Update on The Imprisonment of Hoàng Thi Minh Hồng
I have been in contact with leading US climate activists about the ongoing efforts to free imprisoned Vietnamese climate activists. Last week, legendary climate activist
gave us a shout out:My longtime colleague Hoang Hong continues to rot in a Vietnamese jail for the crime of standing up to the coal industry; climate tech entrepreneur Matt Gordon offers a noble argument on her behalf.
The progress of unborking the climate relies on a collaboration between two forces: The climate activists who create the will for change, and the scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who create the means of change. These two groups are not always fully aligned, but they require each other. An attack on any of us is an attack on all of us.
Bill’s organization 350.org has started a petition, and I would like to ask everyone in the CTAN community who reads this to go sign it and share it on social media with the hashtag #FreeHongFreeThemAll. I think it is hard to imagine what being a political prisoner in Vietnam must be like, but I am scared for Hong and her colleagues, on a very visceral level. Sharing this costs you nothing, and will help not just them, but the broader community of climate activists worldwide, by sending the message that you do not fuck with our friends.
Upcoming Events: EVs and Equity
I like to talk a lot about equity, but our panels usually focus pretty tightly on technology. But we’re changing that! On Sept 6, we will be presenting Navigating an Equitable EV Transition, a panel produced in conjunction with the Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.
This will be a free event with limited capacity. Register here.
This Week: Heat Waves and Extreme Weather Events
The ongoing heatwave across the US is not showing any signs of letting up. Fortunately, the State of Texas, always at the forefront, is taking decisive action by getting rid of rest breaks for construction workers, working to undercut renewables, and weakening climate education for students.
But, has climate change really caused this heat wave? And what would that even mean? Returning to the good old IPCC report, there’s a lot of interesting discussion on the burgeoning science of extreme event attribution. No individual weather event can be attributed to climate change directly (as we discussed previously), but what scientists can do is look at all the available evidence and determine how likely it is that an event would have occurred with or without climate change, using, for instance, a Bayesian model. The answer is pretty clear: Climate change has and will continue to increase the frequency of extreme weather events. And, as we have often discussed, these impacts will be felt unequally, and will wreak the most havoc on less-developed countries that have contributed the fewest carbon emissions. Additionally, in urban areas, the IPCC reports Observed adverse impacts are concentrated amongst economically and socially marginalised urban residents.
What kinds of extremes should we expect? The IPCC report tells us,
The assessed climate response to GHG emissions scenarios results in a best estimate of warming for 2081–2100 that spans a range from 1.4°C for a very low GHG emissions scenario to 2.7°C for an intermediate GHG emissions scenario.
So, it’s pretty likely that we’ll see around 2°C warming this century. The report provides a graph showing what this means, in terms of extreme weather events:
In North America, this means the hottest day of the year will probably be about 4-6°F hotter. The hottest day in Phoenix in 2022 was about 115°F, and the hottest day every recorded was 122°F in 1990. So, we would expect this to become pretty normal in this scenario. In fact, Phoenix hit a record this year, with 19 days of weather above 110°F. And July 4 of this year was, globally, the hottest day in about the last 125,000 years.
All this comes at a cost, not just in human lives, but in dollars. Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest insurers, predicted that climate change could incur $23 trillion in losses to the global economy by 2050. As climate science continues to refine our ability to estimate these impacts, and their attribution to climate change, the case for rapid and drastic decarbonization continues to grow, for our children, and for the rest of the humanity.