Goodish News of Climate Change

Emissions of carbon dioxide (related to energy production) have stabilized, for now.

Is it a peak, a stutter or just a brief pause? Time will tell. But whatever it is, on February 11th the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental ________ which collects such data, announced that emissions of carbon dioxide in 2019 which were ________ to energy had remained the same (33.3bn tonnes) as the previous year’s.

Energy-related emissions, which include those (produced by electricity generation), heating and transport, ________ more than 70% of the world’s industrial CO₂ pollution. The reason why the emissions remained the same was that there was a(n) ________ in coal use, particularly in rich countries, combined with an increase in the use of renewable power.

As a result of this the CO₂-intensity of electricity generation—a(n) ________ of how much of the gas is emitted per kilowatt hour of petrol produced—fell by nearly 6.5%, to 340 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt hour. It had already been ________, but this is three times the average for the past decade. Such declines more than offset (抵消) the ________ of increased electricity production. The average emission-intensity of power generation in 2019 was “lower than all but the most efficient gas-power plants”, according to the IEA.

This is not the first time energy related emissions have plateaued (保持稳定). Between 2013 and 2016 they hovered around 32.2bn tonnes a year, before rising again in 2017 as the use of coal to ________ developing economies increased. This ________ plateau was accompanied by excited declarations that such emissions had peaked. Similar ________ have been made this week, perhaps also prematurely. Besides changes in coal use, a ________ economy may have played a part and the data show that milder than usual weather caused a perceptible drop in emissions from several countries with large, carbon-hungry economies.

________, the latest data from the Amazon rainforest also make us feel relieved. This, one of the world’s largest woodlands, has acted ________ as an absorbing sponge (海绵) for CO₂ by removing it from the atmosphere through photo-synthesis. Researchers at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research have shown that a vast part of the south-east of the Amazon, about one fifth of its area, has lost its ________ to absorb the gas and is now a net source of emissions into the atmosphere instead. This land has been widely deforested, so the result is little ________. But it is disappointing.

Afroz Shah, a lawyer in Mumbai, hasn’t had a weekend off in four years. But he hasn’t spent this time preparing for_________.

His mission? Saving the world’s oceans from _________ pollution.

It’s a calling he found in 2015 after moving to a community in Mumbai called Versova Beach. He had played there as a child and was _________ to see how much it had _________. The sand was no longer _________ because it was covered by a layer of garbage more than five feet thick — most of it plastic waste.

“The whole beach was like a _________ of plastic,” he said. “It hurt me. The ugly mess.” What Shah had seen is part of a global environmental crisis. More than 8 million tons of plastic _________ in the world’s oceans each year. It’s _________ that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. “Plastic in the ocean is a _________. And the sea-species have no choice at all,” Shah said. “We are ____________ their habitats.”

In October 2015, Shah began ____________ up plastic waste from the beach every Sunday morning. At first, it was just him and a neighbor, and then he began calling on others to join in. Word ____________ and with the help from social media, more volunteers got ____________.

For Shah, the work has always been a ____________ journey, but it has earned global attention. After he was ____________ as a Champion of the Earth by the United Nations in 2016, Shah now devotes nearly all of his free time to this ____________.

He’s now spent 209 weekends on this mission, ____________ more than 200 ,000 volunteers, some of whom are young students, to join him in what’s been called the world’s biggest beach cleanup. By October 2018, Versova Beach was ____________ clean and Shah’s cleanups expanded to another beach as well as a stretch of the Mithi River and other regions of India.

“This world talks too much. I think we must talk ____________ and do action more,” he said when interviewed by CNN in October 2019. “We are a smart species. Well adapt. We’ll learn. And with these youngsters rising up, I see ____________.”

Saddleworth Moor in the north of England is a bare place. It seemed almost wired to me, then, that anyone should _____ the building of seven wind turbines( 风力发电机) to produce clean, renewable energy. Surely this was the perfect place to situate them--- basically dull, unattractive to tourists and ----- _____ ---windy. Yet Saddleworth is becoming another battleground in an increasingly confusing _____ over wind farming and the future of the planet.

Typical of this confusion is hearing Professor David Bellamy _____ the fight against wind farms. I had always thought of Professor Bellamy as an environmentalist had made the _____ assumption that he would be a natural supporter of wind power. However, on reflection, Bellamy would be better described as a conservationist, whose main aim is to preserve natural habitats of plants and animals from destruction, rather than a(n) _____ on climate change. He has fought against other renewable energies that _____ wildlife and wildness, and has described the wind turbines as weapons of mass destruction killing birds and bats.

Bellamy, along with other opponents, has argued the wind farms are in fact _____, and are only commercially successfully because they are so heavily funded. This argument has been put forward by several newspaper commentators recently , who have then gone to _____ nuclear power. This doesn’t take into account years of _____ from Greens who claim that nuclear power is both expensive and dangerous. And yet nuclear energy has recently been _____ by a leading green scientist , Professor James Lovelock, who was one of the first to draw attention to the problem of climate change. He argues that renewable energy such as wind simply cannot provide sufficient electricity for our energy needs.

And so it goes on. There are so many _____ claims, each apparently fronted by some outstanding scientists and backed up by a lot of statics. So who’s actually right? What’s the right solution? What _____ me is that we will take so long in deciding that it will be too late. The damage will have been done. Yet what I also _____ is how convenient these conflicting arguments are. We can avoid making any changes to our personal lifestyles by just doing nothing. Global warming isn’t down to me going to Barcelona by air for the weekend or having a dishwasher or driving everywhere; no, it’s because those people in Saddleworth won’t let us build our _____!