1. Turning carbon emissions into running shoes
On, October 2022
“On is leading a supply chain coalition to reshape carbon waste into running shoes, working in cooperation with LanzaTech and Borealis.
With CleanCloud™, we make carbon emissions the starting point for the creation of EVA (ethylene vinyl acetate) foam – a material we can engineer into high-performance cushioning for running shoes. There’s also the potential to use it in other parts of the shoe, and other products, in the future.
“It’s a win-win situation: we are capturing emissions before they pollute our atmosphere and are at the same time moving away from fossil-based materials,” explains Caspar Coppetti, Co-Founder and Executive Co-Chairman of On.”
2. VW faces investor lawsuit over climate-change related lobbying disclosures
Reporting by Victoria Waldersee; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Reuters, October 20, 2022
“The investors — Swedish public pension funds AP7, AP2, AP3, AP4, Danish AkademikerPension and the Church of England Pensions Board — allege that the automaker's lobbying via its membership of automotive and business associations runs counter to its public messaging on the importance of the green transition.”
3. With renewables, Native communities chart a path to energy sovereignty
By Jeff St. John, Canary Media, October 10, 2022
“Solar development also means economic opportunity. The Red Lake Indian Reservation, with a population of about 5,500, has an unemployment rate of 24 percent. Most of the available jobs are linked to tribal government, and most revenue is generated by Red Lake’s casinos. “We wanted to create jobs, entrepreneurship opportunities,” Blake said.
The ecological benefits of solar power are significant too for a tribe that has lived on the same 1,260 square miles of land since the 18th century. High levels of mercury from more than a century of coal power plant emissions have polluted the nearby Great Lakes and have been detected in the fish in the community’s namesake body of water, Red Lake, home to the country’s largest and oldest commercial walleye fishery. The tribe has fought the construction of fossil fuel pipelines across its land, which bring the risk of catastrophic explosions and oil spills as well as worsening climate change.
Blake views the fossil-fuel energy system as part and parcel of an “extractive and predatory” economic system, one that threatens not just the communities and ecosystems directly harmed by it but the entire planet. Native people can now “take back these profits, take back these resources and start taking care of the planet and taking care of our communities,” he said.”
4. Decarbonization Won’t Require As Much Land As You Think
By Austin Vernon, Institute for Progress, October 17, 2022
“What if we pushed for an energy system that was driven by renewables, but incorporated other energy sources as well? The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) models many cases beyond pure renewables. A recent NREL study incorporated hourly regional energy demand and costs like transmission infrastructure to estimate the future price of energy resources, then computed the market share that minimizes costs. The resulting projections suggest that a market-friendly approach to decarbonization can be successful. Wind generation has a minor market share in most cases, only two to three times our current installed capacity. In scenarios that allow natural gas, wind’s total area would be slightly larger than West Virginia.”
5. Winter's burden: The new heating prices for 2023
By Herb Scribner, Axios, October 20, 2022
The Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration forecasted that heating costs will spike this year.
