The man who sequenced the first Neanderthal genome, the person who discovered a new type of human, the Denisovans, Svante Pääbo, is the winner of the Nobel prize in Physiology this year.
Let’s start with perhaps the most important one – the 1997 publication on the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA (mDNA). It established the presence of an extinct human, who was unlike the modern human. But in 2010, he sprung another surprise through genome sequencing and showed that there was, indeed, a gene flow from Neanderthal to modern non-African humans.
He’s not done yet! In the same year (2010), he published the mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia, the Denisovans.
References
Krings et al., Cell, 90, 19–30, 1997 Green et al., Science, 328, 710, 2010 Krause et al., Nature, 464, 894, 2010
The 2022 report of the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor assesses the latest status of 25 world-leading companies for their commitment to net-zero and actual performance.
The selected 25 reported combined revenue of USD 3.18 trillion, or 10% of the world’s top 500, in 2020. Their footprint (self-reported) added up to 2.7 GtCO2e/y; about 5% of the global.
The researchers looked at the ratings from CDP (the Carbon Disclosure Project) on transparency and 1.5°C-ratings from the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) on integrity. The notable finding from the report is the gulf between the target as they advertise and what they could achieve based on their actions so far.
Scope 3 emissions account for about 87% of the selected companies. And only about 8 of them had a reasonable plan to address emissions. One such credibility challenge is how companies plan to achieve carbon neutrality. The study raises its criticism over the (over) use of offset and nature-based solutions as the main strategies versus a plan for the absolute reduction of CO2 from activities.
The story of Covid-19 is getting three years old, and we are still getting the magnitude of the calamity it caused. One way of studying the impact is by mapping the change in life expectancy during the pandemic. Nature human behaviour has just published a paper on this topic, summarising data collected from 29 countries.
Understanding life expectancy
The calculations, known as the period life expectancies, are not a prediction but an estimate of how long a newborn will live if today’s death rate persists for her entire life. So these numbers will vary between 2020, when it was severe cases of Covid-19 with no vaccinations available, to 2021, where there were some mitigations available, to 2022, where the deadliness was relatively lower.
LE deficit
The researchers covered the change in LE rates of countries, that included Europe, the USA and Chile, since 2019, using data on all-cause mortality. They also define a term, LE deficit, which is the difference between the observed LE, and expected LE based on pre-pandemic estimates. Consider this: a country estimates an LE of 80 years in the last quarter of 2021. Imagine it was 79 years in 2015 and was slowly progressing upward (based on the trends from the past few years), and the expectation by Q4 2021 was 82. Then the LE deficit is 80 – 80 = 2 years.
There are a bunch of findings worth mentioning here: Of the countries under investigation, only Finland, Norway and Denmark did not see a decline in LE (in comparison with 2019) in 2020. Many Western European countries bounced back in 2021, i.e. positive change LE from 2020 to 2021, whereas most of Eastern European, the USA and Chile continued the fall.
One impressive trend was the correlation between vaccination coverage and life expectancy deficit.
Emissions accounting forms a pillar in the benchmarking of the industrial decarbonisation process. We have seen last time the categorisation (the scopes) of emissions. The relative contributions to these scopes vary from industry to industry. Today we discuss some of these variations based on the 2022 report published by the World Economic Forum.
The industrial sector accounts for about 30% of today’s global carbon emissions (excluding scope 3 emissions). Six sectors – oil, natural gas, steel, cement, aluminium and ammonia – take 80% of the share (without scope 3). The proportions of scopes 1, 2 and 3 of these sections are.
We have seen how much is planet’s carbon budget and terms such as net-zero emissions to stay within the limit. These are as fine as targets. But how do we reach there, and how do we know we are on track? Answering these questions requires accounting.
One such thing is the standards defined by the greenhouse gas protocol. They provide the framework for businesses, governments and other entities. For companies, these led to the creation of scopes, which captures their direct and indirect emissions and the ones related to the supply chain.
Take an example of an oil and gas company. There are three scopes for the emissions. Scope 1 means the emissions related to the direct emissions from their operations, e.g., CO2 from the refinery, chemical plant or petroleum production. Scope 2 emissions are mainly the indirect emissions related to the energy they buy to run the operations, such as electricity, steam and heat. And finally, scope 3 happens when the customers burn the products they sell – petrol, diesel or kerosene.
The hundredfold reduction of solar energy cost is nothing short of magic. To summarise the recipe in one sentence: the US developed technology, Germany created the market, and China just made it! So the question is: if solar is so cheap (cheaper than almost any other technology), why don’t we rely on solar and dump other dirtier ones? It only works when it is sunny, and the electricity demand is not always when it is sunny! It only works when it’s sunny, and the electricity demand goes with a logic of its own, often conflicting with the sunlight.
The duck that you see above has a lot of consequences. The plot indicates the requirement for traditional power generation to start operating in the evening time to manage the peak demand. But the economics is not that simple. Traditional power plants are typically more expensive and can’t make money by only producing in the evening and night. Secondly, the plants can have limitations in ramping up production so fast. These two limitations force the plants to run all day at some capacity leading to the renewable power plans to left unused. This waste (potential) power is called curtailment.
One way to manage is by storing electricity. But that comes with a cost, reducing the cost advantage created by solar significantly. Another way is to have common grids connecting multiple time zones and countries.
We have seen the relationship between the human development index (HDI) and energy consumption.
There are two parts to the curve – a linear part until about 0.9 HDI and a plateauing part then onwards. Let’s focus on the linear. While attributing a causality, that energy consumption is the reason why some countries have high HDIs, may be a tricky conclusion to make, it nonetheless can be established without much trouble that countries that are behind the curve have the right to improve. It becomes a matter of distributive justice.
And that threshold energy consumption is around 25,000 kWh per person per year. The number of people that crossed this threshold is about 38%. Here is something already interesting. The percentage of people who crossed 0.9 HDI is only 13%. The difference between the two numbers is mainly due to China and Russia – large, reasonably energy-consuming countries that still need to climb the HDI ladder.
The amount of additional energy required for the below-threshold is about 80,000 TWh, which is about half of today’s global consumption of 160,000 TWh! If you are curious about the “excess” energy used by the top countries, it is 40,000 TWh. The shortfall and the excess don’t match because of the choice of 25,000 kWh, which is arbitrary and is not an average.
Alan D. Pasternak, Global Energy Futures and Human Development: A Framework for Analysis, 2000 Global energy consumption: Our World in Data World Population Review: Energy Consumption
We have seen how electricity consumption and human development are related. This time, we go further to seek available data on the total energy consumption. That led to a dataset from “worldpopulationreview.com”. The question was how electricity consumption is related to overall energy consumption. Here is how they are related.
They are reasonably related, especially for the lower-consuming countries.
The next relationship is no more a surprise, i.e. between the total energy consumption and the human development index.
Today, let’s look at the relationship between the human development index and per capita electricity consumption.
The data was acquired from Wikipedia by web scraping using an R program. The codes used for the extraction, conditioning and plotting are provided below.
