Thematic Thoughts/What Caught Our Eye
Developments that we found particularly interesting during the week and why.
Coal's (very) long goodbye
Bloomberg (republished in various newspapers) recently highlighted coal's recent period of resurgence, on the back of China's energy insecurity, rising Indian demand, the fallout of the Ukraine war, and "faltering international programs to wean developing economies off fossil fuels". If we go back a
Has Britain's diversity drive backfired?
We have recently seen 'DEI' come under fire, particularly in North America, but also in Europe. "Britain's diversity drive has backfired?" was the headline of a recent Telegraph article that caught our eye via a LinkedIn post from Paul Sesay. On 20 March 2024,
Temperature control is a key electricity demand driver
In Hannah Ritchie's recent Sustainability by numbers blog, she asks the question "what do American households use electricity for?" As many of you will know, Hannah is a data scientist and deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data. She dives into data from
Facilitating inclusion
At a recent Australia and New Zealand Roadshow in London organised by the UK Department for Business and Trade, I met Denise Crouch and Jamie Crathern from LapSafe who talked passionately about their business. LapSafe provide smart lockers, trolleys and cabinets to organisations in the education, healthcare, manufacturing and other
Economic shutdown in the energy transition
It's not just the total cost of the alternatives that we need to consider, it's the operating cost advantage. Much of what we read about transition technologies, such as EVs, heat pumps and renewable electricity generation, focuses on new capacity being added. So new EV sales
EV charging on a neighbours driveway?
A recent report from Zenith suggests that only 1 in 7 UK EV drivers use public charge points. The EVXperience Report (EVX2), which polled almost 2,800 of Zenith’s EV customers, also shows that more than two-thirds (69%) primarily rely on charging off-street at home. The good news is
Legal opinion - no surprise, directors do need to consider nature related risks
The Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative, together with Pollination, commissioned a legal opinion from a team of corporate and financial law barristers on the duties of UK company directors and the need to consider and assess nature related risks. For regular readers of our blogs, it will come as no
Thinking differently about energy: it's not like-for-like
Michael Liebreich published part 2 of his series of essays titled "Net Zero Will Be Harder Than You Think – And Easier!" Last September we discussed part 1 in which Michael focused on the challenges in transitioning to net zero (the 'harder' bit) 👉🏾 https://www.thesustainableinvestor.org.
The dawn of the industrial heat pump age?
There has been a lot of coverage (including from us) on the development of heat pump technologies for home heating. And it's not impossible to see residential heat pumps overtaking gas fired boilers in say the next decade. One approach that might accelerate this is heat as a
Fertiliser is going green. Or is it?
About 80% of ammonia produced is used to make fertiliser. In terms of direct emissions, it is almost 2x as emissions intensive as crude steel production and 4x that of cement at approximately 2.4 t CO2 per tonne of production. In this blog back in March 2023, we discussed
The combined burden of underweight and obesity has risen in most countries
In 2022, over a billion people globally were living with obesity with 160 million of them aged 5-19. A study published in The Lancet used data from 3663 population-based studies that measured the height and weight in representative samples of the general population between 1990 and 2022. There were 222
A more sustainable shift to EVs
The shift to electric vehicles (EVs) is an essential element in our efforts to decarbonise transport. But just building more EVs is only part of the answer. How the vehicles are manufactured is also important. For many a ‘clean car’ is about more than just what powers the engine. It