Finally, the Act still requires facilities to use 50 percent renewable energy by 2024, and 100 percent by 2027. An amendment is expected to clarify that this demand can be met by using certificates brought from Nordic suppliers; instead of relying on German green power.

In Neubauer, for example, legal advocate Roda Verheyen has been part of other strategic climate cases, such as the high-profile case of a Peruvian homeowner, Lluiya, suing RWE for compensation for climate harms

Dr Lisa van Aardenne, the chief scientist of the University of Cape Town’s climate system analysis group, discussed the use and utility of thermal stress indices. She pointed out that, by the definitions of the universal thermal climate index, much of Africa is under heat stress most days of the year.  Van Aardenne noted that these indices have been developed from a European perspective and do not align with the reality on the ground in Africa. She added: “I’m very concerned that these indices are not fit for purpose here.”

Prof Kris Ebi from the University of Washington started off the third day of the conference with a presentation on heatwaves and early action plans. She pointed to the 2021 Pacific north-west “heat dome” event, which resulted in around 800 excess deaths and was later found to be a 1-in-10,000 year event. The rarity of that event means, in effect, “these people died because of climate change,” Ebi said. She added: “Every heat-related death is preventable.”

Dr Sokhna Thiam, from the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, Kenya, added that water-borne enteric diseases are among the “primary expected health impacts” of climate change.

Together, the plants will enable more than 120 gigawatt-hours of U.S. battery production annually and displace more than 455 million gallons of gasoline per year, LPO reported.

Calhoon of ClimateWells acknowledges the worry that oil operators will simply drill new wells in other places, canceling out any emissions reduction benefit from plugging older ones. In the carbon credit market, this notion is called “leakage,” meaning that the emissions are not prevented but essentially moved.

California Legislation Would Force Corporate Polluters to Come Clean

We don’t provide banking services to or invest in organisations that use excessive power to systemically promote public behaviour that is harmful to individuals, groups or to the whole of society in order to maximise their own profits. This may include, for example, arms manufacturers and tobacco companies.

For now, we haven’t included emissions relating to loans and investments in our Scope 3 carbon footprint breakdown as these are worked out separately with the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF). We were the first UK digital bank to join PCAF, which asks members to calculate emissions from loans and investments by following industry best practice

As a policy, end-to-end has a lot going for it. First, it is easy to administer. If you want to find out if a company is reliably delivering posts from willing senders to willing receivers, you can easily verify it by creating accounts and performing experiments. Compare this to more complicated policies, like "platforms must not permit harassment on their services." To administer that policy, you need to agree on a definition of harassment, agree on whether a specific user's conduct rises to the level of harassment, then investigate whether the platform took reasonable steps to prevent it.

It adds that there is “no shortage of physical capacity”, with Chinese coal plants running an average of 52% of hours in the year (4,600 out of 8,760 hours). CREA continues: “Thus, simply adding more coal capacity across the whole of China may not fundamentally address the power shortages in China.”

The country is also slowly shifting from an “equal share” dispatch system to an “economic dispatch”, which is more responsive to consumer demand. (CREA notes that the “equal share” system is another barrier to greater flexibility.)

“Given the rapid growth of clean energy and expected slower electricity demand growth, the massive additions of coal-fired capacity don’t necessarily mean that China’s coal use or CO2 emissions from the power sector will increase.” 

China’s power market remains primarily coal-fueled. Coal made up 61% of electricity generation in 2022, while wind and solar power – despite making up a growing proportion of power capacity – accounted for only 14% of generation.

The average price for a solar panel delivered in the United States was 38 cents per watt as of June 7, which is double the global average, according to BloombergNEF and PV InfoLink. The U.S. price has been about the same, going up or down just a penny or two, since last fall.

This move was heavily pushed for by the three-party coalition’s smallest member, the Free Democrats who are in charge of the transport ministry. This means if a target in one sector such as industry, transport, or buildings is missed, another sector can compensate for it.

To that end, we’re excited to announce the launch of the VMware Zero Carbon Committed cloud partner initiative. We envision catalyzing and accelerating the transition to zero carbon clouds through VMware Cloud Partner data centers powered by renewable energy sources by 2030. This initiative is a collaboration with our VMware Cloud Verified providers that operate infrastructure-, energy- and carbon-efficient data centers based on VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies and have commitments to using renewable energy power. Exemplifying VMware’s ongoing commitment to product sustainability innovation, this initiative aims to: Catalyze the transition to a zero carbon internet through our partnerships with public cloud providers. Help customers reach their sustainability and decarbonization goals by connecting them with cloud providers that have aligned goals. Accelerate sustainable computing with VMware’s SDDC technology.

Without public access to the emissions data SBTi sees, its climate targets are “effectively inscrutable,” she and other scientists told the organization in October

Under SBTi’s net-zero plans, companies can counterbalance up to 10% their emissions with “permanent removal” of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These efforts, it expects, will have negated 20 to 40 billion tons of emissions by 2050.

SBTi has recently stopped approving plans for this looser target

We can solve this problem by defining separate types for different kinds of IDs with a “NewType”:

The first successful trust was Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which amassed a 90% share of all US oil. Other "capitalists" got in on the game, forming the Cotton Seed Oil Trust (75% market share), the Sugar Trust (85%). Then came the Whiskey Trust and the Beef Trust. America was becoming a planned economy, run by a handful of unelected "industrialists" with lifetime appointments and the power to choose their successors.

The authors then divided that figure by three, proposing that the total costs should be shared equally by the governments that allowed companies to pollute, the consumers who bought fossil fuels and the corporations that produced them.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s first-ever methane fee for large emitters will also start in 2024 at $900 per ton of methane and increase to $1,500 per ton by 2026.

There are snakes, and the turnover is horrible. People are like, ​‘The heck with this. I’ll go work at an Amazon distribution center.’

OpenCost and Kubecost are helpful for monitoring, allocating, and optimizing Kubernetes costs granularly. Both monitor Kubernetes costs in K8s environments, but neither goes beyond that. For costs outside of Kubernetes, or to consolidate costs of containerized and non-containerized resources in one place, you’ll likely need another service, adding complexity and expense. Alternatively, you can use a Kubernetes cost optimization platform that does both. CloudZero provides granular Kubernetes cost analysis across major cloud providers, including single-cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid clouds — down to individual customers (unit economics).

With Kubecost, you can estimate costs using a model calculation or connect your hypervisor to get exact figures.

The Guardian recently revealed that Turkmenistan was the worst in the world for methane “super emitting” leaks. Separate research suggests a switch from the flaring of methane to venting may be behind some of these vast outpourings.Flaring is used to burn unwanted gas, putting CO2 into the atmosphere, but is easy to detect and has been increasingly frowned upon in recent years. Venting simply releases the invisible methane into the air unburned, which, until recent developments in satellite technology, had been hard to detect. Methane traps 80 times more heat than CO2 over 20 years, making venting far worse for the climate.

With CPU TDPs skyrocketing, these typical datacenter racks are now more power-constrained than space constrained. Stacking a rack full of high-density blade servers with high-power Xeons would blow out this power budget many times over, requiring specialized datacenter infrastructure with higher cooling capabilities. We also see this with Nvidia’s AI servers. Their DGX SuperPOD design is not able to fully populate each server rack due to the huge power consumption. Nvidia AI servers are often as much as 5U to 6U, with the A100 DGX servers being ~6.5 kW and the H100 10.2kW.

Ampere also places a large emphasis on clock speed consistency. Intel and AMD CPUs vary their core clock speed significantly based on how many cores or threads are in use and what type of code is being executed. This helps their CPUs maximize performance within a given power and thermal budget, which is a huge advantage in many workloads.

They believe the future of computing will rely heavily on microservices, containerization, and serverless execution models. These concepts are generally about scaling performance out via a large amount small jobs and processes and not overly focusing on single-threaded CPU performance. Both AMD and Intel are releasing CPUs with similar strategies over the next year

The continued funding of fossil fuel projects remains a grey area

Simultaneously, another evolution is also taking place at the World Bank. From July, all projects that go to the board for funding will have to demonstrate that they are in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

One example algorithm aims at switching on/off Pico-BSs in a heterogeneous network (see Fig. 1) [5]. There is one Macro-BSs that is always active and provides coverage in the area, while several Pico-BSs can be intelligently activated/deactivated depending on the current traffic volume. E.g., one could imagine that Pico-BSs are needed during the daytime in the city center where a lot of people work, but during the nighttime, some of them can be put into sleep mode as most people came back to their homes in the suburbs. The process is driven by the so-called Reinforcement Learning (RL), i.e., learning through interaction. The aim of the agent is to learn which set of active Pico-BSs would provide the best EE under a given spatial distribution of users.

Another key argument for community energy is that involving ordinary people in energy generation and distribution boosts local acceptance for renewables. Not-in-my-backyard protesters have slowed the expansion of new wind farms across Europe in recent years. But where the wind farms are "owned by local community stakeholders, such as farmers, landowners, individuals, [and] municipalities," they "often enjoy higher levels of trust than commercial developers, which are usually not embedded locally," concludes a 2020 study by the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Norway.

Nevertheless, proponents of community renewables argue that they are integral to the goal of achieving carbon neutrality and should continue to receive state support. They point out that community renewables boost local economic activity through investment, jobs and tax revenue. One German study showed that a seven-turbine community wind park of 21 megawatts generated $71 million in regional income over a 20-year operating period, while the same-sized park in the hands of commercial developers produced only $8.6 million for the local economy. The difference lay in the profit, tax revenue and job creation that stayed in local hands.

In Denmark, Europe’s other community energy powerhouse, community initiatives took off in the early 1980s. Danish communities invested in onshore wind turbines and district heating systems. By 2016, 67 percent of onshore wind energy in Denmark was generated by citizen-owned parks. This production, together with bioenergy and offshore wind generation, grew the country’s share of clean electricity to more than 50 percent of consumption by 2019.

In Germany, citizen energy stretches back to the 1980s and '90s when environmentally minded groups began striking out into renewable energy. Communal energy projects in Germany took off dramatically when the EU broke up the private-sector energy system monopoly in 1998, and the German government set up a price-support scheme that favored renewables in 2000. In the first decades of Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition, grassroots energy projects and private individuals produced the bulk of clean energy, while the utilities held out, believing conventional energy would prevail, as it always had.

Nvidia is the largest customer of CoWoS for their A100 and H100 class datacenter AI GPUs. Google, through Broadcom, is the 2nd largest customer for TPUv4 and TPUv5. AMD also utilizes CoWoS in some capacity, but their volume in 2023 is relatively small. Lastly, Amazon’s Trainium through AlChip, as well as Microsoft’s new AI chips, also use CoWoS.The demands of AI training on memory performance are pushing designs to use High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which has to be connected using advanced packaging technologies such as CoWoS. Any one of these companies and, more likely all of them are increasing spending heavily and require more CoWoS capacity. To be clear, Amazon’s Tranium, despite big orders through Alchip, isn’t that great, and Microsoft’s 1st gen AI chip won’t be able to replace Nvidia either.

TSMC also talked about a fab cancellation and how an expansion is now no longer financially feasible. We will be sharing some of our data about TSMC’s utilization rates and how TSMC’s pricing is coming down. We dive deep into TSMC’s 3nm and 5nm ramps as there are some quite heroic assumptions that TSMC is making regarding those in the back half of the year.

Qualifying EVs also can’t contain inputs from ​“foreign entities of concern,” a concept that the Treasury Department has yet to explicitly define, but which is expected to include many Chinese firms. (If you haven’t heard, China dominates the EV supply chain.)

This is a very weird imaginative failure. America operated public banks. It had broken up too big to fail banks. These weren't the deeds of a fallen civilization whose techniques were lost to the mists of time. There are literally people alive today who were around when America operated nationwide public banks – a practice that only ended in 1966!

Wooden towers are promising when it comes to material costs and availability; the company uses Scandinavian spruce from sustainably managed forests, for which regrowth exceeds logging. According to its calculations, a typical turbine tower requires between 300 and 1,200 cubic meters of wood, equivalent to 1.5 to 5 minutes of growth in Swedish forests.

Alphabet Inc. calculates the total electricity procured from renewable sources by totaling the amount ofrenewable electricity generation from the grids Alphabet Inc. uses, the amount of on-site renewableenergy generation and the amount sourced through contractual instruments (PPAs) globally

Unlike the Nazis, whose plan involved liquefying coal, the current German government is promoting a cleaner technique that entails extracting hydrogen from water and combining it with carbon dioxide to create fuel. At the heart of both methods is what’s known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, a process developed in the 1920s by two German chemists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch.

At 0.5gCO2e per person per day, the absolute reduction potentialis negligible and highlights the need for more research to support thedecarbonisation of digital media. While video streaming constitutesthe majority of data traffic in the Internet, and the energy consump-tion of user devices is substantial (in particular TVs), an attributionalapproach overestimates the potential reductions of interventions

This is why I believe it’s much more useful, and less confusing, to just talk about Layer 1 government-issued money and Layer 2 bank-issued chips.

A country’s residual mix represents the shares of electricity generation attributes available for disclosure, after the use of explicit tracking systems, such as GO, havebeen accounted for.Without a residual mix, renewable electricity sold with GOs would be double counted because the same electricity would be disclosed to consumers buying “regular” electricity

Reporting via the CSRD will incorporate the increasing demand for digitization. Companies will be required to prepare their reporting in XHTML format in accordance with the European Single Electronic Format Regulation. They are also required to tag sustainability information within the report according to a digital categorization system, which should be developed with the ESRS.

The CSRD will also mandate the reporting of Scope 3 emissions from across the full value chain. This arises from guidance set out by the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group’s (EFRAG) draft European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) - specifically “Disclosure Requirement E1-9 – Scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions” which states that “The undertaking shall disclose its gross indirect Scope 3 GHG emissions in metric tons of CO2 equivalent.”

2028 for non-EU companies (to be reported on in 2029),

With data for the CSRD needing to be captured as soon as 2024 for EU companies (to be reported on in 2025)

Google, with their Apollo project, has developed a non-blocking 136x136 optical circuit switch that is both forward and backward-compatible with any bandwidth or wavelength Google uses or will use in its data centers. This switch, according to Google, only uses 108 watts of power consumption. Compared to a standard 136 port EPS switch, which would be in the 3,000 watts range. So while there are disadvantages to OCS, Google has created a solution that has far more upsides than there are downsides for them. And over the past 5 years, “tens of thousands of 136x136 port OCS (eight spare ports) were manufactured and deployed.” Google has created a system that works incredibly very well for them.In the future, Google is looking at a larger port count OCS for further scale-out capabilities as well as faster switching speeds to allow wider adoption of OCS in the lower layers of the network. This broader adoption would be tremendously negative to Broadcom, the leader in hyperscale networking switches. Furthermore, Google says they will also continue to improve reliability and lower insertion/return loss.

The low latency of OCS comes from the fact that OCS does not have to decode packets; all they have to do is bounce the incoming light from the source port to the destination port.

Google uses these optical switches in a direct connect architecture to directly connect the leaves through a patch panel. This is not packet switching; this is, for all intents and purposes, an optical cross-connect.

Traditionally the spine of this network uses what is called Electronic Packet Switch (EPS). These are the normal network switches of which Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell, and Nvidia are the leading providers. However, these EPS use a ton of power. Furthermore, every 2 to 3 years, networking speeds have doubled. While this doubling improves power consumption, it also comes with the requirement of upgrading the existing spine EPS. As such, there is always a huge wave of Capex associated with every new generation of Broadcom Tomahawk switch.

Before diving too deep into how their custom networking stack works, let’s quickly discuss what it does and the industry implications. First off, Google claims their custom network improves throughput by 30%, use 40% less power, incurs 30% less Capex, reduces flow completion by 10%, and delivers 50x less downtime across their network.

The EU Renewable Energy Directive and Irish legislation permit the use of GOs.Though using GOs is legal and overseen by the energy regulator in Ireland, ASAI found claims companies were supplying 100 per cent renewable power were misleading to customers.The advertising watchdog said six sections of its advertiser's code of conduct had been broken including one section that says "advertisers should not exploit the credulity, inexperience or lack of knowledge of consumers".

Organisations must demonstrate progress towards their science-aligned reduction targets on a three year cycle to maintain climate positive level certification.

absolute reduction (as opposed to intensity reduction) of category 1 and 2 emissions, aligned to 1.5°C warming

The proposals under the forthcoming Bill are expected to be similar to the CMA’s existing powers in competition matters and would give the CMA the power to decide itself whether consumer law has been broken and impose directions and monetary penalties on companies without having to go through the courts.

This past November, Google Cloud hosted an “emissions hackathon” at the offices of Schlumberger, a Houston oil field services company. The winning team was none other than six Aramco oil and gas data scientists who’d devised a method of using Google Cloud’s machine learning features to detect and repair leaks in methane gas pipelines.

Addressing the nexus of concerns related to water and electricity consumption — along with the associated impact on carbon dioxide emissions — is one of the biggest challenges faced by any big data center operator. In a blog about its new commitment, Brandt reports that water-cooled data centers use about 10 percent less energy than those using methods related to air cooling. Last year, the company estimated that using water cooling helped Google reduce the "energy-related carbon footprint" of its data centers by about 300,000 tons of CO2. 

Klarna which levies money on a per-tonne basis on its own emissions, and uses the funds to finance mitigation projects.

At COP27, governments agreed to create a “contribution unit” as part of the establishment of new carbon markets under the Paris Agreement - a clear sign of support for this evolution in claims

Based on the comparison between carbon emissions and performance, we can observe that the only task in whichbetter performance accuracy has systematically yielded more CO2is image classification on ImageNet, seen on the topright subplot of Figure 4. Still, the relationship is far from being highly correlated (especially given that that the x-axisin on a logarithmic scale).

Another observation that can be made based on our data is that none of the models from our sample were trained ineither Africa nor South America – in fact, the majority of the models from our sample (76) were trained in countriesrepresenting the Global North. This is consistent with previous work examining the ‘digital divide’ in ML and observingthe centralization of power in the field, which hinders researchers from underrepresented locations and groups fromcontributing to the field, given the attribution of computing resources [2,3,9]. Generally speaking, emissions, mattersof equity and accessibility are closely connected to those around climate change, and the centralization of resourcesremains a major problem [33, 34

Oil

However, energy-efficientbenchmarks such as HULK [58] have also been proposed, which take computational requirements and environmentalimpacts into account during model evaluation, allowing a comparison of models based on multiple criteria.

Boosting the efficiency of water usage, too, is a priority, with Google Cloud committing to investing in community projects that “replenish 120% of the water we typically consume in our offices and data centres, in a bid to improve  the health of the local watersheds.”

“A staggering 90% of C-level executives said ESG initiatives are a top organisational priority,” says Keeble. “But only 9% are allocating dedicated resources towards sustainability goals.”

Amazon retires, or has retired on its behalf, environmental attributes for Amazon renewable energy projects included in the renewable energy percentage calculation. We may choose to purchase additional environmental attributes to signal our support for renewable energy in the grids where we operate in line with the expected generation of the projects we have contracted.

Among the most deplorable habits of greenwashers is the procurement of unbundled Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). In places like Texas, favorable economics encourage renewable energy deployment, but neither the state energy office nor the grid operator particularly care if the generated electrons are renewable or not. As a result, RECs from these projects are sold separately to offtakers looking to burnish their green credentials.

The top renewable offsets suppliers for Germany-based E.ON SE and Italy-based Eni came from state-backed hydropower projects in China’s Jiangxi and Sichuan provinces, respectively

Yet as of last year renewable offsets remain widespread, despite deep doubts about their efficacy. In the broadest investigation yet of how companies have been relying on junk offsets, Bloomberg Green analyzed 190 million tons of carbon offsets purchased in more than 50,000 transactions in 2021. Close to 40% came from renewable-energy projects. According to Ecosystem Marketplace estimates, the total carbon offsets market was worth $2 billion in 2021.

Lithium resources—concentrations of minerals that are potentially economically viable to extract—are not particularly rare. What matters over the medium and near term is how quickly these resources can be developed into reserves, or minerals that are both recoverable and profitably minable in a given price environment.

Green Mountain Power, Vermont’s largest utility and a creative adopter of grid storage technologies, decided it had some of those cases. The utility bought Nomad’s first large-scale battery trailer, with 1 megawatt/​2 megawatt-hours of storage capacity. GMP currently controls the battery’s charging and discharging at Nomad’s corporate facility in Vermont, while its new ​“home base” docking station gets built, said Josh Castonguay, GMP’s vice president and chief innovation officer. In the meantime, the utility brings out its Nomad unit to support electric-vehicle charging at special events.

The growing number of data centers is expected to drive a 38 percent increase in all electricity sales in Virginia between 2020 and 2035, according to a report by the University of Virginia’s Energy Transition Initiative—an increase of around 44,000 gigawatt-hours per year in electricity use. A gigawatt hour is just about the amount of electricity that 1,000 Virginians on average use in a year. 

Among their chief concerns are the massive amount of stormwater runoff from the millions of square feet of paved over surfaces that would imperil the watershed that provides drinking water for Northern Virginia residents, and the hazardous and noisy construction activities next to residential areas. There are also lingering questions over the impact of energy intensive data centers on the state’s clean energy targets and the true economic benefit for the state. 

The source of this seed funding was provided from Microsoft’s internal carbon tax. Companies that implement carbon taxes should implement mechanisms that recirculate those funds back into individual business group accountabilities in a way that empowers employees to take effective action.

Most future climate scenarios envisage large-scale deployment of so-called “negative emissions,” where we suck CO2 out of the atmosphere in order to keep warming below 2°C. One proposed method for achieving that is “enhanced weathering”—accelerated silicate weathering done by grinding up silicate rock and spreading it on agricultural fields to react with CO2 from the air and fertilize plants at the same time. Brantley’s work shows that for such efforts to be successful, those fields would need a good supply of water and—crucially—would probably need to be plowed regularly to expose fresh minerals to the air. “If you're not going to be turning it over, you'll start to precipitate secondary minerals, and… most of the surface area could be occluded from reaction,” said Brantley.

Over geological time, those landscape proportions have changed in response to shifting tectonic plates. This has changed how efficient silicate weathering has been at removing the CO2 emitted by volcanoes, thereby allowing high CO2 levels and warm climates at times, like in the Cretaceous, or lower CO2 levels and a cool climate when plate tectonics was building lots of “kinetic-limited” mountainous landscapes, like over the last few million years.

The amazing thing is that Microsoft knows that LLM insertion into search will crush the profitability of search and require massive Capex. While we estimated the operating margin shift, check out what Satya Nadella says about the gross margin.

Attributes (and certificates) must be sourced and purchased from within the same defined geographic region that constitutes a “market” for the purpose of transacting and claiming attributes. Ideally this “market boundary” would be clearly defined, but in general it refers to an area in which the laws and regulatory framework governing the electricity sector are sufficiently consistent between the areas of production and consumption. As such, transactions that are both international and intercontinental are not usually appropriate unless there is physical interconnection (indicating a level of system-wide coordination between countries) and ideally if these countries’ utilities or energy suppliers recognize each other’s instruments

Alphabet Inc.’s renewable energy methodology is a custom calculation and is based on a global approach. The numerator includes all renewable energy procured, regardless of the market in which the renewable energy was consumed. Additional details on Alphabet Inc.’s criteria and methodology can be found in theAchieving Our 100% Renewable Energy Purchasing Goal and Going Beyonddisclosure

Renewables and nuclear energy will dominate the growth of global electricity supply over the next three years, together meeting on average more than 90% of the additional demand

More glaring, the company claims that since 2000, it’s cut emissions by 19%. In reality, when excluding RECs from that calculation, Intel’s climate footprint has jumped by more than a third.

The EU’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager on Wednesday also highlighted how Germany and France had accounted for nearly 80 percent of state aid approved under emergency subsidy rules. “European countries are not equal when it comes to state aid,” she said.

When we throw in the fact that some of the parties with the deepest resources, expertise and capabilities in AI are the very same providers of the primitives – providers intent on growth and whose customers are struggling with the size of their respective product catalogs – it’s worth asking whether said providers may be coming around on the idea of a PaaS, but models based on AI rather than prescriptive curation and constraints. One thing, at least, is clear: if any of the above speculation proves true, the industry equilibrium is about to be punctuated.

Sustainability researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology point out that there is significant variation in the types and amounts of critical materials present in different reservoirs of coal waste. This means that not all waste will be profitable to purify. As the researchers have written, “The value of rare earths in a single ton of coal ash can vary from US$99 at a coal plant in Ohio to $534 at a West Virginia plant. With extraction costs expected to range between $380 and $1,200 per ton, not every coal plant’s ash will be a profitable place to find rare earths.” There are also concerns that the chemicals used to harvest critical minerals could be damaging.

Ziemkiewicz has a picture in his office of himself and Senator Joe Manchin, who has expressed support of his program. “Recycling provides a tremendous opportunity to avoid outsourcing the raw supply of critical minerals we need while creating new economic opportunities right here at home,” Manchin said, at a congressional hearing in the spring. Ziemkiewicz keeps his politics to himself. In the past, he has called himself “a Trotskyite,” but he believes that the success of his past three decades of work, reclaiming thousands of miles of rivers and streams in Appalachia, is based on sharing knowledge across a wide array of communities

But that’s just one way to get batteries into low-income customers’ homes. Sunrun also acts as a third-party owner of solar and battery systems that Grid Alternatives installs for customers that can’t or don’t want to borrow money to finance it. Third-party owners can monetize the value of federal tax credits for low-income households that don’t pay a large enough federal tax bill to take advantage of the credits themselves. 

Participants will get zero-interest loans to finance the equipment and installation costs, plus monthly credits in exchange for allowing MCE to tap that equipment to reduce its need to buy high-priced energy during the peak hours of 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. The program is open to households that currently lack rooftop solar as well as households that have already had solar installed by Grid Alternatives and want to take advantage of that self-generated power to heat their homes or charge their cars, said Alexandra McGee, MCE’s manager of strategic initiatives.

The UK Energy Research Centre observe that although the current arrangements are increasingly expensive for consumers, they provide a high degree of certainty for generators, because they get paid regardless of the constraints in the network. This favourable arrangement has underpinned the UK’s impressively rapid growth of wind power, an undeniable success story in the race to Net Zero. There’s understandable reluctance to sour the investment environment in a country which is already suffering from other self-inflicted economic wounds 5.

But filling a battery up and leaving it charged for days on end is not attractive – most battery operators make money by cycling (charging and discharging) at least once a day. Of all the interesting things to do with batteries, it’s not clear that solving curtailment will be the most lucrative.

Around 40 million homes (or roughly 35 percent of all U.S. houses) use a gas stove to make food.

For example, within the literature on 44data centres, top-down models that project energy use on the basisof increasing demand for internet 45servicestend to predict rapid global energy use growth, (Andrae and Edler 2015; Belkhir and Elmeligi 462018; Liu et al. 2020a),whereas bottom-up models that consider data center technology stocksand their 47energy efficiency trends tend to predict slower but still positive growth (Hintemann and Hinterholzer 482019; Masanet et al. 2020; Shehabi et al. 2018; Malmodin 2020)

“It is concerning to see a vast majority of companies and investors, including major renewable energy companies, do not have policies expressing zero-tolerance against reprisals in their operations, supply chains and business relationships,”

The sui generis database right grants the database maker the exclusive right of “extraction and/or re-utilization of the whole or of a substantial part”. Extraction is defined as “the permanent or temporary transfer of all or a substantial part of the contents of a database to another medium by any means or in any form”. Re-utilization is defined as “making available to the public” (all quotes from Ref. [14]; Article 7), which refers primarily to online publication. In other words, re-utilization here means “redistribution and online transmission”.12

onentially rising ‘frequent driver’ charges could be used to fairly discourage excess car use, without penalising those who really need to drive.

Roughly one billion people live with some form of disability. For these people, the advent of the Web was a great step forward in their ability to participate in information exchange.

First, we are deploying DNS-over-HTTPS by default so that only a single party sees the target domain. Second, we require the DNS endpoints in Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program to legally commit to gathering a limited subset of data only for operational purposes, keeping the data confidential and deleting it promptly

Safety is a promise, and maintaining it engenders trust and confidence in the Web. Trust in turn enables casual browsing, empowering individuals with unprecedented freedom to explore, and eliminating the need for gatekeepers to decide what may or may not be part of the Web

All of this is possible because people have a user agent — the browser — which acts on their behalf. A user agent need not merely display the content the site provides, but can also shape the way it is displayed to better represent the user's interests

The Web is also durable. While not absolute, backwards-compatibility is a key principle of the Web: as new capabilities are added (typically as extensions to the core architecture), existing sites are still usable. The end result is that individuals can easily view older content and publishers can keep their content available and consistent over time without needing to recreate it.

when I look at climate change as as a issue, I look at it as a journalistic issue. I think that it's not been communicated honestly by journalists for a long time. I think that's our main problem. I think that journalists haven't approached climate change with the same level of vigor and ruthlessness that they've covered other political topics. I think it's because for some reason, the fossil fuel industry has convinced them that that there is no corruption to be seen here. There's a reluctance among journalists today to take climate change seriously as a corruption story, which is the heart of what our profession does. And I think that that's harming democracy, because people don't see climate change the way that they should, in the most truthful way.

The Democratic National Committee’s decision on fossil fuel subsidies is a good example of this. As HuffPost’s Alex Kaufman first reported, the DNC recently erased previously-approved language from its party platform calling for an end to fossil fuel tax breaks. The DNC did this without telling anyone, and have so far refused to explain its decision. Why should taxpayers continue to artificially prop up the industry that causes climate change to the tune of at least $20 billion a year? I don’t know, but the DNC prioritizes climate change, OK?

Energy must be just about the most socially conservative – no, I will use the correct word, backward – industry in the world. At times it seems as if the main criterion for leadership is to be a straight white male, born between 1950 and 1965. This is starting to change, but not fast enough. Women are disproportionately disadvantaged by energy poverty, bearing the extra workload and health impacts of cooking with traditional biomass. Access to modern energy is essential for women to enjoy basic healthcare, particularly during childbirth, and for girls to have time to study1. Gender in the energy sector is not just a question of fairness, it is also a question of effectiveness. Women may hold up half the sky, but more importantly they also buy half the world’s appliances, half the world’s energy and half the world’s cars – and, if they do not, they should and soon will. They are a huge part of the market the energy industry needs to understand. Women also offer half the world’s talent. There is a growing body of work showing that those companies that have diverse management teams and boards outperform those that do not.

Clean energy is inherently more local, more distributed, more accountable. While Germany’s big four utilities own the bulk of the fossil and nuclear generating capacity, they own only a small proportion of its renewable energy capacity; the general public owns many gigawatts of the latter either directly or via retail funds. Some may find wind farms ugly, some may find them beautiful; either way, they make us talk about the trade-offs we are making to generate electricity. In the past, there were no discussions about the relative aesthetics of open-cast coal mines and gas fields in far-away countries.

There is, however, a third level on which the struggle between defenders of clean and fossil energy must be understood, and that is in terms of the social structures in which we want to live. Fossil-based energy lends itself to scale and centralization. Physical centralization – huge oil, gas and coal-fields, massive power stations, a universal grid, pipelines, refineries and the like – as well as the inevitable fellow-travellers of political and economic centralization.

In 1995, when Saro-Wiwa was judicially murdered, I felt helpless. Now, however, I do not. Back then it was impossible to envisage a different world. Back then, health, wealth and happiness were inextricably linked to fossil fuels and their attendant corrupt, corrosive centralization of power. Now we know another way is possible. Back then I was a news industry executive, now I am playing my bit part as the world moves from old energy to new.

While some of the most advanced, “hyperscale” data centers, like those maintained by Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have pledged to transition their sites to carbon-neutral via carbon offsetting and investment in renewable energy infrastructures like wind and solar, many of the smaller-scale data centers that I observed lack the resources and capital to pursue similar sustainability initiatives

It’s not a lack of science that’s driving the climate crisis, it’s a lack of democracy.

Before the pandemic, aviation accounted for 7% of UKgreenhouse gas emissions, with emissions from the sectorhaving increased by 88% since 1990. Yet just 15% of people in4the UK take 70% of all the flights, while around half of peopledon’t fly at all each year.

Thiscost is of the same scale as the aviation industry’s £7 bnexemption from fuel tax and zero-rating for VAT each yearbefore Covid, and shows the scale of environmental andsocial benefits that could be achieved by directing aviation’stax breaks into more productive areas.

However, this study makesclear that, at the level of the UK economy, it is worse for jobnumbers, as well as for the climate, to maintain thepre-Covid status quo of high aviation emissions, frequentlyunaffordable train travel and a large tourism spendingdeficit

even prior to the impacts of theCovid crisis on the aviation industry, it had a pattern ofdeclining jobs supported per passenger, requiring ongoingdemand growth in order to sustain employment

The disruption to the aviation industrycaused by the Covid crisis, along with industry’s failure toprioritise protecting jobs, shows the harsh impacts on workingpeople of an abrupt, unmanaged drop in demand without aplan in place to protect workers, or sufficient care for theirjobs or livelihoods

until 2030 (date of approval of construction permit), and where renewables are not available at sufficient scale, direct emissions are below 270gCO2e/kWh or, for the activity of electricity generation, their annual direct GHG emissions must not exceed an average of 550kgCO2e/kW of the facility's capacity over 20 years. In this case, the activity must meet a set of cumulative conditions: e.g. it replaces a facility using solid or liquid fossil fuels, the activity ensures a full switch to renewable or low-carbon gases by 2035, and a regular independent verification of compliance with the criteria is carried out.

The European Commission tabled its proposals based on robust evidence: the Fit for 55 Package rests on a common analytical base with energy system modelling at its core. According to the scenarios in this modelling, natural gas will continue to play an important role in terms of consumption and generation until 2030, after which we expect a decline to 2050. Throughout the transition of our energy system, the function of natural gas-fired electricity generation will change and will increasingly be a facilitator for the spread of renewable electricity and stable supply.

by 31 December 2035.

Part of the challenge here is that researchers have been socialized in academia to be apolitical or to think of themselves as scientists and not as people who have values imbued into the work that they’re doing. That is also part of the problem that we’re trying to contend with around the making of these technologies that are also allegedly neutral and just tools. This is part of the reason why we need feminists and why we need people who are committed and connected to social movements around the world to contextualize our work and to make sense of what it’s working in service of. That’s really important. 

ExxonMobil appears to be caught between denying that it is in possession of information on flood risk to its Mystic River site – opening it up to charges of negligence (or worse if evidence to the contrary emerges) – and admitting knowledge, but being found to have breached its duty of care to employees, investors and local residents by failing to act on it. If ExxonMobil loses, it will be forced to invest considerable sums in flood protection at Mystic River, but the implications could have much wider implications across almost all energy, industrial and real estate companies.

The District Court found in favor of the plaintiffs, based on Article 21 of the Dutch Constitution, which states: “It shall be the concern of the authorities to keep the country habitable and to protect and improve the environment.”

Video streaming is a particularly prominent driver in data traffic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Netflix agreed with EU regulators to reduce their traffic and ease the load on the network, allowing network provision for homeworkers.25 Belkhir (personal communication) pointed out that this agreement between Netflix and EU regulators makes it difficult to argue that data traffic is independent of ICT infrastructure growth and therefore that data traffic has little effect on emissions.

Andrae and Edler3Anders S.G.A. Edler T. On global electricity usage of communication technology: trends to 2030.Challenges. 2015; 6: 117-157Crossref Google Scholar and Belkhir and Elmeligi7Belkhir L. Ahmed E. Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: trends to 2040 & recommendations.J. Clean. Prod. 2018; 177: 448-463Crossref Scopus (168) Google Scholar both agree that data traffic is a driver in ICT growth and emissions. Growth in the internet's infrastructure capacity allows for new data-intensive services and applications; these offer more affordances to users, driving demand for the services and therefore further infrastructure growth.24Preist C. Schien D. Blevis E. Understanding and mitigating the effects of device and cloud service design decisions on the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure.in: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2016: 1324-1337Crossref Scopus (53) Google Scholar Peak data traffic is one driver for this infrastructure growth due to increased demand for data-intensive services; other influences include ensuring technology is always accessible to all users (Preist, personal communication).

Some Defintions

Figures 5 and 6 show some trends for the synthesis per contributing category in 2020 and 2030, separately. Andrae and Edler [3] is compared to the present update.

Fixed access wired networks 0.07 (171/2444)

Andrae and Edler [3] arrived at an accumulated improvement factor of 0.083 in 2030 for 5G by assuming 22% improvement between 2010 and 2022 and 5% improvement from 2022 to 2030. However, it is wrong to assume an improvement for 5G from 2010 to 2020 as 5G did not (more or less) exist then. Due to gradually introduced Moore's law problems, the accumulated improvement factor is assumed to be 0.229 in 2030. On top of this, a gradually waning Moore's law is introduced for all mobile technology Gs from 2022 so that the improvement factors run from 19% in 2022 to 5% in 2030, instead of 5% from 2022 to 2030. This leads to more than 4 times more TWh from 5G in the latest understanding mentioned in [12] than in [3]. Tables 2 and 3 show some of the new assumptions.

Use stage power of consumer devices (including Wi-Fi modems) is now at some 50% of ICT total power use but is ideally expected to decrease thanks to advanced power saving features.

Another angle to be analyzed further is that as web page sizes increase, the metrics Page Load Time and Page Render Time have larger impact on energy usage on the client side [31].

According to (Cisco 2020), the worldwide Internet data traffic for 2020 was around 254 EB/month,corresponding to 3048 EB (or 3.05 zettabytes, ZB) yearly.

Reasonable estimates for 2020 are: E (WAN) = 110 TWh, E (FAN) = 130 TWh, and E (RAN) =100 TWh, EI (WAN) = 0.02 kWh/GB, EI (FAN) = 0.07 kWh/GB, and EI (RAN) = 0.2 kWh/GB.

While Cisco foresaw an average annual growth rate of 26% for the entire IP trafficover the period 2017-2022 (Cisco 2018), it foresaw an average annual growth rate of 46% for theglobal RAN traffic over the same period (Cisco 2019). As a consequence, the share of radio access iscontinuously increasing, from just 1% in 2010 to over 16% today (see Figure 5)

According to (Aslan et al. 2018), the energy intensity of the Internet has decreased onaverage by 30% per year. This corresponds to a halving over 2 years, and to a reduction by a factor of30 over a decade.

To compute the overall energy consumption of the Internet in the US, both (Gupta and Singh 2003)and (Koomey et al. 2004) start their analysis from a detailed inventory of computing and networking

Annual End User Traffic: 2444 EB

Instead of using a managed service, we’ve chosen to build expertise in-house, treating outages as unscheduled learning opportunities rather than reasons to fear Kafka.

Supplier must publicly disclose its Scope 1 Emissions, Scope 2 Emissions, and Scope 3 Emissions within twelve (12) months of the Effective Date.

Without affecting any other right or remedy available to it, SFDC may terminate the Agreement by giving one (1) month written notice to Supplier if the Supplier’s environmental practices or negative environmental impacts, in SFDC’s reasonablediscretion, could have a material negative impact on SFDC’s reputation as a result of conflicting with SFDC’s published sustainability, carbon reduction, and renewable energy targets.

publicly disclose that Supplier has incorporated the Sustainability Exhibit into an agreement with SFDC

Supplier must maintain a Sustainability Scorecard and if requested by SFDC, provide a copy of such Sustainability Scorecard to SFDC on an annual basis promptly following Supplier’s receipt of a Sustainability Scorecard from Supplier’s Sustainability Scorecard provider. For purposes of this section: “Sustainability Scorecard” means a corporate social responsibility assessment report prepared by a reputable provider that is reasonably acceptable to SFDC.

Supplier agrees to (i) review and share with its relevant subcontractors SFDC’s relevant sustainability best practices guidance within ten (10) businessdays of SFDC providing such guidelines to Supplier and (ii) use commercially reasonable efforts to comply, and cause its relevant subcontractors to comply, with SFDC’s relevant sustainability best practices guidance.

2.2.3.To verify the Products and/or Services were provided on a Carbon Neutral Basis, Supplier agrees to provide SFDC with (i) a Carbon Neutrality Attestation no later than January 15 of each year and (ii) each Emissions Report no later than sixty (60) days after the expiration of the applicable Emissions Reporting Period, in each case in form and substance reasonably satisfactory to SFDC. Supplier will use commercially reasonable efforts to promptly respond to any inquiries or requests for clarification from SFDC related to any Carbon Neutrality Attestation or Emissions Report.

“Carbon Neutrality Fee” means (i) with respect to Supplier’s failure to deliver the Products and/or Services on a Carbon Neutral Basis, an amount equal to the cost of carbon credits that must be purchased to offset each metric ton of CO2e that the Total Emissions, as stated in a given Emissions Report or as reasonably determined by SFDC, exceed zer

Supplier represents and warrants that (i) Supplierhas operated in material compliance with all Environmental Laws, (ii) Supplier has not received written notice of material violation of Environmental Law with respect to the Products and/or Services or Supplier has remediated any material violations of Environmental Law for which it has received notice, and (iii) Supplier has provided SFDC with reasonable detail of all environmental practices or negative environmental impacts, that, in SFDC’s reasonable discretion, could have a material negative impact on SFDC’s reputation as a result of conflicting with SFDC’s published sustainability, carbon reduction, or renewable energy targets

if Supplier has not already set a science-based target,and shall promptly provide a copy of the Plan to SFDC on request. For purposes of this section: “Carbon Footprint” means the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (CO2e) that will be released into the atmosphere as a result of the provision of the Products and/or Services, determined in accordance with international carbon reporting practice, being the accepted practice from time to time in relation to reporting for the purposes of the protocols to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

one-half of one percent (0.5%) of the aggregate amount paid by SFDC to Supplier or invoiced by Supplier to SFDC over the prior twelve (12) months.

“Climate Deficiency” means (i) a material breach of Section 2.2(Carbon Neutrality; Climate Reporting)of the Sustainability Exhibit (if applicable) or (ii) any other material breach of this Sustainability Exhibit.

Distribution of solar, uranium, and oil densities across nations. Data are from EIA (2019) for oil; OECD (2019) for uranium; UNdata (2019) for area; and OpenEI (2019) for solar illumination. The x- and y-axes share the same logarithmic scaling. Countries with land area below 5000 km2 are not included.

We assume that the multi-week lulls in variable renewable energy outputs possible in some regions ofthe world are broadly representative of all global regions. In the Fast and Slow Transition scenarioswe therefore specify that there must be enough P2X fuel stored to cover one month’s worth of end-useelectricity each year, everywhere. This length of reduced output is not likely in all regions, so providingenough P2X fuel to cover global final electricity for this length of time is likely excessively conservative.

A review of the literature on oil market elasticities has concluded that a one barrel increase in oil supply leads to a roughly half-barrel increase in global oil consumption (with broad uncertainties).[86] A reasonable range for this “displacement factor” runs from 0.2 to 0.8 barrels consumed for each additional barrel produced.[

As discussed above, this represents approximately 5% of ExxonMobil’s anticipated Permian oil production in that year and could add as much as 3.4 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere by 2025

In addition to specific machine learning contracts for managing upstream datasets, all three cloud companies are part of the Open Group Open Subsurface Data Universe™ (OSDU) Forum, an international group of oil and gas operators, including Shell, Chevron, Schlumberger, ExxonMobil, Total, BP, ConocoPhillips and Devon Energy, that aims to build an open data platform for the oil and gas industry.

Litigation could also develop into a tool for vulnerable states to hold the nations and companies they deem responsible for climate change to account. In 2018, Vanuatu foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu revealed his island nation was considering suing fossil fuel companies.

Increasingly robust climate science, combined with the emerging field of extreme weather attribution, have given litigation a boost in recent years, Lydia Omuko-Jung, a climate change lawyer and research fellow at the University of Graz, tells Carbon Brief. Another key development has been the so-called “rights turn” in climate litigation. In 2015, a judge in the Lahore High Court, Pakistan, became the first ever to find that the government’s delay in implementing its climate policies violated citizens’ fundamental rights.

“Climate justice groups were saying: hold on, that’s just not true, because if that was true we would also have solved inequality, poverty and all of these things. You are failing to understand that this is not an environmental issue, it’s fundamentally an economic and political issue.”

Supporters of the Paris Agreement argue that such concessions were necessary to produce a successful deal. Moreover, former US climate negotiator Todd Stern has written in Brookings that legally binding targets, “paradoxically, can yield weaker action as some countries low-ball their targets for fear of legal liability”.

At the Durban COP in 2011, nations agreed to forge ahead with a new deal that, unlike Kyoto, would be “applicable to all” nations, both “developing” and “developed”. The EU’s lead negotiator, Elina Bardram, said it “must reflect today’s reality and evolve as the world does”, while US lead negotiator Todd Stern stated their position plainly: “If equity is in, we are out.”

Di-Aping suggested “one Africa, one degree” as a rallying cry.

The map below shows the results of their most recent study (pdf). “Climate risk index” is mapped for most countries in the world – where a lower score and darker colouring indicates that the country has greater exposure and vulnerability to extremes.

One study finds that in more than 70% of US counties, “neighborhoods with lower-income and higher shares of non-white residents experience significantly more extreme surface urban heat than their wealthier, whiter counterparts”. Another study has found that black people are 52% more likely than white people to live in areas of unnatural “heat risk-related land cover”. Asian people are 32% more likely and Hispanics 21%.

For example, in June of this year, the city of Jacobabad in Pakistan reached 52C, pushing it over the 35C wet bulb temperature limit. This made the city one of only two places on earth to have officially passed the threshold. The Daily Telegraph reported that the extreme heat was exacerbated by the lack of wealth and resources in the region

“To actively promote such fossil-fuel development and then punish developing countries for emissions through carbon border adjustments is, at best, hypocritical. It’s also unjust.”

This is why carbon border adjustments of the variety being proposed by the EU, which place taxes on imported goods based on the emissions associated with their production, have been criticised and even labelled a form of “economic imperialism”.

One study found that most European countries would be unable to meet their removal targets domestically, meaning they would have to rely on climate finance or offsetting schemes to support removals abroad.

“The closer we get to 1.5C…the question becomes less about fair shares in terms of greenhouse gas mitigation and more about fair shares in terms of CO2 removal as well.”

In the UK, the Climate Change Committee has advised that the nation should meet its net-zero target domestically, “without relying on international carbon units”.

However, once again the pushback is largely based on the extent to which these targets rely on offsets and carbon removals at the perceived expense of emissions cuts, particularly if the effort is shifted to the global south in acts of “carbon colonialism”.

In 2004, academics and NGOs signed the Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading, which criticised the way in which markets turned “the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity into property to be bought or sold in a global market”. This became a key foundational text for climate justice groups.

Criticisms were levelled at the Kyoto Protocol after the US pushed for the inclusion of a carbon market in the agreement.

Harjeet Singh, a senior adviser on climate impacts at CAN International, tells Carbon Brief that it is clear why wealthy nations want to avoid admitting responsibility: “The numbers are massive and rich countries and corporations know that they are going to be blamed and that’s why they have always been scared of recognising loss and damage and the related compensation and liability provision.”

Separately, the concept of “loss and damage” has been developed in a bid to generate support for unavoidable or unpredictable climate impacts that cannot be adapted to. 

With the UNEP adaptation gap report suggesting that adaptation costs “in developing countries alone” could reach $140-300bn in 2030, there are widespread calls for at least half of climate finance to go towards adaptation. This echoes language in the Paris Agreement urging a “balance between adaptation and mitigation” finance.

Most climate finance also comes in the form of loans

“What we are asking is repayment…We are not begging for aid. We want developed countries to comply with their obligation and pay their debt.”

Its analysis suggests that a top 1% earner – someone earning over $109,000 (£80,000) per year – will need to cut their personal emissions by 97% to reach a “fair share” level by 2030, in line with the 1.5C target, indicated by the purple line.

This is recognised in the Bali Principles of Climate Justice, developed by NGOs in 2002, which note that “unsustainable consumption exists primarily in the north, but also among elites within the south”. Indian journalist Praful Bidwai has described the focus on national per capita emissions as “a shield that enables India’s elite to hide behind the poor”.

For example, in its most recent update, Climate Action Tracker (CAT) – an independent analysis of climate pledges produced by two research organisations – deemed both India and China’s commitments to be “highly insufficient” based on their “fair shares”.

National pledges as of 2018 expressed in CO2e per capita emissions cuts (black lines), compared to different “fairness” benchmarks. Orange bars are based on national capacity alone. Blue bars are based on national historical responsibility alone. Green bars reflect both capacity and responsibility equally. The grey bar represents a “political” benchmark based on low progressivity and low responsibility settings. Bright colours represent a “high progressivity” setting and dim colours represent a “low progressivity” setting. Source: Civil Society Review.

Concerns about intergenerational injustices, demonstrated more recently by the Fridays for Future protests, are one of the “four pillars of climate justice” identified by Srivastava and her colleagues in a recent paper. The others are: Distributional – how the costs and benefits of climate change and action are shared.Procedural – ensuring the processes for making decisions about the impacts of and responses to climate change are fair, accountable and transparent.Recognition – Recognising differences between groups in how they experience climate change and their right to express these differences.

Using the same methodology, which prioritises nations’ historical responsibility and financial capacity to act, the US branch of Climate Action Network (CAN) has called for a “fair share” target of cutting US emissions by 195% below 2005 levels by 2030. NGOs in the UK have called for a similar reduction target of 200% below 1990 levels.  The current domestic targets for the US and the UK are 50-52% and 68%, respectively.

many fairness justifications used in NDCs, such as allocating emissions cuts where it is cheapest to do so, relied on arguments that were not supported by principles of international law. Sticking to these legal principles would tend to require deeper cuts from developed countries, the paper found.

The work done must be measured and must be part of a pre-existing environmental strategy.

Organizations today typically must assess their spending records and then look up tables that estimate the average emissions associated with them. This falls far short of what the world really needs, which is the ability to pull accurate and near real-time data directly from the emissions sources themselves.

To obtain the best set of data, we commissioned two active telecom sites in Peru. One is the baseline site that uses conventional telecom sizing and operational methodology. The other is a smartly designed site that uses fewer solar panels and batteries. By commissioning these two sites side by side, we can compare their performance over time and track relevant telecom performance indicators, such as number of connections, bandwidth, and reliability. We believe that significant savings in power costs — on the order of 40 percent to 60 percent — are possible while maintaining relevant telecom performance.

Conventional telecom power system sizing of a solar-powered site is based on (1) the worst-case historic irradiance in the installation site, which can be much worse than the average irradiance, and (2) the average power consumption of the telecom system, which typically remains static and invariable over the time, no matter how the weather is and even when most of the people are sleeping and the traffic is close to zero.

One of our most recent collaborations is Project SEISMIC: Smart Energy Infrastructure for Mobile Internet Connectivity. In this project, we are developing a solution to smartly manage the power and functionality of telecom sites. For example, we can reduce the capacity and transmission power of the site during less busy periods. By doing so, we want to better design and operate off-grid sites in order to reduce cost and improve their sustainability.

Table 2 - Energy efficiencies of mobile networks

Therefore, we take the 17% of app traffic associated with ATS found by Vallina-Rodriguez et al., (2016) as an upper boundary, also because in some video apps lots of advertisements are shown, and as a lower boundary we assume 10%, to use a conservative range for the carbon footprint of unwanted data-use.

We assumed that the electricity use is distributed all over Europe. In the calculation we used the actual European electricity grid mix from 2019.

To compensate for 3 to 8 Mt CO2 emissions, 160 to 410 million trees need to grow for one year or between 60 and 150 million PV panels need to be installed to replace the average European electricity production.

This analysis results in an estimated total carbon footprint of ATS data-use in Europe of between 5 and 14 Mt CO2-eq. per year. The carbon footprint of unwanted data-use by ATS is estimated to be between 3 and 8 Mt CO2-eq. per year. This is comparable to the CO2 emissions of 0.7 to 1.8 1,000 MW coal-fired powerplants, the CO2 emissions of European cities such as Turin or Lisbon, or the CO2 emissions of 370 to 950 thousand European citizens.

In this study we define the unwanted data-use by smartphone apps as the network data (both cellular and Wi-Fi) used to transfer the data collected by third-party advertisement and tracking services (ATS) in smartphone apps to the third-party servers. As approximately 60% of the consumers indicate that they would turn off third-party tracking, 60% of the network data used by ATS is qualified as unwanted.

Smartphone apps collect more user data (also called tracking) than most consumers prefer. Besides privacy risks, the collection of user data also results in a carbon footprint as sending this user data to third parties and showing personalised advertisements consumes network data. When the user tracking is unwanted, also the consumption of network data for tracking is unwanted.

This is the result of using high and outdated energy-use assumptions for various access modes – for example, 0.9 kWh/GB for “mobile” compared to more recent peer-reviewed estimates of 0.1-0.2 kWh/GB for 4G mobile in 2019.

The German National Action Plan (NAP) on business and human rights sets out the expectation for at least 50% of German companies with more than 500 employees to have introduced effective human rights due diligence measures into their business processes by 2020. According to its coalition agreement, the Government has committed to taking legal action if this target is not reached. As part of a monitoring process the Government is currently reviewing to what extent companies are meeting their due diligence obligations.On 10 July 2019 the Federal Foreign Office published the first interim report, outlining the methodology and the questionnaire for the 2019 survey. NGOs, media and parliamentarians criticized in particular the inclusion of additional evaluation groups 'Companies with implementation plan' and 'Companies on the right track' (BHRRC translation) as well as the current failure to consider 'non-responders'.