Everyone with even a little bit of debt has to manage their debt. If you just have a little debt, you have to keep up your payments and make sure it doesn’t get out of control. On the other hand, when you have a large amount of debt, you have to put more effort into paying off your debt while juggling payments on the debts you’re not currently paying.
Know How Much You Owe
Make a list of your debts, including the creditor, total amount of the debt, monthly payment, interest rate, and due date. You can use your credit report to confirm the debts on your list. Having all the debts in front of you will allow you to see the bigger picture and stay aware of your complete debt picture. Debt reduction software can make this process easier.
Once you have a handle on your debt and your income, you can calculate your Debt to Income ratio (DTI). This ratio tells you how much of your income is going toward debt payments. To find yours, divide your debt payments by your income, and multiply by 100. For example, $1,200 of monthly debt divided by $3,000 of monthly income is 0.4 x 100 = 40%. The lower this number is, the better, and tracking it can help you understand your finances more clearly.
Don’t just create your list and forget about it. Refer to your debt list periodically, especially as you pay bills. Update your list every few months as the total amount of your debt changes.
Pay Your Bills on Time Each Month
Late payments make it harder to pay off your debt since you’ll have to pay a late fee for every payment you miss. If you miss two payments in a row, your interest rate and finance charges will increase.
If you use a calendaring system on your computer or smartphone, enter your payments there and set an alert to remind you several days before your payment is due. If you miss a payment, don’t wait until the next due date to send your payment, by then it could be reported to a credit bureau. Instead, send your payment as soon as you remember that it was missed.
A budget can help you stay out of debt, and it can help you climb out. It allows you to see how much money you earn and where that money is going. Create a bare-bones budget that allows you to pay for necessities like your rent or mortgage and utilities. Set aside everything else to pay off your debt as quickly as possible.
Create a Monthly Bill Payment Calendar
Use a bill payment calendar to help you figure out which bills to pay with which paycheck. On your calendar, write each bill’s payment amount next to the due date. Then, fill in the date of each paycheck. If you get paid on the same days every month—the 1st and 15th—you can use the same calendar from month to month. But, if your paychecks fall on different days of the month, you’ll need to create a calendar every month.
Make at Least the Minimum Payment
If you can’t afford to pay anything more, at least make the minimum payment. Of course, the minimum payment doesn’t help you make real progress in paying off your debt. But, it keeps your account in good standing, which avoids late fees. When you miss payments, it becomes harder to catch up and eventually your accounts could go into default.
While you’re working on paying down debt, stop using credit cards. Start carrying cash instead. Stick to the budget you created and only buy what you can pay for with cash.
Decide Which Debts to Pay Off First
Paying off credit card debt first is often the best strategy because credit cards have higher interest rates than other debts.1 Of all your credit cards, the one with the highest interest rate usually gets priority on repayment because it’s costing the most money.
Use your debt list to prioritize and rank your debts in the order you want to pay them off. You can also choose to pay off the debt with the lowest balance first. This might cost a little more in the long run, but knocking off small debts first can build confidence.
Pay Off Collections and Charge-Offs
You can only pay as much on your debt as you can afford. When you have limited funds for repaying debt, focus on keeping your other accounts in good standing. Don’t sacrifice your positive accounts for those that have already affected your credit. Instead, pay those past due accounts when you can afford to do it.
Build an Emergency Fund to Fall Back On
Without access to savings, you’d have to go into debt to cover an emergency expense. Even a small emergency fund will cover little expenses that come up every once in a while.
First, work toward creating a small emergency fund—$1,000 is a good place to start. Once you have that, make it your goal to create a bigger fund, like $2,000. Eventually, you want to build up a reserve of three to six months of living expenses.
Don’t Confuse Wants and Needs
It’s easy to convince yourself that you “need” to purchase a new tv or that you “need” to go on vacation. The truth is, there aren’t that many true needs in life. You need food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and things like that. You want steak, a nice house in the suburbs, designer labels, and a luxury car, for example.
Recognize the Signs That You Need Help
If you find it hard to pay your debt and other bills each month, you may need to seek outside help, like a credit counseling agency. Other options for debt relief are:
These each have advantages and disadvantages, so weigh your options carefully.
What is debt consolidation?
Debt consolidation is rolling your debts into a product that offers a single payment and a lower interest rate. Popular debt consolidation tools include personal loans and 0% interest balance-transfer credit cards.
What is debt settlement?
Debt settlement is when you negotiate with a creditor to settle your debt for less than you owe. Creditors will typically only settle debt that isn’t current. If you stop making payments in order to settle debt, your credit score will drop due to the missed payments. You can hire debt settlement companies, but they charge fees for resolving your debt. You can settle debt on your own or consider another option like credit counseling.
Manufacturing in China started to improve in May after the country lifted coronavirus lockdowns that shut down China’s richest and most populous city of Shanghai, as well as other industrial areas, according to an official survey released Tuesday.
The Purchasing Managers’ Index of the National Bureau of Statistics of China’s manufacturing industry jumped from 47.4% in April to 49.6% this month on a 100-point scale. Numbers below 50 reveal activity contracting.
Tuesday’s data shows that “activity has started to rebound as containment measures were rolled back,” Capital Economics’ Sheana Yue said in a report, adding that the recovery “is likely to remain tepid amid weak external demand and labor market strains.”
More businesses in Shanghai, China’s most populous city, are being allowed to reopen this week after outbreaks were deemed to be under control. Other industrial centers including Shenzhen in the south and Changchun in the northeast also were temporarily shut down, disrupting manufacturing and trade.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is zeroing in on the ties that China’s state banks and other financial stalwarts have developed with big private-sector players, expanding his push to curb capitalist forces in the economy.
In April, China’s industrial groups posted their biggest profit decline in two years, the latest sign of economic and corporate woes caused by a wave of coronavirus lockdowns. Industrial profits fell 8.5% in April from the same period a year earlier, the biggest drop since March 2020, when China was also engulfed in restrictions to deal with the initial outbreak of the virus.
The cutbacks are increasing pressure on the government, which is pushing to maintain its zero-Covid policy to eliminate infections through mass testing, lockdowns and quarantines. The strategy is a priority for President Xi Jinping this year as he seeks an unprecedented third term in office, but its rising economic costs pose a serious threat to the country’s 5.5% growth goal by 2022.
Official data last week showed a drop in overall activity in April at a time when Shanghai, China’s financial center, was closed and residents were chained to their homes. Retail sales, an important indicator of consumption, fell 11%, while industrial production also fell. Unemployment hit 6.1 percent, the highest level in two years. The lockdowns are estimated to have affected dozens of cities and hundreds of millions of people. Restrictions are also being put in place in Beijing, which reports dozens of cases daily.
The latest outbreak in China was centered mainly in Shanghai, where about 63,000 infections have been reported and where many residents are still staying at home. Officials stressed the need for a rapid citywide response to the highly contagious Omicron variant. Zhu Hong, senior statistician at the National Bureau of Statistics, said the outbreak “had a big impact on the production and operation of industrial enterprises” in April, adding that profits fell by 22% for manufacturing companies in particular.
The authorities, which had already eased monetary policy in response to last year’s real estate liquidity crunch, have taken other steps to support the economy. Last week, China’s mortgage lending rate was cut for the second time this year. Analysts at Goldman Sachs pointed to the impact of “high raw material costs” on industrial profits, in addition to supply chain disruptions caused by Covid lockdowns at manufacturing centers.
“We expect further policy easing on the fiscal front to stimulate demand, given the downward pressure on growth and the uncertainty of the pace of recovery from the Covid disruption,” they said.
As part of its ambitions to move to a net-zero economy by 2050, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has been ramping up its plans to facilitate removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and drive down the cost of the technology required to do so. These efforts are set to receive a massive cash injection, with the Biden administration announcing US$3.5 billion in funding for a set of regional direct air capture hubs.
The announcement follows a string of far smaller investments that began with $22 million in 2020 and a further $24 million last year, designed to accelerate research into carbon capture technology. As part of the the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) signed by President Biden in November last year, the the DOE also announced its Carbon Negative Shot initiative. This is centered on deploying carbon capture technologies on a gigaton scale by 2050, by driving down the cost of carbon capture and storage to $100 per ton.
A gigaton is equivalent to one billion metric tons, and to put things into perspective, the world’s largest direct air capture plant currently collects around 4,000 tons of CO2 each year. Humans pump out around 30 billion tons each year, while a single gigaton is about the amount generated annually by the US’s entire light-duty vehicle fleet.
The DOE has today released a Notice of Intent, which acts as a kind of high-level draft ahead of an official funding opportunity announcement later in the year. The $3.5 billion in funding will go towards hubs that will act as regional centers for direct air capture projects, with applicants needing to demonstrate an ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it. The DOE expects each of these hubs to permanently sequester a million metric tons of CO2 each year.
“The UN’s latest climate report made clear that removing legacy carbon pollution from the air through direct air capture and safely storing it is an essential weapon in our fight against the climate crisis,” said US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is funding new technologies that will not only make our carbon-free future a reality but will help position the US as a net-zero leader while creating good-paying jobs for a transitioning clean energy workforce.”
The project in question, the Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program, is funded under the bipartisan infrastructure law and will involve the construction of four regional hubs for carbon dioxide removal.CO2 removal involves sucking carbon dioxide from the surrounding air and either storing it underground or using it for products that do not release it back into the air.
It is a separate process from carbon capture, which aims to prevent the initial release of emissions outright.“CDR is a key element in scenarios that likely limit warming to 2°C or 1.5°C by 2100,” the report states. “Strategies need to reflect that CDR methods differ in terms of removal process, timescale of carbon storage, technological maturity, mitigation potential, cost, co-benefits, adverse side-effects, and governance requirements.”
Nick has been writing and editing at New Atlas for over six years, where he has covered everything from distant space probes to self-driving cars to oddball animal science. He previously spent time at The Conversation, Mashable and The Santiago Times, earning a Masters degree in communications from Melbourne’s RMIT University along the way.
Carbon removal is the process of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it away for decades, centuries, or millennia. This could slow, limit, or even reverse climate change — but it is not a substitute for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This is because carbon removal is generally slow-acting and may not be able to be deployed at scales commensurate with society’s current greenhouse emissions. Carbon removal is sometimes referred to as carbon dioxide removal or CDR, and technologies for implementing carbon removal are sometimes called Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs).
Some prominent ideas for carbon removal include:
planting massive new forests (afforestation/reforestation)
using no-till agriculture and other practices to increase the amount of carbon stored in soils (soil carbon sequestration)
creating charcoal and burying it or plowing it into fields (biochar)
capturing and sequestering carbon from biofuels and bioenergy plants (bioenergy with CCS or BECCS)
spreading crushed rocks over land to absorb carbon dioxide from the air or exposing them to carbon dioxide-rich fluids (enhanced mineralization)
building machines that would suck carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and bury it (direct air capture)
oceans-based methods, including:
spreading alkaline materials, such as lime, over the ocean (ocean alkalinization)
fertilizing selected areas of the ocean by spreading nutrients, such as iron, over the surface (ocean fertilization)
fertilizing selected areas of the ocean by pumping nutrient-rich waters from the depths to the surface (artificial upwelling)
accelerating the transport of carbon to the ocean depths by pumping surface waters downward (artificial downwelling)
When you’ve got news to share with your employees, team, or executives, an internal company newsletter can be the most effective way of reaching everyone. An internal newsletter could contain an update about the upcoming holiday party for the entire organization or information around the company’s quarterly results for the executive team exclusively.
And, you could have both! There are many different ways to use internal company newsletters, and you can have more than one for different teams, offices, or departments. The approach you take depends on the objectives of your marketing strategy.
We’ll explore internal newsletter examples a bit further down, but before we dive into the concept of internal company newsletters, let’s briefly answer the following question: What is a newsletter?
What Is a Newsletter?
To put it simply: A newsletter is either an electronic or printed report covering various activities of a company or business. It is sent to its customers, community members, or other subscribers and consists of interesting content, promotions, announcements. A newsletter helps to increase traffic and serves as an information source.
What Is an Internal Newsletter?
Just like a normal newsletter, an internal newsletter is an electronic or printed report sent out on a regular basis to update subscribers. For internal newsletters these subscribers are internal stakeholders such as employees, shareholders, the board, management, different departments, etc.
Oftentimes, organizations have an external-facing newsletter but lack any type of internal company newsletters. And that’s the problem we are trying to solve with this blog (and our newsletter management platform). One reason why organizations forgo putting together these weekly, monthly, or quarterly email updates is that there’s a myth that they aren’t read by employees, however, the data shows otherwise.
What Is the Purpose of an Internal Company Newsletter?
Besides being a way to inform employees about the latest company updates, an employee newsletter can also be a fun way of sharing, explaining, and reinforcing your company culture.
At first, a company newsletter may seem insignificant in the day-to-day operations of a company, but it does play a role in shaping the workplace environment.
Some argue internal company newsletters are time-consuming and don’t offer enough ROI. Well, we have some stats that say differently. According to Retrospectively, Inc., employee productivity increases anywhere from 20-25% when employees feel connected to the company.
However, only 13% of employees reported participating in their intranet daily—31% said they never do.
So, although most PR & Communication teams are focused on getting the word out there, it’s just as important for these teams to spread the word internally — often they also involve the HR department to provide additional internal newsletter ideas. A company newsletter (corporate newsletter) is a critical part of your email marketing strategy that can help keep employee engagement and communication levels high.
When embarking on an employee newsletter strategy, remember that the values you want your company to reflect should be the values underlying your internal newsletter content. In this blog, we will cover internal newsletter ideas, internal newsletter names, company newsletter examples, and templates to use for your internal employee newsletter, so when you’re done reading, you’ll be a pro.
14 Internal Newsletter Ideas
Share Your Company’s Successes: Make sure everyone knows what the PR and marketing teams are up to. In your internal company newsletter, you want to share your wins, notify people about your latest content, and get everyone in sync on your company’s top messages so that they can communicate and increase your reach.Want to make things easy? Our internal newsletter template which is part of our media intelligence suite will allow you to curate a hand-selected feed of articles to be shared via a branded email newsletter.
Promote Social Advocacy: You spend a lot of time on creating social media content—but chances are your co-workers and employees aren’t all following your branded social media profiles. An internal company newsletter can help spread your social message and make sure everyone is aware and motivated to help communicate and promote it. Plus, if you run out of ideas of what to include in a company newsletter, add a few examples of people mentioning you on social media, it may incentivize others to start creating similar UGC. Let them be your brand’s #1 fans.
Share What’s Going on in the Competitive Landscape: Use an employee newsletter as an opportunity to cover industry news, trends, and insights. No matter how innovative a company is, competitors are a healthy part of any industry. That’s why highlighting the achievements, as well as the missteps of close competitors, can give colleagues insight into how to do their jobs. Using a media monitoring solution, you can benchmark how well you’re doing in comparison to your top competitors. By sharing these metrics, news alerts, or industry updates, you’re giving colleagues insights that can inform future campaigns or sales pitches.
Boost Your Branding: A company newsletter can help you reinforce brand voice, style, imagery, and personality. Are you seeing fellow employees misrepresenting the brand? Quick do’s and don’ts can go a long way in keeping employees on their toes. Plus, linking out to your style guide and templates.
Highlight Evergreen Content: The internal comms and content marketing team are creating great content. And your sales team could use the blogs, webinars, or case stories as a great excuse for touching base with key prospects…if only they knew about it. Use your corporate newsletter to encourage them to communicate about the thought leadership you’ve worked so hard on.
Bring in the Voice of Your Customers: Highlight customer case studies and bring in suggestions for new ones. Case studies are a great sales tool, and an internal company newsletter can highlight new and relevant clients that are using your product or services. You could also include any comments or reviews left by customers that you think your employees should know about. There’s no better advocate for the brand than happy customers!
Complement Existing Company Collateral and Resources: Your email employee newsletter can be a weekly, monthly, or quarterly examination of what the company finds important. It can be a platform to welcome new employees, announce new product versions, highlight relevant assets, and ask for input on a rebranding. In this way, it reinforces the messages and information in all the other content that your company produces. Use it to collect feedback and insights.
Employee Engagement and Advocacy: Communication is key. Turn a colleague into a hero. Calling out successful collaboration helps those involved feel appreciated and encourages more sharing of ideas and resources, which boosts employee engagement.
Reinforce Transparency As a Mindset: Having a company newsletter opens up a line of communication that doesn’t clog up the email inbox. As comms pros, we know that the best way to start a conversation is to provide the subject and the platform. At the very least, this newsletter can be the jumping-off point to discuss company values and employee culture.
Share News Updates: If you introduce a newsletter right with a predictable cadence, it can be an invaluable mouthpiece for stakeholders throughout the organization. The resulting content can be a 360-degree view of what is going on in an organization. The material can be as diverse as a recap of the CEO’s recent “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session; the sales team’s exceeding their monthly sales quotas; issues with a recent product launch, communication from a Vice-President, or highlights from the social media team.
Provide the Data Analytics Behind the Successes of Your Efforts: Data is how a segment of your colleagues track success, so in addition to sharing media coverage, you can share easy to read graphs and charts that track monthly media coverage, social media mentions, sentiment, competitive benchmarks, etc…. It’s an easy way to benchmark the work you do for those more interested in volume than they are the engagement aspect of KPIs.
Earned Media Coverage: If you receive hard-earned coverage in a media outlet, whether it’s the Washington Post or a niche publication that’s important to your industry, wouldn’t you want to shout it from the mountaintop? Well, here’s the perfect venue for doing just that. Tag the story in your media monitoring platform and create a company newsletter using the built-in functionality, don’t forget to include additional insight. Your brand mentions mean as much to your colleagues as they do to you, so share that article that has a link to your product, quotes your CEO about the state of your industry, or shows how your company is making strides with its offerings. Your colleagues want to know how the rest of the world perceives the company. And as a bonus, summarize your coverage analytics to show how your reach and share of voice have grown, so they can take pride in the momentum you’ve built.
Include Industry News, Trends, and Insights: No matter how innovative a company is, competitors are a healthy part of any industry. That’s why highlighting the achievements, as well as the missteps of close competitors in the form of an internal company newsletter, can give employees insight into how to do their jobs. With a media monitoring solution in place, a company can monitor their own, as well as competitors’ keywords to see how well their social media accounts are leading to engagement. From this info, they can perform a competitive analysis to share with the entire organization.
Highlight Key Partners and Customers: Use the employee newsletter as an opportunity to highlight key partners and customers and what their public media coverage is. The newsletter can show how your key partners and customers are using your products and services in interesting ways. This can be useful for sales, biz dev, and customer service teams as they reach out to new partners or assist existing partners and clients. It can also help UX/CX and engineering teams as they understand how products and services are actually used by partners and clients.
Best Internal Company Newsletters [Examples]
Now that we know what to put in a company newsletter, let’s take a look at an example for some inspiration. We took an informative and concept-driven approach and mocked it up below. This internal newsletter comes directly from the marketing team to highlight their accomplishments, upcoming events, resources, and more.
But what is the best format for a newsletter?
An internal company newsletter truly is just another email in our inbox, right? So the design element is crucial to whether your readers are encouraged to click through or not. And today, you can use our internal newsletter template or customize your own using a service like Meltwater.
Here are some more internal newsletter templates and concrete internal newsletter examples we think are k-i-l-l-i-n-g it that are worth checking out.
Internal Newsletter Example #1:
Meltwater’s newsletters & website newsfeeds allow you to easily share media coverage in a customized fashion, that way, you can:
Share results & inform stakeholders—The employee newsletter will allow you to curate a hand-selected feed of articles to be shared via a branded email newsletter & the newsfeed product allows you to showcase positive news or social media content on your website, adding third-party validation to your own content.
Promote your hard work—Use the company newsletters to share company mentions, provide commentary on important stories, and compile market and competitor briefs.
Showcase news and social mentions—Promote relevant news and any social media mentions. The newsfeed allows you to stream customer testimonials and feature industry insights.
Meltwater newsletter options
Meltwater offers a couple of ways to build newsletters. Your team can either cherry-pick the content featured, or you can lean on Meltwater’s analyst team to do so on your behalf.
Not sure which option to go for? If newsletters are new to your organization and you don’t receive a huge amount of media coverage, we’d recommend having your team curate the content in the first instance. If you work for a large brand, the process of finding and sharing business-critical media can take up a lot of your internal time and resources and so Meltwater’s Curated Media Briefings may be a better option since our team of analysts do the heavy lifting for you.
Benefits of Meltwater’s Curated Media Briefings:
We make sure that the dedicated Meltwater analyst we assign to your company understands your industry and competitive landscape so they can proactively monitor trends, market disruptions and new competitive threats, and alert you to the conversations you need to
be aware of.
Analysts help eliminate irrelevant mentions by manually reviewing all content and selecting critical business insights based on your brief.
Briefings are highly customizable. We understand that different recipient groups are interested in different topics, such as sales, product reviews, negative news, mergers and acquisitions etc. If your priorities change, we’ll pivot with you and update all searches, while offering agility and flexibility to adjust scope.
Meltwater analysts enrich curated briefings, transforming them into insights that are quick to read and easy to understand. We include publication, headline, date, content link, and options for an executive summary and/or customised article summaries highlighting key takeaways. That way, you can stay informed, gain a 360-view of your business, and educate your colleagues on the industry trends they need to know about.
Themezy employee internal newsletter templates are great because they are optimized across devices to ensure everyone can easily read the newsletter. What’s even better is they offer sixteen free company newsletter templates and you don’t have to submit your email address to get started.
If you have some budget to spend, look to TemplateMonster. They have a variety of internal newsletter templates that are user-friendly, customizable, and compatible. You can even do a live demo to see if it fits your needs. Below is their Panda employee newsletter template, built specifically for a creative agency.
With a large collection of email company newsletter templates, HubSpot offers free and paid versions, some as low as $1 and can be used immediately. Below are all examples of newsletter templates from their marketplace.
Internal Newsletter Names: How to Choose The Best Option
Brainstorming names can be tricky, right? And there are so many options of possible internal newsletter names. As marketers, we know It’s one of the first things your employees will read next to the subject line, so it’s important to be thoughtful. And you want to make sure it stands out and grabs the reader’s attention. So where do you start?
First, take into consideration what type of content is included. Is its purpose informative, frequency-driven, goal-driven, or employee-driven? Is it based on a concept or your brand’s name?
Maybe it’s a mix? Second, make sure the employee newsletter name reflects your company’s brand voice and adheres to any internal guidelines. You can reference your company’s brand guidelines as a good place to start. And third, keep it short, simple, and direct.
Here are some examples of internal newsletter names based on the intention or theme of your internal newsletter.
Informative
The Insider
[Company Name] Digest
Just the Facts
Frequency-driven
The Monthly Review
The [Company Name] Weekly Bulletin
The Month Ahead
Employee-driven
The People’s News
Our Voices
All Hands Information
Concept-driven
Marketing Insider
Media Talk
Marketing Thoughts
Brand-driven
Consider how you can use your brand in the publication name. It could be the title of your blog, tied to your brand colors, or an alliteration based on your company’s name.
Improve Internal Communications with Employee Engagement!
Over a 100-year time period, a tonne of hydrogen in the atmosphere will warm the Earth some 11 times more than a tonne of CO2, with an uncertainty of ± 5
Hydrogen will be one of humanity’s key weapons in the war against carbon dioxide emissions, but it must be treated with care. New reports show how fugitive hydrogen emissions can indirectly produce warming effects 11 times worse than those of CO2.
Hydrogen can be used as a clean energy carrier, and running it through a fuel cell to produce electricity produces nothing but water as a by-product. It carries far more energy for a given weight than lithium batteries, and it’s faster to refill a tank than to charge a battery, so hydrogen is viewed as a very promising green option in several hard-to-decarbonize applications where batteries won’t cut the mustard – for example, aviation, shipping and long-haul trucking.
But when it’s released directly into the atmosphere, hydrogen itself can interact with other gases and vapors in the air to produce powerful warming effects. Indeed, a new UK Government study has put these interactions under the microscope and determined that hydrogen’s Global Warming Potential (GWP) is about twice as bad as previously understood; over a 100-year time period, a tonne of hydrogen in the atmosphere will warm the Earth some 11 times more than a tonne of CO2, with an uncertainty of ± 5.
How does hydrogen act like a greenhouse gas?
One way is by extending the lifetime of atmospheric methane. Hydrogen reacts with the same tropospheric oxidants that “clean up” methane emissions. Methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas, causing some 80 times more warming than an equivalent weight of CO2 over the first 20 years. But hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere clean it up relatively quickly, while CO2 remains in the air for thousands of years, so CO2 is worse in the long run.
When hydrogen is present, however, those hydroxyl radicals react with the hydrogen instead. There are fewer cleanup agents to go around, so there’s a direct rise in methane concentrations, and the methane stays in the atmosphere longer.
What’s more, the presence of hydrogen increases the concentration of both tropospheric ozone and stratospheric water vapor, boosting a “radiative forcing” effect that also pushes temperatures higher.
How does hydrogen escape into the atmosphere?
A lot of it is leakage, according to a second report from Frazer-Nash Consultancy. Store hydrogen in a compressed gas cylinder, and you can assume you’ll lose between 0.12 percent and 0.24 percent of it every day. It’ll leak out of pipes and valves if you distribute it that way, losing some 20 percent more volume than the methane gas that’s now running through municipal pipelines – although since hydrogen is so much lighter than methane, this larger volume equates to just 15 percent of the weight.
Where hydrogen is transported as a cryogenic liquid, boil-off is unavoidable, and you can expect to lose an average of about 1 percent of it per day. Currently, this is vented to the atmosphere.
Indeed, venting and purging operations are currently common across the hydrogen life cycle. They occur during electrolysis, during compression, during refueling, and during the process of conversion back into electricity through a fuel cell.
Where there is venting or purging, the percentages tend to dwarf what’s lost through simple leakage – for example, current electrolysis procedures using venting and purging are assumed to lose between 3.3-9.2 percent of all hydrogen produced, depending largely on how often the process starts up and shuts down – this is a bit of a worry in situations where hydrogen production is seen as a way to store excess renewable energy that’s not being snapped up by immediate demand.
Purging and venting emissions can be cleaned up significantly by adding systems to recombine the vented or purged hydrogen back into water and feed it back into the process – but it’ll be a while before these kinds of operations are economically viable.
In all, the Frazer-Nash report expects that between 1-1.5 percent of all hydrogen in its central modeling scenario will be emitted into the atmosphere, with transport emissions responsible for around half of that, and emissions at the production and consumption ends taking up roughly a quarter each.
Meanwhile, operating under different assumptions, the first report linked expects somewhere between 1 percent and 10 percent of all hydrogen in its global scenario will be emitted into the atmosphere,
Does this mean “green hydrogen” should be avoided in the race to zero emissions?
No. The UK Government report explains that “the increase in equivalent CO2 emissions based on 1 percent and 10 percent H2 leakage rate offsets approximately 0.4 and 4 percent of the total equivalent CO2 emission reductions, respectively,” so even assuming the worst leakage scenario, it’s still an enormous improvement.
“Whilst the benefits from equivalent CO2 emission reductions significantly outweigh the disbenefits arising from H2 leakage,” it continues, “they clearly demonstrate the importance of controlling H2 leakage within a hydrogen economy.”
Loz has been one of our most versatile contributors since 2007, and has since proven himself as a photographer, videographer, presenter, producer and podcast engineer, as well as a senior features writer. Joining the team as a motorcycle specialist, he’s covered just about everything for New Atlas, concentrating lately on eVTOLs, hydrogen, energy, aviation, audiovisual, weird stuff and things that go fast.
A woman is sitting on the floor looking at bills and receipts. Photo: © David Sacks / Digital Vision / Getty Images
Once you have a handle on your debt and your income, you can calculate your Debt to Income ratio (DTI). This ratio tells you how much of your income is going toward debt payments. To find yours, divide your debt payments by your income, and multiply by 100. For example, $1,200 of monthly debt divided by $3,000 of monthly income is 0.4 x 100 = 40%. The lower this number is, the better, and tracking it can help you understand your finances more clearly.
A budget can help you stay out of debt, and it can help you climb out. It allows you to see how much money you earn and where that money is going. Create a bare-bones budget that allows you to pay for necessities like your rent or mortgage and utilities. Set aside everything else to pay off your debt as quickly as possible.
While you’re working on paying down debt, stop using credit cards. Start carrying cash instead. Stick to the budget you created and only buy what you can pay for with cash.
Build an Emergency Fund to Fall Back On
What is debt consolidation?
