Our new paper in @NatureClimate finds 1.5C pathways underestimate how much Global North must cut CO2 emissions and how fast oil & gas must be phased out globally
This is because pathways rely too much on phasing out coal, with less emphasis on oil & gas.
nature.com/articles/s4155… Ending coal use is urgent, for both climate & health

But it takes time to enable a just transition in countries that are highly coal-dependent: e.g coal provides 73% of power in India + 89% in South Africa. These can’t be switched off overnight without severe social costs.

This is an important and thought-provoking new paper by @st_pye et al on the limitations of current energy-system modelling approaches for guiding net-zero policies. Some helpful insights for @ipcc_ch WG3 and @theCCCuk.

Top takeaways for me (thread):

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… 1) Fossil CCS is suited to 80% or 90% emissions reductions but not net zero, because CCS does not capture all the emissions where it’s installed. Energy system models (ESMs) still rely heavily on such techs, and may need to be updated to focus more on net-zero techs

Forensic analysis of #oil companies' climate plans by @kellyatrout in new @PriceofOil report: priceofoil.org/2020/09/23/big…

Relative to #ParisGoals they are all grossly insufficient on most metrics TL;DR? Check out Kelly's blog: priceofoil.org/2020/09/23/big…

With a week’s post-thesis holiday in Cornwall, I finally got round to reading Frank Snowden's Epidemics and Society. I found it absolutely gripping. A few things stand out for me from the historical experience (short thread) 1. Social stigmas tend to be greater when a disease is seen as “foreign” (eg plague) or affecting poor (cholera) or marginalised (HIV/AIDS) parts of society, compared to those that have been around for time (smallpox) or that affect elites (polio). Stigmas drive further spread

Great article by @ChloeFarand on how @IEABirol avoids addressing the contradiction at the heart of the @IEA: it wants to be relevant to the #energytransition but remains tied to #FossilFuels

IEA needs to #FixTheWEO

climatechangenews.com/2020/07/27/gre… “IEA was set up and designed for a different era and it needs a radical transformation if it's still to have relevance in the modern era” - @KingsmillBond

“Given the IEA’s rhetoric and calls for leadership, omitting 1.5C is a pretty significant oversight” - @mckinnon_hannah

@Khaldunium Hi Khaldun. The problem is: to limit climate change to tolerable levels (e.g. Iraq is vulnerable to water shortage and extreme heat), most global fossil fuel extraction needs to end by 2050. But this will be much harder to do in countries like Iraq @Khaldunium I agree oil is currently and historically central to public life in Iraq. I would say it has a cultural role as well as political and economic. So our paper tries to square these 2 realities: global limits vs some countries v dependent on oil/gas/coal

.@GeorgeMonbiot makes a good point in contrasting @theCCCuk's "no need to do more because this is enough to meet target" with UK policy to "maximise" oil extraction. But I don't agree that the problem is targets per se.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
1/ Rather, IMO the problem is the near-universal framing of climate mitigation that it will necessarily be costly, difficult and unpleasant, and therefore that the amount societies act to address it must be traded off against that cost and pain
/2

Our friends @ClientEarth have just filed a complaint against @bp_plc's misleading advertising which gives the impression the company is helping solve climate change.

Check out the campaign site supporting the complaint: clientearth.org/the-whole-trut… @ClientEarth @bp_plc BP's adverts wrongly imply that the company is focused on clean energy, wrongly claim that rising energy use is necessary for human progress and wrongly claim that gas is a clean energy source.

The @IEA is the world's most influential energy adviser. Its annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) provides a map of the future of energy, used by governments and companies to decide on policies and investments. It's a map that leads to #climate disaster /1 All 30 of the @IEA's member governments have signed the Paris Agreement. The IEA urges greater action on climate change. But its energy forecasts undermine that call, and make it harder for governments to achieve their climate goals /2

Today's new climate scenario from @Shell sees oil and gas consumption staying at or above today's levels for decades ahead. How can such a world be aligned with the Paris goals? The truth is that it's not It ignores the 1.5C goal, and might keep us below 2 degrees only if new technologies are invented to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.