Squish-squish, darling

One of the most memorable scenes in “Absolutely Fabulous” features horrible mother extraordinaire Eddie pretending to empathise with her long-suffering daughter Saffron who’s crying after the latest insult from the AbFab duo. This is pretty much how I felt for much of this week reading headline after headline about the latest series of stumbles on the way to a net-zero world.

Here’s a Bloomberg columnist, for instance, who is lamenting trends in heat pump sales that nobody could have foreseen at all. In the column, headlined Europe’s Heat-Pump Bubble Is Sadly Deflating, Chris Bryant tells us that “Alternative home-heating systems still have bright futures, providing they can be shielded from the culture wars.”

Using the plural form of nouns that would do just fine with the singular has puzzled me for a while now but I guess it’s a mark of net-zero ambitions, where more transitions sound better than just one. Anyway, heat pump producers in Europe are having troubles selling their products. And they were supposed to be selling like hotcakes.

If only there weren’t so many people complaining about their sub-expectation performance. If only they had been informed in advance about the limitations of the technology. If only they had known about the need to retrofit their homes ahead of installing a heat pump so it can perform per specs. Ah, if only.

Carmakers in Europe are no happier than heat pump makers. Perhaps they should get together and have a good cry-out over a beer or two. Mercedes this week amended its expectations for EV sales, saying it now sees them rising to 50% of total car sales in 2030 instead of next year. I’d say this is still overly optimistic but I’m sure Mercedes knows better.

We’re talking about a company that reported EVs only accounted for 11% of sales last year, with another 8% coming from hybrids. Yes, I can definitely see this rising to 50% in six years—especially as Mercedes also admitted that EVs will remain more expensive than its ICE cars for years to come.

Tesla’s had a bad week, too. In a local referendum, the citizens of the town of Grünheide, where Tesla’s gigafactory is located, voted overwhelmingly against a planned expansion at the site.

The expansion would involve clearing 100 hectares of forest, which the locals for some reason were not on board with. If only someone could explain to them that clearing trees for a gigafactory is totally different from clearing trees for farming because farming is bad and EVs are good.

Speaking of trees, you may be interested to hear that planting trees as a way of reducing climate emissions — I mean, carbon emissions — is actually a bit bad for the planet. Why? Well, because “expanding tree cover could affect the climate in complex ways.”

This is according to two scientists, and I use the term loosely, who have published a paper arguing that while planting trees is great in itself, planting trees as a way of reducing your pollutions — I mean emissions — may be risky due to side effects such as “changes to other greenhouse gases and the reflectivity of the land surface.”

More specifically, per the paper, “the combination of decreased reflection and increased aerosol scattering of incident sunlight offsets about one-third of the cooling by carbon dioxide removal that forestation produces.” We obviously need to stop planting trees and it might in fact be a good idea to start cutting them down. Someone should go tell the citizens of Grünheide about this paper.

Someone should also go to South Africa and explain to the stubborn people there that the Just Energy Transition Partnership has their best interests at heart. You know what the South Africans did? They didn’t want $2.5 billion in cheap loans. Apparently, the country’s finance ministry has forbidden Eskom, the power utility, to take on new loans without express government approval.

This is extremely bad news because that $2.5 billion was supposed to be used to build transmission lines “in provinces with the best solar and wind power potential,” per Bloomberg. And that transmission line building spree was supposed to save the locals from their chronic electricity shortages. At some point in the future, of course, because potential does not equal capacity.

And that’s not all. The stubborn finance ministry is stopping Eskom and others from tapping a pot of $7 billion in financing for noble energy projects. Odd people, those South Africans. You’d think they have something against clean, cheap, renewable energy.

Wrapping with one last bit of heartbreaking news, the Climate Action 100+ is busy doing damage control after the exit of State Street, JP Morgan, and PIMCO from its ranks. BlackRock withdrew its membership too, albeit more delicately, by transferring it to its international division.

The pullout happened in the wake of a decision by the group to go, per the FT, “from pressuring companies on climate disclosures to pushing them to actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Apparently, this is not something that State Street, JP Morgan, and PIMCO, as well as BlackRock, find attractive for some unfathomable reason, although State Street hinted at the reason, saying that in its opinion the new strategy went too far. Silly State Street. As if anything can be going too far when the climate is at stake.

Anyway, Climate Action 100+ is now trying to calm investors down by focusing on another stated reason for the exit: potential breach of U.S. antitrust law, which was the reason cited by BlackRock for its withdrawal.

The organisation has written to members assuring them they will not be breaching any laws with their new strategy. As chief executive David Atkin, whose name is on the letter, wrote, “no initiative ever requires a signatory to vote in a certain way, even for votes or resolutions that fellow investors have put forward or flagged. Collaborative engagements with companies are always investor-led and always voluntary."

One wonders how the above-referred “pushing” would be exercised and Reuters delivers, no doubt with inspiration from Climate Action 100+. Per Reuters, “The group aims to facilitate more effective engagement with high-emitting companies to help them transition to a low-carbon economy.”

Per me, put “facilitate”, “effective” and “engagement” in a declarative sentence and you’ve lost me forever, especially if you sprinkle some “help them transition to a low-carbon economy” on top.

Last but by no means least, in terms of comedic potential, is the news that Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary have warned Germany that a recent tariff on trans-border gas transportation risks deepening and extending their reliance on Russian gas, which is very bad, as we all know.

The FT tells us that Germany imposed the tariff in question back in 2022 to recoup some of the costs associated with filling up its gas storage ahead of winter per Brussels requirements. But for its neighbours to the East, the tariff has made importing gas from and via Germany more expensive, so they’d been forced against their highly moral wishes to stick with cheaper but evil Russian gas.

It has been a sad week all around. Squish-squish.