You know what's better than money?

Welcome to The Strawman, the newsletter that’s like your morning coffee - strong, sweet, and we raise your heart rate a few beats!

Last week we covered the IPCC’s summary report covering their scientific consensus on climate change but there were some nuggets we didn’t get into. We’d highly recommend you check out the report itself but in the meantime we clicked the graphs for you. Let’s be honest, you weren’t going to do it yourself.

To date, decision making on climate change has felt slow and lethargic and honestly it feels like we’ve been procrastinating on making difficult decisions. Its like that one time I decided to go to a party instead of writing my essay. Unfortunately, this time we can’t just ‘borrow’ a friend’s answers (shout out Ben!)

What did the report show?

One of the most insightful sections of the report covered the near-term solutions we have to combat climate change with a focus on cost-efficient solutions. As we discussed last time, we need to:

1. Reduce new CO2 emissions

2. Capture CO2 in the air

3. Improve our ability to cope with climate change

There are a number of low-hanging fruit to mitigate the impacts of climate change. From shifting our energy supply and food systems, to changing the ways in which we interact with infrastructure and industry, there’s plenty of opportunities that offer a lot of bang for our buck, with solar and wind in particular offering high value.

In fact, options costing 100 UAS tCO2-eq or less could reduce emissions by at least half of the 2019 level.

Wait what?

Translating to English: If we targeted only the cheapest solutions, we could go half way to hitting Net Zero™.

Other than this, there were some insights that are a little less expected. For example, the best thing we can do to mitigate the climate impact of land, water, and food is to stop converting natural ecosystems into space for human use. Yep, just leaving the forests alone could do a whole lot of good - good luck stopping lumberjacks though.

Some cool (no pun intended) high-impact options include efficient building material, carbon sequestration, and fuel switching. The report also indicated that some of the most commonly discussed interventions such as shifting to sustainable diets and electric vehicles are some of the hardest to track. Remember, like eating a healthy diet, just because it’s hard to measure, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. More on all of these in future newsletters.

Finally, the report concluded that plastic straws are better than paper ones. Okay wait, I might have made that one up to check if you’re still paying attention.

Until next time,

Stay sequestered