#Fossil Fuel Phase-Out

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

"In October, Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental, one of the largest operators there, promised­ yet more production in a basin that Bloomberg last year described as “uniquely positioned to become the world’s most important growth engine for oil production.”

Did nobody tell them about climate change? " @Yale Environment 360

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

The Swedish capital now has a plan in place to ban gas and diesel cars in part of the city beginning in 2025, according to Bloomberg. The ban is going to begin in a 20 block area around the capital's finance hub, the report says.

The same area also houses the city's main shopping attractions. It'll only allow "electric cars, some hybrid trucks and fuel cell vehicles", the report says, citing rules reported by SVT that will be presented mid-week(..)

P.S. One more reason to ditch fossil fuel vehicles...It looks like a fairly rich area of ​​the city and for the majority of residents there, new electric cars are not such an expensive purchase, especially considering that around 2024, several new electric cars will enter the European car market at much more affordable prices such as the Volvo EX30...

[andmaybegayer]

I don't know I find this very normal looking fuel station in the middle of a gigantic oil refinery complex extremely funny. Like yeah just hook me up.

[bumblebeeappletree]

Many climate activists think having an oil exec as president of COP28 is a conflict of interest — especially following these comments by Sultan Al Jaber.

Originally posted on YouTube on December 6th, 2023.

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

P.S. Nothing to worry about: In countries that do not have their own fossil fuel reserves, RENEWABLE ENERGY is the CHEAPEST AND MOST EFFICIENT ENERGY SOURCE ANYWAY! The fact that US "conservatives" want to turn into an energy Taliban and voluntarily gift the world energy market to communist China, these are the problems of these fake "conservative" idiots. Insidious "conservatism" that is based on lies and abandonment of common sense IS DESTINED TO FAIL...! 

“Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch” https://ow.ly/xuZX50PuxWV

[head-post]

EU agrees 2040 ban on fossil boilers in updated green buildings law

On 7 December, EU lawmakers reached a political agreement on the revision of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), Euractiv reports.

As part of this agreement, fossil fuel boilers are to be phased out completely by 2040 and subsidies reduced from 2025. Ciarán Cuffe, a green lawmaker from Ireland who was the lead speaker on the EPBD revision for the European Parliament, said:

 “We have achieved something remarkable this evening. We created a blueprint for the transition towards a zero-emission building stock.”

From 2030, all new residential buildings must be fitted with solar panels, and then gradually installed elsewhere as well, according to a preliminary agreement between the European Parliament and the 27 EU Council member states.

Under this agreement, all new buildings must be zero-emission from 2030 onwards, and for new buildings occupied or owned by public authorities, this target is brought forward to 2028.

Learn more HERE

[dogmoder]

german greens are opposed to nuclear for stupid ideological reasons. that's pretty much it

germany's green party after the country phases out all nuclear energy to save the planet and becomes the EU's largest coal consumer

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

"An oil executive is leading the UN climate summit. It’s going as well as you’d expect."

“#AlJaber’s comments are absurd and troubling, betraying both an ignorance about the science and a dismissiveness about the need for rapid #decarbonization, which is at the very center of the proceedings over which he is in principle presiding as #COP28 president,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist #MichaelEMann told Vox.

"“The outcome of COP28 must be that all the oil, gas, and coal nations of the world see that now we are truly at the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era for the world economy. And that we are now starting to bend the curve, properly,” Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told CNBC."

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

More recently, the annual capacity from gas plants coming online has plateaued while retirements are slowly increasing. Aging plants and state clean energy goals are certainly helping that trend. But we’ve also reached the point where the economics of renewables are just much better. On a levelized cost basis (a fancy term for the average cost of electricity over the generator’s lifetime), utility-scale renewables are cheaper and those costs keep going down(..)

[deadsetobsessions]

Sea Cryptic!Danny Phantom- pt. 8

[Pt.1] [Pt.2] [Pt.3] [Pt.4] [Pt.5] [Pt.6] [Pt.7] [Pt.9] [Pt.10]

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been to the hospital in the past three years, I’d have enough money to buy a bag of skittles from Target. Most of it wasn’t for me though lol I’ll add this onto the list in a bit, but I tend to do that from my desktop but I’m still currently attached to an IV drip. I’ve also never been this hydrated in my life lmao

——

Danny poked a puffed up pufferfish. The poison floated through his ghost form and did nothing but give him a little zap. Danny chuckled, wiping away a bit of oil that had gotten onto the fish from a nearby oil spill. Jesus fuck. Danny knew that bald headed, easily drawn Vlad wannabe from across the river would do something terrible to Gotham’s waters (not that it needed help being atrocious to Danny’s clean water appreciation).

The puffer fish- Danny gave up on understanding Gotham’s water ecosystem, having realized that it was a cursed mix of saltwater and freshwater and swamp- gave a fearful little wiggle and Danny let it go, turning to the oil particles floating around.

Danny took out his phone.

“Danny? Why the hell are you calling at three in the morning?”

Danny raised a hand and blasted out some ice, gathering the oil up. “Hey Sam. If I got you into contact with Poison Ivy, do you think you could team up to get rid of Lex Luthor’s new holding company in Gotham?”

“Danny, are you asking me to commit an act of ecoterrorism?”

“That’s not even the weirdest thing I’ve ever asked you to do.” Danny placed a hand on the ice mass and flew it, the oil, and himself across the river to Metropolis.

“Deal.” Sam’s voice gets further away as she pulled her phone from her ear. “I’ll text Tucker, see if he could futz with Luthor’s taxes. I heard her doesn’t even give his workers a livable wage, and that’s so not gonna fly.”

“Perfect! Thanks! We could totally meet up and hang out with my new friends!”

“Hah! That Tim guy? The one that wanted you to introduce Phantom to him?”

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, goth girl.”

“Sure, dork. I’ll swing by Friday?”

“Sure! Want me to pick you up?” Danny phased through Lex Luthor’s frankly ridiculous amounts of security measures, still completely invisible and towing a giant mass of oil covered ice.

“Cool. Now hang up. I actually need sleep.”

“Ah, you must be dead tired. I get it.”

Sam hung up, and a second later, Danny got a pic of her holding up a middle finger with her signature purple nail polish.

Danny stared down at the sleeping billionaire. Gross. He let his face re enter the visible spectrum and lowered the temperature of the room drastically. Luthor groaned, waking up as he shivered like a hyped up chihuahua.

Danny bared his teeth, glowing green skin reflecting the black holes of the universe and imploding stars and burning planets as he leaned towards the frozen two bit villain.

“RESPECT THE PLANET,” Danny snarled. He unmelted the invisible ice as he simultaneously made the oil visible, the entirety of the oil spill coating every single inch of Luthor’s penthouse bedroom. Danny winked out, but not before snapping a quick picture of Lex Luthor’s absolutely covered in his company’s oil spill.

If Danny had made sure that there were fish droppings mixed in with the oil… that was his own damn business.

——

Danny floated over to a brooding Batman.

“Do you have two hundred dollars on you?” Danny asked in lieu of a greeting.

Batman grunted a yes.

“Two hundred dollars for a photo of Lex Luthor being hit with karma.”

Batman instantly handed over the cash and received a printed out photo of Lex Luthor (in his Lexcorp pjs) covered by fossil fuel.

"Is this..."

"The oil from his oil spill? Yes."

Batman stared at the picture.

"Why was this more expensive than ID'ing corpses?"

"Cause it's funnier. And dead people deserve more consideration than a egg looking ass polluting everything he touches."

Superman zoomed into the space in front of them, face eager.

"I heard you had something about Luthor?"

Danny figured that Batman probably contacted the hero, and confidently said, "$200 for personal use, $300 for commercial use."

Superman quickly got together three hundred dollars in cash and quickly forked it over. Danny gave him another physical copy of the photo and a usb drive with the photo in a digital format.

"I am so pinning this up." Superman muttered.

"Get out of my city." Batman said flatly. Superman waved a hand, beamed at Danny, and left.

"Did you know Gotham's waters is a mixture of freshwater, swamp, and saltwater habitats?"

Batman grunted.

"Also, please stop stalking Danny Fenton. It's odd."

Batman swiveled his head over. "What."

Danny stared him down. "Stop. Stalking. Innocent. Bystanders. Or else I will recreate the phrase "drowned rat" with you as the subject."

Batman stilled.

"I don't kill, by the way. I can, however, dunk you in the sea and lift you up like a goth version of Simba."

Batman relaxed minutely. "I can't."

"And why not?"

Batman gave him a despairing look. "Have you met my children?"

"... Point."

[mindblowingscience]

According to the president of COP28, the latest round of UN climate negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, there is "no science" indicating that phasing out fossil fuels is necessary to restrict global heating to 1.5°C. President Sultan Al Jaber is wrong. There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that a fossil fuel phase-out will be essential for reining in the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. I know because I have published some of it. Back in 2021, just before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, my colleagues and I published a paper in Nature entitled Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5°C world. It argued that 90% of the world's coal and around 60% of its oil and gas needed to remain underground if humanity is to have any chance of meeting the Paris agreement's temperature goals. Crucially, our research also highlighted that the production of oil and gas needed to start declining immediately (from 2020), at around 3% each year until 2050. This assessment was based on a clear understanding that the production and use of fossil fuels, as the primary cause of CO₂ emissions (90%), needs to be reduced in order to stop further heating. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that net zero CO₂ emissions will only be reached globally in the early 2050s, and warming stabilized at 1.5°C, if a shift away from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources begins immediately.

Continue Reading.

[reasonsforhope]

"The prospects of the world staying within the 1.5C limit on global heating have brightened owing to the “staggering” growth of renewable energy and green investment in the past two years, the chief of the world’s energy watchdog has said.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, and the world’s foremost energy economist, said much more needed to be done but that the rapid uptake of solar power and electric vehicles were encouraging.

“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” he said in an interview. “Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investments in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase.” ...

The IEA, in a report entitled Net Zero Roadmap, published on Tuesday morning, also called on developed countries with 2050 net zero targets, including the UK, to bring them forward by several years.

The report found “almost all countries must move forward their targeted net zero dates”, which for most developed countries are 2050. Some developed countries have earlier dates, such as Germany with 2045 and Austria and Iceland with 2040 and for many developing countries they are much later, 2060 in the case of China and 2070 for India.

Cop28, the UN climate summit to be held in Dubai this November and December, offered a key opportunity for countries to set out tougher emissions-cutting plans, Birol said.

He wants to see Cop28 agree a tripling of renewable energy by 2030, and a 75% cut in methane from the energy sector by the same date. The latter could be achieved at little cost, because high gas prices mean that plugging leaks from oil and gas wells can be profitable...

He also called for Cop28 to agree a doubling of energy efficiency. “To reduce fossil fuel emissions, we need to reduce demand for fossil fuels. This is a golden condition, if we are to reach our climate goals,” he said.

Birol stopped short of endorsing the call that some countries have made for a full phase-out of fossil fuels by 2050 to be agreed at Cop28, but he said all countries must work on reducing their fossil fuel use."

-via The Guardian, September 26, 2023

[mariacallous]

In 2025, we will see a fundamental transformation in the language of climate politics. We’re going to hear a lot less about “reducing emissions” from scientists and policymakers and a lot more about “phasing out fossil fuels” or “ending coal, oil, and methane gas.” This is a good thing. Although it is scientifically accurate, the phrase “reducing emissions” is too easily used for greenwashing by the fossil-energy industry and its advocates. The expression “ending coal, oil, and methane gas,” on the other hand, keeps the focus on the action that will do most to resolve the climate crisis.

This discourse shift has been initiated by the latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The world’s climate scientists say that already existing fossil-energy infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for halting global heating at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. This statement means two things. It means that the world cannot develop any more coal, oil, or gas, if we want our planet to remain relatively livable. And it means that even some already developed fossil-fuel deposits will need to be retired before the end of their lifetime, since we need to leave space in the carbon budget for essential activities like agriculture.

The international community has already integrated this new science into its global climate governance. The 28th Conference of the Parties—the annual conference of the world’s nations party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—called for every country to contribute to “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” Never before in the history of international climate negotiations had the main cause of global heating been clearly named and specifically targeted. The United Nations itself now calls for the phaseout of coal, oil, and methane gas.

This new climate language will become mainstream in 2025. In her policy plans for her second term aspPresident of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen pledged not to work to lower EU emissions, but to “continue to bring down energy prices by moving further away from fossil fuels.” The new UK government promised in its manifesto that it will withhold licenses for new coal and for oil exploration—and states outright that it will “ban fracking for good.” And in France, Macron has explicitly vowed to end fossil-fuel use entirely.

Climate politics in the US will also evolve in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection for president. Republicans will continue to embrace a “drill, baby, drill” climate agenda, denying the danger or sometimes even the reality of climate change while advocating for expanding domestic crude and methane-gas production. They may try to greenwash their policies by claiming they embrace an “all of the above” energy strategy, but this messaging will have limited effects. Due to political polarization the association of Trump with coal, oil, and gas will raise Democratic support for phasing out fossil fuels. Before the 2024 election, 59 percent of Democrats said climate change should be the Federal government’s top priority, but only 48 percent said they supported a phaseout. In 2025 majorities of Democrats will begin to support fossil-fuel phaseout, especially if climate advocates revive science-based climate messaging, continue to emphasize that clean-energy deployment is job creation, and frame choosing to phase out fossil fuels as a form of freedom that upholds our right to a livable future.

Given that Democrats won many down-ballot races, and cities and states are still pledging to pass climate policies, this shift in the Democratic majority will keep the US on the map in international climate negotiations, whether or not Trump withdraws the US from the Paris Agreement, creating new local alliances with the UK, the EU, and global south nations calling for international fossil-fuel phaseout targets. This bloc can counter the power of petrostates in international climate negotiations. At the very least, the mainstreaming of the language of fossil-fuel phaseout will help undermine the greenwashing strategy of current oil and gas company PR, which falsely advertises industry as pursuing technologies at scale to help “reduce emissions” even as they continue their upstream investments.

Of course the petrostates, along with India and China, will push back against the rhetoric of fossil fuel phaseout. But India can be helped to turn away from its domestic coal stores by clean-energy financing at close to cost along with the international aid and technology transfers already pledged at previous climate conferences. And although its rhetoric may not align with that of the West, China should not be imagined as opposed to climate action. China has enacted the most comprehensive climate policy on the planet, in service of its goal to peak emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2060. If their climate messaging remains focused on “emissions,” in light of their plan to keep using fossil fuels past 2030, they are preparing for next decade’s pivot away from fossil fuels by building out clean energy at a truly extraordinary rate.

In 2025 climate discourse will recenter on the message that halting global heating requires the phaseout of coal, oil, and gas. This new consensus will shift the politics of climate change and help motivate an urgent sprint to a clean-energy, ecologically integrated economy—the only economy that ensures a livable future.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The pressure to repay debts is forcing poor nations to continue investing in fossil fuel projects to make their repayments on what are usually loans from richer nations and financial institutions, according to new analysis from the anti-debt campaigners Debt Justice and partners in affected countries. The group is calling for creditors to cancel all debts for countries facing crisis – and especially those linked to fossil fuel projects. “High debt levels are a major barrier to phasing out fossil fuels for many global south countries,” said Tess Woolfenden, a senior policy officer at Debt Justice. “Many countries are trapped exploiting fossil fuels to generate revenue to repay debt while, at the same time, fossil fuel projects often do not generate the revenues expected and can leave countries further indebted than when they started. This toxic trap must end.” According to the report, the debt owed by global south countries has increased by 150% since 2011 and 54 countries are in a debt crisis, having to spend five times more on repayments than on addressing the climate crisis.