🌱 The Grumpy Optimists #100
Episode 100 and a two week break...
Happy Monday. 👋
Welcome back to another week of The Grumpy Optimists and a huge milestone for me with my 100th episode of the newsletter, wild really. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I use this episode to create something a little bit different and give you my thoughts on why I’m optimistic about the future but I’m saving that for a few weeks.
For now, I just want to say a massive thank you. In the last nearly 3 years I’ve been able to connect with close to 4,000 people through this newsletter and have officially confirmed with myself that I am a grump optimist, a term that I hope resonates with a lot of you. To those of you who help contribute financially to these blogs, you make doing this feel incredible and I can’t thank you enough, for those of you who share my work and thoughts with others, you’re brilliant, and to those of you who read every week, or when you can, you’re the understated superstars.
In the last three years, my thoughts on climate haven’t changed too much. I see that there is an unprecedented challenge ahead of us, there’s lots left to do and lots of problems but most importantly and ever increasingly, tackling climate change is bringing in the smartest people in the world to try and solve it, now that is cool and shows the opportunities to come.
Here are some of my favourite posts over the last three years.
For now, I’m taking two weeks off from The Grumpy Optimists and work in general to head on a road trip around France. Have a great few weeks and I’ll see you in August!
👀 Articles to read
🍺 Gipsy Hill create a carbon-negative beer without any offsets. Gipsy Hill created two new beers, Swell, a lager and Trail, a pale ale are brewed using barley grown through regenerative farming with the brilliant Wildfarmed. The result means that each pint removes more CO2e from the atmosphere than it produces.
💭 Why it matters. I know I touched on this release last week, but I think it deserves more credit. Being able to incorporate regenerative practices into a conventional product you can buy at a pub is huge news. It’s not just exciting for the brewing industry, but more widely for anybody working with agriculture. It shows that it is possible to produce beer that is both delicious and can contribute to better soil health and regenerative systems and is a bold move that’s needed to change the way we make products and work with nature.
Check out the video on Sky News with Sam McMeekin, Gipsy Hill co-founder and my brilliant co-founder at Zevero Ben Richardson talking about the project and how it works.👇
📈 Why decarbonisation has only just started. Could we break down decarbonisation into a pre and post-2020 world? The data says we probably could. Ben James looks at the growth in the decarbonisation of our planet, with a primary focus on electricity, and how the mass deployment of technology to make a real impact started in 2020. We’re still way off track of where we need to be, but overall investment in the energy transition has nearly doubled since 2020.
👕 France will subsidies clothing repairs. In the UK, an estimated £140m worth of clothing is sent to landfill every year, and globally, fashion is expected to account for 25% of all emissions in 2050. To try and combat waste and reduce the need for new clothing and more emissions, France has announced it will provide subsidies of €6 for restitching and €25 for resoling a pair of shoes. If the world is on fire, why are we still buying shoes?
♻️ Why management research on climate change needs a change. When The Economist is talking about the need to shift away from capitalism to a new structure of protecting nature it’s a strong message for where we’re heading. This article looks at how we need to explore how we create a just transition away from fossil fuels and challenge the norms of the business world we operate in.
🚗 Paris to charge SUV drivers higher parking fees. SUV ownership has risen 60% in Paris since 2019 taking up more room and producing more emissions. In a bid to tackle the problem, Paris is looking to charge vehicles based on their size, weight and type of motor to tackle auto-besity.
🏦 U.S. launches $20bn in green bank programs. The U.S. EPA launched two $20 billion grant programs to spark clean energy investments with the dual aim to reduce emissions and also in particular to support low-income communities.
🤝 Climate X Memes
This week was written on the kitchen table of a friend's house before we packed a van and headed off for two great weeks in France.
The Grumpy Optimists 💚