It may come as a shock, but it turns out the climate crisis has not yet been solved. So joining me for an update is Ketan Joshi, a researcher and communications consultant who works on climate-focused comms.
We discuss why the atmosphere is a bathtub, why bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is absurd, and why more rain and snow doesn’t mean things aren’t warming up. We also talk about some dodgy statistics relating to hybrid vehicles, and Earth Day.
And, sad to say, we riff off one of Ketan’s blog posts to talk about Elon Musk and X — but trust me, it’s interesting.
This conversation was recorded on 22 April 2024.
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Ketan has been on the pod before, back in 2021.
Episode Links
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I did a science degree at Sydney University, and since I was a teenager I’ve loved science, technology, philosophy and psychology. I worked in the renewable energy industry for about eight years, doing operational monitoring, data analysis, community engagement and corporate communications. I’ve also worked in data science and innovation communications at Australia’s national science agency. At the moment, I live in Oslo, Norway. I’m a full-time writer, analyst, communications consultant and author, and you can read more about my work on climate and energy here.
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Fighting alongside my friends for the best possible pathway to climate justice and fossil fuel elimination. Anti-greenwashing.
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Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network) including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2024 is "Planet vs. Plastics." 2025 will be the 55th anniversary of Earth Day.
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The spread of cancer cells from the place where they first formed to another part of the body. In metastasis, cancer cells break away from the original (primary) tumor, travel through the blood or lymph system, and form a new tumor in other organs or tissues of the body. The new, metastatic tumor is the same type of cancer as the primary tumor. For example, if breast cancer spreads to the lung, the cancer cells in the lung are breast cancer cells, not lung cancer cells.
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On 16 April 2024, heavy rains caused floods in the United Arab Emirates, affected cities of mainly Dubai and Sharjah, the northern Emirates, and different areas of the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah. According to the Emirati National Center for Meteorology, this was the country's heaviest rainfall recorded in 75 years. The floods in the Emirates were a part of the greater Persian Gulf floods.
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[19 April 2024] Global warming is amplifying the climate drivers affecting where flash floods occur and how often. All around the world, we’re seeing intense dumps of rain in a short period, triggering flooding – just as we saw in Dubai this week.
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The belief that climate change causes or will cause various weather-related extremes, including both hot and cold weather, to become more intense.
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[19 April 2024] Cloud seeding refers to attempts to manipulate the properties of clouds to produce rain or snow. It has a very checkered history and, by the end, you’ll see why I’m skeptical.
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[20 January 2022] Concerned that science fiction could end up becoming science fact in all the wrong ways, an international coalition of researchers and campaigners has called for an end to solar geoengineering plans.
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I research, write and talk about how humanity is punching through the limits of what our planet can sustain, why that matters, and what we must do about it.
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This table presents the latest, daily average reading for atmospheric CO2 on the planet. Updates happen once a day with few exceptions.
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The Climate Action Tracker is an independent scientific project that tracks government climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement aim of "holding warming well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C."
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[5 December 2023] Despite their promises, governments have not taken enough action to drive down warming projections, with some instead turning to false solutions such as CCS to continue the world's reliance on fossil fuels, the Climate Action Tracker said today as it released its annual warming update at COP28.
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[15 April 2024] It won’t be easy or simple, but clean energy is accelerating. [This article includes the chart showing how nations' actions aren't matching promises.]
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[17 April 2024] Damage to farming, infrastructure, productivity, and health from climate change will cost an estimated $38 trillion per year by 2050, German government-backed research finds, a figure almost certain to rise as human activity emits more greenhouse gases.
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[18 April 2024] Cost of environmental damage will be six times higher than price of limiting global heating to 2C, study finds
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[18 April 2024] Projections that assume the Global North will continue to over-emit help perpetuate inequalities and violate principles of equity, warn scientists.
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[30 March 2024] Guyanese President Mohammad Irfaan Ali had an heated exchange with a BBC journalist over climate change issue. The fiery exchange took place during BBC Hardtalk show, hosted by Stephen Sackur. Ali was questioned about Guyana's plans to extract oil & natural gas from its coastline and carbon emissions it may produce. Ali also highlighted Western “hypocrisy” towards developing nations exploring oil & gas reserves. Watch this to know more.
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Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is the process of extracting bioenergy from biomass and capturing and storing the carbon, thereby removing it from the atmosphere. BECCS can theoretically be a "negative emissions technology" (NET), although its deployment at the scale considered by many governments and industries can "also pose major economic, technological, and social feasibility challenges; threaten food security and human rights; and risk overstepping multiple planetary boundaries, with potentially irreversible consequences"
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[14 November 2023] Greens and David Pocock accused the government of doing the bidding of fossil fuel companies to allow new and expanded polluting projects.
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[11 March 2024] The researchers found that the catastrophic fires likely erased A$2.8 billion ($1.8 billion) from output in Australia’s tourism sector, an amount greater than the economy of Guinea-Bissau, according to World Bank calculations of the West African country of more than 2 million people.
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[10 April 2024] “The full cost of road repair in the Megalong Valley is more than Council’s total annual income. We’ve spent more on Megalong Valley roads recently, than all other roads in the Blue Mountains. “We need significant help from state and federal governments in regards to disaster infrastructure funding."
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[18 April 2024] Tens of millions of people in the country’s coastal lands might find their homes below sea level by 2120 owing to sinking and sea-level rise.
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[31 March 2024] Australia’s government says it wants to build solar panels, instead of importing most of them from overseas – and is funding a boost for local manufacturing of solar.
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[6 September 2022] “This latest move has significantly increased the risk that Europe may not get further gas flows through Nord Stream 1 for the whole winter,” analysts at energy consultancy Rystad Energy said in a research note.
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[27 April 2024] Having pushed for nuclear power as a signature energy policy, National MPs are now divided over where to build reactors – which will be disproportionately located in their seats.
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Jervis Bay Nuclear Power Plant was a proposed nuclear power reactor in the Jervis Bay Territory on the south coast of New South Wales. It would have been Australia's first nuclear power plant, and was the only proposal to have received serious consideration as of May 2023.
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Australia does not currently have nuclear weapons and has never had its own nuclear weapons, although several federal governments have investigated the idea and conducted research into the question. Australia investigated acquiring tactical nuclear weapons from the United Kingdom or the United States as early as 1956 when Athol Townley, Minister for Air, wrote to Philip McBride, Minister for Defence, recommending the acquisition of tactical nuclear weapons to arm Australia's English Electric Canberra bombers and CAC Sabre fighters.
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[23 June 2001] Australia F-111 jets were loaded with bombs ready to attack the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, during the landing of United Nations troops in East Timor, a New Zealand defence expert said last night.
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[8 March 2024] If Australian conservatives wonder why they are losing so many elections they would do well to read Tim Blair’s recent response to my simple suggestion that maybe giant 4WD’s aren’t the best way to move around a city.
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Nissan e-POWER: Driven by electric. Fuelled by petrol. Never need to plug in.
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[17 April 2024] Hybrids outsold pure electrics in the past three quarters, according to new figures, while petrol and diesel sales fell 8%.
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[19 April 2024] Troubled Tritium, in a filing on April 18, 2024 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has called for an administrator to be appointed.
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[23 April 2024] There has been a great conflict between fuel efficiency and eco-friendliness in cars. Even though plug-in hybrid vehicles have for long been thought of as environmentally friendly because they use electricity, in the real world they are the opposite.
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[18 April 2024] New data released by the European Union Environment Agency shows car makers are substantially overestimating the efficiency of their vehicles for petrol, diesel and plug-in hybrid models.
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The Volkswagen emissions scandal, sometimes known as Dieselgate or Emissionsgate, began in September 2015, when the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation of the Clean Air Act to German automaker Volkswagen Group. The agency had found that Volkswagen had intentionally programmed turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines to activate their emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing, which caused the vehicles' NOx output to meet US standards during regulatory testing. However, the vehicles emitted up to 40 times more NOx in real-world driving. Volkswagen deployed this software in about 11 million cars worldwide, including 500,000 in the United States, in model years 2009 through 2015.
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[19 April 2024] Twitter is dead. It has been replaced by something we have never seen before: a blend of highly engaged, influential media/political accounts posting happily inside the newly formed infrastructure of a seething, hate-soaked racist right-wing fever swamp.
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On 13 April 2024, 40-year-old Joel Cauchi stabbed and killed six people and injured a further twelve in the Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Five women and one man died, while the injured included a nine-month-old girl. Cauchi was fatally shot by a police inspector.
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[27 March 2024] App users for social media site, rebranded as X, down by 23% since November 2022 according to Sensor Tower.
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[28 March 2024] Musk is, on paper, the most successful man in the world... Yet with the world at his fingertips, Musk seems joyless, marinating in misery, surrounded by an air of existential bleakness.
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[18 March 2024] It’s the interview everyone is talking about. Don Lemon sits down with Elon Musk to discuss matters ranging from hate speech to DEI to the great replacement theory.
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Hornsdale Power Reserve is a 150 MW (194 MWh) grid-connected energy storage system owned by Neoen co-located with the Hornsdale Wind Farm in the Mid North region of South Australia, also owned by Neoen... Elon Musk placed a wager that the battery would be completed within "100 days from contract signature", otherwise the battery would be free.[14] Tesla had already begun construction, and some units were already operational by 29 September 2017, the time the grid contract was signed.
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The South Australian blackout of 2016 was a widespread power outage in South Australia that occurred as a result of storm damage to electricity transmission infrastructure on 28 September 2016. The cascading failure of the electricity transmission network resulted in almost the entire state losing its electricity supply, affecting 850,000 SA customers.
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[29 October 2022] According to a report by Bloomberg, several Tesla engineers were called to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters to show the company’s code to the Tesla engineers. The engineers were asked to show the code so that “they could assess and explain to Musk what the company needs.”
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[10 June 20156] It's a far cry from Fallout.
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[26 April 2024] When I mentioned last week that politicians had expressed concerns over videos of the Wakeley church stabbing being posted online, I had no idea it was going to turn into an international snipefest between X’s Elon Musk and Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, supported by a gaggle of politicians on both sides.
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In May, Stilgherrian will be one million years old, in binary. To celebrate, because his last birthday ending-in-zero was during the Quarantines, he’s inviting you to join him for a drink. Which you’ll be paying for. Because he isn’t made of money
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