- big changes offshore ]/
*What's going on with offshore wind?*
A conversation with industry analyst Samantha Woodworth.
DAVID ROBERTS
DEC 13, 2023
Last week, for the first time ever, an offshore wind farm delivered 
power to the US grid. It was an important milestone — and also the rare 
bit of good news for an otherwise beleaguered industry. Everywhere else, 
costs are up, contracts are being renegotiated, and projects are getting 
canceled. It all sounds pretty bad, especially for a sector that barely 
even exists yet.

What’s going on? How much of this turmoil is temporary and how much 
reflects lasting structural changes? Is the US offshore wind industry 
going to die before it even leaves its crib?
To gain a little clarity on these questions, I contacted Samantha 
Woodworth, a senior wind industry analyst at Wood Mackenzie. We talked 
about the converging difficulties facing the industry right now, efforts 
to renegotiate contracts that were signed in the Before Times, the odd 
role that ships play in the whole mess, and the industry's prospects in 
coming years and decades.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-going-on-with-offshore-wind?utm_source=podcast-email%2Csubstack&publication_id=193024&post_id=139457588&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&utm_medium=email&r=e3p5r

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/[ Opinion published in the NYTimes - clips ]/
*What It Really Takes to Fix a Monstrosity Like Climate Change*
Dec. 12, 2023
By Auden Schendler - author of the forthcoming book “Terrible Beauty: 
Reckoning With Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul.”
- -
As the global climate summit in Dubai has unspooled, I’ve read 
inexplicably cheerful social media posts from colleagues and friends, 
climate leaders I admire and total unknowns at COP28, the Conference of 
the Parties — which I’ve come to call the party at the end of the world. 
These “Look, Ma!” posts strike me as forced, naïve at best, trending 
toward willful blindness and delusion...
One “breakthrough” being lauded includes a purely voluntary commitment 
by fossil fuel companies to better capture methane, a potent greenhouse 
gas we absolutely must contain.

I know this issue intimately. The one man in America who fully 
understood the obscure problem of methane leaking from coal mines — Tom 
Vessels, a former oil and gas executive — partnered with me and others a 
decade ago to capture the gas to generate electricity. The project was a 
first in the nation, and while it was worthy of and received praise, it 
was also the only such project — because no federal policy existed to 
ensure the capture or mitigation of this super-warming agent.

For fossil fuel companies, committing to containing methane leaking from 
their pipelines and wellheads is a way for those businesses to appear 
beneficent while continuing to traffic in oil and gas. It is that very 
trafficking that causes the leakage that must be regulated, even as 
scientists tell us the essential action required to control warming is 
to stop burning coal, oil and gas.

A few years ago, I visited Tom in Denver as he was dying from 
mesothelioma, the result of home remodels done in his youth, when no 
regulations existed around asbestos. He was rail thin and ghost white. 
We sat on the couch drinking cans of seltzer. I told him: “You lived a 
good life. You did a good thing, and you were ahead of your time.” He 
died a few weeks later. Future generations won’t suffer his fate, thanks 
to strict asbestos laws. On methane, so far, future generations are 
mostly unprotected from its pernicious warming power.
In the missives I’ve seen from COP28, there are bad ideas pitched as 
magical solutions, such as the Rube Goldberg-like plan that John Kerry, 
the U.S. climate envoy, doubled down on. According to the investigative 
outlet The Lever, which reported on a leaked memo outlining discussion 
issues for the conference, the U.S. plan was to build “on existing 
voluntary carbon market standards for the international carbon market, 
as opposed to establishing a new robust framework with stringent 
standards.” This approach is undermining the United Nations’ effort to 
solidify an internationally regulated carbon market.

If we’re going to use these markets to reduce emissions, governments 
must administer and enforce them to make sure the reductions for which 
one polluter is paying another in the carbon market — the so-called 
offsets — are real.

At the same time, there were glimmers of hope. As the climate conference 
began, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced comprehensive 
new rules to regulate methane in the United States, at least. There are 
also plans to create a fund to help vulnerable nations hit by climate 
disasters, and to set a goal of tripling the amount of renewable power 
worldwide by 2030 (if high interest rates don’t derail that objective). 
There were also calls for a full fossil fuel phaseout.

But that proposed phaseout rattled the conference hosts in Dubai, the 
most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s 
leading oil producers. It is ramping up oil production. The idea was 
quickly scuttled. The head of the OPEC cartel called on its members to 
reject any plan that would threaten the production and sale of oil, gas 
and coal. And it was no idle threat: All 198 participating nations must 
consent to any agreement. So much for what the U.N. secretary general, 
António Guterres, said would be a major benchmark of success for the summit.

Let’s be real, though. The summit’s proposals for voluntary commitments 
— on methane, on renewables, on phasing out fossil fuels — were theater. 
Imagine if in the 1960s Americans had responded to the civil rights 
movement not with legislation but with calls to please treat one another 
nicely...
That is one of the reasons that when I read optimistically pithy social 
media posts from colleagues visiting a petrostate hosting a climate 
conference led by an oil executive, I begin to feel the creeping 
tendrils of despair. The climate problem is complex and enormous, and 
the progress to rein it in has been slow. Meanwhile, carbon emissions 
continue to rise in what is expected to be the hottest year in recorded 
history.

And still, I make my coffee, holding it in my hands as I look out into 
my yard, thinking how good I have it. I am reminded of the biologist 
E.O. Wilson’s defining idea, “biophilia,” our innate love of life and 
nature.

I see even in Dubai, as the conference comes to a close, the outlines of 
a human inclination to protect, to hold on and to persevere.

These are mostly good people, after all, who convened to reduce carbon 
emissions worldwide, with the focus on this issue alone, for two weeks. 
Many are driven by the idea that we can’t let this unique and beautiful 
existence, on a spinning globe in the big empty, go down in literal 
flames. Sure, the event has been co-opted. At least 1,300 oil, gas and 
coal lobbyists were granted access to the conference. But there are also 
powerful forces pushing for success.

Thomas Keating, a Catholic priest who helped start St. Benedict’s, a 
now-closed monastic community near my house, lived among turkeys and 
deer like the ones I see from my windows. “Whether we walk down the 
street or drink a cup of soup,” he wrote, “divine life is pouring into 
the world.”
Can we really let it go?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/opinion/oil-dubai-climate-change.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Fk0.wt_j.gmC_gC2RK3TS&smid=url-share



/[ From the Conversation ]/
*Most investors aren’t paying attention to climate risks – the financial 
system needs to change*
Published: December 11, 2023

Climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme weather events. 
For example, extreme sea-level events, where large storm surges and high 
tides temporarily push the sea much higher than normal, currently occur 
once a century. However, they are projected to strike coastal areas 
every decade, if not yearly, by 2040.

Events like these have significant consequences for the global financial 
system, such as depressing economic growth. According to research, a 
once-in-a-hundred year cyclone is linked to an average income loss 
across all countries of nearly 15% per person, surpassing the 9% average 
income reduction typically observed in the aftermath of a financial crisis.

The extensive damage that extreme weather inflicts on infrastructure, 
homes and the economy could also lead to debt that a country may 
struggle to repay, potentially making it harder for it to borrow money 
in the future. Research I carried out with colleagues found that, by 
2030, climate change should result in 59 countries seeing a 
deterioration in their ability to repay their debts, and a subsequent 
increase in their cost of borrowing...

However, it appears that investors (fund managers in charge of large 
amounts of investments) are not paying attention to these risks. A 
recent article in the Financial Times revealed that oil and gas firms 
are facing virtually no additional borrowing costs, despite the fact 
that the future of the entire industry is at risk from the shift towards 
clean energy and global efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Research has also found that, while investors expressed some concern 
about the risks associated with climate policy, the direct risks from 
extreme weather itself had no impact on the price of US stocks between 
2000 and 2018.

Why are investors responding in this way? Not having access to the right 
information is only part of the equation. Investors also need to believe 
that climate change will actually have material consequences for 
financial markets...

Access to information
If a country seeks to borrow from financial markets for investments in 
public infrastructure, its credit rating will determine the cost of 
borrowing. The credit rating influences the interest the government will 
pay, akin to how an individual’s credit rating affects their mortgage 
repayments.

However, credit rating agencies do not consistently incorporate climate 
risks into their assessments. Government debt simply does not have the 
right climate metrics for investors to make informed decisions.

But, when investors are given the right information, they do generally 
make appropriate decisions. For example, research published in May 2023 
explored the impact of exposure to sea-level rise on municipal bond 
yields in the US. (When an investor buys a municipal bond, they loan 
money to the local government in exchange for a number of interest 
payments over a defined period.)

Once presented with worst-case sea-level rise projections, investors 
adjusted their required rate of return on municipal bonds in coastal 
communities. In fact, a one-standard-deviation increase in exposure to 
rising sea levels resulted in a 7% to 10% increase in the cost of borrowing.

The availability of information on the financial risks associated with 
climate change is improving. However, much of this information is not 
brought together into a single place that helps financial markets 
analyse it.

Financial markets also require new tools to help them understand this 
new information. Part of the problem is that finance simply lacks the 
skills to understand environmental data.

Processing it differently
Access to the right information is, however, only one part of the 
problem. Even when investors do have access to this information, they 
process it differently to one another.

The same study suggests that investors in “less worried” (according to a 
survey of climate opinions) locations ignore sea-level projections 
completely. In the US state of North Carolina, for example, lawmakers 
have removed the requirement for long-term sea level rise projections to 
be included in planning applications.

The effect of sea level projections (information) on municipal bonds 
thus appears to be conditional on investors’ prior beliefs about climate 
change. The findings revealed that the projected increase in the 
interest rate associated with rising sea levels was only present in 
“more worried” locations.

What’s the solution?
Having financial data that accounts for the risks posed by climate 
change is a necessary requirement for incorporating these risks into 
asset prices. It should not be surprising that oil and gas firms 
maintain low borrowing costs with high credit ratings when these ratings 
do not consider climate risks.

Nevertheless, access to financial indicators that are adjusted for 
climate risks is only one aspect of the challenge. Before this new data 
is integrated into the decisions that investors make, the investors must 
be convinced that climate change actually holds significant consequences 
for financial markets.

In this sense, encouraging investors to recognise the impact of climate 
change may ultimately pose more of a sociological challenge than an 
economic one.
https://theconversation.com/most-investors-arent-paying-attention-to-climate-risks-the-financial-system-needs-to-change-219070



/[The news archive - malicious fiction from Crichton and Murdoch ]/
/*December 14, 2006 */
December 14, 2006: MSNBC's Keith Olbermann condemns the latest sleazy 
action by overrated novelist and climate-change denier Michael Crichton:
"In his last novel, he dismissed global warming.  So a political 
columnist for the 'New Republic' who went to Yale named Michael Crowley 
ripped him for it.  Now Crichton's got a new book out, in which he’s 
created a minor character who is a child rapist, and described as a 
political columnist who went to Yale, and who’s named Mick Crowley.  
Crichton’s publisher, Harper Collins, is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

"The real Michael Crowley is understandably upset that Crichton gave his 
name to a child rapist, but look, Mr. Crowley, it could have been worse; 
Crichton could have used your name for a character based on himself.  
Author Michael 'Vengeance is Mine' Crichton, today's Worst Person in the 
World."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIdoaaYklJ8






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