Every year, hundreds to thousands of megawatts’ worth of wind turbines across the United States get a facelift. These aging turbines have their rotors swapped out, their blades replaced, and key components like the generator upgraded in order to enhance the machines’ ability to produce electricity from wind. This process is known as “repowering.” Included among the components that sometimes get replaced are magnets made with rare-earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, which also play essential roles inside smartphones, laptops, and electric car motors.
The wide range of applications for rare-earth minerals translates into a lot of potential ways to repurpose the ingredients from spent wind turbine magnets. But today, most of these magnets wind up in landfills. It’s estimated that less than 1 percent of rare earths are recycled globally — from wind turbines, dead hard drives, and everything else.
Technicians examine a wind turbine in Tianjin, China, in 2022.
Zhao Zishuo / Xinhua via Getty Images
The U.S. government, fearing a future rare-earth supply crunch that could hold back the energy transition, wants to change that. In January, the Department of Energy, or DOE, announced 20 winners of the first phase of its $5.1 million “Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize.” Funded by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, the prize seeks to develop “a cost-effective and sustainable recycling industry” for wind turbine components that aren’t being recycled commercially today, including wind turbine blades and the supersized magnets inside some generators. Each of the winning groups is receiving a $75,000 cash prize to help advance its recycling idea. If a team’s initial results are promising, it may go on to win an additional half a million dollars in cash, as well as a $100,000 voucher for technical assistance from a DOE national laboratory.
The end goal, said Tyler Christoffel, technology manager in the DOE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office, is to bring promising recycling ideas closer to commercialization “on a timeline that would impact clean energy deployment and our decarbonization goals.”
Rare-earth magnets are the strongest commercial magnets that exist today. They have a variety of uses, including electric vehicle motors and several types of wind turbine generators. Despite their importance for clean energy, mining and refining rare-earth elements is anything but green. Large volumes of earth must be moved in order to dig up these metals, and harsh chemicals are needed to concentrate and separate them. The environmental impacts of rare-earth mining, coupled with the expectation that global demand for rare-earth minerals will skyrocket in the coming decades, suggests we should be doing everything possible to recycle rare earths from old technology so they can be used again. Considering that the generators inside wind turbines can contain hundreds of pounds of rare-earth metals, it seems like a no-brainer for the wind industry to start recycling rare-earth magnets as soon as possible.
The Mountain Pass rare-earth mine in California.
Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images
But that’s not what’s happening.
“Right now, to our understanding, essentially no rare-earth elements from wind are recycled,” Christoffel told Grist, citing the immaturity of rare earth recycling technology, the economic challenges that come with scaling up new recycling processes, and the limited quantity of spent turbine magnets in need of recycling today. As the U.S. continues to expand its land-based wind fleet and move offshore, where rare-earth-intensive generators are favored, the dearth of magnet recycling options will “become a much more pressing issue,” he said.
The DOE is hoping to get ahead of this problem through its new recycling prize.
Of the 20 teams that won an initial tranche of prize money last month, four are explicitly focused on magnet recycling. Christoffel said these teams were chosen because their recycling solutions seemed novel and promising, and because they demonstrated they were “capable of advancing the technologies to commercialization.” Additionally, most of these groups proposed cleaner and less energy-intensive alternatives to traditional metal recycling approaches.
“What this prize really helps to do is advance some of these recycling technologies that can offer a lower-emissions, lower-resource use [path] to a magnet,” Christoffel said.
For instance, in one process for recycling rare-earth magnets that’s previously been studied, magnet scrap is placed in a furnace at elevated temperatures and exposed to hydrogen gas in order to extract the metals. If the scrap has become highly corroded, or oxidized, an additional, emissions-intensive step called molten salt electrolysis may be required to convert those elements back into a metallic form. A phase-one prize-winning team from the University of Utah is pioneering a novel approach that relies on chemical reactions involving both hydrogen and magnesium at elevated temperatures to separate neodymium from magnet scrap and turn it back into a high-purity metal. With this process, recyclers are able to bypass molten salt electrolysis, considerably reducing both carbon emissions and energy usage.
“We have demonstrated the reaction, the concept, works” at a very small scale, project lead Zhigang Fang, a metallurgist at the University of Utah, told Grist. Over the next six months, the team plans to “scale up to a bigger quantity so that we can demonstrate … that this is a robust process that has the potential to be scaled up to a production scale.”
In another popular metal recycling approach, hydrometallurgy, recyclers often use strong acids to extract metals from scrap. Phase-one prize winner Critical Materials Recycling, Inc. is taking a greener twist on this approach with acid-free dissolution recycling, a method developed at Ames National Laboratory in which rare earths are extracted from magnets using a water-based solution.
A resource technician prepares a generator for a wind turbine for shipping in Houston.
Nick de la Torre / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
Critical Materials Recycling’s parent company, TdVib, signed a licensing agreement for the tech in 2021 and is in the process of spinning up a pilot plant that uses it to recycle rare earths from electronic waste. With the DOE’s support, Critical Materials Recycling will now explore the logistics and economics of setting up a domestic wind turbine magnet recycling industry. Eventually, with additional funding, the company hopes to actually start recycling magnets from turbines at a pilot scale using its technology.
Partnering with the wind industry “seemed like a natural fit” for Critical Materials Recycling, company CEO Daniel Bina told Grist. Bina noted that Iowa, where the company is headquartered, is the second biggest wind producer in the nation. “We should obviously be working with those people in our backyard to reclaim rare earths from materials that we have right here,” he said.
With phase one of the competition over, teams are now working on their phase-two submissions, which include a prototype demonstration of their technology and a detailed plan to scale it up further. Up to six teams will be eligible to win $500,000 phase-two prizes, which the DOE expects to announce in late summer or early fall, Christoffel said.
While the prize competition itself won’t result in a brand-new recycling industry, the DOE hopes to produce a suite of technologies that could serve as the foundation for commercial rare-earth magnet recycling from wind turbines. Currently, there aren’t a huge number of wind turbines that have reached the end of their estimated 30-year lifespan. But that will change in the coming decades. In the meantime, there are some magnets that could be recycled from turbines following repowering, plus additional scrap being produced during magnet fabrication.
“Hopefully, this kind of competition will bring more attention” to the fact that there are ways to recycle rare-earth magnets from wind turbines, said Linda Wang, who’s leading another prize-winning team at Purdue University that is developing a low-carbon, hydrogen-powered rare-earth recycling process. “We have the technology. … The companies who own the wind turbines should do some long-term planning to collect them, instead of ship[ping] them to landfills.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for WBEZ newsletters to get local news you can trust.
Naomi Davis won’t lose her faith in the earth. At a recent community meeting in Chicago’s South Side she wanted to drive the point home — that the city’s Black community will not be left out of the new, emerging green economy.
To do it, she’s betting on energy trapped deep below the surface of the earth known as geothermal, which could be an answer to heating and cooling homes more efficiently and a path to building decarbonization.
Davis heads Chicago’s Blacks in Green, an environmental justice group which has dedicated the past 17 years to figuring out the blueprint for self-sustaining, climate-resilient Black communities everywhere.
“We’re hit first and worst, resourced least and last, and we contribute the least to global warming,” said Davis.
Naomi Davis speaks at a South Side Chicago meeting about geothermal power.
David McDuffie
Last year the group won the support of the Biden administration with the Environmental Protection Agency awarding a five-year $10 million grant. The money will enable Blacks in Green to work with other environmental justice communities in the Midwest to take advantage of historic funding made available through the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Chicago organization is already beginning to work on sustainability projects in Cleveland.
Back home, Davis is focused on carbon-free energy: how to generate it, how to make it affordable, and how to get it out of the ground. Her aim is to ensure that her community won’t be left behind as the rest of the city becomes sustainable.
“We’re not going to be the ones left on the gas bills with the spiraling costs and the technology that is continuing to pollute us,” she said, adding for emphasis, “No.”
In 2023, Blacks in Green was one of 11 community partners across the country chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy to design and develop a community geothermal heating and cooling district. That will mean building out a shared geothermal network across four city blocks containing more than 100 multi-family and single-family homes.
U.S. Department of Energy
The goal is to decarbonize buildings and reduce energy costs for families. To get there, Blacks in Green received nearly $750,000 to kick off the initial phase of the pilot, which includes hosting community meetings and determining household needs.
Davis said Chicago’s West Woodlawn neighborhood — located about 9 miles south of the city’s downtown — is ready to experiment with geothermal energy.
But at the Blacks in Green community meeting, neighbors like Debra Gay and her mother Retta Ford have questions about what exactly it’ll take to bring geothermal energy to the South Side.
“Given that our city lots are so tightly spaced, how would you do that for an existing home and will that create some disruption?” asked Gay.
Ford, Gay’s mother, worried whether the project could destabilize the foundation of older homes.
Debra Gay, right, and her mother Retta Ford, left, attend a community meeting about geothermal power in Chicago’s South Side. Grist / JuanPablo Ramirez-Franco
Not necessarily, according to Andrew Barbeau, president of the Accelerate Group, a clean energy consulting firm working alongside Blacks in Green to design and deploy the geothermal pilot project.
The key to geothermal in these old neighborhoods: the alleys.
“Out in front, you got water, you got gas, you got sewer, and other things are alleys,” Barbeau said. “There’s nothing under that ground.”
The plan is to leverage the earth underneath the alleys behind homes and businesses to build out a community geothermal system. That will mean a series of deep, 400-foot holes that pipe water into the ground, absorb the temperature of the earth, and bring it back up to the surface to make use of it.
By building the community heating system beneath the alleys, the project sidesteps the major challenge that major American cities like Chicago face: lack of open, workable space. Once installed, buildings along the alleyway can connect to the underground heating system at their own convenience.
This all works because the earth functions as a kind of thermal battery. The sun beats down on the earth, and it absorbs some of that energy. So much so that between 20 and 40 feet below the surface of the earth, the temperature hovers consistently around 12.8 degrees C (55 degrees F) year round, according to Andrew Stumpf, a geologist with the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“So you circulate water in a pipe, and you exchange the heat from the pipe into the water, and you’re pulling that temperature out,” Stumpf said.
Experts call geothermal energy a nearly inexhaustible energy source, and it isn’t limited to just Chicago. It can be brought online almost anywhere. Back in 2019, the DOE released a study charting the path to massively scaling geothermal across the country. It found significant economic opportunity for geothermal district systems throughout the Midwest and Northeast, with Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania leading the pack.
With 23 geothermal districts across the country, the U.S. lags behind Europe, where nearly 400 are in operation.
While the DOE is investing in geothermal districts which rely on the earth’s near surface temperatures, they’re also betting big on larger-scale enhanced geothermal systems, which typically require drilling miles underground. Enhanced geothermal works by pumping fluid deep into the earth, which is then recovered as steam and put to work to generate electricity.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced $60 million for three enhanced geothermal system pilots in California, Oregon, and Utah. An analysis from the DOE last year found that by advancing enhanced geothermal, the U.S. could be on track to generating 90 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power 65 million homes by 2050.
Geothermal in West Woodlawn is a long way out. Once the community engagement phase wraps up, Blacks in Green will have the opportunity to be selected for up to $4 million in grants to actually go out and build the system.
But there are still major questions left. Who owns the geothermal network? Who decides the rates? West Woodlawn could develop public benefit corporations or local co-ops that share benefits with residents.
The hope isn’t just to break ground on geothermal but explore new ownership models that center equity along the way.
Back at the Blacks in Green meeting, resident Rosazlia Grillier said she thinks a lot about what people sacrifice when they’re unable to pay their energy bills. She said the more that people know about geothermal, the more likely they’ll be on board.
“Prices around energy costs are skyrocketing,” said Grillier. “And so we can either just complain about it, or we can educate ourselves about it and make the change that we know needs to happen.”
Samantha Gonsalves-Wetherell, a senior at the University of Arizona, has spent years urging university officials to take climate change seriously. As a leader of UArizona Divest, she and her classmates have been pushing the university toward three goals: to divest from fossil fuels by 2029; commit to no further investments in fossil fuels; and to implement socially responsible investing goals.
“It’s hard to both combat the climate crisis and also fund it,” said Gonsalves-Wetherell. She has met with university officials to ask them what stocks the university has invested in and how much revenue oil and gas investments bring in.
But until now, she had no idea that the university, like more than a dozen other land-grant universities created through the Morrill Act, earned millions more through another route: nearly 700,000 acres of land taken from Indigenous nations that is set aside for oil, gas and mineral leases.
A Grist investigation published earlier this week reported that 14 universities — including the University of Arizona — receive millions in annual income from more than 8 million acres of surface and subsurface land taken from 123 Native nations. Over the past five years, these properties have generated more than $2.2 billion. Nearly a fourth of the trust lands are dedicated to fossil fuels or mineral mining including coal mining.
University activists who have been lobbying their universities to pull their endowments out of fossil fuels say Grist’s findings are in line with what they’ve come to expect from their schools: a willingness to turn a blind eye to their complicity in climate change and societal injustice.
When Claire Sullivan, a senior at Colorado State University, learned of Grist’s findings, she thought of the land acknowledgement she’s seen on every syllabus and plastered on many walls all over campus.
The two-paragraph statement ends with this note: “Our founding came at a dire cost to Native Nations and peoples whose land this University was built upon. This acknowledgment is the education and inclusion we must practice in recognizing our institutional history, responsibility, and commitment.”
According to Sullivan, CSU says all of its fossil fuel investments are indirect, but it hasn’t made any promises to avoid direct investments or phase out any existing ones, despite the disproportionate harm that climate change is wreaking on Native peoples. Sullivan’s exasperation at the university’s intractable stance is topped only by her awe at what she describes as their hypocrisy.
“It’s just crazy that you could be making this commitment outwardly and just be doing the opposite in practice,” she said.
Not every divestment campaign has been so frustrating. Many university activists, such as at Harvardand Yale, have seen success. Gracelyn McClure is a senior and environmental sciences major at the University of Minnesota. She was only a sophomore when school officials decided to withdraw its investments from fossil fuels by 2028. It was a huge victory, but McClure said the group’s advocacy work isn’t over.
The group has been meeting with university officials to try to ensure that as contracts for fossil fuel investments expire, the money is being shifted into investments that aren’t similarly harmful. For example, they’ve asked the school not to reinvest in mining that’s opposed by Indigenous peoples.
Even though the initial campaign was successful, the students haven’t yet been able to garner any new promises to avoid nuclear energy or other mining that they fear could harm Native peoples. “They’re not super receptive all the time to our asks,” McClure said of the administration. But she thinks working with Native nations to ensure that reinvestment isn’t negatively affecting their communities isn’t asking for much.
“It’s the least that the university can do, considering how much they profited from Native land, and bodies too,” she said.
A spokesman for the University of Minnesota said the university has been working with tribal nations to address its history of stolen land, including returning about 3,400 acres to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The spokesman also cited the school’s investments in Native student tuition waivers, Indigenous language revitalization and staff training.
He added that the school can’t speak to land managed by the state. The University of Arizona and Colorado State University did not comment on the trust lands revenue.
Many students at universities that have pledged to divest from fossil fuels have been turning their attention to different but related causes, says Alicia Colomer, managing director at Campus Climate Network, which supports student climate activists. She worked on the successful New York University divestment campaign and says some of the newer student demands include asking schools to stop putting fossil fuel executives on their boards and stop accepting research money from oil companies.
To her, learning about the trust lands revenue feels like more of the same problem: “shocking but not shocking.”
She hopes students can sway their institutions to stop practices that are harmful to Indigenous lands and people.
Nadira Mitchell, a Navajo student at University of Arizona, hopes to be part of that change. She’s studying natural resources at the university in the hopes that she will be able to work for her tribal nation one day and make a difference. It has felt isolating to be one of the only Native students in her environmental courses.
Now, she’s struck by the juxtaposition between how Indigenous people like her own are disproportionately harmed by climate change and university’s investments in fossil fuels.
In December, a federal judge found that Enel Green Power, an Italian energy corporation operating an 84-turbine wind farm on the Osage Reservation for nearly a decade, had trespassed on Native land. The ruling was a clear victory for the Osage Nation and the company estimated that complying with the order to tear down the turbines would cost nearly $260 million.
Attorneys familiar with Federal Indian law say it’s uncommon for U.S. courts to side so clearly with tribal nations and actually expel developers trespassing on their land. But observers also see the ruling as part of a broader trend: Gone are the days when developers could ignore Indigenous rights with impunity. Now, even if projects that threaten Native land and cultural resources ultimately proceed, they may come with years-long delays that tack on millions of dollars. As more companies look to build wind and solar farms or mine minerals for renewable energy, failing to recognize Indigenous sovereignty could make the clean energy transition a lot more expensive and much further away.
“I think tribes are starting to see that they have more leverage than they thought, and that they’ve previously exercised, over all this infrastructure that’s on their land,” said Pilar Thomas, an attorney, member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona and former deputy director of the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy. “They want to make sure that they’re getting their fair share.”
Rick Tallman, a program manager at Colorado School of Mines’ Center for Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty who has spent more than two decades working on financing and consulting for clean energy projects, calls the Osage Nation ruling a wake-up call.
“If you’re going to develop energy in the U.S. you’ve got to do it with the support of tribal communities,” he said.
According to Tallman, investors don’t like uncertainty. He said a lot of infrastructure funders are very conservative and won’t back a project unless they are confident it will succeed, which includes getting the buy-in of affected Indigenous Nations. There’s no upper limit to how much the project could cost if investors don’t get it right.
Marion Werkheiser, founding partner of Cultural Heritage Partners, said the costs are so high that some renewable energy projects never even get off the ground, citing the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound that was opposed by members of the Wampanoag Tribe.
And it’s not just a U.S. trend; Indigenous peoples around the world are fighting to enforce their rights, especially the right to free, prior and informed consent to projects on their land–a concept enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, the U.S. hasn’t codified that into law, and compliance globally is spotty.
“Renewable energies are actually not that good in respecting Indigenous rights,” said Genevieve Rose from the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. “They have this feeling that because they bring up something good, something green, that they are automatically a good thing.”
But her colleague David Berger said there’s more awareness and resistance from Indigenous peoples, and companies are being forced to factor in those costs. He pointed to Norway, where the state-owned company that developed an illegal wind farm has agreed to pay Indigenous Sámi people about $675,000 every year for the next 25 years for violating their rights. “What’s good is you have that legal structure so communities can push back,” Berger said.
Wesley Furlong, an Anchorage-based senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said more tribes are filing lawsuits in the U.S., partly because the legal landscape is changing. For example, the National Historic Preservation Act, a federal law managing the preservation of historic resources, has been around since 1966, but it was only in 1999 that the federal government codified regulations related to communicating with tribes about projects that affect them, and the rules weren’t fully in effect until 2004. Some tribes are just now learning about their rights.
Another reason for the increase in lawsuits is because some tribal nations have more resources to fund litigation. “Indian gaming has been a game-changer for tribes to be able to raise revenue and hire attorneys,” Furlong said.
That combination of more legal tools, more financial resources and more education about Native rights, Furlong said, has led to more tribes getting involved in energy developments on their traditional and ancestral territories, including lands with historic connections and are not owned by a tribe. And he only expects that to continue: Most of the U.S. reserves of lithium, copper, cobalt and nickel — metals key to the clean energy transition — are within 35 miles of Federal Indian Reservations, according to a study by the investment firm MSCI.
That’s something renewable energy developers need to be aware of, said Thomas. “I am a staunch believer that if you are within spitting distance of a tribe that you should be engaged in outreach to the tribe,” she said.
Not every project is going to get buy-in, she adds, but she encourages companies to have patients and continue to reach out to tribes even if they don’t respond. Furlong from the Native American Rights Fund said project proponents may erroneously assume that tribes will always be opposed, forgetting that tribal governments want what’s in the best interest of their citizens.
Bottom line, it’s much less costly for companies to invest in tribal consultations and get them right from the get-go, says Daniel Cardenas, the head of the National Tribal Energy Association and a member of the Pit River Tribe who has consulted with tribes and companies regarding fossil fuel projects. “The cost of engagement is almost nothing compared to the cost of what they’re going to have to pay [if they don’t do it right],” he said of developers.
Werkheiser has seen some progress, with some banks, insurance companies and energy developers adopting Indigenous peoples policies to guide their investments and some companies undergoing voluntary certifications to show their projects are ethical and respectful of Indigenous rights. “Financial institutions are recognizing that this is a real business risk and they’re building it into the cost of capital for these companies,” she said.
But overall, change is slow, she said.
“For the most part, the renewable energy developers are repeating the mistakes that fossil fuels developers have made over the years,” she said. “They’re not engaging with tribes early as potential partners and information sources during their planning process, and they are basically deferring their own relationship with tribes to the federal government.”
That’s a mistake, said David Kane, a consultant who leads WindHorse Strategic Initiatives. Energy companies often mistakenly perceive tribal chairs as though they are the equivalent of small-town mayors, rather than recognizing them as heads of state.
Because of that, he says companies often disrespect tribes from the beginning by sending lower-level representatives to liaise with them, and many companies may never even step foot on a reservation or go before tribal councils. Developers often complain that it takes a long time to build relationships with tribal members but Kane says it’s better to do so before projects get underway.
“There’s still a lot of mistrust of white men and with good reason,” he said. And the energy industry, including renewables, he said, is still predominantly white and male.
Another challenge is that sometimes companies assume what will work with one tribe will work with another, said Cardenas from the National Tribal Energy Association.
“There’s 574 tribes, and each one operates differently and independently,” he said. “So if you know one tribe, you just know one tribe.”
He thinks tribal nations should be seen as partners, even sponsoring partners, with shared equity in the developments. There’s growing interest: Over the past two decades, tribal nations have pursued hundreds of clean energy projects, with the Inflation Reduction Act recently increasing funding for such projects.
But in the meantime, costly litigation continues. Last week in the U.S., four tribal nations sued a developer to prevent a $10 billion wind energy transmission line from going into operation. And in Oklahoma, the Osage Nation is now seeking damages from Enel. A judge still needs to decide how much that will cost the company.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
On a Sunday morning in Charlevoix, a small town surrounded by lakes in northern Michigan, people gathered in the Greensky Hill Indian United Methodist Church. The small, one-room log building is almost 200 years old and the hymns are sung in English and Anishinaabemowin.
It was December, so Pastor Johnathan Mays was leading an Advent service, one of his last, since he would soon retire. In between reflections on scripture, Mays touched on an important venture: The church is planning to install solar panels on their larger meeting hall, working withMichigan-based nonprofit Solar Faithful to do so.
Greensky Hill has a long history of environmental care and stewardship, grounded in Anishinaabe culture, with a majority Native congregation.
One of the ministry’s priorities is the “greening of Greensky Hill.”
Mays said that prompts them to ask “how we can use our space and our resources to address those issues for climate care, or creation care, or what some people call Earthkeeping?”
As Greensky Hill works to become more sustainable, it’s switching from propane to heat pumps to become more energy efficient. Mays said solar will allow them to use renewable energy and give that energy back to the grid.
“The biggest issue was how can we get this huge building off of greenhouse gas creation?” he said, referring to the meeting hall, which was built in the 1990s.
Across the country, houses of worship are pursuing solar systems.
As of 2021, about 2 percent of houses of worship in the United States have solar systems, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which the University of California manages for the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s disproportionately high; houses of worship make up only 0.6 percent of all non-residential buildings.
Pastor Jonathan Mays talks to his congregation at Greensky Hill Indian United Methodist Church in Charlevoix, Michigan. The church is putting solar panels on its meeting hall next door.
Grist / Izzy Ross
But these projects can be difficult to execute. Congregations can have tight budgets, older buildings and more pressing priorities. And switching energy systems can mean a lot of bureaucratic paperwork for which they might not have the staff.
And, because houses of worship generally don’t pay taxes, they’ve also had trouble capitalizing on renewable energy tax benefits.
One alternative has been for them to work with third parties that could benefit from the tax credits. For instance, an investor could buy and install solar panels on a church. The church would buy that power from the investor, but wouldn’t own the panels — an arrangement called a power purchase agreement.
Now, they have another option. The federal Inflation Reduction Act has made it possible for governments and tax-exempt entities, including houses of worship, to get tax credits for renewable projects. Called direct pay, the program provides them with a tax credit worth up to 30 percent of the installation cost. That can help cover some expenses, and advocates say it’s critical to getting more congregations to consider solar.
“I expect in the coming year, it’s really going to boom, the solar on houses of worship,” said Sarah Paulos, the programs director for Interfaith Power and Light. “It makes a lot of sense. If they can cut their utility bill way back, then they have more money to do what they’re there for, which is their mission.”
Interfaith Power and Light might sound like a local utility (or maybe a prayer group) but it’s actually a national network focused on climate action and religion, started in 1998 as a coalition of Episcopal churches that worked together to buy renewable energy. It has since expanded to other denominations and faiths.
Paulos has worked in this field for almost 20 years. She said when she started, there were a lot of climate deniers, especially in churches.
“In the beginning, people of faith were really, really being courageous and stepping out and talking about responding to climate change through renewable energy and energy efficiency as a moral call to care for creation,” she said.
While there’s increasing acceptance that climate change is happening, religious Americans are still far from unified in their views.
A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that most religious adults believed they should protect the Earth. But for a variety of reasons, highly religious people tend to be less concerned about climate change than other adults in the U.S.
One way to reach people and engage them in climate action is through tangible efforts like solar, said Leah Wiste, the executive director of Michigan Interfaith Power and Light.
“In the public conversation, I think we’ve kind of failed to see the leadership that people of faith and conscience are taking on these issues,” she said.
Local involvement is critical to getting more people to install solar and non-residential buildings – such as schools or houses of worship – are part of that.
A study published last November in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy found that when non-residential buildings install solar, they can spur other installations in the area.
But raising awareness of solar doesn’t necessarily make it more equitable.
The researchers say it’s unclear how effective houses of worship can be in encouraging more solar in their communities “without directly addressing low-income barriers to solar adoption,” like budget constraints and lower home ownership rates.
And houses of worship with solar are located disproportionately in “relatively wealthy, white and educated census tracts,” according to Berkeley Lab, mirroring the broader trend.
Still, many people working at the intersection of religion and renewables say these projects are an opportunity for more people in those communities to learn about solar.
“Part of that can happen just through the simple physical act of putting a system on the roof,” said Galen Barbose, a scientist at Berkeley Lab. “But houses of worship are also in a unique position to be able to sponsor events, talk to their membership, and potentially really serve as emissaries for solar energy.”
Rob Rafson has worked to put solar panels on churches for years. He’s the president of the solar energy company Chart House Energy.
About a year ago, Chart House Energy teamed up with the Climate Witness Project, Michigan Interfaith Power and Light, and climate activists in the Detroit area to launch Solar Faithful.
Rafson wanted to make it easier for houses of worship to adopt solar.
“It’s been a very big challenge,” Rafson said. “Because churches — they’re nonprofits, they don’t have a budget, they don’t want to borrow money, and the size project… is too small for investors to invest in.”
Despite such challenges, congregations have managed to install panels. At the First Lutheran Church in Muskegon, a new solar array shines on the roof.
“They’re hard to see,” said Pastor Bill Uetricht. He’s walking around the church, craning his neck, trying to get a good view of the panels. “You can see that it’s on about half of that roof up there.”
Now that it has solar panels, the church needs to buy less power from utilities. That’s expected to lower the energy bill.
It’s an example of a power purchase agreement. By purchasing the solar-powered energy, First Lutheran will pay off the project cost of around $175,000 to an investor. Buying the power from their own array, they’re slowly paying back their investor. Once that’s done, the power that comes from the array is essentially free.
Pastor Bill Uetricht at First Lutheran Church in Muskegon, Michigan, said “it only makes senses” that his church would have solar panels.
Grist / Izzy Ross
Uetricht said First Lutheran got involved with solar when a couple in the congregation gave the church two panels they didn’t know what to do with.
“I contacted a cousin of mine who works in alternative energy, and I said, ‘Hey, send me to someplace where I can do something with these two panels,’” Uetricht said.
They ended up working with Solar Faithful.
Uetricht said installing solar panels is one way of fulfilling their mission. He said that the world doesn’t belong to us, but that it is a gift – one that we haven’t been caring for.
“Old technologies have contributed to that lack of care,” he said. “So it only makes sense that we would be at the forefront of encouraging alternative energy sources.”
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Chicago could soon be the first major Midwestern city with an indoor emissions standard that would make gas-powered appliances and heating systems a thing of the past.
The Clean and Affordable Buildings Ordinance, introduced by Mayor Brandon Johnson during the first city council meeting of the year last week, would effectively phase out fossil-fuel based appliances and heating systems in new construction and substantially improved buildings. The new rule would take effect within a year of approval.
“This is an opportunity not just to address climate, but we can build an entire economy around it,” Johnson said.
Not everyone is convinced.
Earlier this month, two aldermen successfully sidelined Chicago’s electrification ordinance by referring it to the rules committee, a tactic often used to obstruct ordinances with procedural delays. Once referred out of the rules committee, the ordinance will have to make it through the zoning and environmental committees before heading to city council for a full vote.
Some of the state’s most influential gas and construction unions are openly arrayed against the passage of the indoor emission standard. Together they’re calling for further trials and studies into the costs of implementing the proposed rule.
“Homeowners should not have to choose affordability over going green,” said Kristine Kavanagh, who is with International Union of Engineers Local 150. “They should have options for both clean and affordable energy”
As the mayor and his allies see it, the push for building electrification in Chicago is part of a broader project to not just wean the city off fossil fuels but also begin to address the cumulative health impacts of indoor air pollution and burdensome utility bills. The effort was a key recommendation of the city’s Building Decarbonization Policy Working Group back in 2022. The report determined that buildings are Chicago’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions — nearly 70 percent.
“The Clean Affordable Buildings Act is the first step in a managed, planned process to move away from dirty, expensive gas and embrace a cheaper, cleaner energy future for all Chicagoans,” said Alderwoman Maria Hadden, who represents the 49th ward on the south side of the city.
Cities across the country are looking towards building electrification as a pathway to cutting planet-warming emissions. Since the first-of-its-kind electrification ordinance was introduced in Berkeley, Calif back in 2019, over 100 local governments across the country have adopted similar policies. Major metropolitan cities like Los Angeles, New York City and Seattle have all gotten on board to rework building codes to prioritize electrification for new construction. Very soon Chicago could be next.
But the surge in local electrification policies has faced significant opposition. Berkeley’s electrification ordinance was overturned by a federal appeals panel last year. Over 20 states have passed legislation effectively prohibiting municipalities from banning natural gas connections.
In a statement to Grist, Peoples Gas, the major gas utility that serves the Chicago area said, “This proposed ordinance would increase costs and risk reliability for everyone, especially during the coldest days of the year like Chicago has been seeing.”
But Chicago’s utility bills are already unmanageable. This past November, the Illinois Commerce Commision approved a $302 million rate hike rate hike for Peoples Gas that is expected to make Chicago gas customers’ utility bills more expensive than they already are — approximately one in five Chicagoans are more than 30 days behind on their gas bills.
“We don’t want to just trade one energy source for another,” Angela Tovar, the city’s Chief Sustainability Officer said. She called the proposed policy “fuel neutral,”and this is a key point for Tovar and others who helped draft the ordinance. They want to avoid the legal challenges that plagued the original iteration of electrification efforts , many of which were largely outright bans on gas hookups. A handful of those have already been withdrawn.
Following the lead of New York City, Chicago’s workaround instead takes aim at indoor air pollution by limiting the combustion of any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy. In the process, the new standard would make natural gas-powered appliances obsolete and encourage the adoption of electric stoves and heating systems. The ordinance does, however, carve out a list of exemptions including emergency generators, health care facilities and commercial kitchens.
Illinois set a goal to sunset fossil fuels by 2050. Oak Park, a Chicago suburb with a population just over 50,000, took the lead last summer and passed the first electrification standards of any local government in the Midwest. Oak Park architect Tom Bassett-Dilley said enthusiasm for living fossil fuel-free is already obvious.
“We don’t do any buildings that have gas lines in them anymore for the last three or four years,” Bassett-Dilley said. “There’s a lot of people out there looking for it, the demand has definitely skyrocketed.”
Allies of Chicago’s new emission standard call it a reasonable first step towards hitting the state’s climate goals and mitigating the worst impacts of climate change.
“Equitable decarbonization is a core principle that guides us in the introduction of this policy, as well as future actions as a city,” Tovar said. “We must design better outcomes that work for every building type and every neighborhood across Chicago, we must ensure that the benefits of transitioning to clean energy sources are accessible to all regardless of your zip code.”
The past five years have been something of a blur for the crew at Energy Concepts Enterprises. The company, which has been installing solar panels in and around Fresno, California, since 1992, could barely keep up with demand as consumers embraced the technology in ever-greater numbers. Every year was busier than the last.
Until 2023, when business plummeted. According to marketing director Carlos Beccar, sales fell from as many as 40 systems a month to 10, or less. “It’s been an incredible downturn,” he said. “We laid off half of our staff and we’re probably not done.”
California is leading what analysts expect to be the first year-over-year decline in residential solar installations since 2017. Energy consultants at Wood MacKenzie anticipate that the state, which accounts for the bulk of the United States market, will see a 41 percent drop in 2024. Nationwide, they predict a 12 percent contraction.
“We’re expecting the first half of the year to be pretty tough for installers,” said Zoë Gaston, a principal analyst for residential solar at the firm. She said she’s heard of more than 100 bankruptcies already across the country.
One culprit is high interest rates, which have made it more difficult for homeowners to afford expensive solar projects. Gaston said this is especially true in states that have traditionally seen a higher portion of systems purchased with loans, such as Texas, which saw a 29 percent drop in installs between the third quarters of 2022 and 2023. Leased systems have picked upsome of the slack and, excluding California, installations are anticipated to grow roughly 4 percent this year — but any growth, should it happen, would be in stark contrast with recent annual growth rates that have sometimes topped 40 percent.
Beccar says interest rates have been a factor in California’s decline too, but a relatively minor one that his company was prepared to weather. The much bigger factor has been a state Public Utilities Commision rule change that slashed the rate at which homeowners can sell power back to their electricity provider. The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., or PG&E, stated in an annual report that the new rules will reduce compensation for solar new customers by about 80 percent. Wood Mackenzie says the new net metering rates have caused the payback period for residential systems to almost triple, from 5 or 6 years to 14 or 15.
“It’s like they put a brick wall in front of us,” Beccar said, explaining that for many homeowners exploring solar the large upfront investment no longer makes sense. While the company was able to get by most of last year installing systems it had sold before the change, the lack of new sales has installations grinding to a halt and workers sitting idle. “I think the impacts are going to be more severe coming up.”
The commission argued that the rate change brings homeowner compensation more in line with the value of the electricity they produce, rather than having other customers subsidize the program. Another goal, it said in a statement, was also to encourage the addition of battery storage to residential solar systems. In an email, spokesperson Terrie Prosper, said battery installations have indeed jumped dramatically, and she contended that payback periods remain in the range of 5 to 8 years. Major utility companies in the state, including PG&E, lobbied in support of the changes.
Of course the utility supported the bill, said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association. “They have natural gas in their middle name,” she said. “ The Association, along with environmental groups, opposed the net metering overhaul. Del Chiaro says the “cost-shift” narrative is misleading and that the commision based its findings on flawed modeling, rather than utility bills, with the end result being less solar deployment.
“All of this flies in the face of where America is trying to go in terms of clean energy,” she said.
A number of other states are poised to potentially follow California, such as Oregon and Wisconsin. This worries Thomas Devine, a solar installer who left California after its recent changes. His company still operates in five other states. “It frustrates the hell out of me,” he said. “We can’t afford to have this spread across the country.”
Gaston expects the nationwide slowdown to be relatively short and the rebound larger than it was after the 2017 slump, which occurred when several companies quit the residential solar business. “There is some upside at the end of the year if the interest rates come down,” she said, also noting that the Inflation Reduction Act extended the 30 percent credit on solar until 2032. Current headwinds have muted its effects, she said, but “in 2025, we’ll start to see more of the benefits.”
Beccar is optimistic that his company will survive the slump, but he hates the term “rebound.” To him it conjures images of a basketball bouncing back to almost the height from which it was dropped.
“This is going to be one of those things where it’s like when you throw those weight balls,” he quipped. “You throw it really hard and it comes back up about an inch.”
As day broke over the small mountain town of Elliston, Virginia one Monday in October, masked figures in thick coats emerged from the woods surrounding a construction site. Three of them approached three excavators and, one by one, locked themselves to the machines, bringing the day’s work to a halt. As they did so, several dozen of their fellow protesters gathered around them, unfurling banners and chanting amidst the groaning and beeping of construction equipment.
They made their way across the field, over patches of bare earth, around sections of rusty pipe meant for burial beneath the mountain. Eventually the metal tubes will form yet another section of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will soon carry 2 billion cubic feet of fracked methane from the shalefields of West Virginia to North Carolina each day. Their breath billowed in the crisp air. Beyond them stretched a bright blue sky, and mountains tinged with yellow. The past night’s rain pooled on the muddy and compacted soil beneath their feet.
Workers in highlighter-yellow vests and hard hats milled around, some looking amused, others frustrated. One or two engaged with the protesters, only to be told off by an irate site manager. A few miles away at the West Virginia state line, another three dozen or so activists did much the same atop Peters Mountain. One even managed to crawl under an excavator and lock herself in place, despite the cold. The others rallied around, enclosing her in a tight, protective circle.
Some might wonder why they bothered. After all, the project is, by the Mountain Valley Pipeline company’s estimate, 94 percent complete and will be wrapped up before summer. It stalled for several years amid legal fights over various permits, but Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West VIrginia, almost single-handedly revived it in 2022 in exchange for his support of key Democratic priorities. Since then, the Biden administration and the Supreme Court have all but assured its completion. With the approximately 303-mile pipeline approaching the final stretch after almost a decade’s work, it might seem hardly worth fighting at this point.
A large contingent of steadfast opposition begs to differ, and will enthusiastically explain why. The pipeline is six years behind schedule, about half a billion dollars over budget, and, despite promises that it would be done by the end of last year, delayed once again. The remaining construction is over rugged terrain, with hundreds of water crossings left to bridge. The company recently postponed, shortened, and rerouted its planned extension into North Carolina, a proposal long stymied by permitting problems with the main line. And, just last month, Equitrans, which owns the pipeline and many others across the country, was said to be considering selling itself. The road to the pipeline’s completion remains rocky, its opponents argue, with many opportunities to make finishing it as difficult as possible.
“We cannot let them destroy our land and water,” said a young woman named Ericka. Like many interviewed for this story, she gave only her first name out of fear of reprisal from Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, which has begun suing protesters in a bid to silence them. She had brought her three children to occupy the land that day. “What are we going to drink? Where are we going to live? People have to come here and stop this.”
A protestor locked herself to an excavator, bringing work on the Mountain Valley Pipeline to a halt. Photo courtesy Appalachians Against Pipelines
Killing the project is their ideal outcome. Barring that, those who have for almost a decade packed public hearings, spent weeks at sit-ins and even lived high in trees for 932 days want to make building pipelines so time consuming, so expensive, so plain annoying, that fossil fuel companies and the politicians who support them think twice about greenlighting any more.
Even as pipeline crews continue steadily boring under rivers and felling trees, activists say each day they can delay construction is another day humanity delays the worst impacts of climate change. The increasingly grave personal and legal risks they face are, they say, worth it, if only for that.
“For five f****** years, we’ve fought you without fear,” sang the masked figures on Peters Mountain, and “we’ll fight you for five f****** more.”
Morning ripened over the ridge, and the fog rolled in, then out. The pipeline workers retreated, mostly without complaint — followed by the protestors’ calls of “Paid time off! Paid time off!” Some of those gathered began to sing: John Prine songs about beautiful landscapes stripped for coal, union songs, and striking miners’ ballads that reverberated through the same ridges long ago. When their voices grew weary, someone blared dance music through a loudspeaker as police cars rumbled up the gravel access road. They tried not to be afraid as the sirens grew louder, knowing the risk they had taken in coming here and knowing, as many said, that the time of act is now.
As the nation’s fracking boom reached coal country about a decade ago, pipelines carrying methane began to snake across the landscape. The Mountain Valley Pipeline, or MVP, met instant fury when Mountain Valley LLC proposed it in 2014. Opposition to the project drew a wide range of people, from farmers in West Virginia to Indigenous tribes in North Carolina, together in a united front. Some were alarmed by what it would mean for their land: Razed trees, disturbed landscapes, water running brown from the tap, and, in the end, a frightening risk of leaks and explosions. A pipeline in Pennsylvania run by one of the companies involved in MVP blew up late last year; a couple and their child suffered severe burns and barely escaped with their lives. Then there’s the longer term, irreversible danger of the 90 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that will come from producing, transporting, and burning all that methane over the 40 to 50 years the pipeline is expected to operate.
Residents along the project’s path joined academics, local organizations, and environmental nonprofits in filing lawsuits, seeking injunctions, and packing hearings. As they worked the legal system, other activists staged equipment lockdowns, organized rallies, and took to the trees for months-long sit-ins. The efforts led to some wins. Opponents repeatedly delayed construction, got various permits thrown out, and leveled allegations of water quality violations and illegal work on national forest land. In late 2018, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a series of rulings annulling the pipeline’s access to federal land and striking down a key permit. The next year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered an end to almost all construction.
The project languished until the summer of 2022, when Manchin, a key Democratic senate vote who often challenges his party, made his support of Biden’s climate agenda contingent upon the pipeline’s completion. Last summer, he included a provision in the debt ceiling deal that effectively cleared away any remaining hurdles. A short time later, the Supreme Court lifted a stay on construction through a 3.5-mile stretch through Jefferson National Forest. Crews returned to work with renewed vigor.
So too did the protestors. Morning after morning, week after week, pipeline workers clocked in only to find their work impeded. Grannies locked to rocking chairs in the pipeline path, teenagers glued to construction equipment, worksites crowded by 20 to 30 people intent on stopping the day’s progress, more often than not, successfully. The campaign drew college students from nearby Roanoke, neighbors from across the mountains, seasoned organizers and newer activists with little experience, all part of a near decade-long coalition, all activated by the pipeline’s anticipated completion, and many ready to face legal consequences for opposing it.
Jammie Hale joined the movement to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline more than 5 years ago.
Photo by Katie Myers / Grist
Jammie Hale is a bespectacled and bearded 51-year-old from Giles County, Virginia. Before he joined the campaign to stop the pipeline five and a half years ago, he was depressed and struggling with addiction. It didn’t help that the ruckus of construction invaded his waking and sleeping hours as it got closer and closer to his home, which lies within the 500-foot blast zone that could level his house in an explosion. “After a while, you hear all that, it kind of gets under your skin,” he said with a gentle intensity. “You build these angers up inside you, and how do you release these angers? Through self harm?” He became sleepless, consumed with visions of his family, and the land he plans to deed to his children, going up in flames.
When people began to organize, he and others in the community joined in. He found a will to live in the work. “I’m five years sober because of this project,” Hale said. “Because, you know, I wanted to be useful.”
Hale attended permit hearings, tested water, and, when people started sitting in trees, hiked up the mountain to support them. He brought home-cooked meals, blankets, and supplies, and rallied on the forest floor to boost their morale. “I instantly fell in love with these people because they were just so badass,” Hale said. He and his neighbors began to take more concerted action, filming and peacefully confronting pipeline company surveyors who came unannounced to survey their land for construction. Eventually, he found himself engaging in civil disobedience, fully aware of the risks he faces.
Hale is among a growing number of protesters the Mountain Valley Pipeline company has targeted with injunctions, a potentially costly legal hassle that could lead to jail time for anyone found on a construction site. Local authorities are taking an increasingly dim view of folks like Hale and show little hesitation in pursuing them for even minor infractions as the company continues to seize their land through eminent domain. These days, Hale supports protestors from afar by making signs and sharing food, among other things. There’s still some risk, he says, but if he lands in a cell or a courtroom, so be it.
“I’m not scared,” he said. “It’s kind of strange that they’re trying to get people for trespassing when they are the ones that have been trespassing.”
Another longtime pipeline fighter who goes by Larkin is no stranger to arrests, or to supporting people whose civil disobedience has landed them in court time and again. A soft-spoken health care worker from nearby Blacksburg, Virginia, Larkin, who is in her late 30s, has been fighting resource extraction in Appalachia since she was a teenager. She spent the better part of a decade marching onto dusty strip mines, locking herself to equipment, and demanding a federal ban on mountaintop removal coal mining. Ten years ago, that energy shifted toward the region’s multiplying pipelines. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was proposed alongside the MVP; it met with similarly vehement opposition, and eventually died amid mounting legal costs and project delays. In short, protest worked, Larkin said.
Protesters with Stop Mountain Valley Pipeline rally in front of the White House in Washington D.C. on June 8, 2023. Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
With the Supreme Court greenlighting the MVP, it seems to Larkin and others that there’s only one thing left to do. That is, throw their bodies upon the gears, in hopes of at least slowing things down for one more day, every day, for as long as possible, by force if nothing else.
“We knew from the get-go that a chapter of the fight requiring an escalated level of resistance is going to come if folks have any hope in pushing back,” Larkin said.
Despite the risks, Larkin, and many others, feel they are taking ownership of their future and their dignity. When we fight, they say, we win, and it’s better that fossil fuel companies know their encroachments won’t go unchallenged. Larkin also feels it will deter future projects like the MVP. Without organized opposition, she feels the whole regulatory system will continue to rubber-stamp permits until the ocean overtakes Washington.
“Old men with no thought to the future are ruining things for all of us,” Larkin said. “It really is down to us to just be mad. And do it with our bodies and be in the way.”
She knows she’s never far from becoming a target of the Mountain Valley Pipeline company’s ire. Over the years, she’s seen friends locked up and beaten down at various protests, and sometimes it makes her feel old. After so long in the fight, her knees and back ache, and she can’t spend hours sitting on the floor painting banners like she used to. When she began this work, she burned herself out quickly, believing that the world would end if she didn’t give everything she had.
“When it’s so obvious that the world is on fire, it does feel like you have to put it out on the table all at once,” she said. “Just like, why think about the future, we have no future, kind of thing. And here we are, eight years later in this fight.”
Yet there are moments, even now, when the pipeline seems inevitable, when she feels the joy of having taken a stand, of having made lifelong friends, of having done the right thing.
“I freaking love to have daybreak on a new blockade that has gone up in the night,” Larkin said, smiling. “And I think the other thing that I love is that I have really met and built real relationships of trust and solidarity with neighbors, people in my community who I wouldn’t have otherwise known.”
The pace is fast and the emotions run hot right now, but the stakes have felt high for a long time, Larkin said. She’s watched friends get sick, both from burnout and from the environmental risks of living near extraction, and watched some die of environmental illnesses and illnesses of stress and poverty. When trying to pinpoint exactly how the fight has lasted so long, Larkin points to the constant influx of new activists, particularly energized young people from nearby towns and colleges, and from other, similar campaigns.
One activist who goes by Gator had only just turned 18 and drifted north after a working-class childhood on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. He felt disconnected and adrift at a military high school, beset by a gnawing sense of climate apocalypse and a bleak future. “My home is disappearing,” he said bluntly.
Gator found his way to the Weelaunee “Stop Cop City” occupation in Atlanta last summer. The connections he made there led him to the woods of Virginia and West Virginia, where he camped in the pipeline’s path and met people who shared his feelings of desperation and urgency.
He felt himself cross a Rubicon of sorts during a stint in jail after his arrest at another demonstration. He spent several days locked up, not knowing how much time had passed and listening to guards mock the people around him. As he sat there on the cold concrete bed, he knew there was no return to regular life, to regular expectations for himself.
“It used to be that you’d be like, ‘I want to keep my nose clean, because I have a chance of having a career and having, at least for me, and the people I love, a comfortable life,’” Gator said. “But even that is disappearing.”
Protestors head toward a Mountain Valley Pipeline construction site in the mountains near Elliston, Virginia, in October 2023.
Photo by Katie Myers / Grist
The atmosphere in Elliston was, like the movement itself, at once nervous and defiant. Like environmental justice advocates most everywhere, those standing up to the Mountain Valley Pipeline are facing ever greater restrictions on their protests and increasingly harsh punishment for their actions.
In September, Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC filed a lawsuit against more than 40 individuals and two organizations — Appalachians Against Pipelines and Rising Tide North America. The suit seeks more than $4 million in damages and a ruling prohibiting the defendants from accessing construction sites, planning demonstrations, or raising funds for protest activities. The company said it decided to sue because protestors endanger themselves and workers, and because they’re breaking the law.
“If opponents were truly interested in environmental protection,” said MVP spokeswoman Natalie Cox, “they would have engaged with us to address their concerns through honest, open dialogue, which we respectfully offered on numerous occasions, rather than wasting agency resources and burdening the courts to support their myopic agendas.” Cox also blamed protesters for disrupting landowners and limiting the region’s economic opportunities.
Such lawsuits — which activists and their attorneys often call a strategic action against public participation — are usually filed by corporate or government entities against people who speak out on a matter of public concern. Those fighting the pipeline say the suit is intended to chill protest and intimidate them. Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC has been regularly adding defendants to the suit, often after identifying them near protests or reading their names in the news. Many protesters have been charged with felonies in recent months, all for blocking construction.
Despite a relative lack of trouble at the Peters Mountain lockdown – authorities arrested two people and quickly released them – the arraignment later that week proved more contentious. The two young activists were unexpectedly re-arrested and prosecutors slapped each of them with a felony kidnapping charge – presumably, protesters say, for asking construction workers to leave their vehicles – and held without bond.
According to Appalachians Against Pipelines, another protester, who goes by Pine, turned themself in on a felony warrant; they were charged with kidnapping and theft for holding up a work vehicle. A judge set bail at $25,000. Another protester was sentenced to six months, with three of them suspended, for similar charges. They are free pending an appeal.
“This system is seeking to doom us to a future that will not even exist,” Pine said in a statement. “However, there is solidarity everywhere … these ridiculous charges that I received do not make me afraid, since I know I do not stand alone.”
Fear of arrest and imprisonment remains a restless undercurrent for many activists, said a young organizer who gave only her first name, Coral. She stepped away from fighting pipelines on tribal land to answer a call for support in central Appalachia..
Protestors gather at a Mountain Valley Pipeline construction site in rural Virginia in October, 2023, an effort to delay its completion.
Photo courtesy Appalachians Against Pipelines
“I’ve been grappling with the repression piece a lot because it is working,” said Coral, who identifies as Indigenous but would not state her affiliation for fear that it might help identify her. For her, and many of those fighting alongside her, the effort to stop the pipeline is a commitment to protecting unceded Indigenous land, and to building a world free from old, colonial, and extractive social structures. That obligation weighs heavily on her, though. The killing of an environmental activist at an ongoing forest blockade in Atlanta and the ceaseless violence against Native land defenders worldwide is never far from her mind. “Our people were persecuted and killed for fighting for our land,” she said.
And yet, despite it all, the pace of protest has increased since construction resumed. Few weeks go by without people locking themselves to equipment, blocking the pipeline route, or picketing banks that support the project and the company building it. Despite several frightening incidents, including one in which crews reportedly felled trees dangerously close to an activist, the blockades and lockdowns continue. The hope, many activists said, is to draw a critical mass of supporters to the region. The fight, they said, is far from over, and they hope to bring the same kind of energy sparked by the massive Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
In Elliston, as the crisp October day warmed, the crowd was as energized and raucous as ever, echoing demands that have evolved over decades of environmental organizing in central Appalachia. Many hands unfurled colorful banners connecting the fight against climate change to movements opposing war, genocide, incarceration, and the theft of Indigenous land. Before long, though, several police cars slowly rolled up the road from the main highway, blocking the group’s exit. As officers stepped from their cars and made their way up the hill, some protesters with children in tow began to worry about their safety but remained for the moment.
As the police amassed, a young person of about 20, bundled in warm clothing and locked to an excavator, called down to the crowd. Their face couldn’t be seen, but their voice sounded small and very young. “I’m here because…these mountains are beautiful,” they called, laughing. “Appalachia is beautiful. This planet is beautiful!” Some in the crowd, though anxious, smiled at the voice speaking for them. The crowd held one another and swayed in the breeze as the drums started up again.
“The judge has had it up to here with y’all,” one exasperated police officer remarked as some in the group talked him down from arresting everyone in sight, mothers and children and all. Other officers took photos of license plates and threatened to increase their retaliation if they saw any of the cars at another protest.
When the group moved on to a neighboring plot owned by someone sympathetic to their cause, the police followed them, threatening to cite anyone who stuck around. Everyone knew that probably meant being added to MVP’s lawsuit. They decided to move along, but vowed to return another day.
Both Republicans and Democrats in deep-red Louisiana have warmed up to the idea of carbon removal, a practice that involves capturing carbon dioxide from large industrial operations and storing it a mile underground. Federal tax incentives promise to make the burgeoning industry profitable at a time when businesses are looking to slash their carbon emissions. There’s one big hangup: the Environmental Protection Agency has been slow to issue permits for underground wells where the captured carbon is supposed to be stored.
So when the agency announced in the waning days of 2023 that it’s handing over permitting duties, known as “primacy,” to Louisiana regulators, elected officials and industry executives celebrated. Republican Governor-elect Jeff Landry, who previously said that carbon reduction policies are “extremely destructive on the economy,” called the decision a “significant milestone in our state’s economic development.”
Even the local branch of Big Oil’s lobbying arm, the American Petroleum Institute, hailed the move as a boon for growth and sustainability. “Today’s decision will empower the state to continue to be a leader in energy production, community engagement and environmental progress while boosting the local economy,” Gifford Briggs, API’s Gulf Coast regional director, reportedly told local news outlets.
Environmentalists and many locals are not as enthusiastic. Though it holds the promise of reducing climate-warming emissions from highly polluting facilities, carbon removal is a nascent industry that some scientists warn could pose serious health risks to nearby communities. When a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide ruptured in Mississippi in February 2020, dozens of people were hospitalized after experiencing shortness of breath and passing out. Some residents were initially unable to drive their cars to the hospital because the high levels of carbon dioxide in the air prevented their engines from starting.
And since the gas will be captured from industrial facilities, its transfer and storage will disproportionately occur in places already overburdened by air pollution. In Louisiana, the country’s third-poorest state, those communities are predominantly Black and low-income. Advocates worry that a state with a legacy of lax oversight of oil and gas companies is the wrong place to streamline permitting for more planned carbon removal projects than anywhere else in the country.
The carbon removal industry “just hasn’t been going on that long,” said James Yskamp, a senior attorney at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice. “So we just think it’s a little bit of a mistake to hand over primacy to a state that there’s this big of a planned build-out for.”
The wells that would store carbon dioxide are regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which requires businesses to prevent fluids and waste that they store underground from contaminating public water supplies. While the EPA is the default authority for issuing companies permits to operate these injection wells, the agency can choose to delegate the responsibility to states that prove to have implemented a permitting program of their own. To date, federal regulators have handed off what’s known as “primacy” to just two other states — North Dakota and Wyoming — and Earthjustice says that neither state has any operating wells that store carbon dioxide.
Polly Glover poses for a photograph at the St. James Boat Club launch, along part of the Lake Maurepas watershed. The CO2 captured at the Air Products and Chemicals facility will be stored in sites such as under Lake Maurepas. Gerald Herbert / AP Photo
Louisiana applied for permitting powers in September 2021, but it wasn’t until this past June that the EPA held a hearing on it. Even though the vast majority of the 45,000 comments submitted to the agency during the public comment period were in opposition to the state’s bid, EPA Administrator Michael Reagan signed over the permitting duties to the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources on December 28. It’s a decision with sweeping implications for the carbon removal industry. Louisiana has more applications for carbon dioxide injection wells than any other state, with 22 of the 61 proposals pending with federal regulators. And as state officials have promised to speed up the permitting process for these wells, the Pelican State could become an important testing ground for the new technology.
Regan has said that provisions in its agreement with Louisiana will guarantee that the permitting is done right. “We’re building in monitoring and oversight measures to ensure that the state — regardless of who is in the governor’s office — complies” with federal law, Regan told the Associated Press in late December.
Environmental advocates aren’t so confident. In a 60-page letter submitted to the EPA in June, Earthjustice laid out a litany of problems with Louisiana’s permitting proposal, and argued that state regulators don’t have the expertise needed to approve and regulate carbon dioxide wells. The organization pointed to the EPA’s own research indicating that these wells are more sophisticated than other types of underground storage systems, since they create high-pressure conditions with the ability to crack subsurface rocks and cause dangerous leaks. Modeling exercises are necessary to understand the scope of these risks, but Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources has “no experience” conducting this type of study, according to Jane Patton, a New Orleans-based campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law.
In its letter, Earthjustice wrote that the state of Louisiana’s permitting program absolves businesses of responsibility for their well sites after 50 years, a provision that the organization says conflicts with federal regulations. A lack of scientific research into the long term impacts and efficacy of carbon storage make this half-century benchmark arbitrary, they argued.
Carbon removal “hasn’t been proven to efficiently and effectively capture the carbon emissions, and it hasn’t been proven to permanently store the amount of carbon that we’re proposing to store here safely,” said Yskamp, the Earthjustice attorney. He argues that fossil fuel companies are piloting most of the state’s carbon removal projects as a way of “greenwashing” their pollution.
Louisiana officials say the carbon removal industry will be a boon for the economy. In its latest annual report, the state’s economic development agency projected that the industry will create more than 2,300 new jobs in the state over the next year. But there are questions about how long those jobs will last. Patton told the Louisiana Illuminator, a nonprofit news outlet, that the lion’s share of these positions are temporary construction jobs that won’t benefit state residents in the long term.
Advocates are also concerned that carbon dioxide wells will pose public health risks in places where air pollution is already a problem. The Earthjustice letter pointed to numerous projects that would be built right next to predominantly Black neighborhoods, including Air Products’ proposed ammonium plant in Ascension Parish. The parish sits along the lower Mississippi River in the state’s main industrial corridor, a region known as “Cancer Alley” for the concentration of petrochemical plants there.
Regan has offered reassurances that people living near well sites will be protected, pointing to measures in the EPA’s agreement with Louisiana designed to shield vulnerable communities from the hazards associated with carbon storage. The concern is that the state will not honor these provisions, given its history of coziness with the oil and gas industry, and Landry’s recent lawsuit against the federal government for trying to enforce civil rights law in the state’s most polluted areas.
“Communities across Louisiana are depending on these provisions to protect them from decades of environmental policy that put these very communities at risk from illness, pollution, and death,” wrote Bevery Wright, the founder and director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, in a statement. “Louisiana’s most vulnerable cannot be left exposed to an untested pollution control technology without accountability.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 will require decarbonizing the nation’s energy production, transportation, homes and buildings, and industries. Here’s a look back at some of the progress the U.S. made in 2023, seen through the lens of the stories Grist told.
Still, ditching coal requires supporting communities whose economies have long depended on it. Southwestern Virginia has been mining coal since 1880, but the area is beginning to benefit from solar. The industry is gaining trust by creating local jobs and building arrays for schools, saving them money on their utility bills. Even the mines are getting a second chance — scientists are finding rare species like the green salamander returning to areas once stripped for extraction.
Despite the nation’s best efforts to stop emissions, research shows that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will also require removing hundreds of gigatons of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Whether to do that with machines or through natural solutions is a matter of intense debate.
Opponents of technologies like direct-air capture warn the oil and gas industry could use them to justify prolonging fossil fuel use. But the Biden administration is supporting direct air capture by sending $1 billion to two planned facilities on the Gulf Coast each designed to initially capture up to 1 million metric tons of CO2 annually.
Meanwhile, we’re gaining a better understanding of how natural solutions can promote sequestration. Wetlands, for example, can serve as vast carbon sinks. Louisiana has begun a $3 billion project to restore them, hoping to bring back 21 square miles of land to the coast. Trees are also powerful carbon keepers, and restoring them can cool urban heat islands. As part of a tree-equity “collaborative,” Seattle pledged to plant 8,000 trees and 40,000 seedlings in an effort to cover one-third of the city in tree canopy by 2037.
Some of the most encouraging signs of progress this year came from electric vehicles. Transportation accounts for nearly one-third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and most of that pollution comes from cars and trucks. People in the U.S. bought more than 1 million EVs this year, and the country could have 30 million of them by 2030.
Heating, cooling, and powering homes and other buildings takes a lot of energy. Although emerging technologies can lower the impacts of doing so, the first place to start is improving the efficiency of those structures so they require less power in the first place.
People nationwide discovered efficiency hacks like insulated shades and exterior window awnings as they battled extreme heat. The Lower Sioux in Minnesota are creating sustainable home insulation using “hempcrete,” which they grow and process in their own facility.
As consumers make their own efforts toward decarbonization, it’s becoming easier for them to see what commitments businesses are making toward net-zero. Although a federal requirement that they disclose greenhouse gas emissions is still forthcoming, California passed its own climate disclosure laws requiring companies that make over $1 billion annually to reveal all of their greenhouse gas emissions and the content of the carbon offsets they buy.
Even the U.S. cattle industry could see disruption, since the USDA approved the sale of lab-grown meat. Perhaps an even bigger threat to Big Ag? Teenagers. A Los Angeles teen sued her school district and the USDA over their milk mandates.
International climate negotiators explicitly mentioned the technology as a route to decarbonization in their first-ever “stocktake” of global emissions. Looking back across the final texts agreed on at the annual U.N. climate conference since the 2015 Paris Agreement, this is the first time the word “nuclear” has ever been used.
Twenty-five countries made the point even more emphatically at the start of the conference in Dubai, where — led by the U.S. — they pledged to triple nuclear electricity capacity by 2050.
“We’ve never had anything like this on nuclear at a COP before,” said Ted Nordhaus, executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, which promotes technological solutions to environmental challenges. “It reflects how much attitudes have changed over the last decade.”
Whatever the reasons, nuclear has been on a downward trajectory of late. The share of global electricity derived from it has slumped to 9.2 percent, its lowest level since the 1980s. By the 2040s, more nuclear facilities are expected to be decommissioned than come online. The latest commitments at COP28 are an attempt to not only reverse that trend but dramatically expand the world’s nuclear footprint. But multiple nuclear experts say that the tripling target is almost certainly unattainable, if not irresponsible.
“It’s an essentially meaningless commitment,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He noted that some of the countries who signed the pledge don’t even generate nuclear power right now, so a tripling would still technically be zero. And it doesn’t include China or Russia, which are global leaders in regard to nuclear ambition. Even Nordhaus admits that “it’s not really clear that anybody has a particularly credible plan.”
Attempts to both maintain and expand nuclear have stumbled recently. The Biden administration recently had to provide a $1.1 billion lifeline to keep a legacy nuclear plant in California running, and a highly anticipated foray into smaller-scale reactors fell apart. This points to perhaps the most significant impediment to a more nuclear future: cost.
“Nuclear is so much more expensive than solar,” said Allison Macfarlane, the former chair of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, estimating that it would take tens, or even hundreds, of billions of dollars to bring some of the proposed technology to market. “The only people that have that kind of money is governments”
Even if the financials make sense, she said, time is not on nuclear’s side. It can take a decade or two for a facility to come online, which makes it difficult to scale quickly enough to meet climate goals and make a dent in the climate crisis. While that might have been possible if the nuclear revival had begun a decade or two ago, she said it’s now too late.
“Nuclear is not a short-term solution to climate change. We need a solution yesterday,” said Macfarlane, who is currently the director of the school of public policy and global affairs at the University of British Columbia. Instead she argues for putting money toward technologies that can be deployed today, such as solar and wind. “We need to direct our energies toward whatever we can build immediately.”
To Lyman, the nuclear pledges at COP28 are worse than empty — they could be detrimental or even dangerous. “It damages the credibility of the U.S. and any other countries that signed on,” he said. That includes Japan, which was home to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Broken promises could mean that future declarations are taken less seriously.
Beyond politics, Lyman worries that a renewed push on nuclear could lead companies, governments, or both to cut corners or curb regulations in the name of financial gain or expediency. That, he said, “is a recipe for disaster.”
For the second year in a row, world leaders met in the Arab world to negotiate the future of the planet. As a backdrop to the United Nations climate conference in Dubai, it’s a fitting venue for a planet-wide shift that scientists say needs to happen: The region has extensive deposits of oil and gas, but also immense, untapped potential for renewable energy.
Over the past several years, European governments and corporations have made moves to capitalize off this potential, investing in sprawling mega-projects to capture the sun’s energy from the region’s vast deserts and export the electricity north. The oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, which constitute the region’s financial and geopolitical powerhouses, are also developing green hydrogen plants and wind and solar farms, with the aim of using renewable energy domestically in order to free up more of their fuel reserves for export. Activists and locals worry that the flurry of new mega-projects will reproduce the same exploitative practices associated with the fossil fuel industry: land grabbing, unchecked pollution, and the disenfranchisement of indigenous people.
More than a decade after the start of the Arab Spring, when popular protests against repression and economic stagnation erupted from Tunisia to Syria, many of the same or equally oppressive power structures remain in place. Some of these governments appear to be prioritizing European countries’ renewable energy needs before meeting the demands of their populations. Given these challenges, what might a shift away from fossil fuels look like in the Arab world, one that distributes the benefits across the population, and what might other countries stand to learn from it?
This is the question that Hamza Hamouchene, an Algerian researcher-activist, has been exploring over the past five years. As part of his work with the Transnational Institute, an international research and advocacy institute based in Amsterdam, he has interviewed people across the region to ask about their experiences living near oil and gas deposits and planned renewable energy mega-projects. One of the products of that research is a new book of essays, edited by Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, also of the Translational Institute, and titled Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region.
Underlying the book is the unequivocal urgency of moving away from fossil fuels in this part of the world. Large swaths of the Middle East and North Africa are warming at almost twice the rate of the global average, with devastating effects: blazes in the forests of Algeria and Syria, sandstorms choking the air in Iraq, and deadly heat waves gripping urban centers. But rather than serve the communities of the Arab world, many of the proposed renewable projects are for exporting energy abroad, and will do little to serve local people. Meanwhile, Gulf states have indicated their determination to extract every drop of fuel from their land, with COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber even casting doubt on the science of climate change at the conference in Dubai earlier this month. Grist sat down with Hamouchene to discuss COP28, the new book, and the future of the region’s renewable energy. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Lylla Younes: Why should people who care about getting the world off fossil fuels pay attention to what’s happening in the Arab world.
Hamza Hamouchene: First of all, clearly, there are many examples in the region of what some people call sacrifice zones [to serve] the energy transition in Europe, through export-oriented projects and land grabbing. Second, if we look at the numbers, just in 2021, 35 percent of the oil produced in the world was produced by the Middle East. The region is a nodal point of the global fossil fuel regime. This is described by Adam Haniah, in his excellent chapter of the book. He’s raising a warning to the climate justice movement and saying that the Middle Eastern countries, especially the Gulf countries, are going to be indisputable protagonists in any discussion around phasing out fossil fuels. And we are seeing this right now, in COP28 in the Emirates, where Sultan Al Jaber, the President of COP28, is an oil executive and the president of the Abu Dhabi Oil Company.
HH: Right, that’s the thing. These Gulf countries will constitute a really huge challenge to that transition away from fossil fuels. So for the global climate justice movement, if they just focus on Western companies like BP, Shell, or Exxon Mobil, they are missing the point. You need to focus on Gulf capital as well, and that is tied up with the question of democratization in the region and the redistribution of wealth in the region.
When we talk about the Arab region, there is the tendency to put every country in the same basket, like Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or Lebanon and the Emirates. These countries are in completely different categories. It’s not just that the Gulf is richer, much richer actually, than its neighbors, but it also participates in the capture of profits at the regional level, reproducing the same practices that we see from colonial countries – land grabbing in Egypt, Sudan, and even East Africa.
LY: And all of these places are experiencing the escalating severity of the climate crisis.
HH: There have been deadly wildfires in Algeria in the last two, three years, flooding in Libya that killed I think more than 10,000 people, droughts that have impacted small scale farmers and food production. We have seen sea level rise threaten some islands in the Mediterranean like Djerba and Kerkennah in Tunisia. Desertification, heatwaves — the impacts are there and people are suffering from them right now. And they just exacerbate the multi-dimensional crisis that is already in the region. It’s not just an ecological or climate crisis, but also a food, energy, social, economic, political crisis that creates a kind of powder keg.
An anti-government protester holds a lit flare during a protest, in Beirut, Lebanon in October 2019.
AP Photo/Hussein Malla
LY: Let’s talk about the idea for the book. Why did you bring these researchers together to write it?
HH: Most of the writing and the analysis out there around the ecological crisis, the climate crisis, the energy transition, are dominated by international neoliberal institutions like the World Bank, international aid agencies, the European Union agencies, USAID, and so forth. And their analysis is biased towards the most powerful. They do not take into account questions of class, race, gender, power, colonial history. The solutions that they propose are, let’s say, superficial. They do not go into the root causes of the ecological crisis, the food and energy crisis. So the book wanted to remedy this state of affairs by centering voices from the Arab region and to shine a light on some of the aspects of the energy transition there, and how to make it a just and equitable process for the communities and the working people in the region.
LY: Can you describe what climate injustice and fossil fuel extraction has looked like in the communities that you’ve researched across North Africa?
HH: In Algeria, I’ve done some fieldwork in two towns, Ouargla and Ain Saleh. Ain Saleh is the site of the anti-fracking uprising of 2014-2015. I thought it was important to study the case there and to interview people and leaders and activists who participated in that uprising. It was a proper intifada [Arabic word for revolution] because all elements of the community erupted — women, old people, young people, students, workers — because they saw it as, how can I say, another example of accumulation by dispossession. The Algerian military regime, along with national and foreign companies, came in there just to extract fuel and then created a new sacrifice zone by polluting the water, and the local communities did not benefit.
And then Tunisia and Morocco have phosphate mining. If you visit those sites, you will really understand the meaning of sacrifice zones. It really [affects] peoples’ bodies, their health, their environment, their air. Near the mine in Gabès, Tunisia, where the first part of the phosphate is processed for export, you see how the fishers are affected, the small farmers are affected, the water is plundered.
Women protest a silver mine in Imider, Morocco in TKTKYEAR.
Nadir Bouhmouch
LY: You’ve described the exploitative legacy of the fossil fuel industry in North Africa and the Middle East. I’m wondering if you can also offer a vision of what you think it should move toward?
HH: It’s not going to be the same in every country. If we’re really talking about a just transition, we need to challenge the power of the Gulf, in terms of their authoritarianism, but also in terms of their capital accumulation and how they are dominating various sectors in the Arab region. We want to move away from an extractivist, fossil fuel, environmentally destructive, socially exploitative system, to a more sustainable, just, and equitable system for all its members. People call this different things. I call it eco-socialism. I’m not sectarian about this, as long as we agree on the principle and we want a more just and more sustainable future.
LY: That is a daunting aspiration.
HH: It is a utopia, right? What can we do right now? Let’s say we focus on the energy question. Energy shouldn’t be a commodity. It should be a public good for everybody. And there are a lot of examples that show how this is not impossible to do. So we need to de-privatize, wherever the energy sector has been privatized, and we need to resist all attempts to privatize renewable energy as we’re seeing in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and even Algeria. At the same time, the local communities and the workers need to be involved in those projects. And that’s where the question of democratization comes in. We’re not talking about elections, in the liberal, bourgeois sense of democracy. We’re talking about the communities really shaping those projects, embracing those projects. Nothing is going to be perfect, there will be compromises, there will be mistakes, but if we want to avoid creating new green sacrifice zones, that is what we want.
LY: Given that all countries, not just the United States and Europe, need to shift away from fossil fuels, how should we think about the renewable mega-projects being proposed in the region?
HH: All countries have a responsibility to move towards renewable energy. But because the historical responsibility of causing the climate crisis lies within the industrialized West, these countries need to move swiftly and rapidly to invest a lot of money to move towards renewable energy. And it’s not just the West, I would put the Gulf as well in there. They have a big responsibility. I would put China in there as well.
But for the Global South, you cannot go and tell Tunisia you need to move as fast as possible towards renewable energy, right? These countries have the right to develop. They have the right to provide a decent livelihood [for their people] before thinking of exports, but what we are seeing right now is the opposite. We are seeing these countries shoulder the burden of the energy transition. All these mega projects are being implemented for export, not to produce energy for local markets — Desertec in six countries across North Africa, Xlinks in Morocco, TuNur in Tunisia. They are developed by the private sector, by foreign companies. They tend to be either Western or Gulf companies and some of them are Chinese as well. And all these projects are done through private-public partnerships, which is a euphemism for privatizing profit, and socializing the losses. I’m not against those mega projects, because we need to move fast towards renewable energy, given the current escalating climate crisis. Compromises need to be made, but not at the expense of local communities, not at the expense of the development goals of less advanced countries, not at the expense of access to energy.
An aerial view of the solar mirrors at the Noor 1 solar power plant outside the central Moroccan town of Ouarzazate
FADEL SENNA/AFP via Getty Images
LY: It’s depressing that a lot of the places developing renewable energy for export are not meeting the electricity demands of their own population.
HH: Let me give you this example. In Namibia, there is a big green hydrogen project being built right now with the former colonial power, Germany. The project is owned by the Germans and the British. They are building a huge project, building solar panels, wind farms, and then using desalinated water to break the hydrogen molecule and export green hydrogen to Germany. In Namibia, 45 percent of the population does not have access to electricity, and the electricity it uses is imported from South Africa. This project would make sense if you were building solar plants and wind farms to produce green electricity for your own usage, right, but not to produce green electricity for export.
LY: In Palestine, the situation is even more challenging, because Israel’s military occupation limits peoples’ access to electricity.
HH: The colonial dynamics I mentioned in the export-oriented projects are clearly discernible in the renewable projects erected and being built in occupied territories such as Palestine, the Golan heights, and Western Sahara, because they take place at the expense of colonized people and go against their right for self-determination. Israel has portrayed Palestine pre-1948 as an empty, parched desert, which has become a blooming oasis after the establishment of the state of Israel. Israel covers up its war crimes against the Palestinian people by posing as a green and advanced country, in a superior position to a fearsome and arid Middle East. This position has been reinforced with the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan in 2020, and through agreements to jointly implement environmental projects – renewable energy, agri-business and water, which are are a form of what is described as eco-normalization – the use of ‘environmentalism’ to greenwash and normalize Israeli oppression.
We must always ask: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? Who wins and who loses? And whose interests are being served? Because if we don’t ask these questions we will go straight to a green colonialism, with an acceleration of extraction and exploitation, in the service of a so-called common ‘green agenda’.
LY: We’ve talked about how both fossil fuel and green energy projects often extract resources from communities and give little in return. Can you think of a successful example, one that offers a sort of guide for equitable climate solutions?
HH: In 2011, at the time of the Tunisian revolution, the revolutionary council in the southern oasis town of Jemna recaptured land that had been taken away from them during colonial times. Even after independence in 1956, the state offered the land to two investors who captured all of its wealth. So in 2011, the people of Jemna recaptured the land and started managing the whole oasis, in terms of agriculture, in terms of selling the dates, in terms of marketing them. And all the proceeds that they got, they invested in the community. They remodeled the school, they bought an ambulance. That was truly inspiring. When people are given the power, and especially in a revolutionary context, people can do a lot.
An agriculture worker in Jemna, Tunisia
Nadir Bouhmouch
LY: We are more than 10 years out from the Arab Spring, with some pretty discouraging results. How can communities across the region end their dependence on fossil fuels without sacrificing aspirations for democracy and freedom?
HH: What you’re asking me is how are we going to make the next revolution successful, right? There is no easy answer for this. From history, we’ve seen how most revolutions fail. This is the reality, and some revolutions take other revolutions to succeed. We’ve seen the French Revolution; it took more than a century to become a republic. It’s the same thing in the Arab region. We have seen two waves of uprisings, the first in 2011. Most of them have been defeated. This is the reality. And then we saw the second wave [in 2018], and most of them have been defeated. But what it shows is that there is a protracted, long term revolutionary process taking place, with ups and downs, sometimes victories, sometimes failures, sometimes defeats. What we know is that the people in the region are not passive victims. They say, ‘We are here. We are going to resist.’
Scientists with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were flying a plane equipped with a visible-infrared imaging spectrometer over an oil field in California’s San Joaquin Valley when they made a worrisome discovery. Images produced by the device revealed a large plume of methane lingering in the air.
The plane made flights over the field for several more weeks. The plume shifted and changed shape with the blowing wind, but its presence persisted, indicating that its source could be a leak at the oil well. The scientists notified the operator. Soon, the plume disappeared. The leak, coming from a small fuel line, had been repaired.
“This is the essence of proactive measurement,” Riley Duren, one of the scientists involved in the flights and now CEO of Carbon Mapper, told Grist. “It’s a good example of how you would want it to work.”
A super-emitter event in the California’s San Joaquin Valley was captured by Carbon Mapper’s airborne spectrometer. Since TK, Carbon Mapper has detected 11,000 methane plumes in the U.S.
Courtesy of Carbon Mapper
The leak, detected in July 2020, was what’s called a “super emitter.” The term refers to events in which a lot of methane is quickly expelled, or to infrastructure that releases a disproportionately large amount of the gas. In oil and gas production, events can occur on purpose, as part of routine processes like venting (when producers intentionally release unburned gas) or by accident, due to faulty equipment or human error.
However they happen, super emitters release a particularly insidious greenhouse gas. Although it only stays in the atmosphere for about a decade, methane is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Because methane lacks color or odor, releases can go undetected for months.
Nearly one-third of its emissions in the U.S. come from the oil and natural gas sector, and super emitters account for almost half of them. But a new emissions rule from the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, targets super emitters by leveraging technology like remote-sensing aircraft and even high-resolution satellites to not only find leaks, but to hold those who cause them accountable.
The EPA’s methane rule, announced Dec. 2 at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, includes a suite of regulations aimed at addressing the gas and other dangerous pollutants at oil and gas facilities. It establishes emissions standards for new equipment, phases out routine flaring of natural gas, guides states in regulating emissions from existing equipment, and requires the industry to conduct regular monitoring for leaks.
“Its importance should not be understated,” Darin Schroeder, of the Clean Air Task Force’s methane pollution prevention program, said of the rule. “Reducing methane emissions is the best action we can take right now to bend the climate curve.” The EPA predicts the new regulations will avoid 58 million tons of methane emissions by 2038, reducing projected emissions from the gas by 80 percent.
The rule also includes the “super emitter program,” in which outside organizations certified by the EPA can use approved remote-sensing technologies, including airborne spectrometers and satellites, to monitor oil and gas facilities and detect large releases.
Under the program, watch dogs will report super emitter events — defined as a release of more than 100 kilograms per hour — to the EPA, which vets the data and informs the operator. The owner must investigate and report back to the EPA within 15 days, explaining how and when it will fix the problem.
The EPA will also post verified super emitter events on the program’s website, allowing those in frontline communities to monitor their possible exposure to dangerous gasses.
Schroeder said the program gives organizations that are already identifying leaks a way to make their data actionable. “They’re finding super emitters all over the place, but there’s nothing to do with that information,” he told Grist.
One of those organizations is Carbon Mapper, a nonprofit created in 2020 to drive emissions mitigation with data from specific facilities. The aircraft that Carbon Mapper uses carries an imaging spectrometer capable of measuring hundreds of wavelengths of light. Gasses absorb different light wavelengths, leaving a “spectral fingerprint” invisible to the human eye.
Through a coalition that includes JPL, Planet Labs, and several other institutions, Carbon Mapper is working to launch two spectrometer-equipped satellites to detect methane and CO2 directly at their sources.
Satellites are quickly boosting the potential of methane monitoring. The UN-led Methane Alert and Response System, launched at COP27, has used them to issue alerts on 127 plumes in the last year. The technology is also expected to play an important role in monitoring the new Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, announced at COP28, which commits 50 oil companies to drastically lowering their methane pollution by 2030.
In the super-emitter program, Duren of Carbon Mapper said outside monitoring will act as a backstop to the inspections oil and gas companies do themselves. Although the EPA rule requires operators to periodically check their infrastructure and repair leaks, inspections are made bimonthly or even quarterly. “Super emitters are unpredictable,” said Duren. “There’s a lot of methane that can be emitted between that, which a satellite can catch.”
Methane can also be emitted in places that aren’t being monitored at all. Duren says his team often detects releases coming from abandoned oil wells. The Interstate Oil and Gas Commission counts more than 130,000 orphan wells in the U.S., but estimates there could be between 310,000 and 800,000 still unidentified.
The new rule mandates that operators address verified leaks, something Andrew Klooster of the advocacy group Earthworks said they don’t always do.
As a field advocate in Colorado, Klooster uses a handheld camera called an optical gas imaging thermographer to track pollution. In a press briefing last week, he recalled visiting a site in Idaho last spring where, half a decade ago, the EPA had found problems with leaking storage tanks.
“Fast forward five years and these issues persisted, they had not been addressed,” said Klooster. “Without strong regulations and oversight, the oil and gas industry can’t be relied upon to strive for anything more than the bare minimum of emissions reductions.”
A home sits next to a well in the Permian Basin in southeastern New Mexico. More than 140,000 people in the state live within a half-mile of an oil and gas production facility.
Courtesy of Center for Biological Diversity / Becca Grady
The program also could empower frontline communities. The EPA will publish confirmed super emitters on their website, making it easier for nearby residents to know what’s being released by neighboring oil and gas operations.
Releases can be dangerous in the short and long term: As the gas spills out, so do volatile organic compounds like benzene which can increase the risk of chronic illnesses and cancers. During the 2015 Aliso Canyon methane gas leak, which lasted nearly four months, more than 8,000 households in the Los Angeles suburb of Porter Ranch had to be evacuated to escape a leaking well.
Protestors demonstrate outside EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. in January 2016, urging the agency to shutdown all operations at the site of the Aliso Canyon gas leak. Alex Wong / Getty Images
Joseph Hernandez, Indigenous energy organizer for the Native American Voters Alliance, or Naeva, noted in the press briefing that Indigenous communities in New Mexico are surrounded by operating wells. In San Juan county alone, 27,000 Native Americans live within a half-mile of an oil and gas production site, he said.
As a former oil worker who lives on the Navajo Nation, Hernandez has seen the risks firsthand. “It’s not a question of if [leaks] will happen, but when,” he said. “Our communities deserve protection.”
How much the program protects people will depend on how effectively it is enforced, according to Lauren Pagel, policy director at Earthworks, who said that currently, even states with strict methane regulations don’t have enough inspectors or high enough fines to compel companies to act. “Without on the ground enforcement, we could be in the same situation that we are in now.”
The EPA rule is expected to take effect early next year, but monitors must first be certified by the agency. It’s not clear yet how many organizations could apply to join the program. The Environmental Defense Fund will launch its own methane-detecting satellite in 2024. The company GHGSat operates 12 greenhouse gas-detecting satellites and says it will monitor every major industrial site in the world by 2026, but did not respond to requests for comment on whether it would participate in the program.
Access to the technology will be a barrier, and so will funding. Carbon Mapper relies on philanthropic support to conduct its monitoring. “It’s something that governments are going to have to step up to solve,” said Duren, “to make sure these programs are maintained and expanded and sustained.”
In an email, the EPA confirmed that the rule does not include funding, but said that the agency is partnering with the Energy Department to provide financial assistance for monitoring and reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, which is “intended to complement EPA’s regulatory programs.”
As the oil and gas industry updates equipment to comply with other aspects of the rule, Duren hopes that eventually, there will be far fewer super emitters to detect. But that will take time. “We’re all going to be very busy with this for the rest of a decade.”
Most Americans would prefer to live in a home where almost all major appliances run on electricity — but only if they can keep their gas stoves. Just 31 percent want to go fully electric.
Researchers asked roughly 1,000 people to what extent they would prefer to have their appliances powered by electrons or fossil fuels (natural gas, propane, or oil). It was the first time such a question was included in the long-running Climate Change in the American Mind survey, conducted by Yale and George Mason universities. The surveys, which started in 2008, are conducted biannually to track attitudes toward climate-related issues, such as electrification.
“We realized we didn’t really have a baseline for what people actually want,” said Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication who helped design the question and push for its inclusion. Combine those who said they would go fully electric with the 29 percent who would do so except for their gas stove and six in 10 Americans are ready to decarbonize. ”As a starting point, this is quite encouraging.”
Addressing residential energy use is critical to combating climate change, as the sector accounts for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Meeting the 2050 goals of the Paris Agreement will require an aggressive move to decarbonize the grid and move homes off of oil and natural gas onto efficient electric options such as heat pumps.
While the United States boasts one of the lowest rates of support for climate policies in the world, this polling question suggests many Americans are open to a more electric future. That said, the appetite for eschewing fossil fuels varies by political affiliation. Three-quarters of liberal Democrats, for instance, would prefer an all or mostly electrified home, while that number sits at half for conservative Republicans.
However, people across the political and demographic spectrum are very attached to their natural gas stoves — an affinity that was particularly strong among respondents who identified as Hispanic. Nationally, one-third of all homes use methane for cooking and when the Consumer Product Safety Commission said it might take steps to regulate gas stoves, it sparked a culture war.While that stickiness is perhaps evidence of industry efforts, dating to 1970s, to promote the devices, the reality is they represent a small portion of residential energy consumption.
“If people did one thing in the home that really mattered, it would be to get rid of their gas [or oil] furnaces,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University professor who has researched methane extensively. But, he added, there are clear health reasons for cooking with electricity.
“Gas stoves emit pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and benzene into the air we breathe,” he said, and nearly 13 percent of childhood asthma cases in the U.S. have been linked to the devices.
Beyond the gas stove caveat, there are other reasons to be cautious about the polling results, said Sanya Carley, an energy policy researcher at University of Pennsylvania. She says the framing of the question may have led to results that are particularly favorable to electrification. For example, using the term “fossil fuel” in contrast to electricity could prime people to choose electricity.
“People have far more extreme views when you’re talking about fossil fuels than they do when you’re talking about anything else,” she said, also noting that electricity is frequently generated by burning coal or natural gas. “I think it is either confusing to some people or misleading.”
The survey also told respondents to assume “costs and other features are the same.” That’s a big assumption, because the price and performance of gas, oil, propane and electric systems can vary widely. The cost of heat pumps, for instance, depends on state and local rebates, and homes in cold weather climates may still require backup sources of heating.
The language of the question was heavily vetted, said Marlon, and had to fit a national audience. Its aim was to elicit what people truly want in a way that allows comparison across various geographies and demographics. She also acknowledged that there is likely a gap between someone preferring an electrified home and someone actually taking steps to make that happen.
But, she said, arguably the most important part of the poll is that it sets a baseline that future polling can be compared to. The plan is to continue asking the question at least annually, and ideally add in other more specific queries as well .
“There are a lot of questions we’d like to ask,” said Marlon. “We squeezed in this one question to get started.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
During a heated public meeting last Friday, Michigan’s top energy regulator granted the Canadian company Enbridge Energy a permit to build a new pipeline and tunnel under the environmentally sensitive Straits of Mackinac, in an important — but not final — step in the controversial project’s approval process.
Construction can’t begin unless the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers grants it a federal permit. Before that happens, the Army Corps has to release its assessment of the project’s environmental impacts.
The Michigan Public Service Commission’s decision sparked strong reactions from opponents and supporters of the tunnel.
Line 5 carries oil and natural gas liquids 645 miles from Superior, Wisconsin to Sarnia, Ontario. Two pipelines run 4 miles along the lakebed, between lakes Huron and Michigan. Enbridge is proposing to replace those with a single 30-inch wide pipeline housed in a concrete tunnel in the bedrock below.
On Friday, the Public Service Commission said building the tunnel would meet the public’s energy needs while protecting that section of the pipeline from damage and preventing leaks.
Opponents called the decision “disastrous.”
The state has been in talks with Enbridge regarding the tunnel since 2017.
In 2018, an anchor struck the pipeline in the straits, damaging it. Commission Chair Dan Scripps cited that incident as an example of how vulnerable the pipes are, and why it was important to build this tunnel.
“We have a responsibility to approve the infrastructure needed to meet our energy needs, and to take steps necessary to get the current pipelines off the bottom lands,” he said.
Enbridge, which submitted a proposal for the tunnel in 2020, applauded the commission’s decision. Spokesperson Ryan Duffy said in an emailed statement on Friday that it is a “major step forward in making the Great Lakes Tunnel Project a reality.”
State Sen. John Damoose, a Harbor Springs Republican, was among the lawmakers cheering the decision; in a news release he called it a “major development toward energy security in the region” and “tremendous news for residents of northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula.”
But many people strongly oppose the tunnel and the pipeline.
The commission said it received more than 23,000 comments ahead of its decision, and people who spoke during Friday’s meeting said granting Enbridge a permit threatened their communities, their health and the environment.
After the decision was announced, project opponents voiced their anger with the commission.
“You were supposed to protect the Great Lakes, protect us,” said Andrea Pierce, a citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians and chair of the Anishinaabek Caucus. “These pipelines and tunnels are going to go through my tribal lands, through my people’s lands, through my community. And I think that’s just reprehensible.”
All 12 federally recognized tribal nations in Michigan oppose Line 5. The Bay Mills Indian Community in the Upper Peninsula has been leading a legal fight to stop the tunnel project for years, citing threats to treaty rights, resources and ways of life.
Bay Mills is challenging a separate tunnel permit from the state Environment, Great Lakes and Energy department.
“Today’s decision is another notch in a long history of ignoring the rights of Tribal Nations,” Bay Mills President Whitney Gravelle said in a statement. “We must act now to protect the peoples of the Great Lakes from an oil spill, to lead our communities out of the fossil fuel era, and to preserve the shared lands and waters in Michigan for all of us.”
Enbridge pipelines have ruptured multiple times. In what was one of the nation’s worst inland oil spills, a section of the Line 6B pipeline burst in 2010 and poured more than 840,000 gallons of oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. (The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 1.2 million gallons were recovered from the river in the following years.)
In 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ordered Enbridge to shut down Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac by the spring of the following year, saying that Enbridge was violating its 1953 easement to operate there and that it threatened the Great Lakes with an oil spill. Enbridge defied that order.
In addition to the threat of a spill, opponents say the project is a foe in the global fight against climate change.
The 70-year-old pipeline transports more than 22 million gallons of oil per day. Opponents of the tunnel project say this permit shows that the state will continue to rely on fossil fuels.
In 2021, the Michigan Public Service Commission agreed to consider greenhouse gas emissions when reviewing Enbridge’s tunnel proposal under the state’s Environmental Protection Act.
It was the first time the commission considered climate impacts under the law when making its decision about a project like the pipeline. As part of that process, environmental groups submitted expert testimony to the commission.
Peter Erickson, then a climate policy director at the Stockholm Environment Institute, testified that construction of the tunnel would lead to the release of 27 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, compared to a scenario where Line 5 was shut down and no tunnel was built.
The commission said last week that it found no feasible alternatives to the tunnel project, and that many alternatives “would have a greater environmental impact.”
Commissioner Scripps acknowledged that a transition away from fossil fuels is taking place, mentioning the energy legislation recently signed into law by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, which requires that the state transition to 100% clean energy by 2040. Scripps said that in the meantime, the commission had a responsibility to approve infrastructure necessary to meet the state’s energy needs.
But there’s also disagreement on just how much Michigan relies on Line 5 for its energy. For instance, Enbridge says that the pipeline provides over half of Michigan’s propane, and that it’s central to energy security in the Upper Peninsula. But environmental groups like the Michigan League of Conservation Voters say there are alternatives. A report released in October by PLG Consulting said that with enough notice of a Line 5 shutdown, the state’s energy markets could adapt without supply shortages or price hikes.
While Friday’s decision by the commission was a big step toward the tunnel’s construction, it’s not the last.
Along with a slew of legal challenges, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will need to weigh in with its determination of the environmental impacts of the project. A decision on whether to grant the project a federal permit is expected in 2026.
The United States and China agreed on Wednesday to “sufficiently accelerate” the deployment of clean energy and boost global production of renewables in a bid to begin displacing fossil fuels and address the climate crisis.
Their joint announcement included a commitment by the world’s two largest polluters to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions within the decade in an effort to keep global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). To achieve that, the two countries pledged to ramp up their use of solar, wind, and battery storage through the end of 2030 to reduce their dependence on coal, oil and gas. They also aim to triple renewable energy capacity worldwide in the same time frame.
“The United States and China recognize that the climate crisis has increasingly affected countries around the world,” the Sunnylands Statement on Enhancing Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis states. Both countries said they would “rise up to one of the greatest challenges of our time for present and future generations of humankind.”
That lofty promise came just hours before presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were to meet in San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. More significantly, it comes two weeks before the annual United Nations climate talks known as COP28 brings representatives from nearly 200 countries to Dubai. An agreement by the U.S. and China to take steps to mitigate climate change could help shape the gathering’s outcome.
“This lays the foundation for the negotiations in Dubai,” David Sandalow, a former Clinton and Obama administration official and a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told The New York Times. “It sends a strong signal to other countries that this language works, and more broadly that differences can be overcome.”
Li Shuo, incoming director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society, told Reuters the relationship between the two countries is “a precondition for meaningful global progress” and said the pact would help “stabilize the politics” between two geopolitical rivals. “The Sunnylands statement is a timely effort of aligning the United States and China ahead of COP28,” he said.
Nothing in the statement specifies how, or when, China will phase out its use of fossil fuels to generate electricity, let alone stop building coal-fired power plants. Still, the country has been expanding its use of renewable energy faster than any other, and the International Energy Agency predicts China’s use of coal could peak next year, then dwindle in coming years.
Sandalow told the Times that the efforts described in the Sunnylands agreement would allow China and the U.S. to share knowledge as they bring more renewables online and invest in energy storage and improved transmission. “In my experience, neither the U.S. government nor the Chinese government make high-profile statements like this unless there are serious plans to implement the agreement,” he said.
Although the United States is, historically, the world’s largest emitter of planet-warming gasses, China currently ranks first. For the first time, China stated its intention to control the emission of all greenhouse gasses, not just CO2, in its 2035 national climate plan. Last week, it offered a blueprint for reducing methane emissions, though the drew widespread criticism for lacking firm targets.
The Sunnyland agreement also lacks targets, but says the two countries will work together to set them. Both nations also agreed to resume a working group on climate cooperation and outlined other areas where they can collaborate, including sharing information on climate policies and technologies, curbing deforestation, and reducing plastic pollution.
The Sunnylands agreement, released separately by the US State Department and China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, followed several days of meetings between US climate envoy John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua. It’s named for the Sunnylands retreat in California where the two met earlier this month
Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, praised the accord in a statement and called it “a powerful message of cooperation on the existential challenge of our time” ahead of COP 28. “It sets a foundation of ambition going into global climate talks in Dubai,” he said. “Today’s agreement provides the urgent multilateral commitment we need – and not a moment too soon.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
In a turning point for Michigan, a state long associated with industry and fossil fuels, the state legislature passed a package of bills that aims to cut carbon emissions, requiring 100 percent of its electricity to come from clean sources by 2040.
The state’s new 2040 target is one of the most ambitious in the country, bringing it in line with Minnesota, New York, Connecticut and Oregon.
“This really marks the first swing, industrialized state in the country to pass such sweeping legislation,” said Tim Minotas, the deputy legislative and political director for Sierra Club Michigan.
Lawmakers passed the final legislation last week along party lines. Based on Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s climate plan, it’s a big move for a state so heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Minotas added that it shows a momentum both in the Midwest and across the country for clean energy.
But there are major disagreements about how effective the laws will be.
Democrats see it as an important step toward addressing climate change. They say it will also cut energy rates and bring more than 100,000 jobs and billions of federal dollars to the state. But Republicans argue that the transition away from fossil fuels is too fast, destabilizing the grid and hiking costs. Meanwhile, environmental justice groups say it won’t do enough to reduce emissions or protect communities of color from pollution and the impacts of climate change.
The climate package centers on a bill that requires Michigan utilities to transition completely to clean energy sources by 2040.
Betsy Coffia, a Democratic representative who serves part of northern Michigan, said the state’s lower chamber “hotly contested” what counted as clean.
“We are a single-vote majority,” she said. “And in order to get all of our colleagues on board, we did have to come up with something that everybody was willing to vote ‘yes’ to.”
According to the bill, clean energy includes nuclear power and natural gas coupled with carbon capture. Renewable energy also falls under that umbrella. It includes solar, wind, and hydropower, as well as things like gas produced by landfills, and biomass (burning organic matter such as wood or agricultural waste).
The climate package requires utilities to reduce energy waste with a focus on low-income households. It also creates an office to advise the government on how to help communities and workers affected by the transition away from fossil fuels.
Republicans have pushed back.
Dave Prestin, a Republican representative from the Cedar River community in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, said the legislation is the opposite of what his district needs.
“The most urgent need is to reduce costs and increase reliability,” he said in a joint news release. “Even if the tiny contribution Michigan makes to global emissions mattered, which it doesn’t, this plan will make living and working here harder for our residents.”
Republicans also opposed bills that will give the state’s public service commission authority to approve or deny large solar, wind and energy storage projects. Until now, township authorities had final say over whether those projects got built — and some have blocked developments. Democrats said the change was needed to reach clean energy goals.
John Roth, a Republican representative based in the northern community of Interlochen, said Democrats pushed through legislation without enough discussion. And while the bill requires companies to work with local governments first, he doesn’t think that’s enough.
“You can have local control as long as you say ‘yes,’” Roth said. “You cannot say ‘no’ and still have local control.”
Groups like the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, meanwhile, said the legislation isn’t aggressive enough and will allow companies to continue polluting low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
“That goes against any principles of justice. It goes against science,” said the coalition’s climate justice director, Juan Jhong Chung. “We need to stop burning fossil fuels. We need to close down the power plants in Black and brown communities that are so overwhelmed because of toxic air.”
The bill also includes the state’s one commercial trash incinerator as “renewable energy,” which Jhong Chung said poses risks to nearby communities.
“If we say that trash incineration, landfills and animal manure counts as renewable, then we’re placing all the burdens in Black and brown communities, in poor white communities, that will have to endure those dirty energy sources,” he said.
Jhong Chung said lawmakers ignored repeated calls from environmental justice groups to address their concerns.
Instead, he said, they carved out exceptions for utilities, such as allowing natural gas plants to continue if they have carbon capture systems that store at least 90 percent of the emissions. (Carbon capture means taking the emissions from a natural gas plant and storing it in perpetuity. But it’s a new technology that doesn’t have a strong track record.) Natural gas is the biggest source of electricity in the state, followed by coal, nuclear and renewables.
Michigan’s two largest utilities, DTE and Consumers Energy, raised concerns about the bills’ feasibility, leading lawmakers to change them, according to Inside Climate News. The watchdog organization Energy and Policy Institute also reported that Democrats and Republicans have received a total of nearly $500,000 from both utilities.
For Democrats, the timing was urgent. Last year, they won control of the governor’s office, House and Senate for the first time in nearly 40 years. Many saw this as the last chance for them to pass robust climate legislation; two representatives won mayoral races during the November 7 municipal elections, scrapping the party’s two-seat majority in the House.
Federal funding was another incentive to pass the package now. Democrats say the changes are necessary for the state to compete for billions of dollars in investment through the Inflation Reduction Act. Governor Whitmer is expected to sign the bills into law.
Jacob Corvidae works at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research firm based in Colorado. He followed developments this fall and said there is “no doubt” that this will mean big changes for the state and the region.
“This is a huge amount of clean energy to move forward in Michigan, no matter what,” he said. “This moves us far forward on better health outcomes, better clean energy investment, all of this.”
Still, it’s unclear how changes to the state’s energy production will play out on the ground. According to Barry Rabe, an environmental policy professor at the University of Michigan, state governments have weakened renewable energy legislation in the past.
“Michigan will really become a great national laboratory to see if this sort of clean energy revolution, as it’s being described, builds support and diversifies its constituency base over time, or might ignite some kind of a backlash or divide,” he said.
The Komati coal-fired power plant, located 88 miles east of Johannesburg in South Africa’s coal heartland, has been called the flagship of the country’s budding energy transition. At its peak, the facility, which came online in 1961, produced 2 percent of the country’s power supply. It also supported thousands of people, from miners digging nearby seams to hawkers selling bananas by its front gates. Yet its owner, the state company Eskom, retired the plant in October, 2022, after deeming the repairs needed to keep it running cost-prohibitive. Instead, it chose Komati for a different sort of makeover.
A $497 million project financed by the World Bank will, over the next five years, dismantle the plant and surround it with solar panels and wind turbines, a battery array, a green-jobs training center, and a factory that will employ hundreds of workers building community microgrids. President Cyril Ramaphosa hopes Komati will not only lead his country’s emergence as a clean-energy heavyweight but show how to do so equitably and with the guiding input of communities and labor. Eskom calls Komati one of the largest efforts in the world to decommission and repurpose a coal plant, and says it could become a “global reference on how to transition fossil-fuel assets.”
But when Malekutu Motubatse visited a nearby village in September, he found a ghost town. Motubatse, who represents some 35,000 miners and others as regional chair of the National Union of Mineworkers, says the closure cost at least 1,000 contractors their livelihoods and crashed the local economy. “People are demoralized, people are hungry,” he said of the 4,000 or so residents. “You can’t just close down a power station without an alternative. People can’t eat promises.” A recent report on Komati, commissioned by Ramaphosa, backs him up, saying Eskom wrongly shuttered the facility before new work opportunities were in place. But with four more coal plants scheduled to close in the area by 2030, Motubatse fears more harm to workers and communities lies in store.
If Komati is the flagship of South Africa’s plan to transition to a clean energy economy, it’s also an early indicator that things are off to a choppy start. For the last two years the country has led a group of developing nations that are working with the Global North to prove it’s possible to accelerate this process while buffering workers and communities from the shakeup. In 2021 South Africa became the first to formalize this mission in a policy plan, signing an $8.5 billion deal with a cluster of G7 nations called the Just Energy Transition Partnership, or JETP. The program’s guiding logic is that many emerging states want to grow on a sustainable path but need cash to do it fast enough to benefit the climate.
JETPs are designed to support them with a burst of focused investment. The basic structure is that a group of rich nations, like the United States, pledges money to a developing partner, which comes up with a compendium of projects that it thinks can hasten its energy evolution and deliver specific emissions reductions. Partners review the list and match funding to projects over a three-to-five-year window. Ideally, they should unlock billions of dollars more in private-sector investment. It’s not yet known how well this will work, but that hasn’t stopped Indonesia, Vietnam and Senegal from signing similar deals over the last two years. More announcements could be coming at COP28; India, Nigeria and Kazakhstan are some of those rumored to be in the hunt. China’s signaled interest in financing similar programs. Last week President Xi Jinping announced roughly $100 billion in climate financing to spur clean-energy projects abroad, in an initiative that boosters say has some resemblances to the JETP.
No one expects these efforts to go smoothly. Even in rich countries energy infrastructure is notoriously slow to change, with transitions measured in decades rather than years. Experts have already observed frictions between the global North and South – from squabbles over financing to differing visions of justice – and say this is slowing the flow of money and deployment of real-world projects.
In some cases these frictions are evidence of tough, pragmatic negotiations; in others they reveal deep divisions that could slow or even derail a country’s participation in the program. “This is your credibility,” Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, Indonesia’s coordinating minister and its top JETP negotiator, snarled at G7 partners in a May interview with Bloomberg. “We don’t lose anything if the deal doesn’t materialize.”
Protestors rally in Cape Town to protest ongoing electricity outages prompted by the nation’s aging coal-fired power plants.
Gallo Images/Brenton Geach
South Africa’s energy transition was driven by a combination of factors: A sense that its economy was overdependent on fossil fuels, direct exposure to climate impacts, and perhaps most immediately, practical necessity. Not only does the country generate 80 percent of its power from coal, but half of its plants are more than 40 years old and require intense upkeep that one expert likened to life support. As energy demand increases, this wheezing fleet is increasingly incapable of keeping up, and electricity gets rationed. This year has seen particularly severe stretches during which South Africans experienced up to 12 hours of power outages a day.
In towns like Komati, the local power station, also called Komati, is the axis around which the local economy revolves. Nationally, the shrinking coal-mining industry only employs about 80,000 workers, but the tally of everyone whose livelihoods are directly or indirectly tied to that fossil fuel – including families – totals 2 to 4 million people by one estimate.
Ramaphosa, a former general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers who also played a key role in negotiating the end of apartheid, has said the energy transition could simultaneously advance South Africa’s climate, economic and social-justice goals. Analyses cited by his Presidential Climate Commission say the shift from coal to renewable energy could create up to 1.4 million more jobs than it eliminates. Third-party assessments suggest that developing new industries in electric cars and green hydrogen could create millions more jobs. In an October 2021 public letter, Ramaphosa said the country would begin this long-term evolution by converting roughly 10 retiring coal plants into nodes of green infrastructure, featuring solar, wind power and energy storage – starting with Komati.
South Africa could do even more, Ramaphosa wrote, if rich countries chipped in. A month later, at COP26 in Glasgow, it became clear what he was talking about when South Africa signed its JETP. Success in South Africa, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, would offer a “template” for others in the developing world.
Two years in, there’s little to show for it. Less money is moving than expected, said Leo Roberts of E3G, a think tank focused on addressing climate change, and there’s no physical infrastructure or up-and-running programs to evince a transition in progress.
One hangup is money. When South African officials read the fine print on the $8.5 billion deal they’d signed, they found just 4 percent came in the form of grants that don’t have to be repaid. The remaining 96 percent looked much like the loans South Africa could have obtained on its own, and some was money rebundled from previous programs, said Roberts, E3G’s program lead for fossil transition.
This skews the funding package toward capital equipment. Because loans must be paid back, lenders favor investments with high returns. Solar and wind farms qualify, said Roberts, as do grid upgrades to some extent. Activities that emphasize equity, like training workers or supporting small businesses, don’t have direct investment returns, and so are less likely to get funded.
The unemployment rate in Mpumalanga province, which produces 80 percent of South Africa’s coal, hit 38.5 percent this year. Mining production, a pillar industry, decreased 1.9 percent year over year in January, 2023, according to official data.
Shiraaz Mohamed/Xinhua via Getty Images
But it would be a mistake to view such programs as charity, said Mandy Rambharos, a former Eskom official who helped launch its energy transition program. “The return on investment is not in terms of financial benefit, but social license to operate,” said Rambharos, now vice president of global climate cooperation at the Environmental Defense Fund. “There is a return: Otherwise your [infrastructure] projects are not going to fly.”
Perhaps in response to this concern, last month the Netherlands and Denmark announced about $180 million in grants for South Africa’s JETP, Bloomberg reported.
Recent events have revealed domestic discomfort with the energy transition, too. In the towns near Komati, community leaders have fumed that they aren’t seeing credible plans for creating jobs. Mineworkers have accused the government of selling out to the West and institutions like the International Monetary Fund, prioritizing climate goals while ignoring devastating unemployment in coal country. (The official unemployment rate in Mpumalanga province, which produces 80 percent of South Africa’s coal, hit 38.5 percent this year.) In July, the national electricity czar — whom Ramaphosa named in March to fix the country’s crippling power shortages — said the proposed energy transition was harming both people and the grid. “If I had my way, we’d go and restart Komati,” he said. “We have international obligations but, I’m sorry, we have an obligation to the South African people.” Those words gave heart to one local leader near Komati, who said, “The plant should be opened, because coal is the future.”
As Eskom held public-engagement meetings in Komati town this summer, a number of locals blasted them for paltry training programs and distant promises of opportunity. At one event, recorded by journalist Elna Schütz, company representatives seemed shaken by the withering critiques. “What did we miss?” blurted one official against the rising voices. “Help us understand.”
In July Ramaphosa sent a special delegation to Komati to assess progress. Its September report said the project, while flawed, does have green shoots. According to Eskom, which did not respond to a list of questions from Grist, a facility that can produce container-sized solar microgrids, each capable of powering 50 rural homes, is ready. A green-jobs skills center has begun training its trainers. But to union rep Motubatse, these might as well be on Mars. “There is nothing there,” he said. “There’s no way to go there and find work.”
The Suralaya coal power plant seen from Suralaya village in Banten province Indonesia.
South Africa is hardly the only country having headaches. Indonesia’s involved in multiple early-stage energy-transition programs, including a $20 billion JETP it signed in November 2022. Outside analysts say these efforts have produced little besides paperwork. A major investment plan, expected in August, has been pushed to later this month. Last November the country teamed with the Asian Development Bank to devise a financial plan to retire a 660-megawatt coal plant up to 15 years early. It’s hoped this could become a test case for shuttering similar generators in the region. But no financing has been announced to underwrite the proposal.
A key problem is that Indonesia’s coal plants, unlike South Africa’s, are relatively new. Many have locked in 20- or 25-year contracts with the state to buy their electricity and just begun their lives as profitable assets. One of the JETP’s core missions is to eke out financial deals that retire these facilities early. Putra Adhiguna, an analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, is unsure what kind of offer could compel an owner to abandon that kind of moneymaker. “There’s just no sheer financial rationale to do this,” he said. One Asian Development Bank official has likened it to persuading someone to leave their apartment before the lease is up.
Behind this has loomed an even thornier issue: Indonesia is planning a massive coal buildout. The country’s volcanic origins have blessed it with some of the world’s biggest deposits of nickel and aluminum, two elements essential to batteries. But smelting them takes heat. Industrial producers are building fleets of private, or “captive,” coal plants that generate electricity, heat, or both. Tiza Mafira, Indonesia director at the Climate Policy Initiative, estimates that the JETP, if successful, could retire up to 5 gigawatts of coal-generated power. But the potential pipeline of captive facilities is quadruple that. “To invest in an early coal retirement knowing there’s more in the pipeline than you’ll retire is not exactly great,” said Mafira.
But blame can cut both ways, she added. In their eagerness to fund renewable energy, she said, G7 partners have shortchanged the amount devoted to coal retirements, causing frustration on the Indonesian side.
Late last month, Reuters reported that Indonesia will propose one solution to break the impasse: simply excluding the captive coal plants from the JETP scheme.
Then there’s the two newest JETP implementers, Vietnam and Senegal, where the energy transition has caused friction in different ways.
In recent years Vietnam has experienced a wind and solar boom that’s the envy of Southeast Asia. Its success helped seal a $15.5 billion JETP deal with the European Union, United Kingdom, US, Japan and others in December, 2022. Core goals include writing off 7,000 megawatts of planned coal and increasing renewable generation to nearly half the grid by 2030.
Analysts say this green shift was driven by the tireless work of Vietnamese climate campaigners who – working within the narrow political space afforded by the one-party government – persuaded leaders that renewable energy would benefit the air and the economy. But in the last year Vietnam has drawn censure from its JETPpartners for arresting a half-dozen of these advocates, mostly on tax charges that human-rights groups consider baloney. Some of these groups have called on JETP funders to pause implementation until the crackdown ceases.
Senegal’s $2.7 billion (€2.5 billion) JETP, signed in June with France, Germany, Canada and the EU, drew notice for a different reason. Although the deal committed the country to the ambitious goal of getting 40 percent of its power from renewables by 2030, it also affirmed its plans to use natural gas as a transition fuel. (Senegal wants to refashion plants that burn heavy fuel oil to use methane, which the JETP partners claim will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.) Defending this choice, French President Emmanuel Macron promptly stepped in it: “We will allow it to develop its gas resources because gas is a transitional energy,” he said. The comment rankled some in Senegal and elsewhere, as it sounded less like that of a partner and more like that of a former colonizer.
If the gas has European partners gritting their teeth, Senegalese leaders consider it the piece that sealed the deal. The nation’s recently discovered gas fields represent one fifth of a percent of global resources, according to Rystad Energy, a consultancy. But for politicians eager to expand electricity access and industrialize the economy, they represent a multi-billion-dollar development fund. Public opinion surveys and stakeholder engagements suggest many Senegalese support developing the country’s hydrocarbon resources as well as clean energy.
The triumph of the final JETP, argues Secou Sarr, executive secretary of Senegalese NGO Enda Tiers Monde, is that Senegal got to choose its path forward, as developing countries too often don’t. “We are not just passive subjects,” Sarr wrote in a June essay. “We will lead the way in shaping the future of our country.”
It’s too early to judge if the JETP or similar efforts will succeed in fostering a just transition. It’s not too early, though, to make an observation: Nobody’s done this before, and it shows. The U.S. and the U.K., for example, are two countries where the collapse of the coal industry left lasting wounds. Germany is sometimes upheld as a model green transition, but the ability to transpose that experience to a developing country is unproven.
In South Africa, there is a growing sense that there will have to be learning, and not all of it will be painless. After a September briefing on Komati, South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy struck a sober note. “If this is not a blueprint for the future,” she said, “we have to learn from this experience what would be a blueprint.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
In 2019, the nonprofit Michigan Energy Options had just put up a solar farm in the city of East Lansing — in a dump.
“It was a closed dump,” said John Kinch, the solar company’s executive director. “There was grass and some flowers and weeds growing there. “
As part of the project, Kinch and his colleagues restored the land around the newly installed panels.
“We took all the junky grasses and things that were not native, got rid of it all and planted all native prairie and wildflower species to Michigan,” he said. “It’s a beautiful sight right now.”
But one day, Kinch was out there admiring the work, when a thought entered his mind: “Holy cow, when we’re done with this project, am I going to remove a thousand solar panels from a landfill and go put them underground in a landfill somewhere else?”
The world is seeing a huge push for solar power. But what happens when those panels wear out?
About 12 years ago, a woman named Annick Anctil was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. She was researching the environmental impact of solar, and she became interested in making this renewable energy more sustainable.
At her next job, she decided to go further: “The first thing I did when I started in academia after my postdoc was to write a proposal about looking at the end of life of solar modules and the need for recycling and sustainability.”
But, she said, other people weren’t on board.
“The response to that proposal was just, ‘Well, that’s not a problem. And it’s not going to be a problem for a long time. So we’re not going to fund that,’” she recalled.
Anctil submitted another proposal a few years later, and was rejected again.
Around that same time, interest in solar waste was starting to pick up. The country was installing panels at record rates. And in 2016, the International Renewable Energy Agency released a big report, saying that in the next few decades the world could see up to 78 million metric tons of solar waste. To put that in perspective, that’s about 5 million school buses.
That estimate has fluctuated over the years as solar has advanced. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory now estimates waste could reach between 54 and 160 million metric tons.
By 2021, Anctil’s research was finally funded. And she’s been working on that ever since as an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University.
“Looking at the waste part, for me, that’s part of the full life cycle of the solar panels,” she said. “As soon as we start thinking about a product, we should think about what’s going to happen to them when we’re done with it.”
Crushed glass from a recycled solar panel, ready for reuse in new products.
SolarCycle
To understand solar recycling, it’s helpful to know where the panels begin.
Most solar panels are made in China. Those blue rectangles that convert sunlight to electricity are covered in big sheets of high-quality glass and plastic polymer. Those rectangles are usually made of silicon, which is basically a pure form of sand. Panels can also contain copper, silver and other metals. An aluminum frame holds it together.
The solar life cycle is intertwined with human rights. There have been charges of abuses in mining and manufacturing for solar that gets shipped to countries including the United States. And a report by the London-based Business and Human Rights Resource Centre said the U.S. is among the countries that have failed to provide environmental and labor safeguards for the workers doing the mining, allegedly leading to a slew of violations, like polluting drinking water.
Last year, Reuters reported that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol had seized solar equipment shipments because of concerns about ties to slave labor in Uyghur detention camps in northern China.
“There’s a lot of illegal mining,” said Anctil, who co-authored a Science Direct report on the carbon footprint of silicon production last year. “There’s also concern that some country might import high quality sand from another country using illegal mining.”
Most solar has been installed in the last decade, and that pace is expected to continue, as it becomes cheaper due to federal incentives, new technology and higher demand. Many of those panels are meant to last for at least 25 to 30 years, and could produce power for much longer. Eventually, that will pile up and we’ll need to dispose of them.
But there are no federal requirements for recycling solar panels, and states have different regulations for what to do with them. Panels can also contain small amounts of heavy metals like lead, which makes getting rid of them more complicated. The vast majority of panels are thrown away in landfills — only about 10 percent are recycled. And people who are recycling are dealing with a patchwork system with a lot of organizations.
Solar recycling companies are part of that configuration. Some are in the Great Lakes region, but panels are also shipped to big facilities thousands of miles away.
Jesse Simons helped found the California recycling company Solarcycle last year, and is the company’s chief commercial officer. He said the first step is sending out a team to determine whether panels can be reused instead of recycled at their facility in Texas.
Once the panels arrive at the facility, they’re put on a machine.
“A robot, essentially, pops the frame off,” Simons said.
Panels are hard to take apart. They’re fused together in a kind of sandwich of glass, silicon, and plastic polymer, built to withstand decades outdoors, and specialized recycling systems are needed to recover valuable materials.
Once the glass is removed, there’s the laminate.
“It really does, at that point, roll up like a yoga mat,” Simons said. “It’s like a very thin piece. But that’s where most of the value is currently. Something like 80 percent of the value of the panel is now in the 8 percent of the weight that is in that yoga mat-like laminate.”
They put the laminate in a shredder, where it’s ground down to the size of sand.
“Then we’ve got another machine that basically uses electromagnetic processes to separate the valuable metals from the remaining plastic and glass,” he said.
At the end of the whole process, they’re left with around five pounds of plastic, which they’re trying to find a way to reuse.
So why isn’t everyone recycling?
Well, it’s still expensive. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that it can cost between $15 to $45 to recycle a panel, but just a few dollars to throw it away.
Getting panels to recycling facilities is another factor. The company We Recycle Solar actually has regional warehouses in places like Chicago, where they store panels until there are enough to justify shipping them to their center in Arizona.
The solar recycling industry is expected to grow as technology improves, waste accumulates and demand for materials goes up. And people like John Gilkeson, from Minnesota’s Pollution Control Agency, say this transition can’t be left to the free market and industry alone.
“That’s called wish-cycling,” he said. “Because the market will drive to the cheapest option, which is going to be landfilling. We have had many conversations with larger energy providers who say, ‘We’ll do the right thing.’ And we say, ‘What is the right thing? And when it really happens, will you do it?’ And then we get no response. Because people are not going to do anything that they do not have to do.”
Gilkeson said policy is key to dealing with any kind of waste, including solar. He’d like to see reuse and recycling take-back programs that are funded ahead of time and supported by the industry, along with federal efforts. And he thinks we should start working on that now.
“Deliberate, intentional action is needed to make this happen,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ve got thousands of actors all doing whatever they think is in their own self-interest. And it’s not going to be a coordinated reuse and recycling system.”
There are efforts out there to make reuse and recycling more feasible.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced $20 million for solar sustainability this year. Washington State passed a law requiring company take-back and recycling programs that’s set to take effect in 2025. Some states have included solar in their universal waste programs, which can help streamline collection and recycling. Illinois could ban panels from being thrown away. Some companies, like Michigan Energy Options, have started collecting panels in the Great Lakes to test out reuse and recycling in the region.
One of the best ways to reduce waste is by developing panels that last longer and are more reliable, say researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory or NREL. They also said it’s important to try reusing and repairing panels before recycling them.
Worries about solar power — both the recycling issues and the potential toxins — are influencing efforts to cut carbon emissions, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics. There, NREL researchers like Silvana Ovaitt said “unfounded” concerns about waste and toxicity are slowing solar installations.
“There is a need to grow recycling and management practices, but it’s also not the most important thing to do right now,” Ovaitt said. “We are really facing these decarbonization needs; right now what we should really focus on is quick deployment.”
Over its lifetime, solar generally produces far fewer emissions than non-renewable energy — a 2021 NREL assessment found that solar emissions are about 4 percent of coal, 5 percent of oil, and 9 percent of natural gas. And although the projected amount of solar waste internationally may seem like a lot, it’s still much less than the amount of trash we throw out globally every year.
Annick Anctil, the professor at Michigan State, thinks now is actually a great time to figure out how to move forward. She said the main reason to keep working on this is simple.
Solar is great, she said, but what if the industry created a new design that didn’t end up in landfills? Or didn’t need so much mining for materials? Or could end up recycled as new panels?
For more than a decade, an Australian company called Arafura Rare Earths has been looking for customers willing to buy rare earth metals from a mine under development in the nation’s Northern Territory. In April, it secured one of its biggest clients yet.
Siemens Gamesa, one of the largest offshore wind turbine makers in the world, signed an agreement to purchase hundreds of tons of rare earths from Arafura, beginning in 2026, to make giant magnets for its seagoing turbines. The reason a major manufacturer entered a contract with a mining company that isn’t mining anything yet? As CEO Jochen Eickholt told Reuters, Siemens Gamesa is almost 100 percent reliant on China for rare earth magnets — and its customers want to change that.
Rare earths are a group of 17 elements with chemical properties that make them useful for a range of high-tech applications. Because of geological good fortune and early manufacturing investments, today China dominates the rare earth supply chain, producing more than half of the world’s raw rare earths and over 90 percent of the powerful rare earth magnets used in consumer electronics, electric vehicle motors, and offshore wind turbine generators. While the magnets inside smartphones might weigh a couple of grams, those inside wind turbines can tip the scales at several tons. Given the industry’s large and fast-growing rare earth needs, European and U.S. wind companies are anxious to secure future supplies — as well as suppliers in countries that have better relationships with the West.
There are already several large rare earth miners outside of China, including California’s MP Materials and Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths, and Western nations are working to set up additional processing and magnet-making capacity. But it remains to be seen whether emerging supply chains will be able to produce magnets at the scale and cost needed to help offshore wind flourish.
“The world is playing catchup, and it’s an expensive game,” David Abraham, a rare earth analyst and author of The Elements of Power, told Grist.
To understand why the offshore wind industry needs rare earth metals, you have to understand how a turbine works.
Wind turbines are essentially steel towers topped with long, propellor-like blades. As the wind blows, those blades twirl around a rotor hub, which spins a generator to produce electricity. Most land-based turbines use an electromagnetic generator, in which copper coils rotate through a magnetic field to produce electricity. But another option, popular in offshore wind, is a permanent magnet generator, which contains an enormous ring of brick-shaped rare earth magnets that spin with the rotor to produce electricity.
An offshore wind turbine hub is seen in an assembly hall at the Siemens Gamesa wind turbine factory in January, 2023 in Cuxhaven, Germany. Gregor Fischer / Getty Images
There are many reasons the offshore wind sector has embraced permanent magnet generators, but a key one is their efficiency. “The performance of a permanent magnet generator is really quite good — the power density is better than we can get with a copper wound machine,” Michael Derby, program manager with the Wind Energy Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, told Grist.
More efficient permanent magnet generators, Derby said, can be “smaller and therefore lighter and potentially less costly,” all of which make them attractive to developers building massive, expensive machines in the ocean. This is especially true due to another trend in offshore wind: The use of a “direct drive” turbine design, in which the generator connects straight to the rotor, as opposed to connecting via an intermediate gearbox that speeds up the generator’s rotation.
The gearbox is a high-maintenance component, and eliminating it has advantages offshore, where it’s not easy to conduct routine repairs. But generators lacking a gearbox spin more slowly, meaning they must be physically larger to produce the same power. In this case, “every little performance advantage you can get” by using a permanent magnet generator “really manifests itself,” Derby said.
Permanent magnet generators have one big drawback, though: They need a lot of rare earths. A large direct drive offshore wind turbine equipped with one of these generators can contain upwards of 5 tons of magnets, according to Alla Kolesnikova, the data and analytics lead for the critical minerals research firm Adamas Intelligence. While rare earths only represent about 30 percent of the weight of these magnets, that can still add up to hundreds of pounds of the rare earth metal neodymium — and often, smaller amounts of the heavy rare earths dysprosium and terbium — per megawatt of electricity produced.
Those quantities multiply quickly when you consider the number of offshore wind turbines needed to help nations reach their climate targets.
An aerial view of the Siemens Gamesa offshore blade factory on the banks of the River Humber in Hull, England, in October 2021. Paul Ellis / AFP / Getty Images
Take the U.S., where the Biden administration has set a goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind, enough to power about 10 million homes, by 2030 to help the nation reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Recent modeling work by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that in a scenario where the U.S. reaches that 2050 goal, the wind industry’s neodymium demand would consume over 90 percent of the neodymium produced domestically in 2020. And wind is just one application — neodymium is also required for the magnets used in electric car motors, consumer electronics, and defense technologies. By 2050, “there’s going to be greater demand for everything,” Derby told Grist.
With demand rising not just in the U.S. but globally, Adamas Intelligence recently forecasted the world could face a shortfall of 90,000 metric tons per year of neodymium-praseodymium oxide, the rare earth alloy used to make magnets, by 2040.
Limited supplies of rare earths are one concern for the wind industry. Another is the reality that nearly all rare earth processing and magnet-making takes place in China today. Daan de Jonge, a rare earth analyst at the research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, said that rare earth-reliant industries are increasingly concerned about how “tensions between the U.S. and China” could impact future supplies. A disruption of critical mineral supplies would not be unprecedented: Earlier this summer, after U.S. and European semiconductor manufacturers restricted the sale of advanced chips to China to slow the advancement of the nation’s military technology, China retaliated by setting export restrictions on gallium and germanium, two metals used in semiconductor manufacturing.
The wind industry, de Jonge said, may be especially keen to secure its supply chain over the long term, since offshore wind plants can take years to develop.
Some, like Siemens Gamesa, have taken steps to find new suppliers. Through its recent contract with Arafura, the wind turbine maker will purchase several hundred tons of neodymium-praseodymium oxide yearly for five years once the company’s rare earth mine is up and running, with the option to extend the contract two years longer. In an emailed statement, Maximilian Schnippering, head of sustainability at Siemens Gamesa, described this agreement as part of a larger effort to build “sustainable and resilient supply chains.” Siemens Gamesa declined to answer questions about how much of its rare earth needs the new offtake agreement will support or why it chose Arafura as opposed to a more established rare earth producer. Arafura didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Siemens Gamesa isn’t the only wind turbine maker betting on Arafura. In 2022, GE Renewable Energy, the third-largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world that year, signed a memorandum of understanding with Arafura to “jointly cooperate in the establishment of a sustainable supply chain” for neodymium-praseodymium oxide. In an investor report published in June, Arafura said it has “continued detailed negotiations” with GE this year, “with a view to finalizing an offtake agreement that will contribute to GE’s wind turbine manufacturing activities.”
A GE Renewable Energy turbine is seen at the Block Island Wind Farm, near Rhode Island, in 2016. Scott Eisen / Getty Images
A GE spokesperson told Grist that while the company has “a diversity of suppliers right now,” it is “taking steps like this to build additional resilience and competitiveness in the system.” The spokesperson declined to state when it might reach a final decision to purchase rare earths from Arafura, or in what quantities.
De Jonge said Arafura’s planned rare earth mine “ticks many boxes” for companies like Siemens Gamesa and GE. The company aims to do both rare earth mining and refining on site, making it an “an ‘easier’ offtake partner than most other mines, who will also need some agreements with processors.” (Wind turbine makers, however, will still need to find separate facilities to turn Arafaura’s refined rare earths into magnets.) Additionally, Arafura has already secured many of the permits it needs, including federal and Northern Territory environmental approvals and a Native Title Agreement that provides financial compensation to local Aboriginal groups. But de Jonge warned that Arafura still needs “a large capital investment” to actually start mining, and meeting its ambitious production goals will depend on the company raising the necessary funds.
That isn’t a problem unique to Arafura: Anyone attempting to build a new rare earth mine, processing plant, or magnet facility must make huge up-front investments, as illustrated by the U.S. Department of Defense’s recent decision to allocate $258 million toward a new rare earth processing facility in Texas. “To set up these supply lines from mining to component, they’re billions of dollars,” Abraham said.
John Ebert, a spokesperson for the Chinese rare earth magnet maker Yunsheng, said that the “more stringent compliance requirements” of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators in North America and Europe add costs for companies that want to mine and process rare earths in these regions. And buying Chinese rare earths for processing and manufacturing elsewhere doesn’t necessarily lower costs. Anyone outside of China wishing to buy Chinese rare earths to make magnets is at a disadvantage due to the nation’s value-added taxes, which make it more expensive to export raw materials for manufacturing than to use them within the country, de Jonge said.
A rare earth mine in Baotou, a city in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. Wu Changqing/VCG via Getty Images
The structure of the offshore wind business poses additional challenges for magnet makers attempting to break in, said Ryan Corbett, the chief financial officer of California-based rare earth producer MP Materials, which is constructing a rare earth magnetics facility in Texas. Corbett explained that because offshore wind developers typically sell power to governments at a fixed price, they like to arrange fixed-price contracts with their suppliers to keep costs from exceeding revenues. But the cost of making a rare earth magnet varies as the price of the underlying metals changes.
“When you’re in a business like ours, with significant fluctuations in prices, that’s really difficult,” Corbett said.
While major wind energy players take steps to diversify the rare earth supply chain, some are also hedging their bets by reducing their rare earth needs.
Many offshore wind turbines use a direct drive design, but some do include a gearbox, which means a smaller permanent magnet generator can be used to produce the same level of power. For Vestas, a leading offshore wind turbine manufacturer, gearboxes result in five to 10 times less rare earths used per megawatt of power produced, spokesperson Claes Cunliffe told Grist in an email. In recent turbine models, Cunliffe said, the company is also phasing out the use of the heavy rare earths dysprosium and terbium. China controls nearly 100 percent of the processing of heavy rare earths, which are often mined in dismal conditions. Siemens Gamesa also plans to phase out the use of heavy rare earths, although it hasn’t set a target date.
GE, meanwhile, is doing early-stage research on superconducting generators that eliminate the use of rare earths entirely. Derby of the DOE, which is funding this research, says that the company is in the process of designing and building a 17-megawatt superconducting generator that should be ready for field-testing within the next few years.
The DOE also recently launched a wind turbine recycling competition that will award cash prizes to groups with innovative new ideas for how to recycle both wind turbine blades and rare earth magnets. Commercial-scale recycling options don’t yet exist for wind turbine magnets. But eventually, recycling could meet a significant fraction of the industry’s demand, offering a more sustainable alternative to mining.
“This is a great moment for the U.S. to come in with more environmentally sustainable production,” said Diana Bauer, deputy director of the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office at the DOE. “We should seize the opportunity.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
Michigan isn’t known for sunny weather. Yet in recent years, it’s seen a strong push for solar energy — including in Traverse City, the largest community in northern Michigan. Along the M-72 highway, rows of huge solar panels gleam in the sun, covering about 30 acres of grassy field.
In the shade underneath the panels are sheep.
This is called “solar grazing,” where livestock are placed on solar installations to keep vegetation in check. Sheep have grazed at the site for the past three summers, eating grass and depositing droppings along the rows of panels.
Bart Hautala, operations manager for Heritage Sustainable Energy, said hosting some 30 sheep is a win-win: Sheep eat the grass, and that prevents foliage from shading the panels.
“It’s a multi-use land now,” he said. “It’s environmentally friendly. We’re helping out a farmer. He’s got more space to put more sheep.”
But across the state and the country, similar collaborations between farmers and companies have faced roadblocks.
Solar power is central to the nation’s transition to renewable energy, including in Michigan, which is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050. Reaching that goal will require a lot of land, and some solar companies, researchers, and farmers are trying to use land for both agriculture and renewable energy — a practice called agrivoltaics. But local opposition has hampered those efforts, and solar advocates say Michigan is a prime example of how townships can slow renewable energy development.
This debate is playing out around the country, as people grapple with what a transition to clean energy actually means. A May 2023 report by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University found that across 35 states, there are 228 local restrictions strong enough to stop projects. That opposition has grown steadily, up 35 percent from the year before. And local restraints severely restrict renewable development, according to a 2022 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Michigan exemplifies the tension between solar and local concerns. Since townships decide where renewable energy projects are located, residents have a lot of say and many have placed moratoriums on solar and wind. The Sabin Center found that as of last May, 26 local Michigan governments had delayed or blocked utility-scale developments, the most of any state in the study. It didn’t compare restrictions to the number of existing projects, but 118 wind and solar projects are already operating or under development, according to the state. As more are proposed, much of the focus is on the relationship between solar and farmland.
“Michigan has the most restrictive measures when it comes to siting solar on agricultural land,” said Matthew Eisenson, who authored the May report. “There’s a lot of apples to oranges, but I think Michigan just has the most activity on this issue of anywhere.”
Operations manager Bart Hautala closes the gate at the Heritage Sustainable Energy solar array in Traverse City, Michigan.
Izzy Ross / Grist
Debates over renewable energy have roiled communities in the state. A group called Michigan Citizens for the Protection of Farmland petitioned to block utility-scale solar on agricultural land last spring, though they withdrew it. In some places, residents have recalled officials who approved projects they didn’t agree with.
Milan Township, in southeast Michigan, held a recall election last spring after residents voiced concerns about an ordinance that would have allowed large solar projects on agricultural land. Stephanie Kozar was elected township clerk during that recall. She’s spent her whole life in Milan, and said it was a rough time for the community.
“There have been rifts between friends, between relatives, between acquaintances, because it is such a hot topic, and there are so many strong opinions and emotions about it,” she said.
The township’s original ordinance allowing solar on agricultural land had passed during the height of the pandemic, which Kozar said raised issues of transparency. Since then, she said, more people have started attending meetings and gotten involved in local politics.
“We’re just trying to make the township a place where people want to come, want to live, and keep it in the agricultural spirit,” she said. “It’s about what the majority of our township wants. And that’s our biggest goal, is making sure that their voices are heard.”
Local opposition to renewable projects can often be nuanced, rooted in a wide array of reasons. Those include concerns about a project’s impact on the environment and economy, and extend to governmental failures to consult Indigenous tribes, according to a 2021 study by Science Direct. Some rural communities worry that losing farmland to solar could fundamentally change their culture.
“I think this is a hot-button in most townships, one way or the other,” said Bob Schafer, the supervisor of central Michigan’s Keene Township, who took on the job after his predecessor was narrowly voted out during another recall election held last spring.
Schafer stressed that people there have a variety of opinions on renewable energy — many people support it, and some oppose “mega projects” but not smaller installations.
“All the landowners have some say,” he said. “Both those that are trying to obtain a project and those that may be surrounded by a project. We’re trying to find a balance.”
But that balance is hard to strike, and some Michigan lawmakers are trying to streamline the path to renewables. With a slim Democratic majority, Michigan’s legislature is tackling a heap of ambitious climate legislation this fall.
Abraham Aiyash, a Democrat from Hamtramck, is the house majority floor leader and one of the sponsors of a climate package. He and other lawmakers want the state to have the power to approve utility-scale projects, which he said is necessary to reach their climate goals.
“There is no other way,” he said. “If we are not setting a rapid pace for investing in solar and wind we will not meet the energy centers that we are going to be setting.”
Still, Michigan has a deep history of local decision-making, and for some, the idea of transferring power to the state is unacceptable. Judy Allen, the director of government relations for the Michigan Townships Association, said doing so would create a one-size-fits-all approach.
“It’s not a cookie-cutter situation, and that’s why we think it’s incredibly important that you have that local voice and that local process in terms of location and permitting,” she said — even when it means farmers can’t do what they want with their lands.
Despite those roadblocks, project development hasn’t stopped, and Ohio utilities are on track to meet their renewable requirements, said Matt Schilling, the director of public affairs for the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and the Ohio Power Siting Board.
“We are continuing to see more development projects come into the power siting board,” he said. “I think time will tell, but the work is still going on.”
States like Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin, have seen local challenges as well. But unlike Michigan, those states have the authority to approve large renewable projects — even if local opinions differ.
In Michigan, township control is a big problem for companies, governments, and individuals trying to develop renewable energy, said Scott Laeser, a senior advisor for the Rural Climate Partnership and a farmer in southwest Wisconsin.
“If the opposition were to continue to advance, I think there would be some legitimate concerns about whether we can meet the renewable energy goals that states like Michigan, and quite frankly, the nation have,” he said.
According to Laeser, who has been involved in renewable energy planning for years, outside interests have also gotten involved in local debates, often spreading misinformation. “Some of the opposition is being funded by fossil fuel energy interests who don’t want renewable energy to succeed,” Laeser said. “So there’s a lot of complex dynamics that are mixed up in all of this.”
One way to turn down the temperature may be through projects that use land for both agriculture and energy production.
Proponents see solar grazing and other farm collaborations as an answer to the debate around land use in Michigan. Some studies back that up; a Springer survey in Houghton, Michigan, and Lubbock, Texas, found that most respondents were more likely to support solar projects if they incorporated agriculture. In practice, however, that can be difficult.
Samantha Craig has worked as a shepherd for about six years, first with her husband, and now their children. The family is based in Van Buren County in southwest Michigan, where they manage Craig Farms Katahdins — and a flock of over 200 sheep.
The pandemic and inflation have made the past few years tough, Craig said, and solar could be a path toward a steady income and long-term viability for farmers, as solar operators pay them to lease land or graze down grass.
Craig is excited about the prospect of sheep as vegetation managers. The farm’s website has a section called “lambscaping,” and the family has partnered with United Agrivoltaics, which works to help solar providers and farmers set up solar grazing. Still, Craig hasn’t been able to get her sheep on any solar farms yet. The logistics can be challenging; sheep need water, routine care, and shelter — things many existing solar sites aren’t built to accommodate — and it can cost a lot.
Local ordinances, zoning, and bureaucracy can also mean a lot of red tape. Craig had hoped to get her sheep onto a nearby solar farm, but she hasn’t gotten far with the local government.
“It was just definitely disappointing not to have the sheep out there this summer,” she said. “We were really hoping that that would come to fruition.”
Increasing tensions around renewables complicate potential partnerships. Craig’s neighboring township voted against solar on agricultural land in August and is now being sued by the solar company. To the east, Milan Township, which held the spring recall election, only wants solar erected in industrial areas, which township clerk Stephanie Kozar said excludes collaborations between large-scale solar and farming.
“We feel solar panels, even with crops or animals of some sort, it’s still a very industrial-looking project,” she said. “And so we feel like the industrial zoned area is probably the most appropriate place for it.”
Despite many hurdles, some still think partnering solar and agriculture will play an important role in debates around land use. Charles Gould is an educator at Michigan State University Extension. He started working at the intersection of farming and renewable energy about a decade ago, when farmers began asking him for advice on solar company lease agreements.
Since then, he’s delved into the dynamics of local governance, farming, and solar power. Gould said many farmers have come to see solar lease agreements as a sort of retirement package, and some consequently bristle at local efforts to restrict solar development, seeing them as a threat to their chances at financial stability.
“It evolved to, ‘This is a takings issue,’” he said. Farmers were asking, “How does a township have the right to tell me how to use my land?”
Of course, farmers are far from united on the issue. Some don’t like the idea of using their land for renewables. Gould agrees that areas like brownfields and right-of-ways should be considered for solar projects before farmland. But he said the many benefits of solar–agriculture collaborations mean it’s imperative to work with local governments and those who have concerns about the impacts of solar on their communities, something echoed in a federal study on successful collaborations.
As Michigan pursues its renewable energy goals, companies will continue to approach communities with these plans, according to the extension service. To help local governments tackle solar planning and zoning, Gould and others created a guide that includes templates for solar-specific ordinances and steps on how to plan for various situations.
The goal of this work is to help communities, solar companies and farmers hash out plans before the panels go up.
“Really, if we want to be successful at this, we need to back up and think ahead of time before that solar project is on board,” Gould said. “Bring all the partners together, have them all sit down and figure out what that’s going to look like.”
Four years ago, the United Kingdom became the world’s first major economy to legally commit to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The unprecedented move came even as the country had already reduced emissions by 42 percent from 1990 levels — mainly by slashing its dependency on coal and oil for electricity generation — the fastest reduction of any Group of Seven major industrial nation. It cemented the U.K.’s role as a global climate leader, but that position is now showing cracks.
Last week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced an about-face on some of the country’s core decarbonization initiatives, citing the need to relieve costly burdens on working-class households.
“We seem to have defaulted to an approach which will impose unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families, costs that no one was ever really told about and that may not actually be necessary to deliver the emission reduction that we need,” Sunak said in a live address hastily arranged after the BBC broke news of the planned policy shifts.
Sunak said he would push back a deadline on banning the sale of new internal combustion cars, and another prohibiting new fossil-fuel boilers for home heating. He also scrapped proposals that would have strengthened home insulation requirements.
The prime minister, who was elected last year after the chaotic resignation of Liz Truss, insisted Britain could still reach its net-zero goals, and that the new approach would simply shift the burden away from families that could not afford to shoulder it.
But critics saw the announcement as a thinly veiled populist appeal to a minority segment of the population, ahead of a general election next year in which Sunak’s Conservative Party trails the Labour Party by nearly 20 points in polls. They say the moves will derail the U.K.’s race to zero emissions, and along the way, could penalize the very people Sunak said his rollbacks would safeguard.
“This feels to me like the beginning of the end of British exceptionalism in climate policy,” Dustin Benton, policy director of the British independent think tank Green Alliance, told Grist.
As part of its 2050 commitment, the U.K. set a target of reducing emissions 68 percent by 2030. Before Sunak announced his changes, the Green Alliance calculated that the country was on track to fall short of that goal by about 13 percent. Now it estimates the deficit will increase to 21 percent. “This is a substantial change,” said Benton.
The biggest losses would come from the changes to electric vehicle policy, Benton said. Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Britain, yet Sunak pushed back a ban on the sale of new internal combustion cars from 2030 to 2035, citing the high upfront costs for EVs, insufficient charging infrastructure, and a nascent manufacturing industry.
Emissions cuts will also be hampered by Sunak’s easing of restrictions on gas boilers in homes. Heating and cooking account for about one-fifth of UK emissions. The country was slowly transitioning to heat pumps, which have been shown to be three to five times more efficient than gas boilers, but which Sunak said are too expensive for families already under pressure from rising inflation.
A ban on new fossil-fuel boilers for homes, mostly in rural areas, that are not connected to the gas grid would have taken effect in 2026, but Sunak pushed it back to 2035, when a nationwide ban kicks in. He also created an exemption for homes deemed “unsuitable” for heat pumps, even though a government-funded study found there was no such housing type. The Green Alliance predicts the changes will delay the move to zero-emission heat systems for about 2.5 million homes.
Another way to reduce emissions is to make homes more energy efficient. New insulation standards would have required landlords to meet minimum energy efficiency standards by 2025 to rent their properties, but Sunak said he was scrapping them. “While I will continue to subsidize energy efficiency, we will never force any household to do it.”
Sunak’s changes will eliminate proposed insulation requirements for rented properties.
Portland Press Herald / Getty Images
These decisions don’t just undermine the U.K.’s ability to meet its emissions goals, they also could cost more for the households they purport to protect, said Esin Serin, a policy fellow at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
“So many of the decisions were justified by an ambition to remove unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families,” Serin told Grist, “but what that fails to recognize is by keeping the households that will find it most difficult to make these changes exempt from making them, you’re actually elongating their dependence on fossil-fuel based technology, whether that’s a gas boiler or a petrol car, and that makes them vulnerable to future price shocks.”
Unpredictable energy bills were already straining British households. Gas prices across Europe began skyrocketing in 2021 due to increasing post-pandemic demand and plunging supply after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the summer of 2022, natural gas prices in the U.K. were almost 100 percent higher than a year prior, and electricity costs were 50 percent higher.
An analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, or ECIU, found that Sunak’s changes could cost British households $9.7 billion (£8 billion) in higher bills, and more if gas prices spike again. A quarter of renters (who would have benefited from the insulation requirements) already live in fuel poverty, the ECIU found. The Green Alliance estimates delaying the EV transition will cost drivers $12.1 billion in fuel and maintenance costs.
Serin said to alleviate such burdens, the government should accelerate households’ access to green technologies. “It’s not a case to remove the targets for these households, it’s a case to better target support so these households can afford the upfront costs of making these switches.”
Some of that support exists: This month, the government announced $1.4 billion in grant assistance through the Great British Insulation Scheme to help households make efficiency upgrades. And Sunak coupled his rollback on boiler restrictions with a 50 percent increase in the government subsidy for heat pumps, which is now up to $9,100.
The rollbacks announced last week also will be checked by other government policies that remain in place. A mandate requires that zero-emission vehicles comprise at least 80 percent of each automaker’s production by 2030. Similar controls exist for sellers of gas boilers.
While the quantitative impacts remain to be seen, Sunak’s speech signals a willingness to turn the green transition into fodder for the culture wars, similar to the squabbles in the United States over gas stoves and electric vehicles.
The prime minister repeated assurances that the government would “never force someone to rip out their gas boiler,” which was never part of any policy, and said he was scrapping proposals to tax meat and travel and force people to sort their recycling into seven bins — ideas that were not being seriously considered.
Benton of the Green Alliance said that while these tactics are common in the United States, Britain had enjoyed a long period in which climate change was a relatively nonpartisan issue. (Former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Brexit champion, was even the one to establish the EV and boiler initiatives Sunak is now unwinding.) “There was a pretty robust consensus for climate action,” he said. “Clearly Sunak has decided that adopting a populist message on climate is a route to political success, and down that way are a lot of dangers.”
The Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah is one of the richest oil shale deposits in the country. It is estimated to hold more proven reserves than all of Saudi Arabia. Enefit, an Estonian company, was the latest in a long line of firms that hoped to tap it.
It’s also the latest to see such plans collapse — but perhaps not yet for good.
The company has lost access to the water it would need to unearth the petroleum and relinquished a federal lease that allowed research and exploration on the land. The two moves, made late last month, appear to signal the end of Enefit’s plans to mine shale oil in the Uinta Basin.
“If they’re getting cut off from this water, it’s kind of the nail in the coffin for this whole project,” said Michael Toll, an attorney for the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation nonprofit that opposed the project. “Just ensuring that this water won’t be used for oil shale is a major win for the Colorado River Basin.”
Still, the company may develop other assets in the Basin. In a written statement, Ryan Clerico, Enefit American Oil’s chief executive officer, said that the company holds “extensive private lands and mineral resources in the Uinta Basin” and that it “is currently evaluating a number of different business cases, including some that are unrelated to oil shale.” The company currently leases its private land for grazing, but it has considered solar, wind, and energy storage projects on it, he said.
“There is no active development or construction on the property, but there are also no definitive or imminent plans to terminate our operations in the U.S.,” Clerico said.
Enefit had over at least the last 15 years secured that federal research and development lease, along with rights to billions of gallons of water and the right of way needed to build the infrastructure for such a massive project. The company hoped to produce 50,000 barrels of oil daily for the next 30 years — almost double the Uinta Basin’s current production.
The environmental and public health consequences of that would have been staggering. The carbon emissions from burning all that oil is equivalent to the emissions of 63 coal plants, and the water required would serve nearly 60,000 homes for a year. As a result, Grand Canyon Trust has for years fought the project by challenging the water rights and suing the Interior Department for improperly granting the rights of way to build a pipeline and transmission corridor on federal land.
Enefit’s plans hinged on the ability to access 10,000 acre-feet, or 3.2 billion gallons, of water from the White River, a tributary of the Green River that flows into the Colorado River. Because Utah is not allocating new water rights, Enefit purchased a water right from a public utility called Deseret Generation and Transmission Cooperative in 2011.
However, Enefit quickly ran afoul of state water laws. Because that resource is scarce in the West, most states, including Utah, require rights holders to “use it or lose it.” Once rights are granted, the recipient must put the H2O to “beneficial use” within a certain time — 50 years, in Utah’s case. Any rights that aren’t exercised in that period revert to the state to prevent water hoarding.
In Enefit’s case, its right was appropriated in 1965 and due to be returned to the state in 2015. The only exception to the 50-year rule is for public utilities. Since Deseret Generation could apply for a 10-year extension, Enefit transferred the right back to Deseret, which then applied for an extension. Once received, Deseret leased the water to Enefit again.
The Grand Canyon Trust claimed the move was illegal and raised the issue with the state Division of Water Rights, which approved the transfer and extension. The Trust requested an administrative hearing, which eventually led to a settlement under which Deseret agreed not to use the water for anything other than generating electricity. The agreement, reached late last month, explicitly “prohibits Deseret Power and all other entities or persons from using the water right for fossil fuel mining, extraction, processing, or development.”
“Although the water right is not going to be forfeited, the most important thing for us is that there is a guarantee that this water will not be used for fossil fuel development,” Toll said.
Enefit has also relinquished a 160-acre federal lease for research and development on the land. Last month, it sent a letter to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees drilling on public lands, noting that it does not plan to convert the research lease into a commercial lease. The Trust’s lawsuits against the Bureau and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are pending in federal court.
“The Basin already has some of the least healthy air in the country, and this project would have just made it much, much worse,” said Toll. “It’s a win for the environment. It’s a win for public health.”
Amid 2023’s summer of climate discontent, the nation’s grandest plan yet to rein in runaway greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change is turning one: the Inflation Reduction Act.
“This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever,” said President Biden, one year ago today, just before signing the legislation, abbreviated the IRA. That White House celebration came after months of negotiation, and the President’s supporters greeted him with cheers, music and pomp.
President Joe Biden, center, flanked by Senator Joe Manchin, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, Representative Frank Pallone, and Representative Kathy Castor, signs the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 into law on Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2022.
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Wide-ranging in scope, the Inflation Reduction Act included changes such as allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices and raise taxes on corporations, but at its heart, the IRA is a climate bill. Inside the 730 page bill are close to $369 billion in spending and tax credits designed to move the United States toward a cleaner energy future. A recent report from the Rhodium Group, an analytics firm that tracks greenhouse gas emissions, estimates that the IRA will reduce national greenhouse gas emissions to 29 to 42 percent of 2005 levels by 2030.
Compared to the fanfare that occurred at signing, the year since the IRA was enacted has been outwardly much quieter — with a recent Washington Post and University of Maryland poll finding that 7 out of 10 Americans had heard little to nothing about the measure since it passed. But, largely behind the scenes, experts say that the Biden administration has been implementing the IRA at a scorching pace.
Experts caution against reaching conclusions after the first year of a plan that is meant to span a decade. But they say there are both achievements worth marking — such as the torrent of private-sector investment the bill spurred and the impact it’s already had on Colorado river conservations — as well as future challenges to stay focused on, specifically whether projects can be permitted quickly enough. All the while, the Biden administration must battle not only a divided-Congress, but public disconnect from the bill.
Popular and legislative support for further climate action will be key to meeting the White House’s goal of an at least 50 percent emissions cut by the end of the decade. Public ambivalence toward the IRA could be a good thing if the bill falters because it may avoid souring Americans on climate policy writ large, says critic Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. However, IRA supporters conversely fear that a lack of public awareness about the impacts of the IRA could make passing future climate legislation more difficult.
For now, the administration’s focus has been on making the IRA a success.
“One doesn’t expect the federal government to move quickly, but they have,” said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice president of energy and innovation at the University of Houston. After passing the IRA, he doubted the administration could stand up such a massive piece of legislation in such a short period of time. “I was extremely skeptical that they would actually be where they are today.”
Activists hold signs ahead of the vote on the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in the House of Representatives on August 12, 2022.
OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP via Getty Images
The government has spent much of the last year laying the groundwork for dispersing IRA funding and enacting its tax incentives. That has required the government to both revamp old programs, such as the electric vehicle tax credits, and build entirely new ones. Columbia University and the Environmental Defense Fund have so far logged 150 IRA-related actions that the federal government has taken, ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency awarding climate pollution reduction grants, to the Department of Agriculture opening applications for its rural energy in America program.
“We’ve been thinking about year one as phase one of the IRA,” said Holly Bender, chief energy officer at the Sierra Club. She said the government has had to stand up hundreds of new funding streams, programs and teams within federal agencies. That effort, she said, has been “incredibly successful” and puts the government in a position to “have the money start flowing out the door.”
But Holtz-Eakin doesn’t see the administration’s ability to distribute IRA funding as an inherent measure of effectiveness. “It’s easy to shovel money out the door,” he said. “They’re far from done.”
There have, however, been some more immediate, tangible results of the legislation.
On a pragmatic level, the federal government has been adding staff in order to implement the legislation. This is true at climate-facing entities such as the Department of Energy, but also agencies that are less-often linked to climate policy, including the treasury, which is charged with outlining the rules for the litany of tax incentives that the law called for.
Krishnamoorti also highlighted another overlooked aspect of the IRA: its impact on the Colorado river. The IRA included $4 billion for water management and conservation efforts in the Colorado River Basin, which has already helped states settle long-fought negotiations over how to reduce water use in the river. The agreement reached this May allocated $1.2 billion to cities and irrigation districts in Lower Basin states in exchange for them using less water.
“The agreement that the states came to was in large part because they anticipate this funding coming,” said Krishnamoorti.
The remains of an old stairway stand above the drought-stricken Elephant Butte Reservoir, where a ‘bathtub ring’ of mineral deposits left by higher water levels is visible, on August 16, 2022 near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Mario Tama / Getty Images
But experts agree that perhaps the most pronounced first-year effects of the IRA has been a deluge of investment announcements from the private sector. Just last week, for instance, Maxeon Solar Technologies publicized a $1 billion plan to manufacture solar cells and panels in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Overall, companies have trumpeted more than $86 billion in IRA-related investments since the bill was passed, according to E2, an organization that has been tracking businesses’ response to the legislation. The White House puts that number even higher, at $236 billion of planned investments in the electric vehicle, battery and clean energy sectors, where the commitments have been particularly pronounced.
“The responsiveness of industry to these new incentives and financial support I think demonstrates the depth of the appetite for an American manufacturing renaissance,” said Trevor Higgins, senior vice president at the Center for American Progress think-tank. He was previously a member of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) staff and helped shape the IRA.
To a certain extent, companies were already moving toward a lower-emissions future, so it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how much of the IRA is driving the investment decisions. But, many businesses and politicians have specifically cited the legislation as motivation. In West Virginia, companies have broken ground at two major battery manufacturing sites.
“These types of investments are exactly what I had in mind when I wrote the IRA,” Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), a key swing-vote on the legislation, said in a statement. He also vowed to “continue to fight the Biden Administration’s unrelenting efforts to manipulate the law to push their radical climate agenda.”
Manchin’s home state of West Virginia is set to see some $1.3 billion in private-sector dollars from the IRA, according to E2 data, and four of the top five states where investments are planned have Republican governors. Supporters of the IRA say that projects in Republican-led states will at least partially insulate the bill from politically motivated rollbacks.
Grist / Clayton Aldern / Unsplash / American Public Power Association
“Any administration that comes in and reverses IRA provisions will lead to a lot of job destruction, primarily in red states,” said Anand Gopal, executive director of policy research at Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, a energy and climate think tank.
Republicans have nonetheless tried to dismantle aspects of the IRA since taking control of the house this year. According to Roll Call, at least four house bills have taken aim at the IRA, especially the EPA’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. And until projects are fully funded and physically built, many of the first-year impacts of the IRA remain vulnerable to a shift in political winds.
In some ways, the IRA could also prove to be a victim of its own progress. Bender, with the Sierra Club, says that the sheer number of new programs has been difficult for eligible entities to navigate. There’s a big capacity gap she said, especially for smaller nonprofits or companies.
“It’s [difficult] to find a person who can understand the programs, read the eligibility criteria, check the application dates, and then apply for funding,” she said, adding that the Sierra Club is working with its partners to “make sure that anyone who wants to access IRA programs is able to do so without a huge administrative burden.”
Then there’s the actual, physical building that needs to happen. Once a project is approved for funding or credits, worries shift to whether it will run into regulatory snags such as permitting. Easing that process is an area experts say the administration has not made much headway on in the first year of the IRA.
“The most likely bottleneck going forward is going to be permitting,” said John Coeqyut, the federal policy team director at RMI, a nonprofit working to accelerate the clean energy transition. “We are concerned that not enough will be done to clear the way for the transition.”
John Podesta, who President Biden tapped to lead the administration’s IRA efforts, addressed so-called permitting reform in remarks this May. “We’ve seen some recent wins,” he said, pointing to the Department of Energy’s move toward accelerating electricity transmission line permitting. But he also called on Congress to pass reforms that have been hung up for months.
“This administration is doing all we can with the tools we have,” said Podesta. “But frankly, we could use more tools to go even further and faster.”
As far as getting more legislation passed, the administration is up against both a divided-Congress and limited public awareness about the effects of the IRA. Less than a third of Americans say they’ve heard of the bill since it passed and even President Biden acknowledges that the IRA has thus far failed to grab people’s attention.
“I wish I hadn’t called it that,” he said at a fundraiser in Utah last week. “It has less to do with reducing inflation than it has to do with providing alternatives that generate economic growth.”
Critiques from environmentalists about the bill’s concessions to fossil fuel interests also remain unresolved after year one. There are, for instance, outstanding questions on issues such as hydrogen tax credits, the wording of which could affect the climate-impacts of the IRA because it could encourage investment in fuels that are derived from natural gas versus renewable energy. “That one is taking a little bit more time,” said Gopal. “But I think rightfully so.”
WASHINGTON, DC – Appalachian and Indigenous climate advocates demonstrate against the Mountain Valley Pipeline project approved as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in Washington, DC on September 08, 2022.
Craig Hudson / The Washington Post via Getty Images
That said, there ishope among advocates that Americans will begin to feel the impacts of the IRA more directly in year two. Perhaps most notably, the Department of Energy has issued guidance for a range of home energy rebates that states are expected to begin dolling out over the coming year.
“These rebate programs are really important because they are a way for low and moderate income households to be part of this transition,” said Ari Matusiak, the CEO of Rewiring America, an electrification nonprofit. “We want to make sure those programs are being stood up and well utilized by the people who can most benefit from them.”
The ultimate test of the IRA, though, will be how quickly and how deeply it reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Holtz-Eakin says he’ll be watching the Energy Information Administration’s annual release of data as a gauge for the amount of renewable energy being brought to homes and businesses across the country. “If that hasn’t moved by year three, the advocates are going to start getting nervous,” he said. “How quickly can you move the needle, and as a result retain the support you have.”
Anand Gopal, with the Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, says the IRA remains on track to meet his organization’s projection that the bill will cut emissions by 37 to 41 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Nothing in the first year of the IRA, he says, has changed that trend toward a cleaner energy future.
Former Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC) was once a climate change skeptic and is now a champion of climate solutions. To him, whether the IRA gets credit for the transition or not doesn’t detract from the progress it will likely lead to.
“When people start seeing it roll out in projects, they won’t know that it came from the IRA,” Inglis said. “[But] the IRA is going to deploy a lot of wind and solar and that’s an accomplishment that people are going to look back and be proud of.”
A state judge in Montana gave climate activists a decisive win on Monday when she ruled that the state’s support of fossil fuels violates their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment.
District Court Judge Kathy Seeley struck down as unconstitutional a state policy barring consideration of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions in fossil fuel permitting. Her ruling establishes legal protection against broad harms caused by climate change and enshrines a state right to a world free from those harms, creating a potential foundation for future lawsuits across the country.
“We are heard!” Kian Tanner, one of the 16 youth plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement. He grew up near the Flathead River and testified to watching wildfires come ever closer to his home each year. “Frankly the elation and joy in my heart is overwhelming in the best way. We set the precedent not only for the United States, but for the world.”
The case was the first of its kind to reach trial. Seeley’s decision adds to a growing number of rulings that say governments have a responsibility to protect citizens from climate change. The timing of her verdict — coinciding with major wildfires and heatwaves that have taken lives worldwide — couldn’t be more poignant, said Julia Olson. She is the chief legal counsel and executive director of Our Children’s Trust, which has brought similar suits in all 50 states.
“As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos,” she said.
Climate change has profoundly shaped the lives of the 16 plaintiffs, both through psychological distress and the damage it has wrought to their homes and cultural heritage. Each has spoken eloquently about smelling wildfire smoke on the wind and feeling trapped by the increasingly oppressive heat of summer on the high plains. All of them have railed against state politicians for not only failing to mitigate the problem, but actively making it worse.
In their lawsuit, they argued that the state’s enthusiastic support of fossil fuels violates their inalienable right, enshrined in Article II of Montana’s constitution, to a “clean and healthful environment.” They also accused the governor and other officials of neglecting their constitutional duty to preserve and protect the environment for future generations. “Although defendants know that the youth plaintiffs are living under dangerous climatic conditions that create an unreasonable risk of harm, they continue to act affirmatively to exacerbate the climate crisis,” the suit states.
For two weeks in June, 12 of the plaintiffs poured their hearts out in a courtroom in Missoula. Their testimony was corroborated by a panel of climate scientists, childhood psychologists, and other experts who spoke to the impacts of a warming world and how it impacts young people.
“I know that climate change is a global issue, but Montana needs to take responsibility for our part,” 22-year-old Rikki Held, the lead plaintiff, testified. “You can’t just blow it off and do nothing about it.”
Seeley agreed. “Every additional ton of greenhouse gas emissions exacerbates Plaintiffs’ injuries and risks locking in irreversible climate injuries,” she wrote in her 108-page ruling. “Plaintiffs’ injuries will grow increasingly severe and irreversible without science-based actions to address climate change.”
The road to the trial was rocky, with the state attempting to throw the case out multiple times. During the trial the state attempted what some termed a “nothing-to-see-here” approach, bringing free-market economists and climate deniers to the fore to convince the judge that permitting and fossil-fuel regulation wasn’t really the state’s responsibility. The state also argued that even if it were to stop emitting CO2 entirely, it would have little impact.
Seeley didn’t buy that.
“Montana’s (greenhouse gas) emissions and climate change have been proven to be a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment and harm and injury to the youth plaintiffs,” she wrote in her ruling. The judge also noted that the state did not offer a compelling argument for why it didn’t consider the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions when making permitting decisions. She also noted that renewable power is “technically feasible and economically beneficial.”
Emily Flower, spokesperson for state Attorney General Austin Knudsen, decried the ruling as “absurd” and called the trial a “taxpayer-funded publicity stunt.” She said the office plans to appeal.
“Montanans can’t be blamed for changing the climate,” Flower said, according to the Associated Press. “Their same legal theory has been thrown out of federal court and courts in more than a dozen states. It should have been here as well, but they found an ideological judge who bent over backward to allow the case to move forward and earn herself a spot in their next documentary.”
Attorneys who participated in the trial say that the verdict is notable because it puts the blame for inaction squarely on the shoulders of state officials, indicating they have the power to change their approach.
Seeley “recognized that the only obstacles to a transition to a clean energy economy in Montana are political,” said Melissa Hornbein, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center. “They’re not technological.”
Hornbein hopes the verdict shapes similar suits focusing on governmental responsibility for addressing climate change. Our Children’s Trust also represents 14 young plaintiffs in Hawaii in a similar case, Nawahine v. the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, which is now slated to move forward next year.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
President Joe Biden was unequivocal when asked, during an interview with the Weather Channel last week, if he was “prepared to declare a national emergency with respect to climate change.”
“I’ve already done that,” he answered without hesitation.
But the president has not, in fact, declared a national emergency for climate change, despite claiming that he’s “practically” done so. Activists, several Democratic lawmakers, and climate scientists have in recent weeks renewed calls for Biden to take that very step, an act that would unlock sweeping executive authorities to halt fossil fuel production and ramp up manufacturing of clean energy technologies.
Though such calls have been made since the day Biden took office, the hottest June and July in history has prompted frustration bordering on outrage with his administration’s response to deadly heat and the climate change driving it. Environmental advocates say that although the president acknowledges the climate crisis in his rhetoric, his administration continues to expand fossil fuel production.
“As long as we are producing and exporting these fossil fuels, the planet will continue to cook,” Jean Su, a senior attorney and energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Grist.
Su and other environmental lawyers say declaring a climate emergency would be fairly straightforward. Under the National Emergencies Act, Biden could issue a declaration that would activate provisions in existing laws to take drastic measures to address climate change. The president could, for example, halt crude oil exports by reinstating a ban that Congress lifted in 2015. He also could suspend offshore oil and gas drilling in over 11 million acres of federal waters, owing to a clause in those leases that allows the president to suspend operation during a national emergency.
For example, once a climate emergency is declared, Biden could divert billions of dollars from the military toward constructing renewable energy projects. Under the Defense Production Act, a law invoked by the Trump administration to boost the supply of Covid-19 medical supplies, Biden could order businesses to manufacture more clean energy and transportation technologies. He also could extend loan guarantees to industries crucial to decarbonizing the electrical grid and transportation sector, further boosting the supply of renewable power.
Biden would, of course, face considerable blowback. Dan Farber, an environmental law professor at UC Berkeley, told Grist that a climate emergency declaration could prompt legal challenges that might land before a conservative Supreme Court. He noted that in the last few years, the court has struck down broad measures taken by the Biden administration to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, including a vaccination mandate for large employers and a moratorium on evictions.
“I think that makes it iffy whether the Supreme Court really would allow sweeping use of any of these emergency powers in a climate emergency,” Farber said.
Su noted that while litigation always is a potential response to any policy, the powers invoked by an emergency declaration would be easily defended in court. “We’re not looking at somersaults and breathing creative definitions into words. These are really straightforward statutory language questions,” Su said.
The Supreme Court has never overturned a presidential emergency declaration, but there are hurdles beyond that arena, including backlash from Congress, which might threaten the chances of passing future climate legislation. Voters might balk as well, making any declaration a potentially risky move as Biden seeks re-election next year.
But the biggest obstacle to a climate emergency declaration may be the Biden administration itself. Declaring an emergency — and invoking all its potential authorities — sits in direct opposition to its stance on fossil fuels, which so far has fostered the industry’s growth. It has in just the past year approved new oil drilling in Alaska, supported a booming liquified natural gas export industry along the Gulf Coast, and fast-tracked completion of the Mountain Valley methane pipeline in West Virginia.
“This administration claims to be climate champions, and yet they have constantly approved things like the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” said Roishetta Sibley Ozane, founder and director of the Vessel Project, a mutual aid and environmental justice organization in Louisiana. “If you’re going to be a climate champion, you can no longer be approving new fossil fuel infrastructure.”
Given these challenges, Biden might have an easier time — and provide more immediate relief for communities — by declaring an emergency for heat rather than climate change. He could do so under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988. The law authorizes the federal government to provide financial and other forms of assistance to states, tribes, territories, and cities when the president declares a natural disaster or emergency.
While the Stafford Act doesn’t explicitly name heat as a disaster covered under the law, Farber and Su say there’s nothing in the statute that prevents extreme heat from qualifying. Much like declaring a disaster for, say, a hurricane, doing so for heat could enable the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to provide relief funding for supplies like power generators and emergency responses like medical care or repairing heat-stressed power grids.
But the challenges with declaring heat as a disaster might be more administrative than legal. To receive assistance, cities, tribes, and states need to prove that an emergency exceeds their current funding and resource capacity. It can be difficult to tally up the costs of extreme heat, which is less likely to destroy property and more likely to take a toll on public health and productivity. As heat continues to strain electrical systems and send people to hospitals, however, those costs are only becoming more tangible.
Environmental activists say it’s a reminder that the crisis of extreme heat will only get worse until President Biden takes decisive action.
“We absolutely need emergency funding to deal with people dying on the streets right now,” Su said. “But we also need to deal with the root of the crisis, which is fossil fuels.”
To visit the country’s newest hub for exporting liquefied gas to Europe, follow the Mississippi River southeast from New Orleans, past the recently shuttered Phillips 66 refinery in Alliance and into Plaquemines Parish, a ribbon of land that flanks the lower Mississippi River before dropping off into the Gulf of Mexico. There, strip malls and highways give way to wide expanses of cypress and low marshes that are home to white-tailed deer, alligators, and pelicans. The border between land and water, solid ground and swamp, seems to dissolve. In this part of the Louisiana coast, most exit roads lead over levees and into wetlands traversed by local fishermen and pipeline workers. You’ll pass small fishing hamlets, clusters of trailers lining bayous, and carcasses of old houses.
Towering over this patchwork of lowland and swamp is a massive liquefied natural gas export terminal owned by the Virginia-based Venture Global LNG, one of three in Louisiana. Built on 630 acres of former swampland, an area larger than New Orleans’ French Quarter, the facility known as Plaquemines LNG extends along more than a mile of the Mississippi River. It encompasses thousands of feet of coiled steel pipes for supercooling gas, 130-foot cylindrical storage tanks, and flare stacks that expel tall, airborne flames while the plant operates. At a break in the levee wall that surrounds the property, a sign warns of the hazards inside: “WORK THE PLAN. DON’T RUSH. GET HOME SAFE.” A large metal pipe extends out of the facility and over the highway, bound for the river.
Two of Plaquemines LNG’s 130-foot cylindrical storage tanks tower above the swamp. Grist / Lylla Younes
Venture Global’s terminal in Plaquemines Parish will cool natural gas down to its liquid form so it can be loaded onto ships and exported around the world. When the facility becomes operational in 2025, tanker ships will be able to plug into it and offload more than 25 million tons of natural gas each year, enough to power more than 15 million homes over the same period. The opening will represent a triumph for gas drillers that have sought to sell more of their product abroad and for President Joe Biden, who has championed American gas exports to ensure “the reliable supply of global energy” as Europe weans itself off gas imported from Russia following that country’s invasion of Ukraine.
In the 18 months since construction on Plaquemines LNG began, Venture Global has transformed the lives of people who have lived in the 23,000-person parish for generations. The streets around the plant became choked with truck traffic, the marsh threaded with pipelines, and the quiet was replaced with the din of construction. Acres of wetland disappeared beneath concrete. The broad ocean skyline of the parish vanished behind a maze of steel. And Venture Global is already working on another plant in the parish, known as Delta LNG.
“I said it would never happen, then you wake up and here it is,” said Henry McAnespy, a fisherman who grew up in the parish and lives down the road from the project. He described the roar of pipeline workers’ airboats at 6 a.m. each morning and the light pollution from the company’s round-the-clock construction. “I live in a place that never gets dark no more.”
A father and son shrimp in Calcasieu Lake.
Grist / Lylla Younes
A father and son go shrimping in Calcasieu Lake. Grist / Lylla Younes
Grist / Lylla Younes
Fishermen hold up an alligator gar, a type of fish native to the Louisiana marsh. New liquefied natural gas plants now threaten those wetlands. Grist / Lylla Younes
Fishermen hold up an alligator gar, a type of fish native to the Louisiana marsh. New liquefied natural gas plants now threaten those wetlands.
Grist / Lylla Younes
Emboldened by a surge in global demand for natural gas, a small group of companies rushed to build an industry along the Gulf Coast, from the southern tip of Texas to southeastern Louisiana, carving up thousands of acres of vulnerable shoreline to clear the way for massive plants and send American fossil fuels overseas. Liquefaction terminals are among the most complex industrial facilities in existence, with footprints that rival those of the largest chemical plants and oil refineries; the first to open — Cheniere Energy’s plant in southwest Louisiana — encompassed an area the size of nearly 700 football fields.
Building them often requires dredging through shorelines and wetlands to build loading docks and lay hundreds of miles of pipelines. Seven of these facilities have started up in the continental United States in as many years, and at least two dozen more are in various stages of planning and construction along the Gulf Coast. A decade ago, the United States had never exported LNG, but earlier this year it became the world’s top exporter of the fuel, surpassing the gas-rich nation of Qatar.
The growth of the LNG industry in the United States has reordered world markets, offering a new energy source to Europe and Asia even as gas exports drive up domestic energy prices. But it’s on the Gulf Coast, and in particular on the rural fringes of the Louisiana coast, that the consequences of the boom have been most visible. Grist reviewed dozens of state and federal records and found that in their haste to greenlight new terminals, regulators are exposing residents of coastal parishes to new and dangerous sources of air pollution from flares and leaks. Louisiana environmental regulators recently cited numerous violations at Venture Global’s LNG terminal in Cameron Parish, but has allowed the company’s project near McAnespy’s home in Plaquemines, on the other side of the state, to move forward. And as gas exporters build their plants on eroding swampland, they are increasing the risk of catastrophic accidents and explosions during floods and hurricanes. People like McAnespy, who live in neighborhoods surrounding the terminals, are right in the blast zone.
“It’s not just that each of these facilities is like a giant death star on sinking land, it’s that there’s so many of them,” said Elizabeth Calderon, a senior attorney at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice who has worked on cases challenging LNG terminals in south Louisiana. “This is how sacrifice zones are created.”
Grist / Lylla Younes
When John Allaire bought his 300-acre property along the Gulf of Mexico in the 1990s, the southwest coast of Louisiana was a very different place. There was no industry in sight, just wide expanses of wild grasses and wetlands leading to belts of oak trees, known as cheniers, that lined the sandy shore near the Texas state line. Since then, coastal erosion has wiped away almost all those old growth forests, and much of the landscape has been cleared for the construction of new LNG terminals like the one Venture Global built near the border of his property.
Allaire lives in Cameron Parish, a once sleepy area dotted with fishing hamlets that has transformed over the last decade into one of the world’s most important hubs for exporting natural gas. Three terminals currently operate in the 5,000-person parish; another seven are on the way. If Cameron Parish is where gas companies go to set up shop, carving out pipeline networks and erecting massive liquefaction terminals, then the city of Lake Charles an hour to the north is where they broker business deals. Long a site of petrochemical development and its accompanying pollution,Lake Charles is trying to capitalize off the prime coastal real estate to its south, with local politicians luring gas executives from Germany to Japan with events like the so-called “Americas LNG & Gas Summit & Exhibition,” which they’ve hosted two years in a row at the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino.
John Allaire stands near Calcasieu Pass, one of three terminals in operation in the 5,000-person parish. Grist / Lylla Younes
Local officials have celebrated the announcement of every new LNG development in the area, calling the industry a boon for economic growth and employment. Some residents like Allaire have a different perspective. As soon as the Venture Global terminal known as Calcasieu Pass began operating near his home in early 2022, Allaire witnessed a string of problems.
“Right away you had black smoke, alarms going off at the plant, and flares going constantly,” he said.
Liquefying gas is a dirty process. Terminals like Calcasieu Pass operate nearly around the clock, sucking in gas from a national network of pipelines and liquefying it so it can be loaded onto ships. When there’s too much gas backed up in the pipes, or when other refrigerant chemicals start to build up, the company prevents explosions by burning off gas, which sends orange flames shooting into the sky from the company’s flare towers.
As a former oil and gas engineer, Allaire knows that a certain level of flaring is to be expected when workers attempt to control pressure variations within their equipment, but too much flaring can be a sign of larger problems. Flaring releases a cocktail of pollutants like carbon monoxide, black carbon, and volatile organic compounds like benzene and formaldehyde. These chemicals are especially dangerous for vulnerable people like pregnant women, whose odds of having a premature birth can double from regular exposure to pollution from flares.
A flare shoots out of a smokestack at Venture Capital’s Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal on July 19, 2022. Courtesy of John Allaire
A flare shoots out of a smokestack at Venture Capital’s Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal on Feburary 12, 2023. Courtesy of John Allaire
Soon after Calcasieu Pass was up and running last year, Allaire began photographing the flares, which often burned throughout the day and into the night. His kitchen table is now littered with printouts of these timestamped images, which, added together, reveal the frequency of the plant’s mishaps. A report by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental nonprofit, found that the facility violated the Clean Air Act by exceeding the pollution thresholds specified in its permit more than 2,000 times last year, according to the facility’s own records reviewed by Grist. This flaring led to the release of numerous chemicals, including between 19,000 and 37,000 pounds of nitrogen dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has been linked to chronic lung disease.
Despite these violations at Venture Global’s first terminal in the state, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has signed off on the construction of Venture Global’s second facility in Plaquemines Parish, which the company itself describes as “technologically identical” to the first one near Allaire’s home in southwest Louisiana.
“Talk about an experiment,” Calderon of Earthjustice said of Venture Global’s two newest enterprises. “They want to be allowed to emit air pollution at the levels of their failed engineering rather than at the levels they promised.”
Last month, in a rare move, the same state agency issued a compliance order against Venture Global for “preventable” and “unauthorized” violations at Calcasieu Pass. In the order, regulators detailed the company’s “failure to timely report” its emissions and alleged that it misrepresented the extent to which its equipment had malfunctioned.
An aerial view of the construction of Calcasieu Pass over time. Planet Labs PBC / Grist / Lylla Younes
Neither the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality nor Venture Global responded to multiple requests for comment on the company’s permit violations or any other details in this story. In a written response to the department, Venture Global’s lawyers said they will likely dispute certain portions of the order.
Flaring is just one of multiple ways that LNG terminals release toxic chemicals into their surroundings. Supercooling natural gas until it becomes a liquid at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit relies on engines known as turbines that burn fuel to produce massive amounts of electricity. The turbines at Calcasieu Pass near Allaire’s house have a generation capacity of 720 megawatts, enough to power more than 500,000 homes at once.
The Environmental Protection Agency considers gas turbines major sources of toxic air pollution, since the combustion process releases a slew of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and formaldehyde. That pollution can travel dozens of miles away, diminishing air quality in more densely populated inland areas like Lake Charles. What’s more, enforcement records from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality indicate that these machines are prone to malfunctions, sometimes for long stretches of time. Last year, three gas turbines at Calcasieu Pass failed repeatedly over two straight months, emitting thousands of pounds of pollutants into the air.
Emissions from LNG terminals across Louisiana and Texas are putting an outsize burden on lower-income neighborhoods. In Cameron Parish where Allaire lives, the median income is $64,000, but more than 14 percent of people are below the federal poverty line, $30,000 for a family of four. A federal analysis of the Venture Global plant in Plaquemines found that two-thirds of residents in a census block near the terminal live below the poverty line.
Advocates see the LNG buildout as part of a larger industrial expansion that has also disproportionately affected Black people. The cluster of terminals in Cameron Parish is just south of Lake Charles, where nearly half of all residents are Black. There, emissions from LNG terminals are compounded by already high pollution levels drifting in from the nearby town of Westlake, where a maze of chemical complexes emits thousands of pounds of cancer-causing chemicals such as vinyl chloride and 1,3-butadiene every year, causing the air to smell like burnt plastic.
“Our children are dying from asthma,” said Roishetta Sibley Ozane, an activist from Lake Charles who runs the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a local environmental organization. “People have cancer. And yet these industries are allowed to pollute and emit all of this right in our community and nothing is being done about it because it’s going under the radar.”
Roishetta Sibley Ozane, second from left, stands with her daughters Keondrea, Kami, and Kamea at a demonstration calling for President Biden to declare a climate emergency.
Courtesy of Roishetta Sibley Ozane
In a petition sent to the EPA in late May, seven environmental organizations from the Gulf Coast, including Ozane’s, alleged that regulators in Louisiana and Texas are illegally granting permits to oil and gas companies, including LNG operators such as Venture Global. The petition charged that in giving them permits to build new infrastructure without first requiring them to demonstrate through modeling that their facilities will be in compliance with the law, Louisiana has violated the federal Clean Air Act, which prohibits granting a company a permit that will “cause or contribute” to a violation of federal air quality standards. The organizations sent a separate civil rights complaint to the agency in June, arguing that allowing the industrial buildout discriminates against majority-Black communities in Louisiana like Lake Charles.
Regulators in Louisiana and Texas declined to comment on the petition, and the EPA told Grist that it would not comment on an open civil rights complaint.
Allaire said that he plans to continue documenting Venture Global’s flares, and he worried aloud about a new fight on the horizon. Another company, Houston-based Commonwealth LNG, is about to break ground on an export terminal and pipeline network just over his property line. In 2021, Allaire turned away representatives from Commonwealth who offered to buy his land. He said that he refuses to leave, no matter the offer.
“This is a unique spot, all my kids grew up here,” Allaire said, gazing out his truck’s windshield at the bright green widgeon grass floating on the surface of his pond. “They grew up hunting and fishing and stargazing and campfiring. … It’s not for sale.”
John Allaire stands on his property in Cameron Parish. Grist / Lylla Younes
Grist / Lylla Younes
An alligator glides through the water in Plaquemines Parish. Nearby, a fisherman traps crawdads. Grist / Lylla Younes
Grist / Lylla Younes
Allaire said that after 40 years working in the oil and gas industry, the year and a half that he’s spent living near an LNG terminal has changed his mind about a few things. When he worked at an oil refinery in the 1980s and 1990s, he wasn’t aware that burning all that fuel would cause carbon to build up in the atmosphere, but now he’s certain about the industry’s impact on the climate. Though natural gas is a less carbon-intensive fuel than oil, burning it for electricity still releases carbon dioxide, and drilling for it can also cause significant leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Yet the companies building LNG terminals in Cameron Parish are assuming that international demand for the fuel will be robust for decades to come.
“They’re selling it abroad to the highest bidder” with full knowledge of what it’s doing to the planet, Allaire said. He now sees oil as a finite resource, bound to dry up eventually, and believes that the country is going to have to switch to renewables at some point.
“It’s just a question of when,” Allaire said. “How much carbon do we put in the atmosphere hoping that it won’t have catastrophic effects?”
An abandoned structure on a property off Calcasieu Lake in Cameron Parish. Grist / Lylla Younes
Since Venture Global began constructing its first gas hub in Plaquemines Parish in 2022, Henry McAnespy’s life has changed in numerous ways. A commercial fisherman since high school, the 64-year-old laments the way the company dredged the marsh where he goes fishing to lay 36-inch-wide pipelines. The water pressure in his home, already low after Hurricane Ida damaged the parish’s water system two years ago, is even weaker now; McAnespy and other locals think it’s tied to the company using the limited resource to build its terminal.
But the thing that keeps him up at night is the fear that, at any moment, Venture Global’s mile-wide terminal up the road could explode.
“You don’t have a crystal ball, you can’t tell me what’s going to happen to this plant,” McAnespy said. “I don’t want to live by this and I don’t think any investor would move his family here either.”
An aerial view of Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG facility shows Lake Hermitage Road and Henry McAnespy’s neighborhood. Planet Labs PBC / Grist / Lylla Younes
Of the five liquefied natural gas terminals in operation on the Gulf Coast, at least four have suffered some kind of leak or blast, whether due to extreme weather or a mechanical malfunction. Multiple incidents at LNG facilities on the Gulf have already demonstrated what happens when supercooled gas escapes from pipelines and storage tanks, underscoring the potential for damage like the kind McAnespy fears.
In early 2018, liquefied gas escaped through a crack in one of the storage tanks at a facility in Cameron Parish owned by Cheniere Energy, a Houston-based corporation that was the first American firm to export LNG. Workers discovered and patched the leak before any explosion occurred, but an investigation by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, part of the federal Department of Transportation, revealed other cracks in the tank. The regulator fined Cheniere $2.2 million and ordered the company to stop using two faulty tanks, deeming them “hazardous to life, property, or the environment.”
A year later, during a separate, previously unreported incident at the same facility, a leak of an unidentified substance caused three construction workers to lose consciousness, according to a lawsuit filed by the workers against Cheniere in Texas state court. The three workers were on the job near one of the plant’s giant liquefaction machines when they became “overwhelmed with the odor of gas.”
In an incident report provided to the court, one of the workers recalled that he “started to feel weak and [dizzy]” after smelling a “strong odor of unknown chemicals,” and after that he “didn’t remember anything until [he] arrived at the Port Arthur hospital.” Cheniere said it couldn’t figure out the source of the leak, according to court documents, calling its investigation “inconclusive.” (A judge ruled in Cheniere’s favor on procedural grounds last year, but the workers have since filed for a new trial.)
Leaks and malfunctions like these can also trigger explosions. In June 2022, a thunderous blast shook Freeport LNG’s facility in Freeport, Texas, the second-largest export terminal on the Gulf Coast, rattling the town of 10,000. A malfunction in one of the plant’s pressure valves caused gas to back up in a pipeline and leak out into the air, where it formed a dense “vapor cloud” and then ignited. It took eight months for Freeport LNG to repair the damage from the blast and secure permission from the federal government to export gas again.
It hasn’t happened on the Gulf Coast yet, but experts worry that the liquefaction process could lead to much bigger blasts. The Freeport explosion involved a leak of methane, but export terminals also employ a cocktail of chemicals known as refrigerants to condense gas into a liquid, including ethylene, propane, and hexane. They are all even more explosive than gas itself, which means they would cause larger vapor cloud explosions, perhaps large enough to level entire city blocks.
“We have searched high and low to find this answer of how far people would be affected and no one has been able to tell us,” said Naomi Yoder, a staff scientist at the Gulf Coast-based environmental organization Healthy Gulf who studies LNG terminals. “If they don’t have those answers, then what in the world are we doing building these things?”
Venture Global and other gas exporters have promised jobs in cash-strapped parishes that sometimes fail to provide residents with basic services. Officials in Cameron, for instance, are still working to resume medical treatment at the parish’s only hospital, which was damaged by Hurricane Laura in 2020. And in July, Louisiana’s Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, declared a state of emergency in Plaquemines after saltwater from the Mississippi River began seeping into the drinking water supply. In response, the parish and a state agency handed out 200,000 bottles of water.
Some locals are worried that the new terminals won’t improve these conditions even if they deliver on the promise of more jobs. Supporters of the Plaquemines project say the parish badly needs the 250 jobs and 728 indirect jobs that Venture Global promised to create, since almost the same number of positions were eliminated when the Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery up the road shuttered in 2021. In an effort to lure the company to the parish in 2016, the Louisiana Board of Commerce and Industry awarded Venture Global a 10-year property tax break to build the LNG terminal. That break was worth $83.5 million in the first year of the contract, a sum larger than the parish’s 2022 budget of $75 million. The board recently approved another $29.8 million in payroll tax rebates to the company over 10 years.
McAnespy appreciates the economic benefit of the terminals, but says companies like Venture Global often ignore the residents who live closest to the facilities.
“The plant is a wonderful economic boost, not just to Plaquemines or the state of Louisiana, but worldwide,” McAnespy said. “My concern is that it’s such a big project that they’re imposing their will on us. Have a little respect for us.”
Given the chance, McAnespy said, he’d move 10 miles up the road and away from the plant where he would be more confident that his family could easily evacuate if there was an explosion. McAnespy’s house is likely within the blast radius of the plant’s high-powered liquefaction machines, as well as its massive gas storage tanks.
McAnespy said that Venture Global offered to buy the houses of some people living on the east side of Lake Hermitage Road in Plaquemines Parish, which the company considers to be the outer boundary of its blast radius. But people like him just across the street haven’t heard anything from the company.
“I feel like they should come back here and give me an option to buy me out,” he said. “Do your project, just give me fair market value for my property. I’ll pick up my pieces and go live somewhere else.”
On a bright day in April, Travis Dardar stood with his boot heels in the shallows of Calcasieu Lake, a few miles away from John Allaire’s house, surveying the area where he took his boat out to catch shrimp each spring. The 38-year-old Dardar has been fishing all his life, beginning in his hometown of Isle de Jean Charles, an island community in southeast Louisiana.
“Back then, fishing wasn’t really a choice for me, you know?” Dardar said, eyes shaded under his camo Louisiana State University baseball cap. “It was the kind of lifestyle we grew up in. We had to eat.”
Travis Dardar stands near the spot where he usually took out his boat to go shrimping. Grist / Lylla Younes
Like other residents of Isle de Jean Charles, Dardar is a member of the United Houma Nation, a state-recognized tribe, and his family had a strong connection to the island. He rebuilt his family home there twice after successive hurricanes ripped through. But after many of his neighbors moved away and his grandfather died, the place didn’t feel like home anymore. Other residents of Isle de Jean Charles were taking part in one of one of the first climate resettlement programs in U.S. history, and Dardar decided it was time for him to leave, too. In 2015, he and his wife and kids moved west to Cameron, where he could still make a living by shrimping, the only way he’d ever known.
Dardar quickly got used to life in Cameron, a fishing community just like Isle de Jean Charles. But then came the LNG terminals, one after the other, tearing out patches of wetlands larger than football stadiums and changing the chemistry of the air and water. The export facilities now ring Calcasieu Lake, a gourd-shaped body of water separated from the Gulf of Mexico by a narrow channel that cuts through a stretch of wetlands. Until recently, most of Louisiana’s fossil fuel infrastructure sat well inland from the Gulf. Sitting back from the water gave oil refineries and chemical plants protection from storm surges and easy access to highways and pipelines. LNG export terminals are different: Because they load gas right onto massive tanker ships, these facilities must sit right at the water’s edge, on land that is both undeveloped and especially vulnerable to flooding.
That soon became a problem for people, like Dardar, who caught shrimp on Calcasieu Lake for a living. The massive waves created by gas tankers damaged his boat and forced Dardar and his fellow shrimpers to cluster in a corner of the lake where they all vied for a small share of the catch. Another gas company, Tellurian, had announced plans to open a 1,200-acre terminal on the Calcasieu River, which empties into the lake, and they began to worry that the shipping traffic to that terminal would one day push them out for good.
An abandoned crane stands near old fishing equipment along the shores of Cameron, Louisiana.
Grist / Lylla Younes
To Dardar, it seemed like a sort of cosmic joke. He’d survived decades of deadly hurricanes only to leave Isle de Jean Charles, and when he finally achieved some measure of stability, a new industry rose up around him, an outside force challenging his livelihood once again. In fact, the plants came to Cameron for the same reason Dardar did: Calcasieu Lake is an ideal access point for LNG tankers coming in from the Gulf of Mexico.
This summer, Dardar made a choice he’d fought hard to avoid. He took a buyout from Venture Global and used the money to move his family 20 minutes north to the town of Kaplan, where he could continue shrimping in nearby Intracoastal City. Dardar said that in the month since they moved, he sleeps better at night. The air, too, is easier to breathe.
“Kind of feel like we’re at home,” Dardar said of the new property in Kaplan. He described the final months in Cameron as eerily similar to the end of his time on Isle de Jean Charles.
The rapid expansion of the LNG industry in Cameron Parish might have pushed Dardar away from the coastline, but Venture Global and its fellow LNG exporters are incurring their own risks by setting up along the Gulf Coast. The five active LNG terminals bordering the Gulf of Mexico sit at the end of “Hurricane Alley,” a band of warm water that begins off the northwest coast of Africa and stretches across the Atlantic, providing fuel in the form of heat for dangerous hurricanes to form.
In August 2020, Hurricane Laura made landfall in Cameron Parish, driving a 17-foot wall of water onto southwest Louisiana’s coast and exacting damage on a third of the state’s industrial facilities, including multiple LNG terminals. A pressure system failure at Cheniere’s facility led to the release of more than 100 tons of pollutants, and a nearby plant owned by San Diego-based Sempra Energy reportedly flared for days after the storm. Two months later, Hurricane Delta swept through, causing more damage to petrochemical plants across the state.
“These locations can barely handle storms now,” said Jessi Parfait, a native of south Louisiana who works on the Sierra Club’s Beyond Fossil Fuels campaign. “Just imagine 30 years into the future, which is supposed to be the lifetime of these facilities, potentially more. They’re not going to be as protected.”
Sunlight glints off equipment at Cameron LNG. Grist / Lylla Younes
LNG developers have tried to assure investors and regulators that they’re getting ahead of future hurricanes by weather-proofing their facilities. A representative from Commonwealth LNG, the firm planning to break ground next door to Allaire’s property in Cameron, told Grist that it will build a “storm-surge wall intended to minimize flood damage or disruption of operations.” A representative from Sempra Energy pointed out that its facility is located 18 miles inland and eight feet above sea level, which puts it out of reach of storm surge events. The representative noted that the terminal suffered minimal damage when Hurricane Laura hit in 2020.
But the risks are only increasing. The sea levels off the coast of Louisiana are likely to rise by as much as two feet over the next 30 years, and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico are only getting warmer, which will provide more fuel to hurricanes as they make landfall. By the end of the century, the Gulf Coast region might be as much as 12 degrees F hotter, which will allow rainstorms to hold more moisture.
Last year, the Sierra Club asked Ivor van Heerden, a noted marine scientist and former Louisiana State University professor, to assess the hurricane risk of Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG terminal. Van Heerden is perhaps best known for predicting the potential devastation of Hurricane Katrina more than a decade before the storm submerged New Orleans in 2005.
When completed, Plaquemines LNG will be surrounded by a 26-foot storm wall and flanked by two separate levee systems. In his report, however, van Heerden determined that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane like Laura or Ida could still flood the facility and cause widespread damage that would spill into surrounding wetlands and nearby communities.
“It is my opinion after years of studying hurricanes and flooding that this LNG site will be flooded, in the not-too-distant future and perhaps even the next hurricane season,” van Heerden wrote in the report. If a flood ever breached the plant’s levee system, he wrote, there would be a high probability of chemicals “being carried off the site and into homes, businesses, farmland, and fragile coastal wetlands.”
The risks are similar at the five other LNG facilities that now line the Gulf Coast, and future export terminals in Louisiana and Texas will be just as prone to devastation during storms. As van Heerden sees it, the gas industry is on a collision course with rising sea levels and ocean temperatures, building explosive infrastructure in an area that is only getting more vulnerable to climate change.
A time lapse over several years shows construction of two LNG terminals on the Texas-Louisiana border. Planet Labs PBC / Grist / Lylla Younes
Grist sent questions about air pollution and hurricane risk to all five companies that operate LNG export terminals in Texas and Louisiana, and only two responded. A representative from Sempra Energy, said that the company “put[s] the health, safety and security of our workforce, customers and communities at the center of everything we do.” A representative from Commonwealth LNG said that “the safety of our employees, the public, and the environment … have the highest priority in everything that we do.”
Officials in Louisiana ignored van Heerden’s warnings before Katrina, and the result was the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the United States, costing more than $170 billion. If he’s right about the risks of exporting LNG, coastal Louisiana could see a devastating LNG disaster in the coming years, as soon as the right hurricane strikes, and it will be people like Henry McAnespy who bear the immediate damage from chemical explosions and contamination. The effects would also be felt well beyond coastal Louisiana.
“The average American should recognize that when it all goes to hell in a bucket, they’re the ones who are going to be coughing up the money for the remediation,” van Heerden told Grist. “Katrina cost billions of dollars. The cost [of an LNG disaster] is going to be borne by the American public, and it’s going to be a substantial cost.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice and the Sierra Club are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Over the past century, the fossil fuel industry has made a habit of letting others clean up their messes. Today, the country is dotted with millions of “orphaned wells,” crevices in the Earth that companies once used to extract oil, and subsequently abandoned once they were no longer considered profitable. But additional help appears to be on the way: This week, the Biden Administration announced it would make nearly $660 million in funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law available to states to plug more of these polluting fissures.
“These investments are good for our climate, for the health of our communities, and for American workers,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in a press release on Monday. “With this additional funding, states will put more people to work to clean up these toxic sites, reduce methane emissions and safeguard our environment.”
Unless they are plugged — filled with concrete and stripped of unused equipment — abandoned oil wells can seep hazardous compounds into their surroundings. A growing body of research has shown that orphaned oil wells are a major source of planet-warming emissions since the steel and concrete walls that reinforce them are prone to cracking over time and releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas. A 2020 Reuters investigation found that in 2018, orphaned wells emitted an estimated 280,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere, roughly the equivalent of the emissions from the total amount of oil that the U.S. uses on a typical day.
Legally, companies are required to plug their wells after they finish extracting fuel, but regulators have long struggled with enforcement. Part of the challenge is financial: It costs an average of $20,000 to seal a single well, and many companies file for bankruptcy before following through. As a result, experts estimate that there are two to three million abandoned oil wells across the country, with the majority concentrated in oil-and-gas producing states such as Texas and Pennsylvania.
The Department of the Interior said that the new funding is part of its goal to advance environmental justice, a term that refers to the disproportionate pollution borne by low-income people and communities of color across the country. Numerousstudies have demonstrated that practices like redlining — in which financial services such as loans and insurance are systematically denied to people in certain neighborhoods of color — have concentrated oil and gas wells in majority Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in places like Los Angeles.
The hazards of living near abandoned wells go beyond their contribution to climate change. Orphaned wells are a public health threat since they can emit dangerous chemicals like benzene and toluene, which have been linked to conditions such as blood cancer and liver disease. In rare cases, they can leak methane into nearby buildings, allowing the gas to build up to dangerous levels.
This week’s announcement marks the second major round of funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to plug orphaned wells. States used the first set of funds, which was announced last August, to plug approximately 3,000 wells. Officials have until the end of the year to apply for this new round of grants, which range from $1 million to $80 million, depending on the number of wells in the state.
“At the end of the day, it’s a lot of money, but it’s nowhere near enough,” Josh Axelrod, a senior policy advocate at the National Resources Defense Council, told Grist. “The big question is whether the federal government should really be in the business of cleaning this up since technically, the industry was supposed to be on the hook for these wells over the years.”
After decades of intensive lobbying, petitioning, heartfelt testimony and the deaths of countless miners, federal regulators have finally taken a major step toward tighter restrictions on exposure to silica dust, a change that could save thousands of lives.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration has proposed halving the permissible level of silica exposure to 50 micrograms per cubic meter. That’s in line with what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has held other industries to since 2016. Silica dust is toxic, and long-term exposure can cause a slow but fatal hardening of lung tissue called progressive massive fibrosis, or, as it’s known within coal-mining areas, black lung disease. The toxin increasingly abounds in mines as companies plumb thinner coal seams with greater impurities. Advocates of the tighter guideline, which will apply to all miners, regardless of what they dig from the earth, say it could go a long way toward protecting workers. But even as they celebrate, they’re strategizing on how to make the rule even stronger.
“There’s a lot more work to be done,” said Vonda Robinson, vice president of the Black Lung Association.
Robinson knows the incalculable costs of lax mine safety regulations. Her husband, who worked 30 years underground in southwestern Virginia, was diagnosed with black lung at the age of 47 and has spent years entangled in byzantine federal benefits systems. She’s been fighting for a stricter standard as long as almost anyone, but she worries that there are still loopholes that the industry will readily exploit.
“They just use the miner to get their pockets full of money,” Robinson said. “The company’s all about production, production, production, let’s get the coal out, let’s get the coal out. They will not do correct sampling.”
Federal mining regulators, along with the Kentucky and West Virginia coal associations, did not respond to requests for comment.
Much has been made of the companies’ responsibility for dust sampling to determine how much silica and other contaminants miners are exposed to; that task is left to the industry because the Mining Safety and Health Administration does not have the funding or personnel to do it. Robinson says regulators must deploy more inspectors if the higher standard, which awaits public comments and clearance from multiple agencies, is to be enforced. The Black Lung Association and other advocacy groups are preparing to lobby for more funding to the agency and stricter sampling oversight.
Robinson feels buoyed by the movement’s victories, though. Last year, campaigns succeeded in securing a permanently higher rate for the black lung excise tax, which the Internal Revenue Service levies on coal companies to support the fund from which afflicted miners draw federal benefits. (Robinson’s next goal is raising that benefit, which stands at just $737 per month or about $1,100 for miners with a dependent.)
Alongside other labor groups, miners and their advocates have long sought tighter silica standards. Although OSHA made silica a priority in 1995, when the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found a need for stricter exposure standards, it didn’t update its standard until 2016. The Mine Safety and Health Administration hasn’t updated its guideline since 1985. Black lung patients and their advocates petitioned the agency for a revision in 2011, but it didn’t send to send one to the Office of Management and Budget for review until last year. Public pressure increased in the months preceding Friday’s announcement on June 30. Last week, U.S. senators Joe Manchin, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown, John Fettermain, and Tim Kane, all of whom represent coal-producing states, signed an open letter urging prompt action. They voiced support for the rule after its announcement.
“We applaud the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s new proposed silica rule to enhance health protections for miners across the country,” they said in a statement. “We urge swift implementation of this rule because protecting our hard-working miners from dangerous levels of silica cannot wait.”
If adopted, the rule will require routine medical testing of all mineworkers, and require companies to find ways of limiting silica exposure through measures like respirators. Once the rule is posted in the Federal Register, MSHA will initiate a 45-day comment period, which will be punctuated by public hearings in Denver and Arlington, Virginia. Both will be streamed online.
Last week, the federal Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, proposed a new rule that would reduce fees for wind and solar development on public lands by 80 percent. Regulators at the BLM say the move could accelerate renewable power production on federal lands and help achieve President Joe Biden’s goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035.
Solar and wind developers and advocates lauded the proposed rule as an important step toward a clean energy transition on U.S. public lands. For more than a century, energy production on federal lands was limited almost exclusively to coal, oil, and gas extraction. Experts say the rules in place were designed to optimize fossil fuel production, not renewables — resulting in disproportionately high costs for clean energy developers that the proposed rule aims to address.
“This rule recognizes that if we want to see renewable energy developed at a sustainable and meaningful pace on public land, there need to be rules that are conducive to that,” Bobby McEnaney, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s dirty energy project, told Grist.
To build an energy project on public lands, the BLM charges developers rental fees for the land itself and additional fees based on the amount of energy produced. The Energy Act of 2020, a bipartisan law to advance clean energy innovation, authorized the agency to reduce those fees for wind and solar projects. In 2022, the agency issued internal guidance that lowered fees by about 50 percent. Last week’s proposed rule would cut costs another 30 percent. It would also codify those reductions, making it more difficult for future presidential administrations to change course.
The rule would also streamline approval processes by allowing the agency to accept leasing applications from renewables developers without holding a competitive auction in areas prioritized for clean energy development.
Fossil fuel developers typically pay far lower fees for using public lands than their wind and solar counterparts. For example, before production fees kicked in, as of 2021 oil and gas paid $1.50 to $2 per acre in rental fees each year — although the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act increased some of those rates. But for wind and solar, the BLM currently calculates rental fees according to market-rate land values, which can run up to tens of thousands of dollars per acre.
“Industries that use our public lands should be paying equitable fees,” said McEnaney. “Oil and gas does not pay its fair share.” He said one reason for the imbalance is that fossil fuel industries have had decades to lobby policymakers for industry-friendly fees and approval processes.
Meanwhile, the first solar project on public lands was approved in 2010, during the Obama administration. But renewable projects on federal lands have since continued to grow. In the last two and a half years, the BLM has approved 35 solar, wind, geothermal, and transmission projects. The projects are expected to generate more than 8 gigawatts of electricity — capable of powering 2.6 million homes.
The agency is currently processing 74 project proposals for utility-scale renewable energy on public lands, all located in the West.
Also last week, the agency issued updates on an expanded Western Solar Plan, a federal framework launched by the Obama administration that identifies priority areas for solar power production on public lands in the West, and incentivizes and streamlines project development. The plan currently spans six states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The BLM is seeking comment on expanding solar planning to five additional states — Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.
The proposed rule and updates arrive as part of the BLM’s broader strategy to permit 25 gigawatts of clean energy on public lands by 2025 — a mandate set by Congress in the Energy Act of 2020. The agency will accept public comments on the proposed rule until mid-August.
