📢Today the Global Carbon Project releases its 2024 edition of the Global Carbon Budget, a comprehensive assessment of our perturbation of the carbon cycle and the balance of sources and sinks of CO₂. 1/🧵 The numbers that make the headlines are what is happening this year. It looks like fossil CO₂ emissions will increase by about 0.8%, but that obviously comes with quite a lot of uncertainty as a lot can happen in the final months of the year, and data are far from complete. 2/

It's only been up a couple of months, but already the Tanager-1 satellite is identifying thousands of methane emissions around the world. 1/3
data.carbonmapper.org There are a lot of sources in Texas and New Mexico. Zoom in to see them in groups, zoom in further to see individual sources. 2/3

Why does Norway say it doesn't need any plan to reduce oil and gas extraction? Because the 'expectation' is there will be a substantial decline in production.
But the Petroleum Directorate that produced these scenarios says that if we try harder, we can have higher production. 1/ In their report the Directorate says:
"Purposeful technology development, players willing to invest and successful exploration can increase opportunities for maintaining both production volumes and revenues at high levels." 2/
npd.no/en/whats-new/p…

There's a bit of noise about ClimateTrace, a really nice dataset produced by a large collaboration of scientists. Facility-level emissions, over the whole world! Satellites see everything, and AI does all the work! I want here to look at a single case to open a window onto this. But note: I'm not here to say CT is *wrong*. This is just one example.

📢Today the Global Carbon Project releases its 2023 edition of the Global Carbon Budget, a comprehensive assessment of our perturbation of the carbon cycle and the balance of sources and sinks of CO₂. 1/🧵 The numbers that make the headlines are what is happening this year. It looks like fossil CO₂ emissions will increase by about 1%, but that obviously comes with quite a lot of uncertainty as a lot can happen in the final months of the year, and data are far from complete. 2/

India's Ministry of Coal announced new production targets yesterday: 1404 Mt by 2027 and 1577 Mt by 2030.
These come on the back of a bunch of other previous ambitious targets.
The new 2027 target appears to be a direct extrapolation of 2023's record-breaking production growth. Previous targets always appeared to be based on the maxim "Past performance is not indicative of future results", although in the opposite way to its usual usage: that while growth had previously been sluggish, it was surely about to take off. Set a target, and it will happen.

The start of safety testing in Europe in late 1996 led to significant efforts by manufacturers to produce safer cars, and some of that extra safety meant extra weight. This probably drove most of the weight trend until 2007.

https://twitter.com/robbie_andrew/status/1662439770725728259

The CO₂-intensity component of the car registration tax, introduced in January 2007, introduced a counter-balancing driver.
This component was increased every year. Note in the unsmoothed data how there's a blip every December: the rush to beat higher taxes.

New cars in Norway have become 35% heavier in the last 10 years 🧵

Norway is known for having a large share of electric cars on its roads, currently over 21%. Do they catch fire more often than ICE cars? Not according to data from the Norwegian authorities. The Norwegian fire service has developed routines for handling battery fires in EVs. But they say that it's rare for the battery to be damaged sufficiently to lead to fire. "The battery pack is the strongest part of the car."
elbil.no/elbiler-er-lan…

I've just published an update to @gcarbonproject's global cement process emissions dataset. zenodo.org/record/7875557
To accompany this release, I've put together some slides on CO₂ emissions from cement production and looked into mitigation options.
Take a look 🧵 1/27ish

India is experiencing another scorching heatwave. Short 🧵 The alarm was raised already in February, when that month broke records going back over 100 years. India's weather office at that time announced that India was likely to experience heat waves between March and May.
timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-to…

Today IEA published its first estimates of global fossil CO₂ emissions for the year 2022. Here I compare with the Global Carbon Project's published estimates and those of Carbon Monitor. IEA agrees with GCP's global estimate (+0.9%), but regionally there are some differences. It's interesting that IEA diverges from GCP for the US, since GCP obtains its estimates almost directly from the US Energy Information Administration, which is the agency that reports to agencies like the IEA.

Jeez, where to start?
This "study" does basically everything wrong. Short thread.

https://twitter.com/NatBullard/status/1487507206576742404

First, here's a link to the original study.
autoinsuranceez.com/gas-vs-electri…

Southern Norway is facing record-high prices for electricity going into winter, after record-low prices in 2020. In one of the world's richest countries, people are struggling with energy poverty. Why is this happening? Norway's hydropower dams have very low water levels after a dry summer and autumn, and electricity prices in Europe are very high. Norwegians compete for electricity on this open market, so prices on the continent affect us here.

The pandemic's immediate effect on global CO₂ emissions has only given us about 20 extra days' grace in meeting our global climate target. Let's not leave this to chance, let's make it happen. Stronger policies to drive emissions down faster are urgently required. While 1.5°C has always been a tough goal, the 2°C goal is more attainable, but still requires substantial effort from all of us. The transition is underway, but we must not slacken the pace.

I keep hearing from Norwegians that Norway was a poor country before the oil age. Where does this idea come from, and what were African countries at the time if Norway was poor?
Norway's GDP per capita before oil was discovered in 1969 was at the median of OECD members. Poor? Is it simply that Norway was not quite as rich as Sweden, which is where Norwegians always looked to?
Or is it difficult to think that even when income was one-eighth of today's (extraordinary) level, the country was nevertheless rich?

Why do electric cars sell so well in Norway?
Because they're exempt most of the high taxes faced by traditional cars. With purchase-price parity and lower running costs, combined with a long history and therefore trust in electric cars in Norway, it's little wonder that most people are buying them.

I doubt there are many outside of Norway that know that the Norwegian pop group A-ha was critical in the introduction of electric car incentives in Norway. I certainly didn't. Read on... In 1989, two members of the group, Morten Harket and Magne Furuholmen were in Switzerland with environmentalist Frederic Hauge, when they came across a hobby-converted Fiat Panda. Stated range: 45 km. They snapped it up and imported it to Norway.

Photo: In Switzerland (Bellona)

The Norwegian government released a new climate plan today. Here a few highlights. Norway's CO₂ price, originally introduced in 1991, will be gradually increased from today's 590 kr/tonne (USD70) to 2000 kr/tonne (USD240) in 2030.

"NO LONGER BEST IN THE WORLD"
UNEP's new Human Development Index includes a new (separate) index: Planetary pressures-adjusted HDI (PHDI). News in Norway is that its position drops from #1 to #16 because of this, while Ireland rises from #2 to #1.
Why?

report.hdr.undp.org Check out Norway's 'Domestic Material Consumption'. Fossil fuels are no different here to Ireland's. What's different is this huge 'non-metallic minerals' category.
(Note also the jump in 1998, suggesting data problems.)
materialflows.net/visualisation-…

1/ New data from the IMF show that the total volume of global seaborne cargo in 2020 through September is only 2% lower than in 2019. Why? What about that pandemic then? 2/ It's clear that some types of cargo saw significant drops in the peak months of global lockdown, April and May, here vehicles. But this is a small category in terms of weight.