In Brazil, “it’s fucking over!” In Poland, it’s only just beginning.
In Brazil, “it’s fucking over!” In Poland, it’s only just beginning.
As COP27 begins, a look at two big emitters.
Greetings from sunny Astoria, Queens, where my boyhood best friend Matt Grasso tried his first vodka-roni pie at the real Bellucci’s pizza last night. He was impressed.
The United Nations’ annual climate summit began yesterday in Egypt, so I’m writing to share with you two stories that can help frame the latest negotiations over how to decarbonize the global economy
The first story looks at Brazil. My colleague Travis Waldron has been down there for weeks covering the election, which last month saw the leftist Lula narrowly defeat incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right climate denier. With our colleague Chris D’Angelo, Travis and I looked at what Lula’s victory means for the country that controls much of the Amazon, the rainforest whose destruction would portend planetary catastrophe, and for this year’s climate talks. You can read that story here on HuffPost.
Already, Brazil is talking to Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo about forming an “OPEC of rainforests” to leverage their ecologically-vital jungles against the rich nations who long ago felled their old-growth woodlands, according to The Guardian.
The second story looks at Poland. Central Europe’s only major economy without nuclear power is, unsurprisingly, addicted to coal to generate upward of 70% of its electricity. As a result, the European Union’s sixth-largest economy is its fourth-largest emitter. But Poland, whose 2018 hosting of the U.N. climate summit yielded no major breakthroughs, is coming to this year’s conference with big plans to go nuclear.
For the past year, at least three major U.S. developers of small modular reactors – the shrunken down machines meant to reduce the cost and time it takes to build a fission plant – made deals to deploy their technology in Poland.
But last month, the Polish government announced the U.S. nuclear pioneer Westinghouse would build its flagship nuclear plant with a series of AP-1000 reactors, the large, traditional machines set to debut in Georgia at the long-delayed Plant Vogtle last month. Then the South Korean developer KHNP, which had been the runner-up, won a deal to build Poland’s second nuclear plant with its APR-1400 reactors.
Big challenges lie ahead. It’ll take a decade or more to build the first reactors – not much help in the current energy crisis. Public opinion remains divided. And there’s a fierce debate over whether SMRs should come before big reactors.
My colleague Akbar Shahid Ahmed, who reported this story with me from Warsaw, covers lots of different perspectives and nuances of this deal in our piece, which you can read on HuffPost here.
As you might have guessed, despite the São Paulo and Warsaw datelines, I did not travel to Brazil or Poland.
The U.S. has an opportunity in Brazil. “Instead of fearing autonomy from new Pink Tide governments, Biden should take the easy win of supporting Lula to achieve shared goals of planetary stability.” The Polycrisis
Canceling the contract for Puerto Rico’s private utility is “not on the table.” That’s what the head of the U.S. territory’s public-private partnerships agency said of mounting calls to end LUMA Energy’s $1.5 billion deal to rebuild the archipelago’s power grid. Bloomberg
A graphite shortage could gum up the U.S. push for electric vehicles. Only two places in the United States hold any potential in the near-term for new graphite mining for EVs: a river ecosystem in Alabama rich with rare species, and an untouched swath of tundra off the coast of central Alaska. E&E News
$180 billion. That’s the value of how much U.S. gas-distribution infrastructure the Brattle Group consultancy estimates could be stranded as a result of the energy transition. The Wall Street Journal
2%. That’s how much of the total worldwide electricity generation fossil fuels equipped with carbon capture technology will produce between 2030 and 2050, and that’s what a boom looks like. IEA World Energy Outlook 2022
Thanks for reading. Here’s something nice.