Recipes of the week
Below are the recipes I’m planning for next week.
Click here to access the list of corresponding groceries for the week.
Recipe #1 - African peanut stew with red beans and sweet potatoes (Vegan)
Recipe from The Plant Protein Revolution Cookbook
Recipe #2 - Super easy mushroom creamy pasta (vegetarian)
Recipe from Rutabago
Recipe #3 - Puy lentils with aubergine, tomatoes and yoghurt (vegetarian)
Recipe from Yottam Ottolenghi, Simple
Climate Readings
Fact of the week: In 2020, the Atlantic hurricane season was so wild that storm namers ran out of letters in the English alphabet with which to name storms — and had to resort to the Greek alphabet instead.
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G7 agrees to stop overseas funding of coal to limit global warming. Leaders from G7 nations took part of a virtual meeting, as a lead up to a gathering in Cornwall in June. The IEA report (covered in last week’s newsletter) is said to have played an influence on the leaders decisions.
We should be happy about this BUT - We’ve heard this before. Back in 2009, the G20 had already committed to phase out fossil fuels subsidies, which was called a breakthrough at the time. All talks, little action?
Big Oil continue to feel the heat this week:
BREAKING -Exxon activist wins board seats in landmark climate vote. A first time activist investor with a tiny stake in ExxonMobil scored a historic win that could change the trajectory of the climate-hostile company.
Court orders Royal Dutch Shell to cut carbon emissions by 45% by 2030. For the first time in history, a judge ruled that an oil company is responsible for the devastating impact it has on the climate.
What is a carbon budget and why does it matter?
You may have heard this before - “We have 10 years to cut our emissions before it’s too late”. “We have 8 years left in our carbon budget”. Let’s unpack this.
Why carbon and why a budget?
The focus is on carbon because carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main anthropic (=human-induced) greenhouse gas and thus has the largest effect on global temperatures.
CO2 has this really annoying physical property of staying in the atmosphere for a very, very long time - think thousands of years. That’s because it’s a chemically inert gas, it doesn’t interact with any other gas in the atmosphere. So once it’s up there, good luck removing it. So we talk about budget because there is a finite amount of carbon we can put in the atmosphere before things start going real bad.
What is the carbon budget?
To put it simply, the carbon budget provides a number to express the maximum amount of CO2 that may be emitted to stabilise warming at a particular level – such as the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target.
Where are we now?
For the 1.5C target, Carbon Brief estimate a range of 230-440bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) from 2020 onwards, which corresponds to a two-in-three to one-in-two chance of not exceeding 1.5C of global warming since pre-industrial times.
This is equivalent to between six and 11 years of global emissions, if they remain at current rates and do not start declining.
Here is nice visualisation by the Global Carbon Budget that shows the carbon budget as a bucket filling over the years:
Conclusion
There are a lot of different methods to calculate carbon budgets, and there are a lot of uncertainties around them. Carbon budgets make it easy to understand our CO2 problem and give us something to aim for.
They do not, however, provide a solution to reaching that goal: an ambition that is becoming more unreachable every year emissions do not decline.