This DOE report covers key lessons learned for the rapid decarbonization of power sectors, emphasizing best practices in planning, building, and operating electricity systems. Decarbonization covers all greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane. The intended audience of this report consists of energy ministers and other high-level energy sector decisionmakers.
Day: November 7, 2022
How pavement can help cool overheated cities, even in chilly Mass.
Read the full story at WBUR.
Reducing pavement or making it more reflective are strategies more communities must adopt to help cool cities, experts say, and slow global warming. One of the dire challenges with pavement is how much heat it radiates at night.
Investors call on real estate industry to step up sustainability practices
Read the full story at Waste360.
The real estate industry, like others, is being summoned to accelerate its sustainability practices, especially as investors pay attention to potential impact of climate risks on asset value. With that awareness, they are calling on the industry to not only deliver more resilient assets, but to leverage return on investments (ROI) generated from sustainability practices to strengthen their businesses.
Deutsche Bank publishes targets for carbon footprint reduction
Deutsche Bank today announced net zero aligned targets for 2030 and 2050 in four carbon-intensive sectors. The bank’s goal is to reduce the amount of financed emissions (Scope 3) significantly by 2030. The targets represent a core element of Deutsche Bank’s sustainability strategy and reflect the bank’s commitments as a founding member of the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA).
Deutsche Bank’s methodology, which is designed to be in line with emerging best practice, aims to support a progressive and orderly phase-out of fossil fuel usage while incentivizing the financing of lower carbon-intensity technologies and clients with credible transition plans.
Deutsche Bank’s targets cover sectors accounting for a significant proportion of financed emissions of its € 250 billion corporate loan book1 as well as key sources of global Scope 3 emissions of clients. Targets for each sector are as follows:
- Oil & Gas (Upstream): 23% reduction in Scope 3 upstream financed emissions by 2030, and 90% reduction by 2050, in millions of tonnes of CO2
- Power generation: 69% reduction in Scope 1 physical emission intensity by 2030 and 100% reduction by 2050, in kilogrammes of CO2 equivalent per megawatt hour
- Automotive (light duty vehicles): 59% reduction in tailpipe emission intensity by 2030 and 100% reduction by 2050, in grammes of CO2 per vehicle kilometre
- Steel: 33% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 physical emission intensity by 2030 and 90% reduction by 2050, in kilogrammes of CO2 equivalent per tonne
US expansion on tap for company making plant-based coatings for packages
Read the full story in Food Business News.
Melodea Ltd., based in Israel and a producer of sustainable barrier coatings for packaging, plans to expand to the United States and South America. The plastic-free, plant-based coatings are biodegradable, fully recyclable and non-toxic to consumers and the environment, according to Melodea.
What a ‘sponge city’ designed to withstand extreme flooding looks like
Read the full story in Time.
Most cities today are not built to handle the kind of extreme weather that climate change inflicts. The asphalt and concrete that are the building blocks of the modern metropolis absorb heat, making heatwaves hotter. Those same materials, used to construct buildings and pave over the wetlands and streams that predated urban development, also repel water, leaving it nowhere to go. And that, as residents of Vienna, Berlin, and other European cities learned the hard way last year, can lead to devastating storm surges and flash floods.
Sponge cities provide one solution. Urban designer Yu Konjian first articulated the idea in 2012 after flooding wreaked havoc on dozens of cities in his native China. Instead of paving over the land with impermeable concrete and asphalt, he proposed adding green spaces that could act like sponges and absorb excess rain water. Instead of a “gray” infrastructure of pipes and dams that whisk water away from the city and dump it into rivers or the sea—systems that are prone to overflowing during storms and wearing out with time—sponge cities would use simple gravity to channel water steadily into soil where it could support plant life, or into reservoirs where it could be stored and repurposed. In other words, the sponge city would replicate the natural water cycle.
Tuna catch rates soared after creation of no-fishing zone in Hawaii
Read the full story in Nature.
Large no-fishing areas can drive the recovery of commercially valuable fish species, a study suggests. Ten years’ worth of fisheries data have shown that catch rates of two important types of tuna increased drastically in the vicinity of a marine protected area surrounding the northwestern Hawaiian islands.
How teamwork — in nature and the lab — can teach us about climate change
Read the full story from Michigan State University.
With $12.5 million from NSF, MSU and UC Merced will help improve climate models and conservation efforts by studying symbiosis in insects, sea anemones and squid
Automakers need more time to meet U.S. minerals requirements for EVs -execs
Read the full story from Reuters.
U.S. legislators need to give automakers operating in the United States more time to achieve the required sourcing levels of battery minerals used in electric vehicles to qualify for federal tax incentives, several industry executives said on Wednesday.
Cirba Solutions gets $75 million in DOE funding to expand Li-ion battery recycling facility in Ohio
Read the full story at Mining.com.
The Biden administration said on Wednesday it is awarding $2.8 billion in grants to boost US production of electric vehicle batteries and the minerals used to build them, part of a bid to wean the country off supplies from China.
Cirba Solutions will receive approximately $75 million in federal funds to expand critical mineral upgrading assets at its lithium-ion processing facility in Lancaster, Ohio.
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