President Joe Biden came into office brandishing an ambitious agenda. Then he ran headfirst into the impenetrable political wall that is the U.S. Senate.
Biden’s $2 trillion climate and infrastructure plan, the crown jewel of his first-term agenda, endured months of negotiations before a bipartisan group of centrist senators whittled it into a version that they could accept. The now-$600 billion deal would still be a major investment in American infrastructure, but it doesn’t resemble Biden’s initial vision, which would have accelerated the transition to a low-carbon economy in the U.S. and invested serious resources in green jobs. But Biden promised he wasn’t abandoning his climate mandate. “I’m not just signing the bipartisan bill and forgetting the rest of it,” Biden assured the progressive faction of his party in June.
Late Tuesday night, Senate Democrats moved “the rest of it” a step forward. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and other Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee announced that they aim to pass the rest of Biden’s agenda — all of the climate and social policies that didn’t make it into the $600 billion infrastructure deal — in a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill. Budget reconciliation is a process that allows Senators to bypass the filibuster — the arcane procedure that allows the minority to block bills that don’t have 60 votes — and to pass spending and tax measures with a simple majority.
Deciding on a spending limit that moderates and progressives could agree on was the easy part. The hard part will be negotiating the specifics of the package, which are still forthcoming.
The climate policies included in the spending plan may center around something called a clean electricity standard, or CES, which is a statutory mandate to reach a renewable electricity generation target by a certain date. The standard, according to Democratic lawmakers and legislative aides, aims to slash emissions 50 percent in the electricity sector by 2030. The standard would require the U.S. to get 80 percent of its electricity from clean sources by 2030, too.
Decarbonizing the electricity sector is relatively low-hanging fruit. The way that the U.S. has made the most progress on cutting carbon so far has been through the electricity sector, with steps like retiring coal-fired plants, putting emissions controls on natural gas power plants, and adding wind and solar to the grid. Even so, power is the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by sector, right behind transportation. And the U.S. will require even more electricity to power the electric vehicles and electric appliances needed to replace the kinds that run on fossil fuels.
But there are about a thousand moving pieces that might make it difficult to pass a clean electricity standard. For one, conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia doesn’t like it. “I know they have the climate portion in here, and I’m concerned about that,” Manchin told CNN on Wednesday. If Manchin doesn’t get on board with a CES, it’s dead in the water, since Democrats must ultimately get all 50 senators in their party to vote for the bill in order for it to pass. What’s more, it’s not clear whether the Senate parliamentarian, the person who decides whether something can or cannot be included in a budget reconciliation bill, will allow Democrats to include a CES in there.
“I don’t think you can reasonably argue that regulations that limit emissions or change car standards or anything like that are budget germane,” Marc Goldwein, head of policy at a nonprofit called the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told Grist in February.
There are ways to tailor a clean energy standard to make it budget-relevant and fit the reconciliation mold. Democrats could incorporate the CES into the tax system by taxing certain percentages of electric utilities’ carbon-emitting generation. They could propose creating a carbon trading program within the federal government that companies can tap into to become more climate-friendly. And it’s worth noting that the CES isn’t the only climate measure under consideration. Democrats are also hoping to include funding for a “Civilian Climate Corps,” similar to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps but for jobs in climate resiliency, conservation, and other green industries. They may try to tie in money to expand existing clean energy and electric vehicle tax credits, funding to weatherize and electrify buildings, and more. In the House, where Democrats have a wider majority, progressives will likely try to tack on more climate-related amendments.
“We’re probably still only about a fifth of the way through this process, but one of the most important thresholds was what’s the top line and what’s the commitment to climate?” Democratic Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii told reporters on Wednesday. “And I feel very good.”
The Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, Florida, collapsed last week, killing at least 18 people with 145 others unaccounted for. It’s too soon to say whether climate change had anything to do with the tragedy. But the collapse has shone a spotlight on Florida’s unique vulnerabilities to climate change and raised questions about whether the state’s coastal infrastructure is equipped to handle the flooding that comes with sea-level rise.
The climate stakes for Floridians are high. By 2050, buildings in South Florida may be inundated by 2 to 3 feet of sea-level rise, plus 4 or more feet of storm surge. By 2100, the flooding will be even worse. Some counties might be able to afford to raise their roads and build sea walls. But adapting to rising seas is expensive, complicated, and, ultimately, unsustainable — especially in coastal states like Florida, which will experience intensifying Atlantic hurricanes in addition to sea-level rise.
Preventing future tragedies means acting now, said Randall W. Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University in Miami. He thinks it’s already time to start thinking about moving residents away from the sea. A certain amount of sea-level rise is baked in, given current atmospheric carbon levels, he says. The longer Florida waits to organize the systematic withdrawal of people and assets from the coast, the more chaotic that eventual retreat will be.
This retreat-oriented attitude isn’t widely shared in Parkinson’s home state. When he gives presentations on the inevitability of mass migration inland from Florida’s coast, attendees have verbally accosted him and called him “Dr. Doom” — a moniker he rejects. He’s even received threatening messages at his house, he says. “It’s just a terrible, terrible shame in this country how we’ve responded to climate change,” he said. “There’s no leadership.”
Grist caught up with Parkinson to talk about climate change, the Surfside tragedy, and what Florida can do to prepare itself for what’s coming down the pike. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Q. Has the Surfside condo collapse made you think more urgently about rising seas?
A. One of the side effects of the tragedy of the condo collapse was people started to say, “Is this because of climate change?” Which is a fair question. But realistically, even if all of the buildings were resistant to the structural challenges of climate change, in 50 years most of them are going to be underwater anyway. It did bring to the front this issue of our coastal zone. How safe are we? How’s our quality of life going to change under climate change?
To me, the collapse was a bellwether moment or a tipping point in the conversation, where for the first time, many more people are thinking more seriously about climate change in the coastal zone. Perhaps they’re doing it for the wrong reason, in the sense that the collapse probably had nothing to do with climate change. But designing more resilient buildings and all that, it really depends on where you live. If your elevation is 20 feet or below and you live within a mile or two or three of the coastline, that zone is at high, high risk. Let’s just say sea-level rise is going to be five feet, although I personally think that by the end of the century it’ll be higher than that. But now, you have a storm on top of that that has a surge of 20 feet. So look up in the sky and imagine 25 feet and that’s where the sea is going to be during a storm surge at the end of the century.
Q. Is climate change impacting Florida’s infrastructure in other ways?
A. We’re looking at flooding by sea-level rise, flooding by storm surge, and flooding by changes in precipitation patterns. There will be a longer dry season. But when the rains do come, they will be very heavy. And this will lead to flooding because Florida is a low-lying land, but also because of our infrastructure. A lot of it is designed for rainfall patterns that are of a historical nature. And if you have a stormwater drain that is draining into the ocean, but the oceans are rising, pretty soon the drain will be underwater, which is what is happening in Miami Beach. Saltwater is bubbling up through the drain systems.
In Miami Beach, when they wanted to do a little work on their stormwater drains and elevate the roads to reduce flooding, they just did a couple of miles and it was $500 million. If you’re an affluent community with a very strong tax base, maybe you can implement these things. But if you don’t have that, what are you going to do? And even if you’re in a community that raises your roads and deals with your storm water, did the community next to you do that? Because if they didn’t, then you can’t get to your home anyway.
All the real estate on high land now is getting pricier and pricier. Traditionally, people who live not on the coast but behind the coast were people that didn’t have the resources. So these areas that are now prime real estate targets because of climate change are being invested in, and the market’s going up, and the taxes and the rents and all that. That process is called gentrification.
Q. Are politicians making progress on thinking about these climate-related issues?
A. We’re making some progress. The state has a resilient coastlines program, it was funded a few years ago, which is when it finally put its toe into the water of climate change and sea-level rise. The program will continue to award grants to municipalities and counties to do what is the first step in preparing for climate change: Identify your risks.
There have now been 30 or 40 of these assessments completed through the state of Florida’s resilient coastlines program. But then you have to implement that plan, and that’s where it gets very challenging. How do you prioritize your list of things to do? Implementing the plan is a struggle in itself, but then where’s the money going to come from? Nobody knows the answer to that. Nobody.
Q. So what can Floridians do to protect themselves against these future impacts?
A. Your options are: You do nothing, you adapt (which is a temporary fix because eventually these low-lying coastal areas are all going to be underwater), or, at some point, people are going to have to think about a managed withdrawal from the coastline. Right now, it wouldn’t be managed; it would be total chaos.
A couple of years ago in the Florida panhandle, when hurricanes devastated the area, people said “We are resilient, we are going to go back in and rebuild.” At some point, there may not be the will or the money. At some point, it’s going to have to be, “We’re just going to have to let that go and relocate.” And how is that done? That is the question that we will be faced in the second half of this century. Because by 2050, sea levels will be a foot or two above present in most of Florida. So these current plans, they might hold the line for the next 30 years or so, but it’s just going to be untenable after that. And people are going to have to begin to make plans for how to withdraw and to ensure equity in the transition.
Q. Managed retreat might be the long-term solution, but if people move, they’re not going to do it right away. What can be done in the short term to prevent Florida’s infrastructure from crumbling?
A. Mayors in Florida are suggesting that they’re going to go in and reevaluate these buildings even if they’re not 40 years old. That’s a visual inspection of the property. I’m assuming that that would be things like revisiting the structural design elements of the building, looking at how the foundation was built, what were the pilings made out of, how deep did the pilings go, what they’re going through or into, and so forth. And then at the end of that, you get what apparently the Surfside condo got in 2018: recommendations on how to move forward. I think that that is a very important first step.
We’re really talking about two different time scales here: the next 20 or 30 years — let’s just say the duration of a mortgage — and then beyond that. Obviously, we need to be doing things now, even if in the end they’re not going to solve the problem. But we also need to be using this time to begin thinking about what the next step is so that you’re not having to make that decision when you have a major catastrophe.
The United States is hot and dry. Large portions of the West are in “exceptional drought,” the most extreme rating assigned by the U.S. Drought Monitor. States that rely on the Colorado River are preparing to ration water. And a hellish heat dome set up camp over the Pacific Northwest this week, smashing temperature records and killing hundreds. As of Wednesday, 36 uncontained large wildfires burned across the nation. The western half of the country is a giant tinderbox. The last thing anyone should be doing there is lighting a match.
But that’s exactly what will happen this holiday weekend. Millions of Americans will celebrate Independence Day with fireworks — a classic American tradition. Those fireworks will start fires.
Research shows that more fires are ignited on July 4 than any other day of the year. From 1992 to 2015, Americans sparked some 7,000 wildfires on Independence Day. This week, more than 130 fire scientists published an open letter calling on people to skip the fireworks this year. “We are gravely concerned about the potential for humans to accidentally start fires,” the letter reads.
Jennifer Balch, an associate professor of geology at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the signatories of the open letter, gets anxious when she sees fireworks for sale on the side of the road where she lives in Boulder, Colorado. “Fireworks are just a terrible idea,” she told Grist. “It’s so obvious, and yet the response is so scattered in the sense that the decision to ban them is left up to local and state-level decision-making.”
A few places have put outright bans on fireworks in place. Colorado has a ban on all fireworks that leave the ground, but sparklers, groundspinners, and other small fireworks are permitted in some counties. Local officials in parts of Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming have considered or enacted bans this year. But the only state in the nation that has put a full ban on all consumer fireworks is Massachusetts. And enforcing those partial bans in some states requires time and resources that many local agencies don’t have. In Portland, Oregon, Portland Fire and Rescue said that it won’t be enforcing the city’s ban on fireworks unless things get really out of hand. “We don’t have the resources, Portland Police doesn’t have the resources right now,” a Fire and Rescue official told a local television station in Portland this week.
People might not know that a firework they set off on July 4 might burn down their neighborhood on July 5. But that’s what ends up happening. Illegal Fourth of July fireworks set off hundreds of fires in California alone last year. Human activity, Balch said, is responsible for the vast majority of fires that threaten America’s homes every year — as much as 97 percent of them, according to her research. “We should be more considerate of the fact that, in the western U.S., we live in very flammable landscapes — landscapes that are getting even more flammable with climate change,” Balch said.
Phillip Higuera, a professor of fire ecology at the University of Montana and the chief organizer of the open letter, is also filled with dread when he sees fireworks for sale in Missoula, where he lives. “To have the stage set with this drought and heat wave, it’s just kind of agonizing to see,” he said. Despite the handful of communities that have banned fireworks as the clock ticks down to July 4, Higuera thinks not enough states and municipalities are sounding the alarm.
“It’s like watching a freight train with a lot of momentum moving down the track,” he said. “You know that there’s gonna be a lot of ignitions, and when those hit these extremely dry fuels, they’re going to be fast-moving wildfires that are going to be hard to suppress.”
This is the first time Higuera and Balch have ever spoken out this assertively to try to head off fireworks ahead of July 4. But both said the risk was just too high this year to sit back and do nothing. “If we can get one person to not ignite a fire, then that will be great,” Higuera said.
“This is a tradition and one of the holidays we celebrate,” Balch, who enjoys fireworks as much as the next person, said. “It’s too bad it didn’t fall on January 4 instead of July 4.”
It’s been three months since President Joe Biden announced a “once-in-a-generation” infrastructure plan at a carpenters’ training facility in Pittsburgh. “The American Jobs Plan will lead to a transformational progress in our effort to tackle climate change with American jobs and American ingenuity,” Biden said at the time. That was before Biden’s moonshot proposal passed through the political meat grinder that is the U.S. Senate, where most legislation requires 60 votes to get past the filibuster.
Last month, Biden tried to pare down his $2 trillion initial proposal to something a little more palatable to moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats in the upper chamber. Then, a group of Senate Republicans led by Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia tried to trim that down to a lightweight package that was almost unrecognizable to the White House. Talks between Biden and Capito eventually disintegrated, which is when a bipartisan group of 10 centrists in the Senate, led by Republican Rob Portman of Ohio and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, struck up a conversation with the administration.
On Thursday, the White House and that bipartisan group of senators announced that they had finally reached an agreement on the framework for the infrastructure package. It would cost $1.2 trillion over the next eight years. Of that amount, $579 billion would be new spending, which Congress will pay for by cracking down on tax evasion, redirecting unused COVID-19 relief funds, and selling off petroleum reserves, among other fundraising and cost-saving measures.
The climate provisions the White House initially wanted have been, for the most part, eliminated from the package, but remnants of Biden’s original vision remain.
If the proportions of the deal as its stands are written into policy and passed, $7.5 billion will go toward electric vehicle infrastructure over eight years, another $7.5 billion will be directed to electric buses and transit, and $49 billion will go to public transit infrastructure — a pathway to reducing emissions across the transportation sector because public transit produces less emissions per person than individual cars. Water infrastructure nationwide will get $55 billion in improvements, and $21 billion will be directed to environmental remediation. “Resilience,” an ill-defined category that could include climate resilience — meaning money for hardening communities against the effects of climate change like rising sea levels — will get $47 billion. The framework also proposes $5 billion for “Western water storage.” As of now, the White House hasn’t released many specifics on how each of those categories would be distributed. The details will get hashed out later.
The plan is a modest step up from the Republican counteroffer that Capito had put together. That plan proposed only $257 billion in new federal spending and would have directed just $4 billion toward electric vehicle infrastructure, $14 billion to resilience, and no money to environmental remediation.
The new bipartisan deal still directs significantly less money toward the climate initiatives Biden included in his proposal. But Biden and top Democrats in Congress are hoping to push the rest of their agenda through via budget reconciliation, a process that allows legislators to pass spending and tax measures with a simple majority in the Senate. Democrats may try to use that process to pass the climate-related portions of Biden’s infrastructure proposal as well as his accompanying “human infrastructure” proposal, which would invest in childcare, education, and other programs. “There ain’t no infrastructure bill without the reconciliation bill,” House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday.
Biden made a similar promise. “If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” he told reporters on Thursday, referring to the bipartisan framework. “I’m not just signing the bipartisan bill and forgetting the rest of it.”
That means that Democratic leadership will attempt to shepherd a bipartisan bill through Congress, a massive feat in its own right, along with a budget reconciliation bill, which will require some serious herding of moderate cats in the Senate, with the aim of bringing both bills to a vote soon. Talk about a moonshot plan.
Representative John Curtis of Utah wasn’t always interested in tackling climate change. In 2018, his first full year in Congress, he voted against 35 climate and environmental bills, according to the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group that keeps track of how members of Congress vote. But earlier this year, Curtis invited his fellow Republican lawmakers to Salt Lake City to talk about rising temperatures. He hoped six lawmakers would show. Two dozen Republicans took him up on his offer, including six ranking members of congressional committees. Now, Curtis is keeping the momentum going by starting a new GOP-only climate caucus in the House of Representatives.
For decades, Democrats have been trying to get Republicans to take climate change seriously. But GOP leaders and Republican voters in general have only become more polarizedover time. Meanwhile, the impacts of global warming have accelerated. Democrats no longer have time or patience to persuade Republicans to join the right side of history. “We can’t sit around and wait,” Pete Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, told Grist. “It’s just not acceptable.” Republicans like Curtis have now begun trying to coax a climate platform out of the GOP, and they could have better success drumming up conservative support for climate action by working from within the party.
The new Conservative Climate Caucus, which Curtis announced on Wednesday, is a bigger, more official version of what he started in Utah. The purpose of the group is to educate lawmakers on climate science and highlight some of the more localized impacts of the climate crisis so that representatives can tailor their messaging to their respective districts. So far, more than 50 House Republicans have joined the caucus, and more could sign on in the coming weeks.
“It’s my hope that any Republican that belongs to this caucus, if asked about climate in a town-hall meeting, will feel very comfortable talking about it,” Curtis told the New York Times. “I fear that too often Republicans have simply said what they don’t like without adding on ‘but here’s our ideas.’”
Daniel Richter, vice president of government affairs at the environmental advocacy group Citizens Climate Lobby, is optimistic about Curtis’ intentions. “I really think that he is genuinely committed to addressing climate. I think he sees a genuine opportunity for Republicans to talk about this and to win elections on this,” Richter told Grist. Richter went on an 8.5-mile hike with Curtis at the Alta Ski Resort in Utah this week to talk about the congressman’s new caucus. “My understanding of this caucus is that it is a way for Republicans to learn how to do this together, to accelerate the ambition within the Republican party,” Richter said.
The caucus is not meant to produce any concrete climate policies. Right now, it’s just a safe space for Republicans to gather and learn more about the science behind climate change and take a look at a few possible solutions to the problem. Maysmith, from the League of Conservation Voters, thinks that’s insufficient. “It’s at least a day late and a dollar short,” he said.
The left, Maysmith pointed out, has been coalescing around big, bold solutions to the crisis. President Joe Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan would invest heavily in climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. The right’s proposed alternatives to Biden’s infrastructure plan don’t include much in the way of climate action at all. And the climate bills Republicans have gotten behind in the past few years have generally been milquetoast investments in carbon capture and sequestration and energy innovation technologies — initiatives that are meant to complement existing fossil fuel infrastructure, not ratchet down emissions in any meaningful way.
Quillan Robinson, vice president of government affairs at the conservative environmental group the American Conservation Coalition, says lasting climate and environment policy is best accomplished when both parties are on board. The left’s plans to pass climate legislation are destined for defeat unless Republicans are in the picture, he said, which is why it’s crucial that more and more Republicans start getting involved. “We need to continue to expand the tent of Republicans who are interested in engaging on this issue and understand what a conservative approach to climate change looks like,” Robinson told Grist. That’s what Curtis hopes his caucus will help accomplish.
Curtis isn’t the only Republican in Congress interested in climate change. Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike Braun of Indiana have also signaled interest in the issue. So has House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, of California — he’s leading a Republican climate legislation push in the House. But these members of Congress generally do not vote with Democrats on other climate and environment measures. Two exceptions to that rule are the 2019 public lands package and the 2020 Energy Act, both major bipartisan successes, and they passed because they dealt with issues Republicans already care about: conservation and innovation. It may be some time before the right puts “emissions policies” on the list of issues it will vote with Democrats on, Ben Pendergrass, senior director of government affairs at Citizens Climate Lobby, told Grist. Republicans might not vote for Democratic-led climate legislation in the short term, he said. The bigger point is to make sure that the GOP doesn’t decide to undo climate progress in the future.
“There will come a time when there is a Republican administration in Congress again, and we want to make sure that there’s a bloc of Republicans who are invested in climate,” Pendergrass said. The new climate caucus might be a step in the right direction. “Even if they’re not ready to vote on some of these major policies now, they hopefully will not be willing to vote to undo the advances we have made.”
On Tuesday, New York City Democratic primary voters headed to the polls to cast their votes for the candidate who will likely become the next mayor of the country’s most populous city. Thirteen Democrats, including a former presidential hopeful, a city comptroller, and a rapper, ran to replace New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Right now, Eric Adams, a former New York Police Department captain and Brooklyn’s borough president, has a big edge over civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley and former sanitation department commissioner Kathryn Garcia, who are neck and neck for second place, as the city waits on absentee ballots to come in. No candidate is on track to clinch 50 percent of the vote, though, which means New York City’s new ranked-choice voting system has been triggered. Low-performing contenders will get systematically eliminated, and their ballots will be reallocated to their voters’ next-ranked choice. Eventually, one candidate will emerge victorious.
Whoever wins the Democratic primary will have cleared the biggest hurdle on the path to Gracie Mansion. But once one of these candidates is in office next January, he or she will have to navigate a series of even more daunting obstacles. How to reduce the city’s contribution to climate change is one of them. The city could see more frequent heat waves, an uptick in infectious diseases, and 6 feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century due to climate change, so the mayor has a strong incentive to cut emissions. They also have a legal mandate to do so: In 2019, de Blasio signed a law that committed the city to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent before the end of this decade. By midcentury, the city aims to have slashed its emissions 80 percent.
Each of the three frontrunners has a plan to address the city’s emissions. But they have different visions for how to do it.
Garcia, who launched the city’s first electronics recycling program and worked to ban styrofoam when she worked at the Department of Environmental Protection under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, says she wants to “move New York City to a fully renewable energy economy starting on day one.” To her, that means requiring school buses to be fully electric and creating 250 miles of protected bike lanes in the city. She wants to convert Rikers Island, a 418-acre island in the East River that is home to a notoriously brutal jail slated to close in 2026, into a “renewable energy zone” replete with solar panels, battery storage facilities, and composting sites. She also advocates for putting gardens on school roofs and making the city’s 520 miles of coastline more resilient to flooding and sea-level rise, among other things.
Wiley’s climate platform is also comprehensive. She suggests retrofitting New York’s affordable housing buildings to become more energy efficient and replacing boilers and furnaces that run on natural gas with greener sources like geothermal energy. She aims to divest city pensions from fossil fuels before 2023 and create a city-wide “Asthma Action Plan” to address high asthma rates. She wants to go a step further than other cities and become “carbon negative” rather than carbon neutral — remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than is emitted (though the technology to accomplish this is still relatively nascent).
Adams’ plan is considerably less fleshed out. “New Yorkers are primed to be global leaders at this critical moment, shrinking our carbon footprint and living more sustainably,” it reads. In order to have New Yorkers live more sustainably, Adams wants to transition the electric grid off of natural gas and onto renewable sources of energy, create training programs in green jobs, expand incentives for community solar installations, and turn the city into “the wind power hub of the Eastern Seaboard.” The plan is, overall, heavy on recycling and composting initiatives and light on specifics of how the city might become a wind energy hub and when it might phase out fossil-fuel powered power plants. His platform does include an unusual proposal to commission green art that turns “pollutants and harmful compounds into harmless nitrates and carbonates.”
These initiatives are grand ideas, not detailed policy roadmaps. Whoever becomes New York City’s next mayor will have to wrangle with New York’s governor, the City Council, recalcitrant community boards, powerful business interests, and activists, all of which will have different opinions on turning the city into a wind hub or transforming Rikers into a giant solar field. Some — perhaps most — of these plans might never see the light of day. New Yorkers will know which candidate’s platform is on a collision course with reality sometime in mid-July.
This fall, world leaders will meet in Glasgow, Scotland, for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly referred to as COP26. They will hash out their commitments under the Paris Agreement, raising their carbon-cutting ambitions or making announcements about climate-related investments. As the pace of warming picks up, it becomes increasingly crucial that each successive international climate conference yield real action — bolder policies, bigger expenditures, faster energy transitions.
At this point, with global carbon emissions still on the rise and only a handful of countries on track to meet their Paris Agreement targets, it may seem like any climate policy, whatever it is, is a step in the right direction. But some climate policies can have unintended consequences for biodiversity — the variety of species on earth, many of which are currently under extreme threat due to rampant human activity like agriculture, development, and overfishing. This year, 50 of the world’s leading climate and biodiversity researchers are issuing a word of caution to world leaders ahead of COP26: Climate action isn’t always a win for nature.
On Thursday, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the independent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services unveiled a landmark workshop report that will help guide policymakers as they negotiate the details of curtailing the biggest threats facing humanity. It’s the first time these two bodies have collaborated on a report — a sign that the interconnectedness of the climate crisis and the rapid decline in biodiversity is becoming increasingly concerning to researchers.
By compiling existing research on the social impacts of climate change and biodiversity, the experts found that climate change and biodiversity are so intertwined that solving one without addressing the other would be next to impossible. “Everyone has known that they are two sides of the same coin,” Pamela McElwee, an associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University and a contributor to the report, told Grist. The report’s new finding, she said, is that policies that safeguard biodiversity — protecting and restoring existing native forests, grasslands, mangroves, and peatlands, for example — are generally also good for mitigating climate change. The same can’t be said of climate policies’ effect on biodiversity.
“There’s a real risk that biodiversity is going to die from a thousand cuts,” Paul Leadley, a professor of ecology at the Paris-Saclay University in France who worked on the report, said at a press conference in response to a question from Grist on Thursday.
Planting more trees, for example — a natural solution to climate change that has become more and more popular in recent years — isn’t always good for shoring up biodiversity. Tree-planting companies may not take the native ecosystem into consideration and sometimes plant non-native trees that fundamentally alter local flora and fauna. Or they may neglect to take the threat of invasive pests into account, which later results in the decimation of those afforested areas.
The renewable energy boom, undoubtedly a positive step in the global effort to limit emissions from fossil fuels, relies on minerals that have to be dug up from deep underground or dredged from the ocean floor. That can have negative impacts on plants and animals, too. Planting monoculture crops for bioenergy on a large scale, such as corn for ethanol, impedes the growth of other plants, which can have a negative effect on humans and animals that rely on ecological diversity for survival.
“The point is, we have to be super careful with climate policies,” McElwee said.
Some might argue that the climate crisis takes precedence over shoring up biodiversity. After all, what good is a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem if the planet itself is hurtling toward disaster? The answer to that question is that a world devoid of biodiversity isn’t much of a world at all — particularly for humans, who have staked our economic prosperity, food security, and even national boundary lines on specific natural resources. When fish move from one place to another in search of colder water, or disappear entirely, conflicts are sparked between nations that depend on those fish. Economies are threatened by the absence of a staple source of protein. Food insecurity rises. For the sake of humankind, you can’t silo one of these issues off from the other.
But that’s what’s been happening in governments around the world. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are largely in charge of emissions policies. When it comes to policies regarding public lands, the Department of Interior calls the shots. These agencies are separate, but they should be working as one team, McElwee said. “This is such a serious dilemma that we have to get essentially all hands on deck,” she said. “We need the foresters and climate folks to get together and try to create solutions that tackle both things at once.”
Not long ago, I went on a walk with some friends through a field near my house in upstate New York. When we stopped for a break, something moving on my pants caught my eye. There were about a dozen reddish-brown ticks crawling up my legs. I looked closer and found ticks tangled in my socks, latched on to the insides of my shoes, hanging by hooked legs to the backs of my knees. The big ones, American dog ticks, were easy to spot, but the little ones, blacklegged nymph ticks the size of poppy seeds, were harder to find. I was still pulling them off of me days later.
Northeasterners are used to coexisting with ticks, but this season has felt unusually intense. An unofficial survey of my friends unearthed some horrifying anecdotes. A landscape designer said she had been bitten by more ticks this year than ever before. The owner of a local wine shop pulled a tick out of his hair at the Atlanta airport that had somehow managed to accompany him on the plane ride south. One guy is living with the (possibly permanent) trauma of finding a tick attached to his nipple.
The anecdotal evidence for a busy tick year is corroborated by data, Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, said. It’s still too early in the season to say exactly how this year stacks up compared to previous years, but early returns indicate that there has been an explosion of ticks this spring. “All these people complaining of a horrendous year,” Ostfeld said, “they’re actually right.”
The tick boom isn’t exclusive to the Northeast. Tom Mather, an entomologist at the University of Rhode Island and director of a tick awareness program called TickEncounter, said he’s seen an uptick in reports of American dog tick sightings and bites around the country this year. TickEncounter, which crowdsources tick data from people all over the U.S., shows American dog tick submissions were up 30 percent in April compared to March, about 10 or 15 percent higher than usual. “They’re having a good year so far,” Mather told Grist.
Jean Tsao, an associate professor of disease ecology at Michigan State University, said she’s noticed more ticks this season, too. When she talks to colleagues in Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, and even Quebec, Canada, she hears the same story: “It’s a big year.”
American dog ticks are big and noticeable, which is why, when people report encounters with ticks, Mather said, they’re often reporting dog ticks. In the Northeast, where the risk of tick-borne illness is extremely high, the most dangerous ticks out and about right now are tiny blacklegged ticks in the nymph stage, the second stage of the blacklegged tick’s three-stage, two-year life cycle. Nymphs typically emerge from hibernation in May, reach their peak around Memorial Day weekend, and stay highly active until July, right when Americans are heading out for some outdoor fun.
“Nymphs are really hungry when they emerge,” Ostfeld said. “And they do look like they are at a peak this year.” That’s a big public health problem. Blacklegged nymphs carry Lyme disease, which can cause joint pain, weakness in limbs, and flulike symptoms in humans. And they’re even harder to see than adult blacklegged ticks. It doesn’t take long — about 36 to 48 hours — for an attached tick to infect a human host with Lyme. As a result, folks who contract Lyme usually experience symptom onset around this time of year.
There are a number of reasons for this year’s tick boom, including climate change. Climate change is making the “shoulder seasons,” spring and fall, longer, which means longer feeding seasons for ticks. And rising temperatures are making it possible for ticks to shift their ranges all over the U.S. The lone star tick, an aggressive tick whose bite can cause humans to develop a severe allergic reaction to red meat, has been steadily making its way north from the southern U.S. for several years. Warming winter temperatures could be giving ticks a boost too, Tsao said. “It definitely seems that a mild winter helps their survivorship,” she said. Urbanization and the fragmentation of forests also play a role, as do rodents and deer, which do a great job of picking up ticks in one place and dropping them off in another.
The main reason blacklegged ticks are booming in the Northeast this year has to do with acorns, Ostfeld said. In 2019, oak trees unloaded a big crop of acorns onto forest floors across vast swaths of the Eastern Seaboard. The plethora of hardy tree nuts was a boon for rodents of all kinds — especially mice, which are major carriers of Lyme disease. Rodents survived well that winter and got a jump-start on spring breeding in 2020. When baby blacklegged ticks hatched that summer, they had no shortage of mice to feed on. A year later, those baby larval ticks are molting into nymph ticks — the ticks posing a risk to so many of us this summer.
Climate change has an indirect effect on these big acorn years, or “masting events,” too, Ostfeld said. Research shows that oak trees are able to produce lots of acorns when they can photosynthesize and store a lot of carbon. Longer growing seasons, in addition to the warmer and wetter conditions we’re getting in the Northeast, help oaks do that. And storing carbon is even easier to do when atmospheric carbon is at record-high levels. “If it’s really warm and wet, the oak trees can come to a point where they can let loose with a large bumper crop of acorns sooner and probably a bigger bumper crop,” Ostfeld said. “So there is some evidence for a climate signal on the ability of oak trees to make bumper crops of acorns.”
Some amount of global warming might be baked in, but tick-borne illnesses are not inevitable. When going outside, experts recommend wearing long, light-colored pants, teaming up with a buddy for daily tick checks, and avoiding tall grass when possible. I also recommend protecting your nipples at all times.
Tuesday marked the official start of the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season — one the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says will be busier than average. But while states brace for the months ahead, many communities are still recovering from the most active hurricane season ever recorded last year. Residents in parts of Louisiana are living in camper vans and filing insurance claims for damage caused by the five storms that made landfall in the state in 2020. Lake Charles, a city on Louisiana’s coast, was struggling to recover from the back-to-back-to-back storms when it was hit by floods again last month. This cycle is familiar. Communities across the U.S. are frequently caught off guard when a disaster hits. And as climate change spurs more intense storms, people have less time between events to recover.
Federal, state, and local governments could break this cycle by investing in both pre-disaster planning — a community-wide process that results in a comprehensive and, ideally, holistic plan for helping counties bounce back after floods, hurricanes, or even pandemics — and climate resilience. But the U.S. has historically spent way more energy and dollars on recovering from disasters than on planning for them. Last year, the federal government spent around $500 million on a program that provides states with resources to prepare for disasters. The 22 disasters that affected Americans in 2020 cost nearly $100 billion. Not enough is being spent on the front end to mitigate damage on the back end.
“What the federal government funds related to emergency management is really recovery,” Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told Grist. “What the federal government has persistently not done is fund mitigation and preparedness to a meaningful degree, to actually affect some kind of tangible change in local communities.”
That could be starting to change. Last week, President Joe Biden announced $1 billion in funding for pre-disaster mitigation resources for communities, states, and Tribal governments ahead of this year’s hurricane season — double the $500 million spent in 2020, and quadruple what was spent prior to last year. “It is our responsibility to better prepare and support communities, families, and businesses before disaster — not just after,” the Biden administration said. The new funding will be distributed through the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, or BRIC, which provides support and resources for communities preparing for disasters. BRIC helps states develop pre-disaster plans — like when to evacuate people and where — but states also use the money to buy generators, weatherize buildings, build safe rooms and shelters, relocate people, manage wildfires and floods, and more.
A few days later, Biden unveiled his budget for fiscal year 2022. The president’s budget is not set in stone — it’s a blueprint that Congress could follow as it hashes out its own budget. But it does provide insight into how the White House is prioritizing various issues in government. Biden’s blueprint would spend $36 billion on fighting climate change, an increase of $14 billion from last year’s budget. Out of that money, $815 million would go toward incorporating climate impacts into pre-disaster planning across the federal government, an increase of $540 million from last year. Some $1.2 billion would go toward climate resilience — strengthening infrastructure, communities, and ecosystems against wildfires, drought, and flooding. This funding is seperate from the $1 billion Biden is directing to BRIC.
Experts say that the Biden administration’s efforts to shore up pre-disaster planning and climate resilience is a positive sign. “It’s probably the largest amount of money that has gone toward this planning,” Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina, told Grist. “And they’re not just planning for the next disaster, they’re building the capacity within communities to improve their resilience.”
But a few billion won’t be enough to fully prepare the U.S. for what’s coming down the pike. “The reality is that adaptation and getting communities toward being better prepared costs a lot of money,” Shana Udvardy, a climate resilience analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Grist. “We’ve got a lot of making up to do.”
Last year, FEMA’s BRIC program received $3.6 billion in applications from states seeking aid for disaster management. If a similar story plays out this year, Montano noted, the $1 billion Biden has promised states via FEMA won’t be sufficient. “It’s still not enough,” she said.
The new funding does illuminate a path forward, however. Cutter, from the University of South Carolina, says that a comprehensive solution to the preparedness gap “starts with the premise that all disasters are local.” That means that a one-size-fits-all approach to disaster preparedness won’t work. A farming community in Iowa preparing for historic flooding has different needs from a town in California preparing for wildfire season. Larger, urban areas have different needs from smaller, rural zones. The key is to get resources down to the local level that can help communities develop disaster preparedness plans with their place-specific needs in mind. “It’s not an easy solution, but the fact that the Biden administration recognizes this is a good sign,” Cutter said. “Something is better than nothing.”
On Thursday, four Republican senators unveiled a counteroffer to President Joe Biden’s $1.7 trillion infrastructure and climate plan — currently the president’s only proposal to scale back greenhouse gas emissions. Biden’s plan used to cost roughly half a trillion dollars more, but he pared it down last week in an effort to jumpstart bipartisan negotiations. The new GOP plan, spearheaded by Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, offers the White House $928 billion in total spending over the next eight years — a boost from the $568 billion Capito proposed in April.
It certainly looks like Republicans and Democrats are engaging in some honest-to-god political compromise: Biden started out with a big number and made it smaller, Republicans started with a small number and made it bigger. But closer investigation reveals that Republicans haven’t compromised very much at all.
Nearly $1 trillion in spending sounds like a lot, but the lion’s share of the money Republicans want to spend on infrastructure isn’t new — it’s money that already gets budgeted out by Congress for infrastructure improvements every year and “leftover” money from previous COVID-19 relief bills. The assumption that there are wads of coronavirus money languishing in federal and state coffers is flawed, experts say. There is a lot of relief money that hasn’t been spent, but much of it will be spent in the coming years on Medicaid, federal lending programs, and state and local relief programs. Democrats believe that there is only $200 billion in unclaimed COVID-19 relief funds floating around.
If you’re operating under the assumption that there isn’t a huge stack of coronavirus relief cash waiting to be spent, as Democrats are, then the Republican counteroffer looks less like an olive branch and more like a slap in the face. Capito and company are proposing just $257 billion in new federal spending.
That’s not a lot of money to work with, especially since Biden’s original plan envisioned an aggressive and sweeping campaign to simultaneously shore up the nation’s ailing infrastructure and put the U.S. economy on course for a greener future. The central pillar of Biden’s climate agenda is a push to reach net-zero emissions in the U.S.’s electricity sector by 2035 — an ambitious and, according to scientists, necessary goal. And Biden still wants to establish job training programs for clean energy industries, create a nationwide electric vehicle charging system, and build new energy-efficient affordable housing units. He wants to decarbonize the power grid and invest in natural climate solutions, like soil carbon sequestration and wetland restoration. And he aims to pay for these things with new taxes on ultra-wealthy Americans and corporations.
Based on the details in the new GOP counteroffer, Republicans don’t want any of that. Their proposal would direct $755 billion toward “traditional” infrastructure — $506 billion for roads and bridges, $144 billion for public transit and rail, $56 billion for airports, $22 billion for ports and waterways, and the rest on other miscellaneous transportation-related issues. The smallest line item in that category by far is electric vehicles. Republicans are proposing $4 billion toward electric vehicle infrastructure — $170 billion less than Biden wants to spend on EVs.
In addition to that $755 billion, the GOP is willing to spend $94 billion on water infrastructure like lead pipe replacement, $65 billion on broadband internet access, and $14 billion on resilience — an ill-defined category that could include natural disaster preparedness for at-risk communities. That about sums up the Republican counteroffer. Biden’s plan would spend billions more on each of those categories. The conservative senators didn’t earmark any money for Biden’s Civilian Climate Corps idea, green affordable housing, or clean electricity. And the counteroffer would commit exactly zero dollars to research and development, one of a few rare areas of bipartisan agreement when it comes to climate policy.
The negotiations are not over. Republicans and Democrats could be haggling over these details into the fall. It seems like the White House is, thus far, committed to passing an infrastructure package the traditional way — with Republican and Democratic votes. But Biden is well aware that bipartisan negotiations don’t always translate into bipartisan votes. In 2008 and 2009, the Obama administration spent months negotiating health care reform with congressional Republicans. The bill ultimately passed without a single Republican vote. If Democrats start seeing dead-end signs, they could begin to look more seriously at ways of passing Biden’s infrastructure package that don’t require Republican support.
Renee Salas, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, has been thinking about the connections between climate change and public health for a long time. In her emergency room in Boston, she sees the consequences of warming up close. Extreme heat, air pollution, vector-borne diseases, and longer allergy seasons are taking a toll on her patients. “My job as an emergency medicine doctor is to protect my patients and keep them healthy,” she said at a press briefing on Thursday. “Climate change increasingly threatens my ability to do that.”
Salas was at the briefing to weigh in on a new report that shows the health costs of climate change now far exceed $820 billion per year in the United States. One of her patients, she told reporters, a middle-aged man, visited her emergency department 30 times in one year with debilitating symptoms of Lyme disease — a tick-borne illness that can cause fever, headache, muscle pain, and neurological damage. She treated a four-year-old girl who had to seek emergency care for asthma attacks intensified by climate-driven pollen seasons and air pollution. The girl’s mother, a single parent, asked Salas for a doctor’s note so that she could show her boss that she was missing work for a legitimate reason — she had already been forced to miss three shifts that week and would likely have to miss more to care for her sick child.
“Receiving care for climate-sensitive diseases can quickly add up,” Salas, who was not involved in the making of the report, said. “We can no longer ignore these costs and they have to be factored into our decision-making.”
“The Costs of Inaction: The Economic Burden of Fossil Fuels and Climate Change on Health in the United States,” published Thursday by the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, the Medical Consortium on Climate and Health, and the Wisconsin Health Professionals for Climate Action, puts specific figures on the staggering health costs of climate change.
Some of those health costs include premature death, medical care for physical and mental health after a major natural disaster, lost wages due to climate-related illnesses, and the price of filling prescription medications for those illnesses. The report found that the diagnosis, treatment, and management of new cases of Lyme disease nationwide costs between $860 million and $1.6 billion per year. The cost of mosquito-borne West Nile virus hospitalizations, premature deaths, ER visits, and other outpatient visits totals $1.1 billion annually.
By aggregating past climate-related public health costs, the report shows that myriad medical issues brought on by climate change are already taking a financial toll on taxpayers. And researchers estimate those costs will continue to rise as climate change accelerates. “These impacts are here and now,” said Vijay Limaye, an environmental health scientist at the NRDC and a co-author of the report. “They’re not just some distant threat.”
The authors of the report readily admit that calculating the exact price of specific climate-driven illnesses is tricky. Federal science agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency track climate change impacts on public health, but the authors said that no federal agency is currently tracking the costs of those impacts. In addition, hospitals often don’t categorize certain illnesses as climate-related, and local health departments are underfunded, both of which compound the lack of data on this issue. As a result, the report says that the true health costs of climate change are likely far, far greater than $820 billion per year.
The report also found that the populations that bear the brunt of those costs are often already vulnerable to begin with — low-income Americans, some communities of color, children and pregnant individuals, older adults, and Indigenous groups. The researchers discovered that Medicare and Medicaid patients are not only especially susceptible to climate change-related illnesses, but also bear the biggest share of the costs. “Our inaction is particularly devastating for vulnerable communities, but everyone is affected in some way by those health harms and/or costs,” Donald De Alwis, research analyst at the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health and a co-author of the report, said.
Ruth McDermott Levy, an associate professor of environmental health at Villanova University who was not involved in the making of the report, told Grist that the findings are a valuable addition to the existing body of climate and health literature because it “puts all the financial cost to human health impacts in one place.” The report also includes a silver lining, she said. It provides policymakers, health professionals, and the public with specific actions they can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — from utilizing public transportation to public health professionals advocating for climate policy.
“In the end, action on climate change is a prescription for improved health and equity,” Salas, the emergency room doctor in Boston, said. “Climate action will also save us money.”
Across most of the Northern Hemisphere, trees are leafing out, birds are chirping, and April showers are giving way to May flowers. But in parts of the Arctic Circle, spring weather has already come and gone and a staggering heat has descended on the fringes of the region. Temperatures in parts of Russia, along the edges of the Arctic ice sheets, hit 86.5 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday — 68 to 75 degrees hotter than average for this time of year. The heat wave broke local records in Northwest Russia, and temperatures could continue rising in the coming days.
“Truly exceptional for any time of the year but mind-boggling for May,” tweeted Scott Duncan, a London-based meteorologist, of the unusual heat.
The Arctic heat wave coincides with the 12th ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council in Reykjavik, Iceland, on Thursday. There are four major issues on the council’s agenda: climate change, Arctic shipping, human health, and innovation in Arctic communities.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is representing the United States at the meeting, which takes place every two years. Blinken is a staunch supporter of climate action, and has been working on President Joe Biden’s behalf to shore up international cooperation on climate change since being sworn in earlier this year. The White House’s priority for the convening is climate change, an issue Blinken spoke about at length as he traveled through Denmark and Iceland ahead of Thursday’s meeting. That attitude is a stark contrast to 2019, when former President Trump’s delegate to the meeting obstructed a declaration that would have included the words “climate change.”
The soaring temperatures on the other side of the Arctic Circle exemplify the rapid changes that members of the council are grappling with throughout the region.
This week’s Arctic high temperatures may be among the most severe on record for May, but it’s hardly the most shocking heat wave the region has experienced in recent years. Last June, temperatures in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk reached an all-time high of 100.4 degrees F — some 50 degrees above average. Temperatures in the Arctic are rising at a rate that’s twice as fast as the rest of the globe’s. And scientists estimate that by mid-century, the Arctic could be totally ice-less in the summer months. Wildfires burned vast swaths of land in regions way above the Arctic Circle in 2019 and 2020 — another harbinger of accelerating climate change.
From a climate perspective, the Arctic’s evolution from an icy expanse to a soupy mess is concerning. But for some members of the Arctic Council, particularly Russia, climate change looks like an economic opportunity. Melting ice presents new trade route possibilities, something Russia has been preparing for with a new and improved fleet of icebreaker ships. Climate change is also making it easier to plumb the Arctic’s buried resources like oil.
Negotiations over the balance between environmental and economic considerations in the region are growing into an ever-bigger source of tension between the U.S. and Russia, the two biggest geopolitical powers in the Arctic. But ahead of the 12th ministerial meeting, at least, both nations promised to play nice. “Our vision … is very much one of cooperation,” U.S. State Department Arctic Envoy Jim de Hart told Reuters.
“We don’t have any friction,” Russian Senior Arctic Council official Nikolai Korchunov said in a briefing last week.
Energy officials and cybersecurity experts have long warned that America’s energy infrastructure is susceptible to cyber attacks. In 2018, Karen Evans, then the assistant secretary for cybersecurity for the Department of Energy, testified before a House committee that energy infrastructure — pipelines, transformers, and other critical conduits for fuel and power — “has become a primary target for hostile cyber actors.”
Last week, a ransomware attack on the company behind the U.S.’s biggest fossil fuel pipeline emphatically proved her point.
On Friday afternoon, hackers stole enough corporate data from Colonial Pipeline to force the company to shut down its 5,500-mile system of pipelines, which transport some 2.5 million barrels of gas, diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel each day from Houston to New Jersey. The system serves 50 million Americans and several airports along its route, ultimately providing the East Coast with nearly half of its fuel.
Cybercriminals used ransomware, code that can lock computer systems and hold them hostage in exchange for money, in the attack. The company has not publicly offered up any details about how the hackers broke in. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating the source of the incident, but federal officials reportedly suspect DarkSide, an Eastern European criminal gang that operates out of Russia, is behind the attack. In a statement on Monday, the group said, “Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society.”
Shutting down the largest pipeline in the U.S. could potentially create a pretty big problem for society. Gas prices haven’t been meaningfully affected yet, and Colonial expects service to resume by the end of this week. But if the shutdown extends past next Monday, gas prices could rise and Gulf Coast refineries could be forced to slow production. Some gas stations in the Southeast could run out of gasoline. Plus, the U.S. is entering peak driving season. “Every hour counts at this point as we get closer and closer to Memorial Day weekend,” a director at an investment banking firm told the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
The U.S. is ill-equipped to handle cyberattacks on its energy infrastructure, much of which is past retirement age. In March, President Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure plan aimed at updating the nation’s bridges, roads, tunnels, pipelines, and spurring the transition to renewable energy. His plan does not mention cybersecurity. That’s a big problem. Renewables are prone to cyber attacks, too. Wind and solar farms and energy storage systems rely on industrial control systems — big computing centers that connect equipment like turbines to electrical substations. We already know those computers are vulnerable to attacks. In 2013, a group of hackers was able to seize control of the industrial control systems running a number of renewable energy operators in Europe.
The Colonial Pipeline attack, shaping up to be the biggest cyberattack on U.S. oil infrastructure in history, has turned up the heat on ongoing efforts to modernize America’s cyber defense systems. Biden is preparing to unveil an executive order aimed at creating a set of digital safety standards for federal agencies. It would also establish a “cybersecurity incident review board” that would investigate major attacks. But the order, by federal officials’ own admission, won’t do enough to stop sophisticated attacks. And it may not apply to privately held companies like Colonial Pipeline, even though privately held companies control 85 percent of the country’s critical infrastructure. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo told CBS’s Face the Nation that businesses need to prepare for a new normal. “Unfortunately, these sorts of attacks are becoming more frequent. They’re here to stay,” she said.
Energy officials and cybersecurity experts have long warned that America’s energy infrastructure is susceptible to cyber attacks. In 2018, Karen Evans, then the assistant secretary for cybersecurity for the Department of Energy, testified before a House committee that energy infrastructure — pipelines, transformers, and other critical conduits for fuel and power — “has become a primary target for hostile cyber actors.”
Last week, a ransomware attack on the company behind the U.S.’s biggest fossil fuel pipeline emphatically proved her point.
On Friday afternoon, hackers stole enough corporate data from Colonial Pipeline to force the company to shut down its 5,500-mile system of pipelines, which transport some 2.5 million barrels of gas, diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel each day from Houston to New Jersey. The system serves 50 million Americans and several airports along its route, ultimately providing the East Coast with nearly half of its fuel.
Cybercriminals used ransomware, code that can lock computer systems and hold them hostage in exchange for money, in the attack. The company has not publicly offered up any details about how the hackers broke in. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating the source of the incident, but federal officials reportedly suspect DarkSide, an Eastern European criminal gang that operates out of Russia, is behind the attack. In a statement on Monday, the group said, “Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society.”
Shutting down the largest pipeline in the U.S. could potentially create a pretty big problem for society. Gas prices haven’t been meaningfully affected yet, and Colonial expects service to resume by the end of this week. But if the shutdown extends past next Monday, gas prices could rise and Gulf Coast refineries could be forced to slow production. Some gas stations in the Southeast could run out of gasoline. Plus, the U.S. is entering peak driving season. “Every hour counts at this point as we get closer and closer to Memorial Day weekend,” a director at an investment banking firm told the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
The U.S. is ill-equipped to handle cyberattacks on its energy infrastructure, much of which is past retirement age. In March, President Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure plan aimed at updating the nation’s bridges, roads, tunnels, pipelines, and spurring the transition to renewable energy. His plan does not mention cybersecurity. That’s a big problem. Renewables are prone to cyber attacks, too. Wind and solar farms and energy storage systems rely on industrial control systems — big computing centers that connect equipment like turbines to electrical substations. We already know those computers are vulnerable to attacks. In 2013, a group of hackers was able to seize control of the industrial control systems running a number of renewable energy operators in Europe.
The Colonial Pipeline attack, shaping up to be the biggest cyberattack on U.S. oil infrastructure in history, has turned up the heat on ongoing efforts to modernize America’s cyber defense systems. Biden is preparing to unveil an executive order aimed at creating a set of digital safety standards for federal agencies. It would also establish a “cybersecurity incident review board” that would investigate major attacks. But the order, by federal officials’ own admission, won’t do enough to stop sophisticated attacks. And it may not apply to privately held companies like Colonial Pipeline, even though privately held companies control 85 percent of the country’s critical infrastructure. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo told CBS’s Face the Nation that businesses need to prepare for a new normal. “Unfortunately, these sorts of attacks are becoming more frequent. They’re here to stay,” she said.
It was the fall of 2019 and Holly Elser was in her third year of medical school at Stanford University when a patient came into the primary care clinic where she was working for an annual checkup. The patient had multiple sclerosis, or MS, a chronic disease that occurs when the immune system destroys the protective sheaths that cover our nerves. Elser asked about how the patient’s symptoms had progressed and how she was managing at home, which is when the patient said something that made Elser stop and think. “She essentially said, somewhat off-handedly, ‘You know, my MS is really bad when it’s hot out,’” Elser said.
Heat intolerance is a well-established phenomenon in MS. As many as 80 percent of patients living with the disease experience a worsening of their neurological symptoms when their core body temperature rises. But when Elser scoured the existing literature for studies on the implications of weather, temperature, and climate for individuals living with MS, she couldn’t find much. “That was really what made me decide that this was something I wanted to pursue in a systematic fashion,” she said.
Last month, Elser’s study investigating the connection between MS and climate change was published in the medical journal PLOS Medicine. Using a database of more than 75 million privately insured individuals between the ages of 18 and 64 who filed insurance claims between 2003 and 2017, Elser and a team of researchers from Stanford and Columbia University identified roughly 100,000 patients who filed MS-related claims and compared their claims data to local temperature data. The data showed that periods of unusually warm weather — defined as months that were 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the long-term average — were associated with an increased risk of inpatient and emergency department visits, and to some extent outpatient visits, in patients with MS. Older individuals were especially likely to end up in the hospital during warm periods of weather.
The implications are serious: Individuals with MS won’t only be more susceptible to the worsening effects of climate change; they’re already being impacted by rising temperatures now.
“It’s really interesting,” Jonathan Howard, a doctor of MS at New York University’s Langone medical center who was not involved in the study, said. “I think this paper is an important warning of the effects of high temperatures on patients with MS.”
Joan Casey, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, was surprised by some of the findings. She thought patients might present with worsened MS symptoms, which can vary from patient to patient and include vision loss, pain, fatigue, and impaired coordination, during the summer, when heat is at its most extreme. But the data showed above-average temperatures had stronger effects on patients with MS in the shoulder seasons — fall and spring.
“I’m speculating,” she said, noting that the researchers looked at the data at the county level and did not actually talk to any of the patients themselves about their experiences, “but my guess is that it’s when temperatures don’t match up with expectation of what the temperatures will be outside that we really have this problem.” People with MS know temperature can worsen their symptoms, so in the summer they’re prepared to cope with heat. “But if it’s fall and suddenly there’s an anomalous month where temperature is much different from what people are expecting to experience,” Casey said, “they may be dressing inappropriately or they might not be seeking out air conditioning.”
The researchers also found that the association between temperature anomalies and acute care visits was strongest in humid climates and very cold climates. “Perhaps there’s some interaction between temperature patterns and humidity,” Elser said. A large number of claims occurred in the South, which Casey said might be due to higher poverty rates in that region of the country. Low-income people can’t always afford air conditioning, and folks unable to afford health insurance might be more likely to wait till the last second to seek out care and end up in emergency rooms as a result. And in cold climates, even a slight increase in temperature feels noticeable and could catch someone living with MS off guard.
There’s a lot of ground that this study doesn’t cover. The data set the researchers used doesn’t include information about socioeconomic status, race, health behaviors, or other factors, so at this point, they can only speculate as to what is influencing the regional differences in the claims data.
Scott Otallah, a doctor at Wake Forest Baptist Health who treats MS patients, said the hypothesis the researchers used was solid but it’s tricky to draw solid conclusions from the study. Whether there’s a connection between climate and MS is “a difficult question to answer,” he said, noting that the researchers were looking for relatively small changes in the number of people showing up to emergency rooms with MS on warm days. Due to the nature of the data, it’s hard to know whether some of these claims are due to issues other than MS, something the researchers themselves note. “You don’t know all of the other factors that could have caused these patients to come to the ER,” Otallah, who was not involved in the study, said.
Elser and Casey hope that this research is just the beginning of a wider body of work that will investigate the links between climate change and MS. “My north star for ‘do I want to do this research project?’ is: Does this have the potential to improve the quality of life for people?” Elser said. “It would be ideal if this information improved patients’ quality of life.”
Doctors can keep an eye out for how their patients react to unusually warm days, but governments also need to do their part in reining in rising temperatures. At least, that’s what a man in Austria with MS argued in a lawsuit filed last month before the European Court of Human Rights. A lawyer for the plaintiff, who is identified as Mex M. for privacy reasons, told the Agence France-Presse that the climate crisis is already affecting her client’s quality of life. Legal fees for the lawsuit are being crowd funded by Fridays for Future, the climate group founded by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. The lawsuit is one of three health and climate-related lawsuits recently filed before the European court.
It’s entirely possible that studies like this one will end up being fodder for the Austrian lawsuit or for similar lawsuits in the future. “My hope in researching the health effects of climate change is to spur us to make the necessary changes sooner rather than later,” Casey said.
It was the fall of 2019 and Holly Elser was in her third year of medical school at Stanford University when a patient came into the primary care clinic where she was working for an annual checkup. The patient had multiple sclerosis, or MS, a chronic disease that occurs when the immune system destroys the protective sheaths that cover our nerves. Elser asked about how the patient’s symptoms had progressed and how she was managing at home, which is when the patient said something that made Elser stop and think. “She essentially said, somewhat off-handedly, ‘You know, my MS is really bad when it’s hot out,’” Elser said.
Heat intolerance is a well-established phenomenon in MS. As many as 80 percent of patients living with the disease experience a worsening of their neurological symptoms when their core body temperature rises. But when Elser scoured the existing literature for studies on the implications of weather, temperature, and climate for individuals living with MS, she couldn’t find much. “That was really what made me decide that this was something I wanted to pursue in a systematic fashion,” she said.
Last month, Elser’s study investigating the connection between MS and climate change was published in the medical journal PLOS Medicine. Using a database of more than 75 million privately insured individuals between the ages of 18 and 64 who filed insurance claims between 2003 and 2017, Elser and a team of researchers from Stanford and Columbia University identified roughly 100,000 patients who filed MS-related claims and compared their claims data to local temperature data. The data showed that periods of unusually warm weather — defined as months that were 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the long-term average — were associated with an increased risk of inpatient and emergency department visits, and to some extent outpatient visits, in patients with MS. Older individuals were especially likely to end up in the hospital during warm periods of weather.
The implications are serious: Individuals with MS won’t only be more susceptible to the worsening effects of climate change; they’re already being impacted by rising temperatures now.
“It’s really interesting,” Jonathan Howard, a doctor of MS at New York University’s Langone medical center who was not involved in the study, said. “I think this paper is an important warning of the effects of high temperatures on patients with MS.”
Joan Casey, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, was surprised by some of the findings. She thought patients might present with worsened MS symptoms, which can vary from patient to patient and include vision loss, pain, fatigue, and impaired coordination, during the summer, when heat is at its most extreme. But the data showed above-average temperatures had stronger effects on patients with MS in the shoulder seasons — fall and spring.
“I’m speculating,” she said, noting that the researchers looked at the data at the county level and did not actually talk to any of the patients themselves about their experiences, “but my guess is that it’s when temperatures don’t match up with expectation of what the temperatures will be outside that we really have this problem.” People with MS know temperature can worsen their symptoms, so in the summer they’re prepared to cope with heat. “But if it’s fall and suddenly there’s an anomalous month where temperature is much different from what people are expecting to experience,” Casey said, “they may be dressing inappropriately or they might not be seeking out air conditioning.”
The researchers also found that the association between temperature anomalies and acute care visits was strongest in humid climates and very cold climates. “Perhaps there’s some interaction between temperature patterns and humidity,” Elser said. A large number of claims occurred in the South, which Casey said might be due to higher poverty rates in that region of the country. Low-income people can’t always afford air conditioning, and folks unable to afford health insurance might be more likely to wait till the last second to seek out care and end up in emergency rooms as a result. And in cold climates, even a slight increase in temperature feels noticeable and could catch someone living with MS off guard.
There’s a lot of ground that this study doesn’t cover. The data set the researchers used doesn’t include information about socioeconomic status, race, health behaviors, or other factors, so at this point, they can only speculate as to what is influencing the regional differences in the claims data.
Scott Otallah, a doctor at Wake Forest Baptist Health who treats MS patients, said the hypothesis the researchers used was solid but it’s tricky to draw solid conclusions from the study. Whether there’s a connection between climate and MS is “a difficult question to answer,” he said, noting that the researchers were looking for relatively small changes in the number of people showing up to emergency rooms with MS on warm days. Due to the nature of the data, it’s hard to know whether some of these claims are due to issues other than MS, something the researchers themselves note. “You don’t know all of the other factors that could have caused these patients to come to the ER,” Otallah, who was not involved in the study, said.
Elser and Casey hope that this research is just the beginning of a wider body of work that will investigate the links between climate change and MS. “My north star for ‘do I want to do this research project?’ is: Does this have the potential to improve the quality of life for people?” Elser said. “It would be ideal if this information improved patients’ quality of life.”
Doctors can keep an eye out for how their patients react to unusually warm days, but governments also need to do their part in reining in rising temperatures. At least, that’s what a man in Austria with MS argued in a lawsuit filed last month before the European Court of Human Rights. A lawyer for the plaintiff, who is identified as Mex M. for privacy reasons, told the Agence France-Presse that the climate crisis is already affecting her client’s quality of life. Legal fees for the lawsuit are being crowd funded by Fridays for Future, the climate group founded by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. The lawsuit is one of three health and climate-related lawsuits recently filed before the European court.
It’s entirely possible that studies like this one will end up being fodder for the Austrian lawsuit or for similar lawsuits in the future. “My hope in researching the health effects of climate change is to spur us to make the necessary changes sooner rather than later,” Casey said.
When Bidtah Becker, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, was growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, clean water flowed from the taps at her house. She and her siblings often visited her grandmother and other relatives on the Navajo reservation a few hours away. There, clean water was scarce — water had to be hauled by truck up to the reservation in large metal containers. “We always knew that every time we went we were going to get diarrhea,” Becker, now an associate attorney for the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, told Grist. “We were just kids, we didn’t know why. But now that I’m an adult, I totally know why that is.”
In 2021, access to running water and clean drinking water is a given for most Americans. The Census Bureau has even considered dropping a question on plumbing access from the U.S. census questionnaire. But many of the nation’s tribes still lack running water, access to clean water, and even flushing toilets. Native American households are 19 times more likely than white households to lack indoor plumbing, according to the U.S. Water Alliance, and more likely to lack piped water services than any other racial group.
That problem is at an inflection point for the Navajo Nation and 29 other tribes in the Colorado River Basin, which stretches from the Rocky Mountains to Mexico. A new analysis shows that Native Americans in the region are severely impacted by lack of water infrastructure and water supplies contaminated by arsenic and other harmful chemicals, a problem that has been laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report was published by the Water and Tribes Initiative, a consortium of tribes, nonprofits, and academics. It’s the first comprehensive analysis of water insecurity among all of the tribes in the Colorado River Basin, and it shows that, without federal intervention and billions of dollars of funding, water accessibility in the basin will continue to deteriorate.
Meanwhile, climate change and its effects threaten to complicate water access in the Western U.S. Each year since 2011 has exacerbated drought conditions that have caused water levels in the region to drop. In the coming years, experts say water supplies could reach terrifyingly low levels in the Colorado River Basin.
There’s already infighting among Western states over water rights and access, and drought threatens to exacerbate those tensions. The drought could worsen the existing water crisis for Western tribes — or it could present a window of opportunity for the federal government to ameliorate them.
“Tribes are very much at the forefront of responding to climate change, it’s disproportionately hitting tribal communities,” Heather Tanana, a Navajo public health expert and the lead author of the water infrastructure report, said, referring to the drought. “So it’s just this other layer they’re having to grapple with.”
The Colorado River Basin, a 246,000-square-mile area drained by the river and its tributaries, includes two reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, that serve as watering troughs for much of the bone-dry West. Seven states and 30 federally-recognized tribes depend on the basin for drinking water, crop irrigation, even hydroelectric power. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming have hashed out a complicated drought contingency plan that gets triggered when water levels are low and requires those states to reduce their reliance on the reservoirs and river by varying degrees.
This summer, that plan will likely be put to the test for the first time. Rising temperatures due to climate change are drying out soil in the basin and forcing layers of snow that accumulate in mountains, called snowpack, to melt unseasonably early. Usually, that snow melts into streams that flow into the Colorado River, bolstering water supplies. But the dry soil is acting like a massive sponge, soaking up precious water before it can reach streams. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which store four years’ worth of water when they’re at capacity, are between 30 and 40 percent full.
“We’re having a challenging year,” John Berggren, a water policy analyst at the conservation group Western Resource Advocates, told Grist. “We’re potentially getting to a really scary place that we haven’t come close to with those reservoirs.” Barring a biblical rain event, water levels will continue to drop in coming years.
On paper, the 30 federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin have access to 20 percent of the river’s annual flow. But in practice, tribes in the basin only have access to a tiny fraction of the river’s water, despite the federal government’s fiduciary responsibility to protect tribal treaty rights and resources. In order to turn paper rights into permanent wet water rights, tribes have to enter into a complicated legal process called a water settlement with the federal government, states, water districts, and private users. Such settlements take years; they’re expensive, complicated, and have to be authorized by Congress. “If the federal government were to do the settlements, they’d have to provide the infrastructure, provide the pipelines to actually move the water to the tribe,” Berggren said. “If they were to, overnight, sign settlements with all 30 tribes for all 20 percent of water, there’s concern that that would further ‘break the system,’ so to speak.”
The system, Becker said, is already fundamentally broken for tribes. “You just live a different lifestyle when you don’t have access to clean drinking water,” she said. She described the ongoing lack of access to flushing toilets and showers on the Navajo reservation, where one in three homes don’t have running water. People waiting in line at the nearby Safeway to use the toilet instead of their outhouses. And the trucks Navajo use to haul water to their homes from water access points in border towns multiple times per week. “In the summer, warm months, it’s not a big deal,” Becker said. “In the winter, snowpack, that sort of thing, all of this becomes so much more difficult.”
In order to solve this problem, the report recommends a “whole of government” approach. The federal government could establish an interagency working group dedicated to increasing water access among tribes. It could remove the red tape around the approval process for water infrastructure projects on reservations. And, most importantly, it can direct more funding to the issue.
But that only addresses one side of the problem. In addition to expanding water access for tribes, the West needs to change the way it thinks about water in general in order to adapt to climate change, Berggren said. The historic average flow in the Colorado River is around 14 million acre-feet of water. In the last few decades, it’s gone down to 13.5. It could dip down to 11 or even 10 million acre-feet in coming years. “That’s still a lot of water,” he said. “We can do a lot of great things with that if we’re smarter about it, we’re more efficient, we take a more holistic approach.” Western Resource Advocates, the organization Berggren works for, published a report that shows that encouraging municipal water conservation, recycling wastewater, improving irrigation efficiency on farms that draw from the river, and taking other similar measures could save the West millions of acre-feet of water — ensuring that there’s more water to go around.
The federal government is starting to take steps to protect the West’s water supply. On Thursday, the Senate passed the bipartisan Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act of 2021 by a margin of 87 votes. It would direct $35 billion to states to update and repair their wastewater and drinking water infrastructure. If passed by the House and signed by the president, some 40 percent of that money would go to small, disadvantaged, rural, and tribal communities via states or direct loans from the federal government.
In her first month in office, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first-ever Native American cabinet secretary and a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, one of the 30 tribes in the Colorado River Basin, announced the creation of a Drought Relief Working Group aimed at solving Western water issues without leaving tribes behind. “We are committed to using every resource available to our bureaus to ensure that Tribes, irrigators and the adjoining communities receive adequate assistance and support,” Haaland said in a statement.
More still needs to be done to close the water gap on reservations. The new report notes that the Navajo Nation alone needs $4.5 billion to address water issues on its reservation. Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River program manager at the conservation group the National Audubon Society, is hopeful that the drought could ultimately lead to a more inclusive water rights strategy in the Colorado River Basin. “My little look in the crystal ball says that drought and climate change are such a big disrupter of this system, that it is going to have to change,” she said. “And while we’re changing it, we actually have an opportunity to address some of what hasn’t been appropriately addressed in the past, and I fully expect that there is that opportunity for tribes.”
Becker, the Navajo associate attorney, is also optimistic that progress can be made. “I have never been this hopeful,” she said. “This issue can be solved, getting the political will behind it to solve it is what’s needed.”
Is the world finally turning the page on decades of denial and delay? There’s a big difference between saying you’ll make progress and actually putting policies in place that will make it happen. There’s even a difference between saying you’ve already made progress and actually making progress. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Australia.
At Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate Change earlier this month, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a member of Australia’s center-right Liberal Party, touted his nation’s victories. “Australia is on the pathway to net-zero,” he announced. “We are well on the way to meet and beat our Paris commitments.” For proof of Australia’s progress, Morrison cited two numbers: His country had reduced emissions 19 percent since 2005 — 36 percent if you discount exports. Australia, he said, is one of the few countries that’s still on track to meet its target under the Paris Agreement, which is to cut overall emissions 26 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2030. On its face, that assertion is true. But Australian climate policy experts say Morrison’s numbers are basically completely made up.
“It’s deeply deceptive,” Robyn Eckersley, professor in political science at the University of Melbourne and author of multiple books on Australian politics, told Grist, referring to Morrison’s assertion that Australia had cut emissions 36 percent. That number excludes not just exports themselves, she said, but all emissions associated with producing fossil fuels for export, like the fugitive emissions — leaks and other irregular releases of greenhouse gases — that are produced in the process of digging up coal, extracting gas via fracking, liquifying natural gas, and other fossil fuel development. The countries that import those fossil fuel products aren’t putting the emissions produced by extracting and exporting those products on their climate ledgers. So who claims them, if not Australia? “We have the economic benefit from these industries,” Frank Jotzo, director of the Center for Climate Economics and Policy at Australian National University, told Grist. “We will have to wear the emissions that happen in the actual production of those fuels.”
Excluding all emissions associated with exports wouldn’t be such a massive oversight if Australia were just dabbling in the fossil fuel business, but it is the biggest exporter in the world for metallurgical coal, the second-biggest exporter of thermal coal, and the third-biggest exporter of fossil fuels overall.
The 19 percent number is misleading, too. Australia’s emissions dropped around 10 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic last year, which is when Morrison elected to assess Australia’s progress on reducing emissions. But those emissions have largely bounced back now. Eckersley called it a “standard case of cherry picking.”
Jotzo pointed out that Australia is likely to meet its existing Paris target without any new climate policies being passed. Old coal-fired power plants are closing down across Australia and being replaced by wind and solar power because renewable energies are getting more competitive. Cars are getting more efficient as technology advances. The nation’s six states and two territories have passed their own climate policies aimed at reducing emissions, similar to what some U.S. states did under former President Donald Trump. All of those things combined will help Australia achieve that 26 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. The emissions reductions that Australia has logged so far, Jotzo said, are almost entirely attributable to land use change. Australia has mostly stopped clearing vast amounts of land for agriculture and industry use, thanks to state-level policies. “If you set that aside, all other emissions combined are about the same now as they were in 2005,” he said.
Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, a climate policy analyst at NewClimate Institute, an organization that tracks the world’s climate progress with a tool called the Climate Action Tracker, says Australia is lagging behind other developed countries. “Japan, the U.S., the E.U., they’re all stepping up their actions, they’ve shown bigger commitments,” she said. “And then you have Australia.” Countries are supposed to update their targets under the Paris Agreement every five years, but Morrison has not increased Australia’s target under the Paris Agreement since it was set in 2015. By comparison, Japan, whose goal was previously identical to Australia’s, just upped its target to 46 percent by 2030 compared to 2013 levels. Canada said it would slash emissions between 40 and 45 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2030, up from 36 percent. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro — an ardent opponent of environmental regulations — pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Morrison can’t even commit to that far-off goal. He said Australia will reach net-zero “preferably by 2050.” That leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
Australia could vastly reduce its emissions with better national policies in place. It has enormous wind and solar development potential. But instead of becoming a clean energy superpower, Australia’s government is doubling down on its immense trove of fossil fuels. “One has to develop a black sense of humor,” Eckersley said. “Otherwise you’d wake up and weep every morning.”
Morrison’s performance at Biden’s climate summit may have been exceptionally misleading, but he’s not the only world leader blowing hot air. Biden is determined to prove to the world that “the U.S. is back,” but he has no real strategy to slash emissions more than 50 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, as he has promised. Biden’s only climate plan right now is a $2 trillion infrastructure plan aimed at fixing the nation’s ailing infrastructure and creating a bunch of green jobs. U.S. climate experts say that plan isn’t guaranteed to produce the emissions cuts Biden needs. Eventually, Biden will have to ease up on the carrots — green jobs, funding for clean energy technologies, wind and solar energy credits — and start pulling out the sticks — a federal emissions cap on emissions or a federal emissions trading system.
In the meantime, though, Biden’s pledges alone could be enough to inspire Australia to up the ante. “What comes out of Washington now is a really big factor in Australia,” Jotzo said. “The U.S. is hands down Australia’s most important international partner.” Before Biden took office, anyone opposed to new climate policy in Australia could defend their position by pointing to the Trump administration’s policies. That’s no longer the case.
Eckersley thinks Australia will keep twiddling its thumbs until the U.S. and other major world powers realize that it’s not responding to peer pressure and start exerting other kinds of leverage. Biden has already floated the idea of a border adjustment tax on imports from countries that aren’t doing enough to curb emissions. Such a policy would be aimed at leveling the playing field in the international trading system, something global leaders have said is a crucial piece of the climate action puzzle. Europe and the U.K. are considering levying a border adjusted tax on imports, too. “Australia is out on a limb,” Eckersley said. “It’s very cold out there, it’s very lonely. People are going to start getting very tired of Australia.”
Two weeks ago, President Joe Biden quietly announced his initial budget request for 2022. The discretionary funding request, which is just a blueprint for the budget Biden hopes Congress will pass later this year, has been overshadowed by the president’s bigger and flashier $2 trillion green infrastructure plan. But the 58-page budget packs its own climate punch. If Biden gets his way, federal and state public health departments will get a big boost in funding to better address the public health impacts of climate change in fiscal year 2022.
Deep in Biden’s budget blueprint, a section on funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS — the agency that houses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, and the National Institutes of Health, or NIH — has serious implications for the intersection of climate change and public health in years to come. Biden wants Congress to direct $110 million to the CDC’s Climate and Health program and another $110 million for climate and health research at the NIH, the federal government’s health research arm. What’s more, the budget requests funding for a new Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in HHS, which would “focus on decreasing effects of climate change on vulnerable populations.”
This isn’t the first time a president has tried to bolster funding for research into the effects of climate change on health. George H.W. Bush started the National Climate Assessment, a huge study that comes out every four years on the domestic effects of climate change, including its impact on health. President Obama held the first-ever summit on climate change and health in 2015. Biden’s budget builds on the work his predecessors did and also charts new territory.
Public health officials and researchers have long warned of health impacts of climate change — heat waves, extreme weather like hurricanes and wildfires, infectious diseases, and more. The 4th National Climate Assessment, published in 2018, concluded that climate change is already causing suffering and even death across the U.S. Every year, heatwaves claim lives, particularly in warm states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. Diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks make people sick with Zika, Lyme disease, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Drought exacerbates water and food insecurity. These impacts aren’t distributed equally among Americans — low-income communities of color are the most vulnerable. This suffering is largely preventable, experts say, if the country invests in prevention measures.
Dedicated climate funding at HHS is a “a good first step,” Kristie L. Ebi, a professor of environmental and global health at the University of Washington, told Grist. “It is not sufficient.” More needs to be done to ensure that the U.S., which Ebi says is a decade behind Europe in climate and public health preparedness, addresses the health effects of global warming. Nevertheless, she says that Biden’s spending request, if approved by Congress, would make “quite a difference” in the short term.
The public health outfit best equipped to hit the ground running with new funding is the CDC’s Climate and Health program, which was established in 2009 and weathered the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate its funding entirely in 2020. It administers an initiative called Climate-Ready States and Cities. With the program’s funding and technical assistance, state and local health departments implement a framework called the Building Resilience Against Climate Effects, or BRACE, a five-step program that requires departments to come up with a climate and health adaptation plan. The framework helps states identify threats that might affect public health locally, rank them according to their severity so health officials in those states can address the direst risks first, and work across multiple state government departments to coordinate a response. Arizona’s climate and health adaptation plan, developed using the BRACE framework, includes specific policy recommendations, such ascreating a medical surveillance program to track how environmental factors like heat affect maternal and child health outcomes and developing hazard response plans for extreme heat and poor air quality in schools.
But with its current level of funding, the CDC has only been able to help 18 city and state health departments protect their citizens from climate-related hazards. That’s a big problem — all 50 states face climate-related health impacts, but only a handful even have a plan to address those impacts. “During the last four years, the program was somewhat constrained,” Patrick Kinney, a professor of environmental health at Boston University’s School of Public Health, told Grist. “Rebudgeting it is a quick way to get things jumpstarted.”
Biden’s budget would allow the CDC to administer its BRACE initiative to all 50 states, which could significantly improve regional responses to climate change. “Understanding vulnerabilities within their own states or jurisdictions is a really key first step to then applying adaptation measures to combat or lessen the health threats of climate change,” Surili Sutaria Patel, former director of the Center for Public Health Policy at the American Public Health Association, a professional organization for public health workers, told Grist. “Expanding funding to all 50 states is phenomenal.”
The benefits of the program, Ebi said, go beyond just the funding that the CDC provides. The CDC’s climate and health program holds meetings where BRACE participants can share and get feedback on what worked and didn’t work in their respective states. That “provides an enormous opportunity to learn from what other people are doing,” Ebi said. States that aren’t a part of the program don’t have access to that knowledge base.
“Being affiliated with the CDC brings credibility, technical assistance, training, and ongoing learning communities that advance our understanding and knowledge, as well as introducing us to the many different methodologies for addressing climate change and health from our colleagues in tribes, states, and cities,” the California Department of Health, a member of the BRACE program, told Grist via email.
Biden’s budget proposal would foster a similar expansion of climate and health knowledge at the National Institutes of Health, something experts say is sorely needed. “The NIH has not really gotten their hands dirty with climate and health yet,” Kinney said, noting that the research that has been done by the NIH on climate change and public health has been relatively limited, and little funding has been set aside for that kind of research at the department. Ebi expressed a similar sentiment. “There is low awareness across NIH about climate change and health and very limited technical understanding,” she said. Dedicated funding for climate and health research at the NIH could help bring the American medical establishment up to speed on the many health risks posed by rising temperatures.
“For the nation to really build the knowledge base and also the cadre of professionals who know how to deal with interactions between climate change and health, we really have to be investing in that,” Kinney said. “$100 million is a good start. The need is much greater than that, but it’s a good start.”
Two weeks ago, President Joe Biden quietly announced his initial budget request for 2022. The discretionary funding request, which is just a blueprint for the budget Biden hopes Congress will pass later this year, has been overshadowed by the president’s bigger and flashier $2 trillion green infrastructure plan. But the 58-page budget packs its own climate punch. If Biden gets his way, federal and state public health departments will get a big boost in funding to better address the public health impacts of climate change in fiscal year 2022.
Deep in Biden’s budget blueprint, a section on funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS — the agency that houses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, and the National Institutes of Health, or NIH — has serious implications for the intersection of climate change and public health in years to come. Biden wants Congress to direct $110 million to the CDC’s Climate and Health program and another $110 million for climate and health research at the NIH, the federal government’s health research arm. What’s more, the budget requests funding for a new Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in HHS, which would “focus on decreasing effects of climate change on vulnerable populations.”
This isn’t the first time a president has tried to bolster funding for research into the effects of climate change on health. George H.W. Bush started the National Climate Assessment, a huge study that comes out every four years on the domestic effects of climate change, including its impact on health. President Obama held the first-ever summit on climate change and health in 2015. Biden’s budget builds on the work his predecessors did and also charts new territory.
Public health officials and researchers have long warned of health impacts of climate change — heat waves, extreme weather like hurricanes and wildfires, infectious diseases, and more. The 4th National Climate Assessment, published in 2018, concluded that climate change is already causing suffering and even death across the U.S. Every year, heatwaves claim lives, particularly in warm states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. Diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks make people sick with Zika, Lyme disease, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Drought exacerbates water and food insecurity. These impacts aren’t distributed equally among Americans — low-income communities of color are the most vulnerable. This suffering is largely preventable, experts say, if the country invests in prevention measures.
Dedicated climate funding at HHS is a “a good first step,” Kristie L. Ebi, a professor of environmental and global health at the University of Washington, told Grist. “It is not sufficient.” More needs to be done to ensure that the U.S., which Ebi says is a decade behind Europe in climate and public health preparedness, addresses the health effects of global warming. Nevertheless, she says that Biden’s spending request, if approved by Congress, would make “quite a difference” in the short term.
The public health outfit best equipped to hit the ground running with new funding is the CDC’s Climate and Health program, which was established in 2009 and weathered the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate its funding entirely in 2020. It administers an initiative called Climate-Ready States and Cities. With the program’s funding and technical assistance, state and local health departments implement a framework called the Building Resilience Against Climate Effects, or BRACE, a five-step program that requires departments to come up with a climate and health adaptation plan. The framework helps states identify threats that might affect public health locally, rank them according to their severity so health officials in those states can address the direst risks first, and work across multiple state government departments to coordinate a response. Arizona’s climate and health adaptation plan, developed using the BRACE framework, includes specific policy recommendations, such ascreating a medical surveillance program to track how environmental factors like heat affect maternal and child health outcomes and developing hazard response plans for extreme heat and poor air quality in schools.
But with its current level of funding, the CDC has only been able to help 18 city and state health departments protect their citizens from climate-related hazards. That’s a big problem — all 50 states face climate-related health impacts, but only a handful even have a plan to address those impacts. “During the last four years, the program was somewhat constrained,” Patrick Kinney, a professor of environmental health at Boston University’s School of Public Health, told Grist. “Rebudgeting it is a quick way to get things jumpstarted.”
Biden’s budget would allow the CDC to administer its BRACE initiative to all 50 states, which could significantly improve regional responses to climate change. “Understanding vulnerabilities within their own states or jurisdictions is a really key first step to then applying adaptation measures to combat or lessen the health threats of climate change,” Surili Sutaria Patel, former director of the Center for Public Health Policy at the American Public Health Association, a professional organization for public health workers, told Grist. “Expanding funding to all 50 states is phenomenal.”
The benefits of the program, Ebi said, go beyond just the funding that the CDC provides. The CDC’s climate and health program holds meetings where BRACE participants can share and get feedback on what worked and didn’t work in their respective states. That “provides an enormous opportunity to learn from what other people are doing,” Ebi said. States that aren’t a part of the program don’t have access to that knowledge base.
“Being affiliated with the CDC brings credibility, technical assistance, training, and ongoing learning communities that advance our understanding and knowledge, as well as introducing us to the many different methodologies for addressing climate change and health from our colleagues in tribes, states, and cities,” the California Department of Health, a member of the BRACE program, told Grist via email.
Biden’s budget proposal would foster a similar expansion of climate and health knowledge at the National Institutes of Health, something experts say is sorely needed. “The NIH has not really gotten their hands dirty with climate and health yet,” Kinney said, noting that the research that has been done by the NIH on climate change and public health has been relatively limited, and little funding has been set aside for that kind of research at the department. Ebi expressed a similar sentiment. “There is low awareness across NIH about climate change and health and very limited technical understanding,” she said. Dedicated funding for climate and health research at the NIH could help bring the American medical establishment up to speed on the many health risks posed by rising temperatures.
“For the nation to really build the knowledge base and also the cadre of professionals who know how to deal with interactions between climate change and health, we really have to be investing in that,” Kinney said. “$100 million is a good start. The need is much greater than that, but it’s a good start.”
A short-run weekly newsletter analyzing federal climate action during the first months of the Biden administration.
Hi there, I’m Zoya Teirstein. It’s day 94 of the Biden administration, and this week, the president brought the world to the bargaining table.
Joe Biden began his first 100 days in office with a slew of climate-related executive orders. He’s wrapping them up with a geopolitical Coachella for climate action.
On Thursday, 40 heads of the world’s most powerful economies attended Biden’s virtual Leaders Summit on Climate Change. At the event, Biden announced a pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least half of 2005 levels in less than a decade as part of an updated non-binding commitment to the Paris Agreement.
While Biden threw down the climate gauntlet before world leaders, his counterparts didn’t exactly scramble to pick it up. Most showed up to Biden’s summit without new or more ambitious commitments to slash emissions — though there were a few notable exceptions.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced a new emissions reduction target of 46 percent compared to 2013 levels by 2030, up from 26 percent. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country will reduce its 2005 emission levels by 40 to 45 percent by 2030, up from 30 percent. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced a new partnership with the U.S. that will help mobilize investment in green technology. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro promised his country would go carbon neutral by 2050, 10 years sooner than its previous target. And Vladimir Putin said he would keep Russia’s emissions below the E.U.’s over the next 30 years, a pledge he made in a speech a day before the summit.
Ultimately, Biden’s gathering was more of a comeback celebration than an international call to action. The president’s new climate target is ambitious by virtually any standard, and it’s one the White House hopes will restore the nation’s climate cred.
America spent the past four years unraveling years of domestic and international climate progress, starting with former President Donald Trump’s announcement of his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement in early 2017. The U.S. isn’t new to the climate hokey pokey, especially as it has ping-ponged from Democratic to Republican administrations. Republican George H.W. Bush blew up the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when he refused to commit to specific emissions reductions. His son, George W. Bush, then withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.
Biden is trying to signal that the U.S. has turned the page on climate inaction, but it’s unclear how he aims to actually accomplish his 2030 pledge. The only plan on the table that could even start the process of slashing emissions at the scale he’s promising is his recent $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, which has drawn staunch opposition from Republicans.
In fact, despite countries’ myriad climate “commitments,” few nations have legally binding emissions reductions programs in place — and even fewer are on track to slash emissions at the rate necessary to avert climate catastrophe. “The huge gap between what we are doing and what actually needs to be done to stay below the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) target is widening by the second,” Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, testified before the House Oversight Environment Subcommittee on Thursday.
In the coming months, there’s no shortage of opportunities for the international community to firm up its commitments to addressing climate change. The G7 and G20 meetings will take place in June and October, respectively. Then there’s the United Nations General Assembly meeting this fall. And finally, after skipping a year due to COVID-19, the U.N. will hold its next climate conference this November in Glasgow, Scotland.
But Wait … There’s More.
Does the U.S.’s new climate goal pass muster? Biden’s pledge isn’t quite as large as the emissions cuts promised by the E.U. and Britain, which were announced in the days leading up to the president’s climate summit. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Tuesday that the United Kingdom would cut emissions 78 percent by 2035, and the E.U. finalized a deal on Wednesday that sets a target of reducing emissions 55 percent from 1990 levels by the end of the decade. Still, Biden’s pledge is one of the boldest goals announced by a wealthy industrialized nation … for now.
The Green New Deal gets a second wind. Progressives reintroduced the Green New Deal — the ambitious call to eliminate emissions, pursue environmental justice, and jumpstart a green economy — on Tuesday, two years after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey initially introduced it. The resolution doesn’t spell out how to achieve any of the above — and it doesn’t stand much of a chance of passing the upper legislative chamber. But that’s not really the point, is it?
The long battle over California’s vehicle emissions standards will come to a close soon. The Biden administration is moving to undo Trump-era policies that sought to prevent the state from setting its own standards. In fact, Biden is considering making some of California’s vehicle efficiency requirements the nationwide benchmark.
When President Joe Biden unveiled his $2 trillion climate and infrastructure plan in March, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was quick to accuse the White House of “trying to use important issues as smokescreens for unrelated agendas.”
It’s true that, at first glance, Biden’s American Jobs Plan — which seeks to increase the corporate tax rate to offset its price tag — looks like anathema to Republicans. It would direct billions toward green infrastructure, green jobs training, climate change adaptation, and renewable energy programs. But a peek under the hood reveals a few green ideas legislators could actually agree on.
The proposal calls for investing in clean energy research and development and carbon capture and sequestration, both steps some climate-conscious members of the GOP have pushed for in recent years. The plan also calls for “continuing to leverage the carbon pollution-free energy provided by existing sources like nuclear and hydropower” — Republicans’ two favorite non-fossil fuel sources of energy. Democrats are big proponents of wind and solar energy, but Republicans say their intermittent nature destabilizes the grid. Republicans advocate for natural gas as a reliable alternative, which Democrats aren’t keen on. Hydroelectric power and nuclear energy, which generate a constant flow of power regardless of the weather, fit both parties’ energy prerequisites. They have mixedsupport among Americans but enjoy rare bipartisan popularity in Congress, with a few exceptions — notably, Democratic Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have advocated for phasing out nuclear. But in general, Josh Freed, head of the climate program at the centrist policy and research nonprofit Third Way, told Grist that enthusiasm for nuclear energy and hydroelectric power on Capitol Hill is widespread.
“Nuclear and hydro are the two exceptions most Republicans have decided to include as acceptable responses to climate change,” Freed said. “There’s a lot of stuff in the American Jobs Plan that one would think Republicans could get behind even if they don’t support the underlying bill when it comes out.”
Hydro and nuclear could be useful bargaining chips for the White House. If Biden can use funding for hydro and nuclear, as well as incentives for carbon capture and sequestration, as a means of getting even a few Republicans to support his plan, he’ll have an easier time getting the moderates in his party to sign on to the package, too. Joe Manchin, the senior senator from West Virginia and one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, has been pressuring Biden to work with Republicans on infrastructure before pursuing other means of passing the proposal. He’s indicated might even vote against the package if Democrats don’t try to reach across the aisle.
Meanwhile, young Republicans are getting fed up with their party’s obsolescent stance on climate change, a fact that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says Republicans should be “nervous” about. Republicans don’t need to embrace Biden’s infrastructure plan to appeal to young conservatives, but they do need to develop a cohesive energy policy in order to stay relevant. McCarthy has been cooking up a GOP response to Democrats’ myriad climate plans, and parts of it may overlap with Biden’s infrastructure plan.
Biden now has to figure out how to motivate both sides of the aisle to make progress on the overlapping bits of their agendas. That might seem like a tall order for a Congress that doesn’t agree on much, but it’s already happening here and there.
In 2019, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican from Alaska, introduced the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act. It directs the Department of Energy to invest in advanced nuclear projects — new nuclear reactors that come in a range of sizes and can do things like process heat and desalinate water in addition to providing carbon-free electricity. The bill was cosponsored by Democratic Senator Cory Booker, from New Jersey, and got more than a dozen other bipartisan cosponsors. It passed as an amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. The 2020 Energy Act, the most significant piece of clean energy legislation in over a decade, also passed with bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. It includes major investments in both nuclear and hydro. Those successes hint that more bipartisan agreements could be forged.
Last month, Manchin, chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, held a hearing on nuclear energy. “We cannot afford to let this carbon-free energy resource fade out,” he said. The ranking Republican on the committee, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, who has voted against almost every single climate-related measure the Senate has considered since he was sworn in in 2007, gave a full-throated endorsement of nuclear energy. “Now more than ever, Washington must advance policies to preserve and expand the use of nuclear energy,” Barrasso, who successfully shepherded his own nuclear bill through the Senate in 2018, said. “Nuclear technology is fundamental to meeting our energy, our environmental, and our national security goals.”
In early March, Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee unveiled a broad climate bill that included a measure to eliminate emissions from the electricity sector by 2035. The Republicans on the committee called the plan a “rush to green with one-size-fits-all regulations,” but they said they were interested in working with Democrats toward eliminating emissions, primarily by expanding investment in innovation, nuclear power, and hydroelectricity. The bill includes a nuclear power purchasing program and improvements to hydropower regulatory and leasing processes.
There’s reason to believe Republicans on the committee are serious about working with Democrats on advancing nuclear energy and hydropower. A Republican on the committee, Representative David McKinley from West Virginia, previously introduced a bill that aims to slash emissions 80 percent by 2050. It includes provisions that would electrify existing dams and invest in advanced nuclear. The ranking Republican on the committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers of eastern Washington, introduced a bill promoting hydroelectric power last year. It didn’t make it to the House floor for a vote before the 116th Congress ended, but McMorris Rodgers, whose state heavily relies on hydro, remains a staunch supporter of electrifying dams.
“It really does seem like we’re kind of on the verge here of a big bipartisan consensus,” Rich Powell, executive director of the conservative clean energy think tank ClearPath, told Grist.
The question now is whether Biden will be able to use these existing areas of agreement as a springboard for his infrastructure package. On Monday, he met with a group of bipartisan senators in the Oval Office. “Roads, bridges, and ports are undoubtedly infrastructure, and I believe that energy grids, broadband, and clean water can fit the definition as well,” Representative Don Young, a Republican from Alaska and one of the legislators who attended the meeting, told reporters afterward. He noted that expanding the plan’s scope beyond those items “could sink the bill,” and other Republicans agree with him. Over the past couple of weeks, Republicans have rallied behind the claim that only a small percentage of Biden’s plan concerns “real infrastructure” — that is, bridges, tunnels, and roads. The White House has been quick to point out that rail, water lines, the electric grid, and broadband are also critical infrastructure. (Republicans used to think some of those things were infrastructure, too.) Biden says he’s open to customizing his proposal to Republican specifications, within reason.
“Democrats are eager to get Republicans to work with them on anything that will help address climate change,” Freed said. “That’s because the Democratic party writ large has really adopted an approach of a multitude of options, because that’s what we need at this point.”Biden might have a better idea of what those options are once Republicans have a coherent energy policy of their own to tout. Later this month, Representative McCarthy is expected to unveil the climate plan he’s been working on, which could include “research and development of low-emissions sources of power as well as the development of carbon capture technologies and natural gas plants,” according to Bloomberg News. The plan almost certainly won’t do enough to curb emissions, but it may accomplish something politically significant: establish a few inches of common ground on climate change. At the end of the day, that foothold may be all Biden needs to generate momentum for his plan.
When President Joe Biden unveiled his $2 trillion climate and infrastructure plan in March, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was quick to accuse the White House of “trying to use important issues as smokescreens for unrelated agendas.”
It’s true that, at first glance, Biden’s American Jobs Plan — which seeks to increase the corporate tax rate to offset its price tag — looks like anathema to Republicans. It would direct billions toward green infrastructure, green jobs training, climate change adaptation, and renewable energy programs. But a peek under the hood reveals a few green ideas legislators could actually agree on.
The proposal calls for investing in clean energy research and development and carbon capture and sequestration, both steps some climate-conscious members of the GOP have pushed for in recent years. The plan also calls for “continuing to leverage the carbon pollution-free energy provided by existing sources like nuclear and hydropower” — Republicans’ two favorite non-fossil fuel sources of energy. Democrats are big proponents of wind and solar energy, but Republicans say their intermittent nature destabilizes the grid. Republicans advocate for natural gas as a reliable alternative, which Democrats aren’t keen on. Hydroelectric power and nuclear energy, which generate a constant flow of power regardless of the weather, fit both parties’ energy prerequisites. They have mixedsupport among Americans but enjoy rare bipartisan popularity in Congress, with a few exceptions — notably, Democratic Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have advocated for phasing out nuclear. But in general, Josh Freed, head of the climate program at the centrist policy and research nonprofit Third Way, told Grist that enthusiasm for nuclear energy and hydroelectric power on Capitol Hill is widespread.
“Nuclear and hydro are the two exceptions most Republicans have decided to include as acceptable responses to climate change,” Freed said. “There’s a lot of stuff in the American Jobs Plan that one would think Republicans could get behind even if they don’t support the underlying bill when it comes out.”
Hydro and nuclear could be useful bargaining chips for the White House. If Biden can use funding for hydro and nuclear, as well as incentives for carbon capture and sequestration, as a means of getting even a few Republicans to support his plan, he’ll have an easier time getting the moderates in his party to sign on to the package, too. Joe Manchin, the senior senator from West Virginia and one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, has been pressuring Biden to work with Republicans on infrastructure before pursuing other means of passing the proposal. He’s indicated might even vote against the package if Democrats don’t try to reach across the aisle.
Meanwhile, young Republicans are getting fed up with their party’s obsolescent stance on climate change, a fact that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says Republicans should be “nervous” about. Republicans don’t need to embrace Biden’s infrastructure plan to appeal to young conservatives, but they do need to develop a cohesive energy policy in order to stay relevant. McCarthy has been cooking up a GOP response to Democrats’ myriad climate plans, and parts of it may overlap with Biden’s infrastructure plan.
Biden now has to figure out how to motivate both sides of the aisle to make progress on the overlapping bits of their agendas. That might seem like a tall order for a Congress that doesn’t agree on much, but it’s already happening here and there.
In 2019, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican from Alaska, introduced the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act. It directs the Department of Energy to invest in advanced nuclear projects — new nuclear reactors that come in a range of sizes and can do things like process heat and desalinate water in addition to providing carbon-free electricity. The bill was cosponsored by Democratic Senator Cory Booker, from New Jersey, and got more than a dozen other bipartisan cosponsors. It passed as an amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. The 2020 Energy Act, the most significant piece of clean energy legislation in over a decade, also passed with bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. It includes major investments in both nuclear and hydro. Those successes hint that more bipartisan agreements could be forged.
Last month, Manchin, chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, held a hearing on nuclear energy. “We cannot afford to let this carbon-free energy resource fade out,” he said. The ranking Republican on the committee, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, who has voted against almost every single climate-related measure the Senate has considered since he was sworn in in 2007, gave a full-throated endorsement of nuclear energy. “Now more than ever, Washington must advance policies to preserve and expand the use of nuclear energy,” Barrasso, who successfully shepherded his own nuclear bill through the Senate in 2018, said. “Nuclear technology is fundamental to meeting our energy, our environmental, and our national security goals.”
In early March, Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee unveiled a broad climate bill that included a measure to eliminate emissions from the electricity sector by 2035. The Republicans on the committee called the plan a “rush to green with one-size-fits-all regulations,” but they said they were interested in working with Democrats toward eliminating emissions, primarily by expanding investment in innovation, nuclear power, and hydroelectricity. The bill includes a nuclear power purchasing program and improvements to hydropower regulatory and leasing processes.
There’s reason to believe Republicans on the committee are serious about working with Democrats on advancing nuclear energy and hydropower. A Republican on the committee, Representative David McKinley from West Virginia, previously introduced a bill that aims to slash emissions 80 percent by 2050. It includes provisions that would electrify existing dams and invest in advanced nuclear. The ranking Republican on the committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers of eastern Washington, introduced a bill promoting hydroelectric power last year. It didn’t make it to the House floor for a vote before the 116th Congress ended, but McMorris Rodgers, whose state heavily relies on hydro, remains a staunch supporter of electrifying dams.
“It really does seem like we’re kind of on the verge here of a big bipartisan consensus,” Rich Powell, executive director of the conservative clean energy think tank ClearPath, told Grist.
The question now is whether Biden will be able to use these existing areas of agreement as a springboard for his infrastructure package. On Monday, he met with a group of bipartisan senators in the Oval Office. “Roads, bridges, and ports are undoubtedly infrastructure, and I believe that energy grids, broadband, and clean water can fit the definition as well,” Representative Don Young, a Republican from Alaska and one of the legislators who attended the meeting, told reporters afterward. He noted that expanding the plan’s scope beyond those items “could sink the bill,” and other Republicans agree with him. Over the past couple of weeks, Republicans have rallied behind the claim that only a small percentage of Biden’s plan concerns “real infrastructure” — that is, bridges, tunnels, and roads. The White House has been quick to point out that rail, water lines, the electric grid, and broadband are also critical infrastructure. (Republicans used to think some of those things were infrastructure, too.) Biden says he’s open to customizing his proposal to Republican specifications, within reason.
“Democrats are eager to get Republicans to work with them on anything that will help address climate change,” Freed said. “That’s because the Democratic party writ large has really adopted an approach of a multitude of options, because that’s what we need at this point.”Biden might have a better idea of what those options are once Republicans have a coherent energy policy of their own to tout. Later this month, Representative McCarthy is expected to unveil the climate plan he’s been working on, which could include “research and development of low-emissions sources of power as well as the development of carbon capture technologies and natural gas plants,” according to Bloomberg News. The plan almost certainly won’t do enough to curb emissions, but it may accomplish something politically significant: establish a few inches of common ground on climate change. At the end of the day, that foothold may be all Biden needs to generate momentum for his plan.
In late February, the Delaware River Basin Commission made a historic announcement: It banned hydraulic fracturing in the basin, a 13,539-square-mile area that supplies some 17 million people with drinking water.
“Prohibiting high volume hydraulic fracturing in the Basin is vital to preserving our region’s recreational and natural resources and ecology,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who represents one of the four states in the Delaware River Basin Commission, or DRBC. “Our actions,” he added, “will protect public health and preserve our water resources for future generations.”
The decision to permanently protect the watershed from fracking was the culmination of years of dedicated activism and public input. Politicians, environmental groups, and citizens alike celebrated the decision by the commission — a powerful, interstate-federal regulatory agency made up of the governors of Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania and the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ North Atlantic Division.
Governor Phil Murphy declares support for the fracking ban in the Delaware River Basin in Phillipsburg, NJ.
Edwin J. Torres / New Jersey Governor’s Office
But the same commission that made the historic decision to protect the basin from fracking also voted several months earlier to pave the way for a natural gas company to use the Delaware River to export its product abroad.
In December 2020, the DRBC voted to approve construction of a dock in the New Jersey city of Gibbstown, in Gloucester County. That dock, attached to an export terminal constructed on the site of a former Dupont munitions plant, will receive a fossil fuel called liquefied natural gas, or LNG, from a plant in northern Pennsylvania and then ship it overseas.
When complete, the Delaware River Basin’s first-ever liquefied natural gas project will pose immediate risks to a wide swath of the Eastern seaboard — to people who live near the liquefaction plant in Pennsylvania and to communities clustered along the 200-mile route between the plant and the export dock in New Jersey — as well as to the Delaware River itself.
The two decisions weighed against each other point to an interesting paradox in the DRBC’s attitude toward natural gas, a significant contributor to global warming. While the commission doesn’t want exploration to pollute the basin, it’s still tacitly permitting the industry to use the river for a different side of the natural gas business — one that’s not without its own environmental and health threats. The rulings illuminate the complex, often contradictory relationship with natural gas that many policymakers find themselves in at the moment, as pressure builds for communities to transition away from fossil fuels toward a clean economy.
Bait and switch?
In 2016, New Fortress Energy, a natural gas company, put in an application to build a dock in Gibbstown, New Jersey, via an infrastructure-focused subsidiary called Delaware River Partners. Environmentalists and some nearby residents opposed the dock at the time — it would be constructed on a 300-acre parcel of land and superfund site that used to be a Dupont munitions factory. Cleanup of contaminants left by Dupont was ongoing in 2016, and decontamination of the groundwater there still hasn’t been completed.
In order to reassure regulators and nearby communities, the managing director of New Fortress said it wouldn’t use the dock to export LNG. The subsidiary would instead stick to exporting fruits, vegetables, automobiles, and small quantities of propane and butane. The Gibbstown Logistics Center port was approved by the Delaware River Basin Commission in 2017 and constructed not long after that. The situation wasn’t ideal for environmentalists, but it was tolerable. It didn’t stay that way for long.
In 2019, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, one of the environmental groups that had opposed the initial project, caught wind that New Fortress Energy, via a different subsidiary called Bradford County Real Estate Partners, had applied for a permit to build an $800 million natural gas liquefaction plant in Bradford County, Pennsylvania — within the heart of the Marcellus shale formation — to be completed in the first quarter of this year. (That timeline was ultimately delayed by COVID-19.) When it’s up and running, the liquefier will produce 3.6 million gallons of LNG per day. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, New Fortress Energy said the gas would be exported from “a port on the Delaware river.”
An aerial view of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker ship.
Felix Cesare/Getty Images
“Everything clicked,” Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, said. A few months later, she saw an announcement for a DRBC hearing and immediately guessed what it would be about. Sure enough, Delaware River Partners, the New Fortress subsidiary that constructed the dock in New Jersey, was applying for a permit to build another dock, with two berths this time, attached to the Gibbstown Logistics Center. Carluccio knew what only a few other community stakeholders knew at the time: If approved, the new dock, called Dock 2, would be used to export fracked gas from Pennsylvania.
Danger, extremely flammable
LNG is natural gas that has been cooled to negative 260 degrees Fahrenheit — a temperature almost as cold as the planet Saturn — in order to transform it into a liquid. It expands to more than 600 times its compressed size if it is accidentally released from a storage tank and sometimes forms LNG clouds as it warms and expands. Those clouds can travel miles when the wind is blowing and will detonate if triggered by a spark. There’s no way to put out an LNG fire — it has to burn itself out. The thermal radiation from such an event can cause second-degree burns in as little as 30 seconds.
Because of these risks, there has long been a federal ban on transporting LNG via rail in dense areas in the U.S. But New Fortress got a special permit in 2019 from the Trump administration to use rail to transport the gas from Pennsylvania to New Jersey. And in 2020, then-President Donald Trump fully lifted the ban via executive order. His Department of Transportation released an analysis that said transporting LNG by rail or truck is relatively safe. An analysis from the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice estimated that the liquefied gas from a single rail tank car, if detonated, could raze an entire city.
New Fortress Energy plans to transport the liquefied natural gas in either tanker trucks or by rail some 200 miles from Bradford County to Gibbstown, snaking through dozens of communities along the way. More than a million and a half people live within a 2-mile radius of the possible LNG transportation routes. Twenty-nine percent of those individuals, a little less than half a million people, are people of color, and 24 percent, some 400,000 people, are low income. In a letter to the DRBC last December, Philadelphia city officials wrote that New Fortress Energy’s LNG transport route through Philadelphia “will expose black and brown and low-income communities to the most intense and inescapable zone of impact should there be an accident such as a derailment.”
The dangers of producing liquefied natural gas are also acute for the communities located near the LNG plant and export terminal. Roughly 600 people live in Wyalusing Township, the community in Bradford County where the plant will be built. Thousands more live within a few miles of the export terminal in New Jersey. Paulsboro Township, which qualifies as one of New Jersey’s “overburdened communities” because at least 35 percent of the households there are low income and minority, is three and a half miles away from the Gibbstown Logistics Center.
Workers move a section of well casing into place at a natural gas drill site in Bradford County, PA.
AP Photo / Ralph Wilson, File
There have been 13 serious accidents at LNG plants, LNG terminals, and other onshore LNG facilities worldwide since 1994. The worst of those, a fire at a terminal in Algeria in 2004, killed 27 workers and 74 others. LNG liquefaction facilities can also produce air pollutants like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide, as well as hazardous waste.
Then there’s the matter of the superfund site where Dock 2 will be built. According to a 2019 lawsuit from New Jersey attorney general, the Gibbstown site contains “a diverse and significant amount of hazardous waste” dumped into “unlined landfills, sand tar pits, pipes, and ditch basins.” The deep-water dredging required to construct the new LNG export dock — more than 134 million gallons of sediment over 45 acres of water — could launch lingering polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, into the river. PCBs have been linked to increased rates of many types of cancer in humans, including brain cancer, liver cancer, and gastrointestinal tract cancer.
Producing and exporting LNG affects the climate, too. In a 2019 Air Quality Plan Approval document, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection estimated the plant will produce more than a million metric tons of greenhouse gases in a 12-month period. Environmental groups say the true climate impacts of the plant are likely higher because “fugitive emissions,” leaks and other irregular releases of gases, are not typically taken into account by such assessments. When the LNG is actually burned by whichever countries end up buying it from New Fortress Energy, it will produce many millions more metric tons of emissions.
The green light
After hearing about the planned DRBC meeting to consider the construction of Dock 2 at the Gibbstown logistics center, environmental groups sounded the alarm, sending letters to state agencies and educating communities along the proposed route about the dangers of the project.
“New Jersey would get all the risk, there’s no reward for this type of project,” said Ed Potosnak, executive director of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters. “The surrounding community is already an environmental justice community.”
Yet despite opposition from environmentalists and community groups, the project has benefited from strong support from several business associations, policymakers, and unions — including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Iron Workers Union, and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters — thanks to the promise of the jobs it would create.
At a hearing in June 2019, the commission unanimously approved Dock 2. In response to concerns about the environmental and climate impacts of the project, the commission said that such issues should be resolved “incrementally” at the state, interstate, and national levels. “Our evaluation,” it wrote in a memorandum, is “focused on management of the Basin’s water resources and not on wider energy policy questions.” The Delaware River Basin Commission declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing litigation around the port. New Fortress Energy did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Governor Murphy’s office told Grist that New Jersey voted in favor of the new dock because the DRBC was considering only the narrow question of whether Delaware River Partners could construct the dock, not whether New Fortress Energy could export LNG from New Jersey. Carluccio doesn’t buy it. “You would have to struggle to put on blinders and noise-canceling earphones to avoid hearing the wide-ranging issues that LNG presents at the facility,” she said.
The site of the Gibbstown Logistics Center in Gloucester County, New Jersey. Office of the Attorney General / Tim Larsen
Delaware Riverkeeper Network appealed the decision, but a federal judge affirmed the approval of the dock over the network’s objections and sent it back to the DRBC one last time for a final vote on the project. At that hearing, in December 2020, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the Army Corps of Engineers voted to approve the dock. New York moved to delay the vote, but the motion failed, and the state proxy ultimately abstained from voting.
An ongoing battle
The LNG export project is not a done deal yet. New Fortress Energy still needs to obtain environmental permits from New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection and an export permit from the Department of Energy. And it can’t start construction until September 15 at the earliest — the Army Corps of Engineers’ permit for the dock has a condition that does not allow for any construction work in the water during the Atlantic sturgeon spawning season, which runs for six months starting on March 15. Meanwhile, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network has sent a motion for summary judgment — which asks a court to decide a case without a trial — to the New Jersey district court requesting that the Army Corps of Engineers’ permit for Dock 2 be thrown out because the Corps failed to do a full environmental impact assessment of the dock before it approved the project, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
Environmental and community groups are hopeful that the Biden administration will step in to stop the project, which was largely approved during Trump’s term. The Army Corps, for example, could choose not to defend itself in court if the Biden administration decides that it agrees with the Delaware Riverkeeper Network’s lawsuit. Or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which oversees many aspects of the U.S. energy landscape, could rule that it has jurisdiction over the construction of New Fortress Energy’s facilities. The commission’s new chairman, Biden-appointed Richard Glick, recently announced that the commission will be taking environmental justice into account when approving projects. That could affect Dock 2 and New Fortress Energy’s hopes of exporting LNG from New Jersey. “Possibly, for the first time, environmental justice considerations are going to be heard on a consistent basis at the commission,” Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at nonprofit consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, who has been keeping tabs on New Fortress Energy’s dealings with FERC, told Grist. “That’s really, really important.”
President Joe Biden could also revoke Trump’s executive order allowing LNG to be transported by rail. At his confirmation hearing in January, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was pressed by Senator Ted Cruz from Texas on his views on Trump’s LNG-by-rail rule. “The best, honest answer I can give you now is that I’ll be taking a hard look at it,” Buttigieg said.
Dock 2 is a test case for how far the Biden administration will go to prune the Trump era’s pro-industry legacy. The LNG-by-rail rule, FERC’s new environmental justice considerations, and the Army Corps of Engineers’ role in the DRBC will come into play in the coming months. Whether or not the project eventually hits a dead end, the years-long controversy over the export of natural gas in Gibbstown demonstrates that “banned” doesn’t always mean “eliminated.”
In late February, the Delaware River Basin Commission made a historic announcement: It banned hydraulic fracturing in the basin, a 13,539-square-mile area that supplies some 17 million people with drinking water.
“Prohibiting high volume hydraulic fracturing in the Basin is vital to preserving our region’s recreational and natural resources and ecology,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who represents one of the four states in the Delaware River Basin Commission, or DRBC. “Our actions,” he added, “will protect public health and preserve our water resources for future generations.”
The decision to permanently protect the watershed from fracking was the culmination of years of dedicated activism and public input. Politicians, environmental groups, and citizens alike celebrated the decision by the commission — a powerful, interstate-federal regulatory agency made up of the governors of Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania and the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ North Atlantic Division.
Governor Phil Murphy declares support for the fracking ban in the Delaware River Basin in Phillipsburg, NJ.
Edwin J. Torres / New Jersey Governor’s Office
But the same commission that made the historic decision to protect the basin from fracking also voted several months earlier to pave the way for a natural gas company to use the Delaware River to export its product abroad.
In December 2020, the DRBC voted to approve construction of a dock in the New Jersey city of Gibbstown, in Gloucester County. That dock, attached to an export terminal constructed on the site of a former Dupont munitions plant, will receive a fossil fuel called liquefied natural gas, or LNG, from a plant in northern Pennsylvania and then ship it overseas.
When complete, the Delaware River Basin’s first-ever liquefied natural gas project will pose immediate risks to a wide swath of the Eastern seaboard — to people who live near the liquefaction plant in Pennsylvania and to communities clustered along the 200-mile route between the plant and the export dock in New Jersey — as well as to the Delaware River itself.
The two decisions weighed against each other point to an interesting paradox in the DRBC’s attitude toward natural gas, a significant contributor to global warming. While the commission doesn’t want exploration to pollute the basin, it’s still tacitly permitting the industry to use the river for a different side of the natural gas business — one that’s not without its own environmental and health threats. The rulings illuminate the complex, often contradictory relationship with natural gas that many policymakers find themselves in at the moment, as pressure builds for communities to transition away from fossil fuels toward a clean economy.
Bait and switch?
In 2016, New Fortress Energy, a natural gas company, put in an application to build a dock in Gibbstown, New Jersey, via an infrastructure-focused subsidiary called Delaware River Partners. Environmentalists and some nearby residents opposed the dock at the time — it would be constructed on a 300-acre parcel of land and superfund site that used to be a Dupont munitions factory. Cleanup of contaminants left by Dupont was ongoing in 2016, and decontamination of the groundwater there still hasn’t been completed.
In order to reassure regulators and nearby communities, the managing director of New Fortress said it wouldn’t use the dock to export LNG. The subsidiary would instead stick to exporting fruits, vegetables, automobiles, and small quantities of propane and butane. The Gibbstown Logistics Center port was approved by the Delaware River Basin Commission in 2017 and constructed not long after that. The situation wasn’t ideal for environmentalists, but it was tolerable. It didn’t stay that way for long.
In 2019, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, one of the environmental groups that had opposed the initial project, caught wind that New Fortress Energy, via a different subsidiary called Bradford County Real Estate Partners, had applied for a permit to build an $800 million natural gas liquefaction plant in Bradford County, Pennsylvania — within the heart of the Marcellus shale formation — to be completed in the first quarter of this year. (That timeline was ultimately delayed by COVID-19.) When it’s up and running, the liquefier will produce 3.6 million gallons of LNG per day. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, New Fortress Energy said the gas would be exported from “a port on the Delaware river.”
An aerial view of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker ship.
Felix Cesare/Getty Images
“Everything clicked,” Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, said. A few months later, she saw an announcement for a DRBC hearing and immediately guessed what it would be about. Sure enough, Delaware River Partners, the New Fortress subsidiary that constructed the dock in New Jersey, was applying for a permit to build another dock, with two berths this time, attached to the Gibbstown Logistics Center. Carluccio knew what only a few other community stakeholders knew at the time: If approved, the new dock, called Dock 2, would be used to export fracked gas from Pennsylvania.
Danger, extremely flammable
LNG is natural gas that has been cooled to negative 260 degrees Fahrenheit — a temperature almost as cold as the planet Saturn — in order to transform it into a liquid. It expands to more than 600 times its compressed size if it is accidentally released from a storage tank and sometimes forms LNG clouds as it warms and expands. Those clouds can travel miles when the wind is blowing and will detonate if triggered by a spark. There’s no way to put out an LNG fire — it has to burn itself out. The thermal radiation from such an event can cause second-degree burns in as little as 30 seconds.
Because of these risks, there has long been a federal ban on transporting LNG via rail in dense areas in the U.S. But New Fortress got a special permit in 2019 from the Trump administration to use rail to transport the gas from Pennsylvania to New Jersey. And in 2020, then-President Donald Trump fully lifted the ban via executive order. His Department of Transportation released an analysis that said transporting LNG by rail or truck is relatively safe. An analysis from the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice estimated that the liquefied gas from a single rail tank car, if detonated, could raze an entire city.
New Fortress Energy plans to transport the liquefied natural gas in either tanker trucks or by rail some 200 miles from Bradford County to Gibbstown, snaking through dozens of communities along the way. More than a million and a half people live within a 2-mile radius of the possible LNG transportation routes. Twenty-nine percent of those individuals, a little less than half a million people, are people of color, and 24 percent, some 400,000 people, are low income. In a letter to the DRBC last December, Philadelphia city officials wrote that New Fortress Energy’s LNG transport route through Philadelphia “will expose black and brown and low-income communities to the most intense and inescapable zone of impact should there be an accident such as a derailment.”
The dangers of producing liquefied natural gas are also acute for the communities located near the LNG plant and export terminal. Roughly 600 people live in Wyalusing Township, the community in Bradford County where the plant will be built. Thousands more live within a few miles of the export terminal in New Jersey. Paulsboro Township, which qualifies as one of New Jersey’s “overburdened communities” because at least 35 percent of the households there are low income and minority, is three and a half miles away from the Gibbstown Logistics Center.
Workers move a section of well casing into place at a natural gas drill site in Bradford County, PA.
AP Photo / Ralph Wilson, File
There have been 13 serious accidents at LNG plants, LNG terminals, and other onshore LNG facilities worldwide since 1994. The worst of those, a fire at a terminal in Algeria in 2004, killed 27 workers and 74 others. LNG liquefaction facilities can also produce air pollutants like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide, as well as hazardous waste.
Then there’s the matter of the superfund site where Dock 2 will be built. According to a 2019 lawsuit from New Jersey attorney general, the Gibbstown site contains “a diverse and significant amount of hazardous waste” dumped into “unlined landfills, sand tar pits, pipes, and ditch basins.” The deep-water dredging required to construct the new LNG export dock — more than 134 million gallons of sediment over 45 acres of water — could launch lingering polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, into the river. PCBs have been linked to increased rates of many types of cancer in humans, including brain cancer, liver cancer, and gastrointestinal tract cancer.
Producing and exporting LNG affects the climate, too. In a 2019 Air Quality Plan Approval document, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection estimated the plant will produce more than a million metric tons of greenhouse gases in a 12-month period. Environmental groups say the true climate impacts of the plant are likely higher because “fugitive emissions,” leaks and other irregular releases of gases, are not typically taken into account by such assessments. When the LNG is actually burned by whichever countries end up buying it from New Fortress Energy, it will produce many millions more metric tons of emissions.
The green light
After hearing about the planned DRBC meeting to consider the construction of Dock 2 at the Gibbstown logistics center, environmental groups sounded the alarm, sending letters to state agencies and educating communities along the proposed route about the dangers of the project.
“New Jersey would get all the risk, there’s no reward for this type of project,” said Ed Potosnak, executive director of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters. “The surrounding community is already an environmental justice community.”
Yet despite opposition from environmentalists and community groups, the project has benefited from strong support from several business associations, policymakers, and unions — including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Iron Workers Union, and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters — thanks to the promise of the jobs it would create.
At a hearing in June 2019, the commission unanimously approved Dock 2. In response to concerns about the environmental and climate impacts of the project, the commission said that such issues should be resolved “incrementally” at the state, interstate, and national levels. “Our evaluation,” it wrote in a memorandum, is “focused on management of the Basin’s water resources and not on wider energy policy questions.” The Delaware River Basin Commission declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing litigation around the port. New Fortress Energy did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Governor Murphy’s office told Grist that New Jersey voted in favor of the new dock because the DRBC was considering only the narrow question of whether Delaware River Partners could construct the dock, not whether New Fortress Energy could export LNG from New Jersey. Carluccio doesn’t buy it. “You would have to struggle to put on blinders and noise-canceling earphones to avoid hearing the wide-ranging issues that LNG presents at the facility,” she said.
The site of the Gibbstown Logistics Center in Gloucester County, New Jersey. Office of the Attorney General / Tim Larsen
Delaware Riverkeeper Network appealed the decision, but a federal judge affirmed the approval of the dock over the network’s objections and sent it back to the DRBC one last time for a final vote on the project. At that hearing, in December 2020, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the Army Corps of Engineers voted to approve the dock. New York moved to delay the vote, but the motion failed, and the state proxy ultimately abstained from voting.
An ongoing battle
The LNG export project is not a done deal yet. New Fortress Energy still needs to obtain environmental permits from New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection and an export permit from the Department of Energy. And it can’t start construction until September 15 at the earliest — the Army Corps of Engineers’ permit for the dock has a condition that does not allow for any construction work in the water during the Atlantic sturgeon spawning season, which runs for six months starting on March 15. Meanwhile, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network has sent a motion for summary judgment — which asks a court to decide a case without a trial — to the New Jersey district court requesting that the Army Corps of Engineers’ permit for Dock 2 be thrown out because the Corps failed to do a full environmental impact assessment of the dock before it approved the project, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
Environmental and community groups are hopeful that the Biden administration will step in to stop the project, which was largely approved during Trump’s term. The Army Corps, for example, could choose not to defend itself in court if the Biden administration decides that it agrees with the Delaware Riverkeeper Network’s lawsuit. Or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which oversees many aspects of the U.S. energy landscape, could rule that it has jurisdiction over the construction of New Fortress Energy’s facilities. The commission’s new chairman, Biden-appointed Richard Glick, recently announced that the commission will be taking environmental justice into account when approving projects. That could affect Dock 2 and New Fortress Energy’s hopes of exporting LNG from New Jersey. “Possibly, for the first time, environmental justice considerations are going to be heard on a consistent basis at the commission,” Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at nonprofit consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, who has been keeping tabs on New Fortress Energy’s dealings with FERC, told Grist. “That’s really, really important.”
President Joe Biden could also revoke Trump’s executive order allowing LNG to be transported by rail. At his confirmation hearing in January, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was pressed by Senator Ted Cruz from Texas on his views on Trump’s LNG-by-rail rule. “The best, honest answer I can give you now is that I’ll be taking a hard look at it,” Buttigieg said.
Dock 2 is a test case for how far the Biden administration will go to prune the Trump era’s pro-industry legacy. The LNG-by-rail rule, FERC’s new environmental justice considerations, and the Army Corps of Engineers’ role in the DRBC will come into play in the coming months. Whether or not the project eventually hits a dead end, the years-long controversy over the export of natural gas in Gibbstown demonstrates that “banned” doesn’t always mean “eliminated.”
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when climate change was a bipartisan issue. In 1988, Congress listened with interest as climate scientist James Hansen testified about the links between human activity and climate change. Bills to limit emissions found ample cosponsors. George H. W. Bush’s administration was eager to work with Democrats on energy policy. But in the mid-1990s, the Republican Party, abetted by oil, gas, and coal companies, began its downward spiral into climate denial. That brings us to today, when the gap between Republicans and Democrats on climate change appears to be growing ever wider, even as intensifying hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and floods leave scars across the country.
Gallup’s annual survey of American attitudes about global warming, published last week, shows that Democrats are increasingly in agreement with the scientific consensus. A whopping 82 percent of Democrats said they believe that the effects of global warming have already begun. Meanwhile, only 29 percent of Republicans did, a record low. That’s a gap of 53 points; for comparison, in 2001, the gap was a mere 13 points.
Still, a closer look at the Gallup poll reveals a silver lining. Data provided to Grist by Gallup, which combined Republicans and people who lean Republican for a bigger sample, shows that Republicans ages 18 to 29 have a more moderate view of climate change and its effects than their elders. Nearly two-thirds of them believe humans are the main cause of global warming, compared to just a third of Republican baby boomers.
Young Republicans polled at the head of the pack on five questions provided to Grist. Over the last four years, 25 percent of these younger Republicans said they worried a great deal about global warming. That percentage starts shrinking the older you go: 19 percent for Republicans ages 30 to 49, 14 percent ages 50 to 64, and 11 percent ages 65 and up.
This trend has been supported by previous polling. “When you look below the hood, young and old Democrats are pretty much the same. There’s not a generational difference among Democrats,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Grist. “But among Republicans, we see a significant difference. Young Republicans are much more engaged, much more concerned about this issue than their parents and their grandparents.”
Still, young Republicans haven’t been immune to their party’s increasingly anti-climate attitudes. Over the last 20 years, their views have generally either stayed relatively steady or grown more polarized, according to Saad. For example, 46 percent of young Republicans in the early to late 2000s said they thought the seriousness of global warming was generally exaggerated, but today, that percentage has grown to 53 percent. Some 38 percent of young Republicans said that climate change will pose a threat to their way of life in their lifetimes between 2000 and 2008, whereas 30 percent of them say the same thing now. The only question young Republicans have shown marked improvement on: whether human activity is the main driver of global warming.
Polls like these are a temperature check of how people are feeling at a certain moment — they’re not a full-blown diagnostic rundown of the nation’s psyche. And the results can be influenced by polling methods, differences in how questions are asked, and the timing of the polls themselves. But the partisan gap on climate change has been well-documented and is reflected in surveys funded by the Yale program and other pollsters. “Partisanship just continues to widen,” Lydia Saad, a senior editor at Gallup, told Grist.
Regardless of variability in how young Republicans are thinking about climate change, the idea that millennials are grasping the consequences of climate change has already sunk in with some Republicans in Congress. At a 2019 Republican summit in Georgia, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told members of his party that without a cohesive plan, the GOP risked alienating younger members. “We should be a little nervous,” he said. “We’ve got to do something different than we’ve done today.”
Later this month, McCarthy and other members of the House GOP are expected to unveil their own plan to address climate change. How will that affect Republican views on rising temperatures? We’ll have to keep an eye on the trend lines.
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when climate change was a bipartisan issue. In 1988, Congress listened with interest as climate scientist James Hansen testified about the links between human activity and climate change. Bills to limit emissions found ample cosponsors. George H. W. Bush’s administration was eager to work with Democrats on energy policy. But in the mid-1990s, the Republican Party, abetted by oil, gas, and coal companies, began its downward spiral into climate denial. That brings us to today, when the gap between Republicans and Democrats on climate change appears to be growing ever wider, even as intensifying hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and floods leave scars across the country.
Gallup’s annual survey of American attitudes about global warming, published last week, shows that Democrats are increasingly in agreement with the scientific consensus. A whopping 82 percent of Democrats said they believe that the effects of global warming have already begun. Meanwhile, only 29 percent of Republicans did, a record low. That’s a gap of 53 points; for comparison, in 2001, the gap was a mere 13 points.
Still, a closer look at the Gallup poll reveals a silver lining. Data provided to Grist by Gallup, which combined Republicans and people who lean Republican for a bigger sample, shows that Republicans ages 18 to 29 have a more moderate view of climate change and its effects than their elders. Nearly two-thirds of them believe humans are the main cause of global warming, compared to just a third of Republican baby boomers.
Young Republicans polled at the head of the pack on five questions provided to Grist. Over the last four years, 25 percent of these younger Republicans said they worried a great deal about global warming. That percentage starts shrinking the older you go: 19 percent for Republicans ages 30 to 49, 14 percent ages 50 to 64, and 11 percent ages 65 and up.
This trend has been supported by previous polling. “When you look below the hood, young and old Democrats are pretty much the same. There’s not a generational difference among Democrats,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Grist. “But among Republicans, we see a significant difference. Young Republicans are much more engaged, much more concerned about this issue than their parents and their grandparents.”
Still, young Republicans haven’t been immune to their party’s increasingly anti-climate attitudes. Over the last 20 years, their views have generally either stayed relatively steady or grown more polarized, according to Saad. For example, 46 percent of young Republicans in the early to late 2000s said they thought the seriousness of global warming was generally exaggerated, but today, that percentage has grown to 53 percent. Some 38 percent of young Republicans said that climate change will pose a threat to their way of life in their lifetimes between 2000 and 2008, whereas 30 percent of them say the same thing now. The only question young Republicans have shown marked improvement on: whether human activity is the main driver of global warming.
Polls like these are a temperature check of how people are feeling at a certain moment — they’re not a full-blown diagnostic rundown of the nation’s psyche. And the results can be influenced by polling methods, differences in how questions are asked, and the timing of the polls themselves. But the partisan gap on climate change has been well-documented and is reflected in surveys funded by the Yale program and other pollsters. “Partisanship just continues to widen,” Lydia Saad, a senior editor at Gallup, told Grist.
Regardless of variability in how young Republicans are thinking about climate change, the idea that millennials are grasping the consequences of climate change has already sunk in with some Republicans in Congress. At a 2019 Republican summit in Georgia, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told members of his party that without a cohesive plan, the GOP risked alienating younger members. “We should be a little nervous,” he said. “We’ve got to do something different than we’ve done today.”
Later this month, McCarthy and other members of the House GOP are expected to unveil their own plan to address climate change. How will that affect Republican views on rising temperatures? We’ll have to keep an eye on the trend lines.
Last week, President Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that, if passed by Congress, would protect the U.S. from climate change and prepare its economy for a transition to clean energy. The plan has a little something for just about everyone — out-of-work fossil fuel workers, public housing advocates, lovers of research and development — but it almost entirely avoids mentioning a looming crisis. Biden’s plan barely mentions managed retreat, a term that refers to the coordinated movement of communities away from coastlines and other vulnerable areas as sea levels rise and climate disasters worsen. The White House infrastructure plan included just one sentence about it, saying the American Jobs Plan will provide “transition and relocation assistance to support community-led transitions for the most vulnerable tribal communities.”
In the coming decades, vulnerable tribes will comprise a tiny fraction of the communities that will need relocation help. Studies show that 13 million Americans could become displaced by rising sea levels and $1 trillion worth of homes and commercial property could be inundated by the end of the century. Southeastern Louisiana, Miami, and New York City are some of the spots that will see precipitous sea-level rise before then. The National Flood Insurance Program, the federally funded insurance program that is one of Congress’ best tools for making people understand flood risks, is mismanaged and has been bankrupted by years of catastrophic flooding events. State governments don’t have nearly enough policies in place to deter people from building and buying homes in flood zones. And federal buyout programs that provide incentives for people to leave their homes are limited and tend to favor wealthier homeowners.
Managed retreat is a strategy few politicians, regardless of political party, want to advocate for, even as climate adaptation in general has become an increasingly integral part of the national conversation. In some cases, politicians haven’t just been slow to embrace retreat, they’ve resolutely marched in the opposite direction.
“I think both parties want to avoid that issue for as long as possible,” Carlos Curbelo, a Republican and former U.S. representative for south Florida, told Grist in early March. “It is a bipartisan issue in the sense that no party really wants to talk about it.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, is one of those politicians with their heads in the sand. The New Yorker has positioned himself as a climate hawk, directing Senate committees to start holding hearings on the climate crisis and calling on Biden to declare a climate emergency. But Schumer has also obstructed efforts to warn people away from flood-prone areas.
Last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers the National Flood Insurance Program, announced new flood insurance rates that will more realistically reflect the true risks of insuring homes in flood zones when they go into effect in the fall and next spring. As it currently stands, the program’s heavily subsidized flood insurance lulls homeowners into a false sense of security. If folks knew the true cost of insuring their home against flood risk, they might not buy it in the first place. Bumping up rates would also discourage construction of new buildings in high-risk zones. But last month, as FEMA prepared to announce its overhaul, Schumer stepped in to object to the reforms, which would increase insurance costs for a fraction of Americans.
“FEMA shouldn’t be rushing to overhaul their process and risk dramatically increasing premiums on middle-class and working-class families without first consulting with Congress and the communities at greatest risk to the effects of climate change,” Alex Nguyen, a spokesperson for Senator Schumer, said in a statement. But FEMA’s Risk Rating 2.0 will actually lower insurance rates for 23 percent of households, and most of the rest will see increases no higher than $20 per month. Just 4 percent will see larger changes to their premiums. That 4 percent will mostly be composed of higher-value homeowners in high-risk areas — like people living in the Hamptons, where the median price of a home in 2020 was $1.2 million. Schumer’s refusal to embrace even a modest step to discourage people from coastal living highlights the political muck miring managed retreat.
Biden and Schumer aren’t the only politicians shying away from the need for managed retreat — it’s also a taboo subject in red states. In Florida, a state where rampant sea-level rise is already a facet of everyday life, Republican state legislators recently unveiled a suite of measures intended to fend off rising seas. The bills will direct $100 million per year over the next two years toward protections against sea-level rise and flooding. As a result, homeowners who pay to raise their houses higher off the ground will get a tax break. Local governments will get funding to come up with targeted strategies to deal with impending rise. The Florida government, in partnership with the University of South Florida, will establish a Flood Hub for Applied Research, which will exclusively focus on the state’s exposure to flooding and how to reduce those risks. But managed retreat is nowhere to be found on the menu of risk mitigation strategies.
Preston Robertson, president and CEO of the Florida Wildlife Federation, told Grist in March that both political parties in Florida are loath to talk retreat because of the financial implications. “How in the world do you do that when there are trillions of dollars in property just in Miami-Dade alone?” Robertson asked. “It’s almost impossible to get your mind around the fact that if the seas keep rising, those residences and commercial structures are going to become uninhabitable.”
Americans are used to confronting extreme weather and flooding with large-scale interventions — sea walls to keep the ocean at bay, pumps to dry our streets out, stilts to keep our houses above the flood line. When a hurricane or a wildfire destroys a community, officials talk about recovery, not conceding defeat. “Americans don’t like to lose,” Yuliya Panfil, director of a housing reform program at the progressive think tank New America, told Grist. “Retreat sounds like losing.”
It’s no surprise that politicians, who typically think in two-, four-, and six-year increments, are skirting the topic of managed retreat, which requires much longer-term planning. A 2019 Columbia University report found that “the inclination to avoid retreat is strong even in cities that have undergone a destructive climate disaster.” Progressive mayors have signed climate bills into law that don’t adequately plan for retreat. Efforts to reform the National Flood Insurance Program ran into roadblocks long before Chuck Schumer got involved. The federal government under former President Barack Obama temporarily toyed with establishing a federal framework for managed retreat but ended up dropping it. Alice Hill, former special assistant to Obama, called it a “third rail.”
“It’s really politically difficult to ask people to abandon their homes,” Panfil said. “Particularly in some of these coastal areas, these are often people’s retirement dreams and they’ve been saving for 30 years to buy themselves a home on the water.”
A few politicians at the local and state level are bucking the trend and touching the third rail. In the Florida Keys, local officials told residents in 2019 that some areas would be lost to the water forever. “As much as we love the Keys, there’s going to be a time when it’s going to be less population,” Rhonda Haag, the county’s sustainability director, said. She was saying the quiet part out loud: It was time for people to move.
And in southern California, state senator Ben Allen, a Democrat, introduced legislation in March that could become a pilot managed retreat project for the rest of the country. The bill would establish a loan program that would provide funds for California municipalities and counties so they can afford to buy up vulnerable coastal properties. Then, the county would rent them out to Californians while the properties are still desirable and use the money to pay off the loans. It’s essentially an extended-release buy-out program for at-risk properties. There’s a good chance that the bill will become law. If it works, other states could follow suit.
When the federal government inevitably starts to scramble for solutions to sea-level rise, it’ll likely look to these places for evidence of what works and what doesn’t. But until more politicians stop treating managed retreat as a third rail and start thinking about it as a lifeline, government plans to adapt to climate change will fall short.
Last week, President Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that, if passed by Congress, would protect the U.S. from climate change and prepare its economy for a transition to clean energy. The plan has a little something for just about everyone — out-of-work fossil fuel workers, public housing advocates, lovers of research and development — but it almost entirely avoids mentioning a looming crisis. Biden’s plan barely mentions managed retreat, a term that refers to the coordinated movement of communities away from coastlines and other vulnerable areas as sea levels rise and climate disasters worsen. The White House infrastructure plan included just one sentence about it, saying the American Jobs Plan will provide “transition and relocation assistance to support community-led transitions for the most vulnerable tribal communities.”
In the coming decades, vulnerable tribes will comprise a tiny fraction of the communities that will need relocation help. Studies show that 13 million Americans could become displaced by rising sea levels and $1 trillion worth of homes and commercial property could be inundated by the end of the century. Southeastern Louisiana, Miami, and New York City are some of the spots that will see precipitous sea-level rise before then. The National Flood Insurance Program, the federally funded insurance program that is one of Congress’ best tools for making people understand flood risks, is mismanaged and has been bankrupted by years of catastrophic flooding events. State governments don’t have nearly enough policies in place to deter people from building and buying homes in flood zones. And federal buyout programs that provide incentives for people to leave their homes are limited and tend to favor wealthier homeowners.
Managed retreat is a strategy few politicians, regardless of political party, want to advocate for, even as climate adaptation in general has become an increasingly integral part of the national conversation. In some cases, politicians haven’t just been slow to embrace retreat, they’ve resolutely marched in the opposite direction.
“I think both parties want to avoid that issue for as long as possible,” Carlos Curbelo, a Republican and former U.S. representative for south Florida, told Grist in early March. “It is a bipartisan issue in the sense that no party really wants to talk about it.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, is one of those politicians with their heads in the sand. The New Yorker has positioned himself as a climate hawk, directing Senate committees to start holding hearings on the climate crisis and calling on Biden to declare a climate emergency. But Schumer has also obstructed efforts to warn people away from flood-prone areas.
Last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers the National Flood Insurance Program, announced new flood insurance rates that will more realistically reflect the true risks of insuring homes in flood zones when they go into effect in the fall and next spring. As it currently stands, the program’s heavily subsidized flood insurance lulls homeowners into a false sense of security. If folks knew the true cost of insuring their home against flood risk, they might not buy it in the first place. Bumping up rates would also discourage construction of new buildings in high-risk zones. But last month, as FEMA prepared to announce its overhaul, Schumer stepped in to object to the reforms, which would increase insurance costs for a fraction of Americans.
“FEMA shouldn’t be rushing to overhaul their process and risk dramatically increasing premiums on middle-class and working-class families without first consulting with Congress and the communities at greatest risk to the effects of climate change,” Alex Nguyen, a spokesperson for Senator Schumer, said in a statement. But FEMA’s Risk Rating 2.0 will actually lower insurance rates for 23 percent of households, and most of the rest will see increases no higher than $20 per month. Just 4 percent will see larger changes to their premiums. That 4 percent will mostly be composed of higher-value homeowners in high-risk areas — like people living in the Hamptons, where the median price of a home in 2020 was $1.2 million. Schumer’s refusal to embrace even a modest step to discourage people from coastal living highlights the political muck miring managed retreat.
Biden and Schumer aren’t the only politicians shying away from the need for managed retreat — it’s also a taboo subject in red states. In Florida, a state where rampant sea-level rise is already a facet of everyday life, Republican state legislators recently unveiled a suite of measures intended to fend off rising seas. The bills will direct $100 million per year over the next two years toward protections against sea-level rise and flooding. As a result, homeowners who pay to raise their houses higher off the ground will get a tax break. Local governments will get funding to come up with targeted strategies to deal with impending rise. The Florida government, in partnership with the University of South Florida, will establish a Flood Hub for Applied Research, which will exclusively focus on the state’s exposure to flooding and how to reduce those risks. But managed retreat is nowhere to be found on the menu of risk mitigation strategies.
Preston Robertson, president and CEO of the Florida Wildlife Federation, told Grist in March that both political parties in Florida are loath to talk retreat because of the financial implications. “How in the world do you do that when there are trillions of dollars in property just in Miami-Dade alone?” Robertson asked. “It’s almost impossible to get your mind around the fact that if the seas keep rising, those residences and commercial structures are going to become uninhabitable.”
Americans are used to confronting extreme weather and flooding with large-scale interventions — sea walls to keep the ocean at bay, pumps to dry our streets out, stilts to keep our houses above the flood line. When a hurricane or a wildfire destroys a community, officials talk about recovery, not conceding defeat. “Americans don’t like to lose,” Yuliya Panfil, director of a housing reform program at the progressive think tank New America, told Grist. “Retreat sounds like losing.”
It’s no surprise that politicians, who typically think in two-, four-, and six-year increments, are skirting the topic of managed retreat, which requires much longer-term planning. A 2019 Columbia University report found that “the inclination to avoid retreat is strong even in cities that have undergone a destructive climate disaster.” Progressive mayors have signed climate bills into law that don’t adequately plan for retreat. Efforts to reform the National Flood Insurance Program ran into roadblocks long before Chuck Schumer got involved. The federal government under former President Barack Obama temporarily toyed with establishing a federal framework for managed retreat but ended up dropping it. Alice Hill, former special assistant to Obama, called it a “third rail.”
“It’s really politically difficult to ask people to abandon their homes,” Panfil said. “Particularly in some of these coastal areas, these are often people’s retirement dreams and they’ve been saving for 30 years to buy themselves a home on the water.”
A few politicians at the local and state level are bucking the trend and touching the third rail. In the Florida Keys, local officials told residents in 2019 that some areas would be lost to the water forever. “As much as we love the Keys, there’s going to be a time when it’s going to be less population,” Rhonda Haag, the county’s sustainability director, said. She was saying the quiet part out loud: It was time for people to move.
And in southern California, state senator Ben Allen, a Democrat, introduced legislation in March that could become a pilot managed retreat project for the rest of the country. The bill would establish a loan program that would provide funds for California municipalities and counties so they can afford to buy up vulnerable coastal properties. Then, the county would rent them out to Californians while the properties are still desirable and use the money to pay off the loans. It’s essentially an extended-release buy-out program for at-risk properties. There’s a good chance that the bill will become law. If it works, other states could follow suit.
When the federal government inevitably starts to scramble for solutions to sea-level rise, it’ll likely look to these places for evidence of what works and what doesn’t. But until more politicians stop treating managed retreat as a third rail and start thinking about it as a lifeline, government plans to adapt to climate change will fall short.
Speaking at a carpenters’ training facility in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, President Joe Biden unveiled an economic recovery proposal called the American Jobs Plan, a plan reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in scope and ambition. It would pump $2 trillion into the economy this decade and heavily invest in fighting climate change and building green infrastructure. “This is no time to build back to the way things were,” the White House said in its preview of the plan. “This is the moment to reimagine and rebuild a new economy.”
That’s exactly what this plan would do over the next eight years. The American Jobs Plan would direct $621 billion toward transportation infrastructure, with $174 billion of that going toward building out the U.S.’s electric vehicle market. It would pour $111 billion into shoring up the nation’s crumbling water infrastructure and eliminate all lead pipes and service lines. It would direct $100 billion toward revamping the country’s electric infrastructure, in no small part to avoid the kind of power crises that have hit different parts of the country, most recently Texas, in the wake of extreme weather. The plan shoots for 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 — a timeline climate activists pushed Biden toward during his presidential campaign.
More than $200 billion would go to “produce, preserve, and retrofit more than two million affordable and sustainable places to live.” One hundred billion would go toward workforce development, and a portion of that money would be dedicated to job training programs for green industries. Workers who lose their jobs “through no fault of their own” — think out-of-work coal miners — would have access to a Dislocated Workers Program that would train them in new skills for sectors like clean energy, manufacturing, and caregiving.
Bridges would get fixed, roads would be repaved, tunnels would be bolstered. The plan has money for communities displaced by climate change and funding for “nature-based” solutions such as forests, wetlands, and watersheds. And 40 percent of the benefits of the investments in climate and clean infrastructure would go to disadvantaged communities.
“The American Jobs Plan will lead to a transformational progress in our effort to tackle climate change with American jobs and American ingenuity,” Biden said on Thursday, and “protect our community from billions of dollars of damage from historical superstorms, floods, wildfires, droughts, year after year.”
The White House says the plan would be paid for by reversing the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and levying new taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans. Biden would raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and eliminate billions of dollars in subsidies for fossil fuels, something he promised to do on the campaign trail. Biden promised that the plan wouldn’t raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000.
The American Jobs Plan is a blueprint for what Biden wants Congress to do. The bill legislators come up with could look different from what the White House announced this week. And in order for whatever plan eventually gets written to actually become law, the Biden administration and both chambers of Congress will have to navigate a series of tricky hurdles. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she wants the House to pass this infrastructure and jobs bill by July 4, which means she has just six weeks in session to make it happen. The progressive members of her caucus are already getting ready to rumble — they say the plan isn’t ambitious enough. Pelosi will have to do some wheeling and dealing to get her moderates in line, too. The veteran lawmaker is likely up to the challenge, though the timing is tight.
The bill will run into more serious roadblocks in the Senate, where Democrats’ majority is razor-thin. The White House says it wants to work with Republicans to pass the plan, but, even though infrastructure has historically been one of the rare legislative arenas where both parties have been able to find middle ground, many Republicans are almost certainly going to vote against it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is already gearing up for a fight over the proposed corporate tax hike. The White House will keep pushing for bipartisanship, but the reality is that this bill will likely get passed via the budget reconciliation process — which allows legislators to pass spending and tax measures while bypassing the filibuster process that allows the minority party to block any Senate bill that doesn’t have 60 votes. But the rules that govern the budget reconciliation process are strict, and squeezing all of Biden’s hopes and dreams into a form that fits the process will be tough.
Democrats have incentives to push Biden’s agenda through. Polling from the progressive think tank Data for Progress and the climate PR campaign Climate Power shows a majority of voters think the federal government should be doing more to bring America’s infrastructure up to speed. The question is whether voters like infrastructure enough to vote blue in 2022 and 2024.
“The divisions of the moment shouldn’t stop us from doing the right thing for the future,” Biden said in Pittsburgh. Biden has come a long way since the Democratic primary, when the subdued former vice president promised to make America normal again. The next several months will determine whether the Democrat can pull off one of the biggest economic transformations since World War II.
