How Do You Solve a Problem Like My Heater? Grattan’s Get-Off-Gas Plan

Let Me Sum Up

We start this week’s show with Tennant taking on tech titan Elon Musk by combining his two great two loves in SPREADSHEETS and SPACE to cast some serious shade on Musk’s plans around Mars colonisation, with hot takes on implications for Hydrogen along the way.

Your intrepid hosts also revisit the latest quarterly update from the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory for Dec 2022 and try as Frankie might to induce sleepiness a la BBC shipping forecast readouts with the numbers, no dice! TLDR: emissions reduction flatlined and there is cause for concern that the rollout of energy transition infrastructure is nowhere near fast enough! And what about our friendly neighborhood Cinderella, Energy Efficiency? Not getting enough attention.

Our deep dive this week is a GAS! We unpack the hot-off-the-press Grattan Institute report ‘Getting off gas: why, how, and who should pay?’ brought to us by authors Tony Wood, Alison Reeve and Esther Suckling. We had many things to say on the report’s many insights and recommendations! If this paper piques your interest, you are likely to find these golden nuggets in our back catalogue diverting:

• On the future of gas in the EU - “EU academy adjudicates hydrogen vs. electrification smackdown!”
• On learning rates - “Ka-ching! Act now for huge learning rate savings!”
• On gas transition in Australia - “Infrastructure Victoria presents: A Very December 2021 Gas Report”
• On transport of hydrogen - “Elementary, my dear IRENA: Hydrogen transport”

Frankie’s One More Thing is offsets redux! Revisiting the subject of our second ever episode, the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative have finally finalised and launched their Claims Code of Practice.

Tennant’s One More Thing is: are clean trade negotiations between EU and US on brink of collapse? With some content harking back to our episode on Climate Clubs, the approach to encourage clean steel and aluminium from the US has received a not-so-friendly reception from the EU. Where to from here? Hopefully not a trade war!

Luke’s One More Thing is the most recent two episodes from one of our favourite podcasts, Origin Story, which takes on climate change denial. Reminiscent of some great writing on the topic (Merchants of Doubt, anyone?) get both Part One and Part Two of this double barrelled delight in our ears ASAP.

And that’s all from us this week Summerupperers! We shall see you next time and until then, please keep tweeting your thoughts to us at @LukeMenzel, @TennantReed and @FrankieMuskovic and if you would like to weave some golden threads 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].