Horsemen 4, Humans 0? Apocalyptic climate scenarios

Let Me Sum Up

This week in our tenth episode (woot!) your intrepid hosts reconvene ENERGY CRISIS CORNER and oh boy there was no shortage of fodder for us to traverse. From the UK where gas reserves are low but the hubris is high and they’ll be capping energy bills and paying people to use less at peak times, to our French friends who’ve coined the best moniker for their efforts in La Sobriete Energetique (Energy Sobriety) campaign with voluntary measures to save 10% energy use. The debate is also running hot in the EU about how they will pay for Fit for 55, maybe CBAM proceeds! And how are things looking at home in Oz? Not much better we’re afraid. This week there was much discussion on just how bad energy prices are likely to get in the next little while. Yikes.

At this point we’d normally cast about for a silver lining but instead we spiralled into apocalyptic catastrophe and with a paper appropriately titled ‘Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios’ brought to us by four horsemen Luke Kemp, Chi Xu, Joanna Depledge and Timothy Lenton and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS). These guys contend that facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst. What did we make of it? Listen on!

Tennant’s One More Thing is a piece of 70s futurism called The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton professor who suggested the answer to the world’s industrial challenges was GIANT SPACE COLONIES that would build orbital solar power stations and beam energy back to Earth via microwaves. Jeff Bezos is a disciple, could you be one too? Well worth a look!

Frankie’s One More Thing was to celebrate the successful 2022 Energy Efficiency Summit. Your intrepid hosts worked on this in their day jobs and were excited to have Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy Jenny McAllister there to announce a National Energy Performance Strategy, veritable music to our ears. Failed to gatecrash the sesh? Never fear, you can watch it all here. You can also read the communique from hosting orgs and the Minister’s media release and speech. Special shout out to the crew at EEC for making the magic happen!

Luke’s One More Thing is a super article in the Economist, ‘The energy transition will be expensive, but not catastrophically so’. It draws an interesting analogy to the current energy transition from fossil gas to heat pumps that we could all take heart from in the transition the UK made from town gas to fossil gas. It can be done! We’ve done it before! Now where do I get my heat pump installer ticket.

That’s all folks, see you next time! Please keep tweeting your thoughts to us at @LukeMenzel, @TennantReed and @FrankieMuskovic and if you would like to weave some red thread through our back catalogue, give us your feelpinions or suggest papers to read we are always here for that - hit us up at [e-mail].