The Good, The Bad, and The Interesting
Three climate & energy trends from 2023, courtesy of Nat Bullard.
Each year, researcher and speaker Nat Bullard publishes a slide-deck of decarbonisation trends in climate, energy, business & technology. This year it reached 200 slides. He kindly gave The Borrowed Earth Project permission to share some with our readers, so I have picked out three. One that shows a positive trend, one negative, and one we find particularly interesting.
The Good
The most positive news in the energy world, in a time of supply shocks, high energy prices, and high interest rates affecting industries like offshore wind, is that the trends in the uptake of renewable energy are skyrocketing.
440GW of solar power was installed last year (Slide 22), that’s equivalent to 137 Hinkley Point C nuclear power stations, in 2010 that number was just 10GW. That growth in solar, along with strong roll out of wind, means a larger share of electricity generation is being taken up by renewables each year.
Some other positive news includes reductions in the amount of deforestation in the Amazon (27), battery prices have fallen again (60), there has been record investment in the energy transition of $1.8 TN (33), and US clean technology investment is soaring (46).
The Bad
In the end, the fight against climate change relies on limiting global warming to boundaries that humans and the natural world can survive without severe consequences. To that end, it is always worth reminding ourselves just how much the planet has already warmed, against pre-industrial averages, and how climate change is no longer some distant future threat, but very much happening already.
In that regard, 2023 was an especially hot year, one with a record number of $1bn natural disasters in the US (10), more land burnt in wildfires in Canada than ever before (11), and the heat of our oceans rose alarmingly higher than normal (8). Set against all this, despite the progress of renewables, emissions of CO2 are at an all time high (13).
The Interesting
There are a few interesting surprises in Nat Bullard slide deck of trends.
Perhaps its not surprising, but it is certainly noteworthy that the 10 biggest battery cell manufacturers are all in Asia (63), with one Chinese company, CATL, making 38% of the worlds lithium-ion cells. It turns out the per-capita emissions of every major greenhouse gas have peaked (26), meaning we emit less per person than we used to. And after a slew of anti-EV press coverage recently, it is interesting to see EV sales are not slowing, as some headlines would suggest, but were actually up 50% (131).
But the one trend I wanted to pick out as particularly noteworthy, relates to something we have covered extensively at The Borrowed Earth Project, and that is the use of the law to enact change to climate policy, with a big growth in the number of climate law suits being filed each year.
