🌱 The Grumpy Optimists #82
The environmental impact of single-use vapes, TikTok being used to battle a new oil project, it's a 16-year-olds typical day!
Happy Monday. 👋
Welcome back to another episode of The Grumpy Optimists, your weekly recap of all things positive and important climate news. This week we’re looking at the impact of Silicon Valley Bank collapsing, how social media is being used to stop the Willow oil project, turning carbon dioxide into clothing and how bad are single-use vapes (hint, not only do they look stupid, they’re bad for the planet).
Have a great week!
📰 An important story
Before we dig into the climate news, I want to bring awareness to something that is pretty important for the UK startup industry, which I am part of with Zevero, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). This is not about bailing out a bank or protecting our pretty horrendous financial system, but it’s about making sure startups can access the money in their accounts and can make payroll.
SVB is one of the biggest banks for UK startups and when setting up my company was one of the banks I looked at using. In the end, I didn’t use SVB, but the idea that I could be sitting here writing this with all of my company’s money blocked, unable to know if I’ll be able to pay myself and the team is pretty frightening. I’ve read stories from friends and people on Twitter who are unsure if they will have a business on Monday. It also matters for climate, over 60% of community solar was funded by SVB. It looks as if UK firms will be getting help from the chancellor, but it shows the many challenges that come with starting a business.
👀 Articles to read
📱Social media Vs the Willow oil project. The Willow oil project is one of the largest developments on US soil in decades, with the potential to produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day. It’s projected the development would create 278 million tons of CO2e over its lifetime, the equivalent of adding 2 million cars to roads in the US.
Hundreds of people are taking to TikTok, generating millions of views to raise awareness of the project and attempt to stop it before it begins (I hate to admit I saw this on TikTok before this article). However, the local mayor and residents want the project to go ahead, providing jobs and also much-needed revenue for the region. This is a perfect demonstration of the need for a just transition, where local people who rely on fossil fuel revenue for jobs and income need to be part of the solution. You can watch one of the best TikToks here.
🇷🇺 Has Putin been a catalyst for climate action? Let’s just start this one off by saying that Putin is a war criminal and that the war in Ukraine is in no way a good thing. This article from Heatmap looks at how the war in Ukraine has helped kick-start a decarbonisation programme that would likely not have happened at the same pace without it. In Europe in 2022, solar investment increased by 35%, wind investment increased by 62%, and battery storage increased by 78%. Heat pump installations increased by about a third, which helped reduce gas consumption by 13%. This is a really interesting read, I recommend reading it in full.
🛒 Lidl commits to halving the environmental impact of your shopping basket. Lidl joins big supermarkets like Waitrose and Tesco in committing to reduce the impact of the way we produce and consume food. The agriculture industry makes up to one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions and while it’s important companies are committing to these actions, this is the type of commitment required to limit temperatures below 1.5°. It should be the bare minimum.
👕 Startup, Rubi Labs, raises $8.7 million to scale their textiles made from carbon emissions. Rubi Labs describes itself as a ‘symbiotic manufacturing’ company which uses biochemical processes to turn carbon dioxide from manufacturing facilities into cellulose and turns it into textiles. It’s genuinely really bloody cool to see.
🪠 New way to remove carbon dioxide shows promise. Scientists have found that they can turn CO2 into bicarbonate of soda and store it safely and cheaply in seawater, up to three times more efficiently than other forms of carbon removal.
💭 Why it matters. In any scenario on the pathway to net zero, we’ll require a major scale-up of carbon removal technology with a projected 10 billion tonnes required by 2050 with 8 billion likely to come from new technology. As of 2021, less than 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide had been permanently removed from the atmosphere by new technologies—1 million times short of the annual scale needed.
⚡ A climate hurdle bringing us back down to earth? We don’t have enough electricians. Electricians are in short supply as demand for green-energy products like heat pumps and solar panels increases, in part due to incentives and climate bills such as the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s clear that climate action can create jobs, but we also need to ensure we’re providing the training and resources to keep up with demand. I see this as genuinely positive news in the long term.
🚬 What’s the environmental impact of single-use vapes? It's genuinely astonishing to see how many people are sucking down nicotine and who knows what else as they walk the streets of the UK. In fact, 18% of 15-year-olds in England and Wales use e-cigarettes. I regularly hear people talking about how "good" a new flavour is, and my house looks like a disposal site for vapes (sorry housemates who read this). But what is the environmental impact of such a pointless product? It turns out there is a lot of e-waste.
The vapes sold in the UK last year contained enough copper to make 370,000 at-home electric vehicle chargers and enough lithium to produce more than 2,500 EV batteries. Vape batteries could also be recharged at least 300 times if they had a charging port, and the batteries are unlikely to be recycled. Less than 1% of the 138 million products sold in the UK are assumed to be recycled. This is me calling out all of you who use single-use e-cigarettes but also want to help tackle the climate crisis. Why?
🐝 New vaccine to protect bees works like magic. Bees are crucial to biodiversity and quite simply the future of the planet, but their numbers are declining due to disease, pesticides and drought, threatening our food supply. However, the good news is that a new vaccine has been created to protect bees from American foulbrood disease. The cool part is that only the queen bee has to be vaccinated and she then passes it on to the millions of bees in the colony.
Fun facts. Each bee creates just 1/16th of a teaspoon of honey in its life and queen bees can lay 2,000 eggs a day, choosing the gender of each one. Mental.
🐢 Over 170tn plastic particles floating in oceans. Scientists estimate that there are now over 171 trillion pieces of plastic in the world's oceans, a significant increase from 16 trillion pieces in 2005. The concentration of plastics in the oceans could nearly triple by 2040 if no action is taken.
💷 £20bn in funding for low carbon energy and carbon capture. UK chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is set to announce £20bn investment over 20 years to reduce emissions. The plans will help create 50,000 jobs with the aim of capturing 20-30m tonnes of CO2 by 2030. They will also help create small, modular nuclear reactors to boost the UK’s renewable energy and prevent us from having to rely on fossil fuels when wind and solar production falls.
💅🏻 Collagen. Good for your skin and nails, but bad for the planet. An investigation by The Guardian and partners has found that collagen is driving deforestation in Brazil. Bovine collagen, the most popular type of collagen, is produced from cow skin and the rise of the $4bn industry is negatively impacting deforestation in Brazil. Currently, collagen companies have no legal duty to track deforestation in their supply chains. There is hope that this research will result in more regulation.
This episode was written to the melodic screams of children in a GAIL’s coffee shop at 9.30 on a Sunday morning. That’s me not having kids for a while. If you could like this post that would be great to boost my self-confidence and convince me that spending £10 on coffee and cake was a worthwhile investment this weekend. I hope you all have a great week.
On the off chance anybody reading this will be at SIBA’s BeerX conference in Liverpool this week, let me know, I’d love to catch up!
The Grumpy Optimists 💚