Democratic leaders have reached an agreement with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia on a package to fund climate action, capping off a contentious battle over a bill that just a week ago seemed dead in the water.
Manchin’s office announced that he would vote for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which along with instating a minimum tax on corporations and reforming prescription drug pricing, would funnel $369 billion toward tackling “energy security and climate change,” according to a summary of the bill.
The proposal claims these investments would reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030, falling short of Biden’s goal to slash them by at least 50 percent. The bill would not rule out additional fossil fuel infrastructure, Manchin was careful to say, while also investing in hydrogen, nuclear power, and renewable energy.
“I support a plan that will advance a realistic energy and climate policy that lowers prices today and strategically invests in the long game,” he said in a press release. “As the super power of the world, it is vital we not undermine our super power status by removing dependable and affordable fossil fuel energy before new technologies are ready to reliably carry the load.”
The release also notes that Congress is committed to considering “commonsense permitting reforms” for energy infrastructure this fall — a possible indication that the embattled Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would carry natural gas from shale fields in West Virginia to southern Virginia and has Manchin’s support, could end up being approved.
President Biden celebrated the agreement, confirming that he spoke with Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Wednesday. The bill “will improve our energy security and tackle the climate crisis – by providing tax credits and investments for energy projects,” he said in a statement. “This will create thousands of new jobs and help lower energy costs in the future.
Early reactions from climate advocates were mixed, with some signaling support for the agreement and others saying it falls short. “The reported agreement between Senator Manchin and Leader Schumer presents the opportunity for a major breakthrough in America’s fight against climate change,” Jamal Raad, executive director of the advocacy group Evergreen Action, wrote on Twitter.
Meanwhile, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the political nonprofit Food & Water Action, argued that the deal would “prop up fossil fuels and promote the various false climate solutions beloved by industry.”
“After dragging his feet for more than a year, Senator Manchin announced an agreement that won’t solve the crisis, and may make it worse,” Hauter said in a press release. “More subsidies for dirty hydrogen, carbon capture, and nuclear energy are not climate action, they are the opposite.”
The announcement comes just over a week after reports that Manchin would not support climate legislation due to concerns over inflation left Democrats scrambling to reassure voters that Biden could still pursue a climate agenda. But it’s a significantly pared-down version of the president’s original climate ambitions, which included nearly half a trillion dollars in clean energy tax credits and other climate-related measures as part of last year’s Build Back Better bill.
Because Republicans are nearly unanimous in their opposition to acting on climate change, Schumer has pinned his hopes on passing climate legislation along party lines through a process called budget reconciliation. But that requires Democrats, who hold exactly half of the seats in the Senate, to vote in unison — and so far they’ve been unable to do so.
Last November, after House Democrats voted to pass Build Back Better with no Republican support, the legislation stalled in the Senate when Manchin, as well as Senator Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, refused to support the bill. (Manchin is heavily invested in coal in his home state and has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the energy industry).
For several months, the ensuing negotiations and tentative deals did not result in anything resembling comprehensive climate action. That changed on Wednesday, although Sinema did not say whether she would support the new bill, leaving some uncertainty about its chances of success. The Senate could consider the legislation as soon as next week.
Seven of the U.S.’s largest Bitcoin mining companies are set up to use nearly as much electricity as all of the homes in Houston — the nation’s fourth most populous city — according to a congressional investigation of the industry.
The findings, released Friday, come as Democratic lawmakers are calling for regulation and cryptominers are increasingly under fire for straining the electrical grid and raising electricity prices for consumers.
In a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, a group of Democratic lawmakers led by Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, revealed that the seven companies have the capacity to use as much as 1,045 megawatts of power, or enough to power all of the homes in Houston, a city of more than 2 million people.
“The results of our investigation, which gathered data from just seven companies, are disturbing, with this limited data alone revealing that cryptominers are large energy users that account for a significant – and rapidly growing – amount of carbon emissions,” the lawmakers wrote.
They also urged federal agencies to develop rules requiring that cryptomining companies report their power usage and greenhouse gas emissions — a first step towards understanding the scope of the problem and crafting regulation.
The cryptomining industry has been undergoing explosive growth in the U.S. In 2021, China banned mining and the U.S. quickly became the world’s hub. Roughly a quarter of American mining operations are located in Texas, where the state’s electrical grid is notoriously fragile.
Mining for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin — a process that requires specialized computers to solve complex math problems in exchange for new tokens — requires a large amount of computing power and is energy-intensive. Earlier this week, as a heatwave swept across Texas, state regulators had to ask Bitcoin miners to voluntarily shut down their operations to avoid overloading the grid.
More troubles lie ahead. According to The Verge, by 2026 cryptocurrency miners plan to increase demand on Texas’s grid by 27 gigawatts, or by roughly a third of the grid’s current capacity.
Cryptocurrency advocates say mining will spur the building of more renewable energy, but so far it hasn’t been enough. Bitcoin mining emits as much greenhouse gasses as entire countries; one recent estimate said as much as the Czech Republic.
The load that cryptominers place on the grid is driving up prices for other consumers, too. Last year a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago found that cryptocurrency mining in upstate New York raised electricity costs for households in the region by a total of $165 million each year.
This is the second in a two-part series about oil and gas emissions in the San Joaquin Valley originally published by Capital and Main. Read the second story here.
Amid the desert of western Kern County — the beating heart of California’s oil and gas industry — the Elk Hills gas power plant and refinery stand out as a mighty structure of steam, steel piping and turbines, surrounded by pumpjacks bobbing for oil. From half a mile away on a public road, Kyle Ferrar of the FracTracker Alliance and Andrew Klooster of Earthworks use an optical gas imaging camera equipped to capture emissions invisible to the naked eye. The camera detects hydrocarbons coming from two flare devices, which appear as constant, furious streams of pollution into the sky.
These emissions can include methane, a greenhouse gas vastly more dangerous than carbon dioxide that is leaking widely into the atmosphere from oil and gas facilities across the world. They can also contain volatile organic compounds, including hazardous air pollutants and hydrocarbons that react with nitrogen oxides, another common industrial pollutant, in the sunlight to form ground-level ozone, the main ingredient in lung-damaging smog.
The Elk Hills facility, owned by California Resources Corporation, is responsible for plumes of methane, according to data collected by a joint partnership between NASA and the state involving the use of remote sensing aircraft. State records show that in 2019, the gas plant emitted 198 tons of organic gasses, including hydrocarbons like methane, contributing to a total of at least 998 total tons of organic gasses and 120 tons of nitrogen oxides emitted that year in the San Joaquin Valley from oil and gas equipment owned by the same company.
The facility has received 20 enforcement violations for leaks over the last five years from the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, the local regulator that oversees compliance with state and federal air laws. A state audit also identified more than 500 methane leaks at the Elk Hills plant in 2019 that were eventually repaired. However, regulators with the local air district told Capital & Main and Type Investigations that the flare emissions are acceptable under the company’s permits.
But the district’s methods of mitigating pollution could be underestimating the impact of emissions from industry, according to residents and experts. And the gas refinery is far from the only source of major pollution in the area, which is home to many of California’s busiest oil and gas fields. Some are among the dirtiest in the world, spewing climate-warming emissions as they pull fuel from the ground.
A local emissions trading system, mandated by federal law in areas that fail to meet standards for air quality, is supposed to incentivize companies to reduce overall pollution beyond what is required by regulations by rewarding them with offset credits. Companies bank credits with the San Joaquin Valley air district, and can “cash in” credits to build more polluting infrastructure while claiming net pollution isn’t rising. Every cashed-in offset credit balances out pollution that is released into the San Joaquin Valley’s air. At least on paper.
As of March 2022, there are banked credits representing 43,300 tons of 10 different pollutants that have been offset. The oil and gas industry has banked almost half of these credits, and California Resources Corporation, or CRC, has banked the most, with credits representing 9,558 tons as of July 2021. The company cashed in credits worth 8.9 tons of volatile organic compound emissions annually to offset the flare pollution.
Spokesperson Richard Venn said CRC “follows emissions reduction protocols to comply with local and federal regulations,” including the use of emissions reduction credits for “a maintenance project related to our gas processing plant at Elk Hills,” adding that the flares comply with regulations and any violations are quickly addressed.
After a state regulator found major issues with San Joaquin Valley’s emissions reductions credits system two years ago, including poor bookkeeping and overcounted emissions reductions, advocates based in the area are raising concerns about high levels of pollution that may have been greenlit by regulators, and expressing doubts about regulators’ proposals to improve the system.
Jesus Alonso, an organizer with Clean Water Action and a member of the public advisory workgroup on the credits system, now sees the program as a failure. “The polluters were allowed to continue to pollute with the promise of clean air, and that’s not what the community members got at all,” Alonso said.
A sign at the entrance of Buttonwillow, an unincorporated community in Kern County.
Aaron Cantú
The air district, meanwhile, says the offsets system has contributed to permanent emissions reductions within the 25,000 square miles of the San Joaquin Valley, which has some of the worst air pollution in the country and is designated as an “extreme nonattainment” area for ozone under federal regulations. The EPA notes that the area is particularly hard hit because smog precursors and particulate matter that get trapped in a mountain basin come not just from industry but also agricultural burning, wildfire smoke, pesticides, landfills, industrial dairy farming, and heavy diesel trucks.
The air district says it’s committed to maintaining “an effective permitting system that allows for protection of public health and strong economic growth,” according to spokesperson Jaime Holt.
Yet it’s under pressure from the industry and federal regulators to keep the struggling emissions credits system humming along. Catherine Garoupa White, executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition and a member of the emissions reductions credits public advisory group, says regulators seem more concerned with giving industry what it wants than with protecting public health. “From my encounters with them, they are more focused on figuring out how to enable industry,” White said.
In the valley, emissions from major oil and gas polluters can harm people’s health directly by contributing to smog, and indirectly by contributing to climate change, which exacerbates illnesses and health problems.
The small community of Buttonwillow sits a few miles from several of the largest oil and gas fields in the state, a blip of homes, a school, and a couple of restaurants along Highway 58. Driving west past agricultural fields, one encounters a large sign underneath looming transmission towers and the distant Temblor Range that proclaims Buttonwillow “The Heart of California Agriculture.”
Adela Carranza stands outside her home with her grandchildren in Buttonwillow.
Aaron Cantú
Outside of his grandmother’s wooden home, a chubby cheeked 4-year-old named Cesar struggles to catch his breath as he excitedly talks about dinosaurs and school. His grandmother, Adela Carranza, tends to Cesar and his three younger sisters on the porch, as she explains that he uses both an inhaler and a nebulizer to manage severe asthma.
“When I take him to school, they’ll send him back because he can’t breathe,” Carranza said in Spanish. His air “catches in his chest.”
Up the street, 22-year-old Armando Guzman also wheezes as he talks about growing up in Buttonwillow, where his parents settled after coming to the U.S. from Mexico as children.
Guzman came down with pneumonia two years ago and then started exhibiting severe symptoms of coccidioidomycosis, or Valley Fever, an incurable fungal infection of the lungs that comes from spores in the dirt of the southern San Joaquin Valley. Infections are on the rise here as intense rainy seasons following periods of drought allow the fungus to thrive in the soil. It’s then blown around by the wind.
“Like right now, it hurts when you breathe,” said Guzman, who worked in a nearby oil field for six months until his lungs couldn’t take anymore. “It’s like trying to breathe into a bag, like you’re breathing your own air.”
Armando Guzman stands outside his home in Buttonwillow.
Aaron Cantú
Respiratory issues rank among the top concerns for the 900,000 residents who live in the sprawling county, according to its public health department. Asthma plagues Kern and surrounding counties like Madera, Kings, and Fresno. In addition to severe ozone, particulate matter in the air is among the worst in the country.
The San Joaquin Valley air district trumpets progress since the 1980s. In response to questions from Capital & Main and Type Investigations, it said stationary sources — regulator lingo for industrial facilities — account for only a fraction of greenhouse and air toxic emissions, while mobile sources such as diesel-powered trucks account for the majority.
One state assemblymember, a former emergency room doctor from Fresno named Joaquin Arambula, introduced legislation this year, now under consideration by the State Senate, that would bring the local air district under closer supervision by state regulators. “It’s unacceptable that we have national air quality standards that haven’t been met since 1997, and I believe that the San Joaquin Air District can do more,” Arambula said.
Arambula’s legislation succeeded in the State Assembly despite the powerful role the oil and gas industry plays in California. Republican Assemblymember Vince Fong and Democratic Assemblymember Rudy Salas of Kern County have taken $195,896 and $266,529 from the industry, respectively. Fong voted against the legislation in the Assembly and Salas didn’t register a vote on it. The bill is still pending in the Senate, where Sen. Shannon Grove of Kern County has taken $259,875 from the industry and leads a Bakersfield company that helps staff the local oil and gas sector.
Fong and Grove didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a statement sent via email, Salas said he supports the air district’s “efforts to restore clean air and improve the health and safety of our Central Valley families,” and would consider supporting the bill if it comes up for a vote in the Assembly again in August.
While there are several sources of pollution in the valley, the oil and gas industry’s political influence may obscure the true extent of the harm linked to its emissions. Major companies like Chevron and Aera Energy, a joint venture of Shell and Exxon, are contributors to schools and local civic organizations and events, and the industry’s revenues represent a significant portion of the tax base for Kern County and several others in the valley.
The emissions reductions credit system’s flawed implementation is an outgrowth of this sprawling influence over the regulatory process, critics say. For years, oil majors banked millions of credits to use for future expansion. Problems with the system began coming to light two years ago.
The systemic problems center on millions of nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compound credits, the two pollutants that create smog. The vast majority of these credits currently in circulation were generated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The idea was that industries would adopt innovative pollution controls to reduce emissions in order to earn credits.
Over the years, state and federal air quality standards improved, which under federal rules would have wiped out the emissions reductions value of older credits because they had to signify pollution cuts “above and beyond” what current regulations require.
But an agreement between the EPA and the San Joaquin Valley air district in the 1990s allowed the district to maintain the value of the credits at the time they were issued — meaning old credits generated under less strict regulations could retain full value. The district just needed to show its system resulted in equivalent emissions reductions as under federal rules.
It did this in part by claiming emissions reductions from oil equipment that was no longer operating, and from agricultural equipment that switched from diesel to electric engines. These methods, separate from the credit system, eventually accounted for hundreds of tons of emissions reductions the district used to say it was in compliance with federal law.
The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, the state agency overseeing all 35 local air districts, audited the system and found that the district overestimated reductions and kept poor records. In one case, the district claimed 528.5 annual tons of volatile organic compound pollutant reductions, based upon estimating the impact of shutting down six petroleum storage tanks. The true value should have been zero because they hadn’t operated for nine years.
In response, the district committed to reexamining the way it counted emissions reductions and over the last two years essentially erased millions of pounds of reductions value from nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compound credits. It also assigned staff to oversee efforts to correct the system full time, and began holding public meetings with industry and environmental representatives.
Environmental justice advocates welcomed the reforms but say they don’t go far enough, and fear the district will eventually revert back to using dubious accounting.
“We’re looking for ways to identify new emissions reductions credits to allow for [industrial] projects to keep happening,” according to Errol Villegas, the permit services manager for the air district’s central region, in a recent public meeting.
At a meeting with community representatives in April, several people asked what regulators could do about pollution approved with faulty credits, arguing many projects should never have been approved. The San Joaquin Valley air district has said it doesn’t have the capacity to investigate past permitted projects.
The EPA has also suggested as much. “You can’t go back and start from the beginning and do this really quantitatively,” said Meredith Kurpius, assistant director of the Air and Radiation Division for the EPA Region 9 overseeing the air district, at the meeting. She added that the audit’s true value was ensuring “in the future we have a more transparent program.”
In response to questions, the air district said that the emissions credits system is one of several methods to limit harms to human health, and that companies must also implement the best available technology to control pollution and ensure it won’t “create a significant health risk” to the surrounding community and vulnerable populations. Companies are also directed to offset the “worse-case potential scenario” for pollution.
The Elk Hills Power Plant owned by California Resources Corporation in Tupman, California.
Aaron Cantú
Last November, the Biden administration proposed a new Clean Air Act rule that would further restrict methane emissions from oil and gas operations, estimating that it could eliminate millions of tons of methane and volatile organic compound pollution over the next 12 years. But if the air district once again allows companies to use old credits, that could blunt the impact of the new regulations.
Regulators have created a “false dichotomy” pitting jobs against public health, said Sasan Sadaat, a senior research and policy analyst at Earthjustice and a member of the emissions reductions credits public advisory group.
“We need to confront this reality that economic growth that depends on increased pollution can no longer be the thing we reach for,” Sadaat said. “We can’t just try and create crediting programs that allow us to pretend like we could actually permit new pollution in this region with the belief that some other programs or projects or credit generating opportunities will offset it. They won’t.”
Jesus Alonso, also a member of the public advisory group, said clean air advocates in the valley see litigation against the air district as a potential avenue for redress. They could, for example, file a civil rights complaint alleging the permitting program discriminated based on race. Air pollution in the San Joaquin Valley has disproportionately harmed people of color, and the Biden administration has pledged to overhaul the EPA’s civil rights enforcement office.
But suing may be a last resort. “First what we’re going after is being able to actually quantify how badly the air district messed up,” Alonso said, “and finding ways to balance that out.”
Funding for this story was provided in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, where Aaron Cantú is a reporting fellow.
This is the second in a two-part series about oil and gas emissions in the San Joaquin Valley originally published by Capital and Main. Read the first story here.
Just outside the small oil town of McKittrick, five large steam generators resembling a row of chimneys and operated by Sentinel Peak Resources rise over the chaparral at the edge of California’s Cymric Oil Field. The gas-hungry facilities heat large volumes of water into steam so companies can “sweep” thick, molasses-like crude out of the ground.
This part of San Joaquin Valley — home to oil and gas production, industrial agriculture and massive dairy operations — is an epicenter of planet-warming emissions in a state that is otherwise known for its leadership on climate policy. But many of the worst emissions are invisible without specialized equipment.
New technology is revealing the true extent of pollution across the valley’s major oil and gas fields and underscoring the need for regulatory reform. These revelations are thanks in large part to the work of Riley Duren, an engineering fellow at NASA who is leading a project that uses aircraft with remote sensing to conduct “wall to wall” surveys to detect emissions missed by cameras or handheld detection. The work is exceptionally important because some oil fields in the San Joaquin Valley rank among the top greenhouse gas-emitting oil fields in the world, due to the energy required to extract their super thick oil reserves, according to the Oil-Climate Index.
Petroleum storage tanks in the Antelope Hills Oil Field in Kern County.
Aaron Cantú
Duren’s surveys, which started in California but have since expanded to several other states, looked at landfills and large-scale animal feed operations in addition to oil and gas facilities. They found that less than 0.2 percent of infrastructure in the state is responsible for between one-third and one-half of California’s total emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that has almost 90 times the atmospheric warming potential as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, surveyed nearly 2.3 million regulated oil and gas components in 2019, based on self-reported data from companies. Seven thousand leaks were identified and repaired, per the agency’s November 2021 report. CARB estimates the leaks would have emitted enough methane to equal 76,000 tons of carbon dioxide had they not been repaired.
But CARB’s regulations don’t apply to equipment already covered by local rules, and there are more pieces of infrastructure subject to air district monitoring rather than state oversight. Regulators with the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, the local regulating body, are required to visit major polluting facilities, including 37 classified as oil and gas, at least once per calendar year, though the district is considering updating its rules to require quarterly visits.
CARB spokesperson Alberto Larios said his agency has delegated primary authority for enforcing methane regulations to the San Joaquin Valley air district and that the state provides “support and oversight.” When major leaks are detected, CARB can also conduct joint inspections with local regulators and inspectors from the California Geologic Management Division, which regulates oil and gas wells.
The San Joaquin Valley air district has required operators of major polluting facilities to “cash in” emissions reductions credits to show they complied with federal clean air laws by offsetting new pollution. But that system has come under fire after years of mismanagement. In addition, at least some of these facilities have leaked planet-warming pollutants beyond what their permits allow.
Regulations don’t always perfectly account for large volumes of emissions, “so you could argue they should be reduced even if they’re permitted,” said Duren, who is working with a team to launch satellites capable of detecting methane and carbon dioxide emissions on a regular basis.
Near the five Sentinel Peak Resources steam generators, a low roar can be heard from dozens of yards away, but no emissions are visible to the naked eye. Through an infrared camera’s lens, however, the generators look more like a row of smokestacks emitting continuous fumes. Sentinel Peak Resources used offset credits worth 1.6 tons of volatile organic compounds a year and 3.46 tons of nitrogen oxides a year for three of the generators. The company also used credits to offset 4.47 tons of annual nitrogen oxides emissions for the other two generators.
In addition to heating the atmosphere, these two types of emissions contribute to the formation of smog. The credits were cashed in before the air district made significant changes to the emissions reductions credits system, and clean air advocates argue the district should account for how the credits overestimated emissions reductions.
In 2019 the five generators alone released at least 217.4 tons of total organic gasses, including methane, and 143.6 tons of nitrogen oxides. They have also leaked gasses in violation of regulations 46 times since May 2017, according to the air district, which said the company has received 14 notices of violation for leaks.
Christina Dixon, land manager for Sentinel Peak, wrote in an email that there were no violations for the generators at the facility we visited, but she declined to explain why the regulator assessed 14 notices of violation. When regulators visited the facility after receiving questions from Capital & Main and Type Investigations, they said the generators were polluting in compliance with their permits, which the company also noted.
When presented with the camera readings, Dixon said the company could not comment on the findings. “We were not present with the group on the date of filming, have no knowledge of the adequacy of training that any of the video participants have had in the evaluation of emissions, and we do not know if the FLIR [Forward Looking InfraRed] camera operators are properly trained in evaluating the differentiation of heat or other emissions from the FLIR device. However, we can inform you that the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District routinely inspects Sentinel Peak’s operations.”
Earthworks’ Andrew Klooster and FracTrackers’ Kyle Ferrar, the two camera operators, were trained and certified through the Infrared Training Center, which offers courses for public safety departments, professionals and others.
CARB’s audit in 2019 identified 287 methane leaks that were eventually repaired on Sentinel Peak Resources’ equipment statewide, including several on the steam generators. The company’s footprint in the valley is small compared with Chevron’s, which emitted a combined 1,685 tons of hydrocarbons and other oxygenated compounds and 262 tons of nitrogen oxides in 2019. Another large producer, Aera Energy — a joint venture of Shell and Exxon — emitted at least 216.9 and 388.2 tons, respectively. Chevron reported 730 methane leaks to CARB and Aera reported 1,907; all were fixed, the agency said.
Along with overvalued offsets credits underwriting decades of pollution, the lack of constant monitoring limits public knowledge about the scale of emissions. In the spring, California updated its rules for monitoring toxic air hot spots to capture new points of emissions. During the rule development process, the San Joaquin Valley air district submitted comments to the effect that the new requirements would be burdensome without more funding.
Detecting emissions leaks with remote sensing aircraft isn’t yet technologically possible outside of NASA, according to Duren. Larios, the CARB spokesperson, said, “Current inspection requirements can be labor intensive, requiring specialized staff and equipment to conduct site visits.”
State and air district inspections “are important because they catch persistent emitters, but they often miss highly intermittent emitters,” Duren explained, agreeing that the infrared camera captured emissions properly but noting that it wasn’t clear from the video whether the emissions were persistent problems. California has higher standards on methane than other states, he noted. Still, he said, the current monitoring framework in California is “necessary but not sufficient.” The regulations “don’t catch everything.”
Occasionally the health impacts burst into view, as when inspectors with the California Geologic Energy Management Division confirmed reports in May of long-idled wells leaking methane within a few hundred feet of homes in Bakersfield. While regulators said they’d fixed the initial leaks, follow-up inspections revealed more troubled spots, and Duren said his remote sensing aircraft was even able to detect the pollution before it was addressed — a sign of a far larger leak than would be expected from a few old wells.
A pipeline carrying wastewater from oil and gas operations in Kern County.
Aaron Cantú
But the oil and gas industry’s political power remains entrenched, even in areas close enough to be harmed by its pollution. In the town of Taft, which sits in the middle of the most productive oil field in the state, businesses on downtown streets that feel like the Old West display signs in support of the industry. One banner on a pizza restaurant reads, “SAVE THE WELLS.”
Local officials and businesses participate in industry pride event Oildorado, held every five years, and former President Trump’s embrace of fossil fuels helped endear him to many here. The city’s and county’s tax base is hugely dependent on revenues from the oil and gas industry, but recent economic downtowns — which city officials partially blamed on “extreme state regulations on the oil and gas industry” — pushed Taft to declare a fiscal emergency last year.
Yet residents also bear the health burdens of living in a gigantic oil field. Near the town’s main drag, 30-year-old Joanne Almaguer was visiting her parents’ home from Lancaster. She’s taken an interest in public health in part because she grew up here, and many people she’s known have come down with coccidioidomycosis, colloquially known as Valley Fever — a fungal lung infection linked to climate-induced changes in the valley. Locals, including her brother-in-law, are defensive of the industry, she said.
“Out here the jobs are oil-based, but I know they aren’t good for the environment,” she said. “If there weren’t oil jobs, there wouldn’t be any other kinds of jobs, other than schools.”
Another resident down the street, a woman who asked to be identified only as Kelly, said she had moved to Taft 15 years ago from the coast. Her grandson came down with Valley Fever, which she said was manageable, but she saw the need to balance the economic benefits that come from the industry with the need to confront climate change and improve the local air quality.
A pizza restaurant in Taft, California, shows support for local oil drilling.
Aaron Cantú
“They should get our opinions and see what’s good for people who live here long term,” she said. “Like meetings, monthly or whatever, to decide — can we plant more trees to offset something? Are there other programs to do that, maybe?” (The air district recently started broadcasting public meetings about the emissions credits system.)
Even as both California and the EPA consider updating their enforcement rules to further restrict methane and volatile organic compounds, advocates, and scientists say the gravity of the climate crisis — to say nothing of the reality of ongoing environmental injustice — demands a quicker and more comprehensive response.
“The problem we have, not just in California,” Duren said, “is that efforts to improve monitoring and rule-making are out of sync with the need to move urgently to solve problems.”
Funding for this story was provided in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, where Aaron Cantú is a reporting fellow.
This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The following sentence doesn’t make any sense, but is actually true: A heat pump can turn 1 kilowatt-hour, or kWh, of electricity into up to 4 kWh of heat.
For the home heating and cooling technology known as the heat pump, this means big potential savings both for carbon emissions and for utility bills. Recently, I’ve been looking at two different questions: First, how good are heat pumps for the climate? And second, how much money do they save?
The term heat pump is actually a little bit confusing. A heat pump is actually a super efficient heating and cooling machine. And the thing about a heat pump is that it doesn’t actually make heat — it moves it.
That sounds a bit weird, but this is how it works: If your house is too hot, a heat pump can basically take the warm air from inside your house and put it outside. That’s exactly the same as an air conditioner. But if your house is too cold, a heat pump can also bring warm air from outside into your house. And it can do that even if the outside air is really cold.
The science here is a little bit complicated, but because a heat pump is moving heat, instead of creating it, it can reach efficiencies of 300 or 400 percent. A normal heating system, on the other hand, can only reach an efficiency of about 100 percent at best. Because of this efficiency superpower, heat pumps can actually save a whole bunch of greenhouse gases from spewing into the atmosphere. According to the energy research group Carbon Switch, switching to a heat pump can save you anywhere from about 1 metric ton to about 7 metric tons of carbon emissions every single year. The carbon savings are the most dramatic if you have an old electric baseboard heater: In that case, you can save over 7 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year by switching to a heat pump.
For reference, if you went vegan for an entire year, you’d be saving about 1 metric ton of CO2-equivalent. If you skipped an international flight to Europe, you’d be saving a ton of CO2. But in this case, you don’t actually have to give up meat or your international travel plans to save carbon. You’re just ensuring a pleasant year-round environment.
But let’s be real: Being a homeowner is expensive, and retrofitting your home heating system is often super expensive. So even with all these carbon- and climate-saving benefits, does switching to a heat pump make sense financially?
First off, everyone’s house is different, and heat pumps, like houses, can come in all different shapes and sizes. They can be ductless or ducted. They can be geothermal, or air-source, or water-source. Some of them can even look like George Clooney.
Whether a heat pump makes sense for you is going to depend on what type of house you have, your existing fuel system, and all of these other little complicated details. But it turns out that for a lot of Americans, buying and installing a heat pump is going to make a lot of financial sense. To understand why, let’s crunch some numbers.
Let’s say you’re a homeowner and your fuel oil furnace is near the end of its life. You’re trying to decide, “OK, do I buy a new, fuel-oil furnace or should I go for an air-source heat pump?”
According to the home repair site Fixr, for a 2000-square foot house, the average cost of buying and installing a new oil furnace is about $6,000. Buying and installing a new air-source heat pump that will fit into existing ducts, on the other hand, is about $10,500 — so nothing to sneeze at. But electricity is a lot cheaper than fuel oil. And don’t forget about the heat pump’s monster efficiency.
Carbon Switch calculates that for the average homeowner, switching from a fuel oil furnace to an air-source heat pump will save about $950 every year in utility bills. That means that in less than five years, your heat pump will have actually paid for itself, and you’ll be saving almost $1,000 every year after that. And on top of that, you’ll also be saving about 4 tons of carbon dioxide from spewing into the atmosphere every single year.
But for some people, buying and installing a heat pump isn’t going to make quite as much financial sense. Let’s say that you’re the same homeowner, but instead of fuel oil, your home is heated by a natural gas furnace. Actually, the prices for a gas furnace are about the same: $10,500 and $6,000. But natural gas in the U.S. is still pretty cheap — partly because we haven’t accounted for all the harms that it’s doing to our environment.
Natural gas is only about one-third the cost of electricity. But remember how I said earlier that heat pumps are three to four times more efficient than any other heating system? That means that you’ll still be saving some money, just not quite as much.
Again, based on those same earlier numbers from Carbon Switch, the average U.S. homeowner can expect to save around $104 a year if switching from a natural gas furnace to a heat pump. That makes switching to a heat pump a little bit less affordable, but it would still save carbon emissions — about 1.1 metric tons every year. And your heat pump will also double as an AC, so that could actually save you another $7,000 or so.
Some utilities and cities are willing to give you rebates for up to a couple thousand dollars off the initial cost of buying and installing a heat pump. And if your home is heated by pretty much anything that’s not natural gas, you can expect to save between $800 to $1,200 a year on utility bills.
And it’s important to remember that these averages are just averages. While the CO2 savings for heat pumps are pretty clear, the financial savings are a little bit more complex.
Each house, installer, and climate zone means something a little bit different for heat pumps.
Back in the 1980s, heat pumps were mostly installed in warm Southern states, where there was a need for air conditioning in the summer and just a little bit of heat in the winter. The common refrain was heat pumps don’t work below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now, a new technology known as variable speed compressors — which is basically just a way to speed up the flow of heat — means that there are now air-source heat pumps that work when the outside temperature is down to negative 31 degrees F.
In Maine, a group called Efficiency Maine has given out rebates to help homeowners install about 100,000 heat pumps in one of our coldest states. That state now sells more heat pumps per capita than even the heat pump-crazy Scandinavian countries.
Now, it is still true that some older or lower performance models still don’t work super well in the cold. So if your heat pump from 10 years ago doesn’t work in subzero temperatures, don’t be surprised. But if you get the right heat pump for your environment, and potentially have a backup source of heat for the really cold days, then heat pumps can pretty much carry you through.
The bottom line is: The humble heat pump can save loads of CO2 emissions, it can keep you warm in the winter, it can keep you cool in the summer, and in lots of cases it can also save you money.
A report from Bloomberg lays out the ways that natural gas is now affecting not only the world’s carbon future, but our present geopolitics and international economy. The price of the ostensible bridge fuel has increased in some European markets by as much as 700 percent as Russian embargoes have tightened its supply considerably. Against this backdrop, the unrelenting pressures of global energy demand have revived an old enemy: coal.
The looming energy crisis, according to Bloomberg, has forced poorer countries that have invested in natural gas-based power infrastructure to implement planned blackouts, while wealthier ones are facing widespread economic recession due to inflated costs. At the conclusion of last week’s G7 summit in Bavaria, leaders called for significant investment in natural gas infrastructure to address the situation — a statement that has been criticized as “backsliding” on prior commitments to climate action.
Growth in natural gas infrastructure would have obvious negative implications for global climate goals, in spite of natural gas’ reputation as a cleaner alternative to coal. A report last month from the Environmental Integrity Project found that the annual carbon footprint of all of the proposed expansions of liquefied natural gas terminals in the United States alone would be equivalent to that of 20 coal-fired power plants.
But until the supply of natural gas and infrastructure to process and transport it expands, energy import-reliant countries are actually turning back to coal. NPR’s Marketplace reports that Germany is ramping up capacity at its coal plants to avoid blackouts threatened by the tight natural gas supply, and that globally we are on track to burn more coal in 2022 than in 2021. Coal imports in the Antwerp-Rotterdam-Amsterdam transportation hub increased by 35 percent in the first half of 2022.
These short-term trends suggest a concerning development for American energy producers, which have largely relied on the forces of capitalistic competition rather than government regulation to reduce their own emissions.
The debate over renewable energy projects in the state with the most expensive electricity bills in the country has landed on the desk of Governor David Ige in Hawaii.
While the governor has until July 12 to make a final decision on whether to veto a controversial renewable energy bill passed by the Hawaii state legislature, he has already indicated he will do so.
The measure requires that each island generate one third of its renewable energy from “firm” sources, which provide power 24 hours a day, before building any more renewables. Critics argue that the bill would make it harder for Hawaii to reach its climate goals and raise the cost of electricity — which is nearly three times more expensive in Hawaii than the national average.
“We shouldn’t waste our time on this kind of legislation if we hope to exist in a clean energy future,” Ige said during a recent press conference indicating his intent to veto the bill.
In 2015, Hawaii became the first state in the nation to commit to generating 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045. The state has made significant progress; last year, Hawaii’s primary electric utility generated nearly 40% of its electricity from renewables.
But Senator Donovan Dela Cruz, a state lawmaker from Oahu, has pushed the idea that a share of the state’s renewable energy must come from “firm” sources. In a recent editorial, he voiced concerns about intermittency, writing, “In Hawaii’s unique environment, wind and solar are clearly vital, but even here, they can’t guarantee power on demand 24/7/365.” In January, he introduced legislation, and after much wrangling, his bill passed in May.
Environmentalists and clean energy advocates were incensed. “Firm” sources of renewable energy include geothermal and hydro, but also biomass, renewable biodiesel, and renewable natural gas, which are technically renewable, but still generate large amounts of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. If the bill were to be signed into law, several of the Hawaiian Islands would be out of compliance immediately, meaning they would be forced to stop installing new wind and solar projects until they could generate more renewable energy from “firm” sources.
For example, the legislation would likely stop a solar-plus-battery storage project on Lanai, which could allow the island to generate a total of 98 percent of its electricity from renewables and lower utility bills. It would also likely give new life to a wood-burning power plant on the Big Island, which has been the subject of a long regulatory fight.
Jeff Kaemmerlen, CEO of the solar company Sunspear, wrote that the bill would “limit our ability to fight climate change and inflict massive damage on the solar and renewable energy industry, raise costs for all ratepayers and residents, and put the State’s renewable energy, resilience, and economic recovery goals in jeopardy.”
Wayne Tanaka, Director of the Hawaii Sierra Club, told PV Magazine that the bill is “a threat to Hawaii’s clean energy future and will slow down our transition away from fossil fuels at the very time that we need to accelerate renewable energy adoption.”
On June 27, the governor announced his intent to veto the bill, citing concerns that it would prevent Hawaii from reaching its clean energy goals by 2045. Ige has until next week to make a final decision, but a veto seems all but certain. During the press conference, Ige was unambiguous. “This bill is not in the people’s best interest,” he said.
Last fall, an emerging climate solution hit a milestone when the Swiss company Climeworks switched on its “Orca” plant, an array of fans and filters that capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. Built in Iceland, it is the largest plant of its kind in the world, designed to filter 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year so it can be permanently stored underground.
Orca was only the beginning for Climeworks. In order for these kinds of “direct air capture” facilities to become a meaningful tool for limiting climate change, they will need to suck up many times that amount of carbon. This week, the company broke ground on “Mammoth,” another plant in Iceland designed to capture 36,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. As with Orca, Climeworks is teaming up with a company called Carbfix that will pump the CO2 underground, where it will react with and bind to the subsurface rock in a matter of years.
Direct air capture plants and other methods for removing carbon from the atmosphere have become “unavoidable” in the fight to stabilize the climate, according to the United Nations’ climate body. The world must cut fossil fuels from the electric grid, cars, and homes. But carbon removal can counterbalance the emissions that are more challenging to cut, like those from agriculture and flying. It can also be deployed to mop up past emissions that are already warming the planet.
As Climeworks learns how to go bigger, a groundswell of new direct air capture companies are sprouting up in its wake. On Wednesday, the financial tech company Stripe, which was an early supporter of Climeworks, announced that it is spending $2.4 million to buy carbon removal from six startups. Three are pursuing different forms of direct air capture. It is the first purchase facilitated by Frontier, an initiative backed by Stripe, tech behemoths Meta and Alphabet, the e-commerce platform Shopify, and the consulting firm McKinsey that has committed $925 million to buying carbon removal over the next eight years.
Climeworks broke ground this week on the site where Mammoth will be built.
Climeworks
There’s increasing demand for carbon removal from the corporate world. Climeworks’ customers, who pay the company to remove carbon in order to offset their own emissions, include Stripe and other tech companies like Microsoft, the insurance giant Swiss Re, and the jewelry company Swarovski, among others. Climeworks’ offsets are expensive, ranging between $600 and $1,200 per metric ton of CO2 removed. But they have proven attractive because the company’s carbon removal process is permanent and easy to measure. Cheaper offsets, like those that come from planting trees, only store carbon temporarily, since trees are vulnerable to drought, disease, and fire. And many nature-based carbon offsets have been based on faulty accounting.
But there are few other companies as far along as Climeworks that can deliver carbon removal that’s measurable and long-lasting. Frontier was formed to help other solutions scale up to meet the growing interest from buyers. “There is a significant amount of customer demand that’s made it into the field, we’re starting to see promising new companies get to the starting line,” said Nan Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe. “We’re going to need to see a lot more of both of those.”
Ransohoff said that some of Frontier’s funds, including the $2.4 million announced this week, may never actually result in tons of carbon getting sucked out of the atmosphere. Instead, they will go to companies with promising ideas that may or may not pan out. Because the field is so nascent, they want to help “get a number of companies to the starting line,” she said. (But if any of this week’s purchases are fulfilled, and the companies hit certain technical milestones, Stripe has committed to spending up to an additional $5.4 million to buy more.)
The amount of carbon removal the world may ultimately want or need is debated, but estimates range from 1.5 billion metric tons per year to 20 billion. That means Mammoth’s 36,000 tons per year aren’t going to do much for the climate. Plants like Orca and Mammoth are best viewed as demonstration projects that are helping Climeworks incrementally scale up.
But after Mammoth is built and booted up, which is expected to take 18 to 24 months, Climeworks plans to go even bigger with a facility that can capture roughly 500,000 metric tons, co-founder Christoph Gebald told Reuters. The company’s goal is to be able to capture 1 billion metric tons across its facilities by 2050.
An important challenge for scaling up direct air capture is the enormous amount of energy and heat required to separate particles of CO2 from the air. Mammoth and Orca are strategically located near a geothermal plant that delivers both renewable electricity and heat. But while geothermal energy is bountiful in Iceland, it’s not available everywhere, and electricity alone may not be able to create the high heat needed for certain direct air capture processes. If the heat comes from burning natural gas or other fossil fuels, the climate benefits of carbon removal could be erased.
When Stripe solicited proposals for this round of funding, it found that an increasing number of direct air capture companies are trying to avoid this issue. One of the companies it funded this week, AspiraDAC of Australia, is building a modular system combining solar panels with a process that requires only low-temperature heat. Another, RepAir from Israel, is working on a process that can be powered by renewable energy and does not require heat at all. That being said, direct air capture plants can only be powered by renewable energy if there’s enough renewable energy to go around.
In addition to improving the energy efficiency of direct air capture projects, Ransohoff said, “We need to make sure that there are enough renewable projects on the grid to support these technologies.”
Editor’s note: Climeworks is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
The Biden administration and 11 states on the East Coast are working together to accelerate the construction of offshore wind projects in the United States. For the last two decades, the U.S. has been lagging far behind Europe and Asia — in no small part because of opposition from the fossil fuel industry. Now, with a push from the federal and state level and growing investment from the private sector, the country may finally begin to close the gap.
Through a new initiative called the Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership, Biden administration and governors from states where offshore wind projects exist or are in the works aim to expedite permitting processes, build the infrastructure and ships required to construct and maintain the offshore wind projects, and streamline the supply chain for the massive installations. The partnership currently includes Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. In time, the administration hopes to also include states along the Gulf and West Coasts, too.
In remarks announcing the initiative on Thursday, President Biden said, “I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been this excited about something we’re about to do, because I think we can change — literally begin to change — the nature of how we generate energy.”
The U.S. currently has the capacity to generate 42 megawatts of power from offshore wind. President Biden wants to increase capacity to 30,000 megawatts by 2030 — enough to power 10 million homes. In order to do that, the Department of Energy estimates the country will need 2,100 wind turbines, five to six specialized installation vessels (as well as a fleet of other support ships), and 6,800 miles of cable to get the electricity from the offshore sites to the cities that need it. Meeting these targets is critical to the U.S.’s goal of powering its electricity grid with clean energy by 2035.
There are several speedbumps slowing down progress, however, which the federal government and states hope to smooth out. One is issuing permits. The Biden administration has pledged to expedite environmental reviews and permit decisions for offshore wind projects, including 10 currently under consideration.
Another factor causing a bottleneck is the limited number of specialized ships capable of carrying the blades and other components for the turbines, which are taller than skyscrapers. There are just over 30 of these ships around the world. Now, the Biden administration has designated these ships as “vessels of national interest,” which means shipyards can apply for federal funds to update their facilities and build more of them.
There are only four companies that manufacture polysilicon, a critical material for solar panels and semiconductors, in the United States. This spring, one of them got a big influx of cash. In April, a Korean company called Hanwha Solutions announced it had become the largest shareholder of REC Silicon, which can produce 16,000 metric tons of polysilicon annually from a refinery in Washington State—enough to meet more than a quarter of the U.S. solar industry’s demand. Hanwha, which already operates the largest U.S. solar panel factory in Georgia, described the acquisition as part of a plan to “revitalize the U.S. solar market” by creating a made-in-America supply chain from raw materials to finished products.
If that plan is successful, it would not only demonstrate the U.S. is, in fact, able to make solar panels with domestically sourced materials — a key policy goal of the Biden administration. It would also show that polysilicon refining, the most energy-intensive step in solar manufacturing, could be made considerably greener in the process.
In the pantheon of climate solutions, low-carbon polysilicon may not sound particularly sexy. But it has become a hot topic in the world of solar as corporations and governments start thinking seriously about how to drive their emissions all the way to zero, including in the so-called upstream supply chains that provide materials and components for renewable energy. Already, solar photovoltaic, or PV, panels generate among the lowest carbon emissions of any energy source out there over their entire life cycle, including manufacturing. But as the industry grows, even the relatively small emissions associated with manufacturing PV panels could become significant in aggregate, potentially peaking at levels comparable to the current yearly emissions of large industrialized nations like France or Germany.
A recent study found that in a scenario where the world deploys solar rapidly, PV production could lead to 25 to 30 billion tons of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions by the middle of the century, eating up roughly 10 percent of the remaining carbon budget for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). If we don’t rapidly embrace renewables like solar, we have little chance of meeting that climate target. Still, it is possible to increase our odds by cleaning up polysilicon production, which accounts for roughly half of the climate impact of solar PV.
REC Silicon is showing how the industry might do that. The company’s polysilicon production facility in Moses Lake, Washington, uses low-emissions hydropower from the local electric grid, instead of the coal that’s often used to power polysilicon refineries in China. What’s more, instead of using the energy-intensive process to purify silicon that’s standard in the industry, the Moses Lake facility has pioneered the commercialization of an alternative process that REC Silicon claims uses up to 90 percent less energy.
The Moses Lake facility has been closed since 2019 due to Chinese import tariffs that priced the silicon maker out of the solar market. Now, thanks to Hanwha’s investment, REC Silicon has begun the process of bringing the facility back online.
“We have a very stable, low cost of power to produce polysilicon that’s also very low carbon,” REC Silicon CEO James May told Grist. “And that’s what we want to do.”
To understand why polysilicon manufacturing produces emissions, you have to understand how it works. Originating from quartz, a humble, abundant mineral, polysilicon is a highly refined form of silicon that converts sunlight into electrons inside a PV panel. To make it, manufacturers heat quartz in a furnace to produce metallurgical-grade silicon, which is about 99 percent pure. Typically, metallurgical-grade silicon then gets transformed into a gas, which is released into a superheated reactor where it resolidifies onto seed rods as polysilicon, a form of silicon upwards of 99.999999 percent pure. This process, known as the Siemens process, is how more than 95 percent of polysilicon is refined around the world today, according to the clean energy research firm BloombergNEF.
Rods of polysilicon are stored in a Hemlock Semiconductor facility.
Hemlock Semiconductor
While the Siemens process has been around for decades and is considered the most reliable way to refine polysilicon, it has a downside. As the silicon rods are forming at the center of the reactor, the reactor walls need to be kept cool to prevent the silicon from crystallizing there. Maintaining that temperature difference is “really energy intensive,” Jenny Chase, who heads solar analysis at BloombergNEF, told Grist. To make polysilicon affordably, companies set up their refineries in places with access to cheap and abundant electricity. In China, where 78 percent of global polysilicon production occurred last year, this means regions where the electric grid includes lots of coal.
“Most people are very aware of what happens with solar once it’s put in the field — that it generates zero-carbon electricity,” said Michael Parr, the executive director of the Ultra-Low Carbon Solar Alliance, an industry group focused on driving down emissions across the solar supply chain. “Most people don’t know that upstream, in manufacturing, there can be quite high carbon emissions, particularly in the Chinese supply chain.”
One way for the solar industry to clean up this supply chain is through improvements in manufacturing efficiency. This is already happening: Data shared by BloombergNEF shows that between 2014 and 2019, the amount of electricity needed to refine a kilogram of silicon declined 22 percent. At the same time, the silicon content of solar panels is falling as manufacturers continue to make solar cells — the individual, wafer-like pieces of silicon inside a solar panel — thinner and lighter. And the efficiency of those cells, or their ability to convert sunlight into electricity, is steadily rising.
“The efficiency of the solar cells has improved by about 50 percent in the last 25 years, and amount of silicon we use is cut down by a factor of two or three,” Meng Tao, a solar sustainability researcher at Arizona State University, told Grist.
Greater efficiency means less energy and emissions are expended to manufacture a solar panel. Further climate gains are possible if manufacturers power their operations renewably. Right now, U.S. electric grids tend to be less carbon-intensive than their Chinese counterparts, meaning there’s a good climate case for onshoring the energy-intensive steps like polysilicon production. That hasn’t escaped the Biden administration: In a February report on the solar supply chain, the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, identified ramping up polysilicon refining as the top thing the U.S. could do to secure a stable solar supply chain. Such an industry, the DOE noted, could take advantage of low-emissions hydropower in the Northwest and elsewhere.
“Economics is on our side here,” Garrett Nilsen, acting director of the Solar Energy Technologies Office at DOE, told Grist in an email. “Hydropower is one of the cheapest forms of electricity in the country, so polysilicon producers naturally locate their plants accordingly.” The DOE, he said, is also investing in programs to deploy additional wind and solar power more cheaply around the country, potentially creating new renewable energy hotspots where polysilicon makers could set up shop.
When it comes back online, REC Silicon’s Moses Lake facility will use hydropower produced on Washington State’s Columbia River to produce polysilicon for solar panels. The largest U.S.-based polysilicon manufacturer, Hemlock Semiconductor, produces polysilicon for both the solar and the semiconductor industry in Hemlock, Michigan. There, the electric grid already includes a significant amount of hydroelectric storage capacity, and it’s getting steadily cleaner as the local utility phases out coal and brings more solar energy online. Hemlock solar commercial manager Phil Rausch told Grist that per kilowatt-hour of energy used, the emissions associated with the electricity the company purchases are about half of its competitors’ electricity emissions.
A Hemlock Semiconductor employee breaking and sorting polysilicon in a cleanroom.
Hemlock Semiconductor
Beyond improvements in manufacturing efficiency and getting power from greener grids, a handful of polysilicon makers have turned to alternative processes that are less energy intensive than the Siemens process. Chief among those is the so-called “fluidized bed reactor,” or FBR, process REC Silicon uses at its Moses Lake facility. Hot, silicon-rich gas is fed into a chamber containing pellets of silicon, which grow in size as more silicon crystallizes on them. Because heat is introduced from outside the reactor, no cooling is required, allowing considerable energy and cost savings, according to May.
Industry experts say it is more difficult to produce ultra-high-purity polysilicon with FBR technology compared with the Siemens process, limiting its adoption in the industry. Rausch of Hemlock said that his company investigated the FBR process “extensively” over the last decade but ultimately determined that the polysilicon it produced “did not meet the needs of the industry.” May, however, is confident that REC Silicon can use the method to make polysilicon that meets the increasingly stringent purity requirements of solar manufacturers thanks to a series of recent upgrades to its Moses Lake facility.
Parr of the Ultra-Low Carbon Solar Alliance is cautiously optimistic. FBR “is a more difficult technology to get better purity from,” he said, but REC Silicon has spent years improving its process. “I think like any technology, it takes a while to perfect it, but it is inherently lower energy, lower carbon technology, so that’s promising.”
Any polysilicon maker that can deliver a greener product — whether that’s due to more efficient production methods or cleaner power sources — is likely to have a growing advantage in the solar market as companies or governments start paying more attention to supply chain emissions.
“We’re already seeing the downstream buyer becoming much more sensitive to the embodied carbon in the supply chain,” Rausch said. As an example, he notes that several years back, when France began taking the carbon footprint of solar panels into account in its public procurement process for clean energy, companies buying polysilicon from Hemlock started doing better in that market. New labeling schemes, like an eco-label for solar that the Global Electronics Council is developing in partnership with the Ultra-Low Carbon Solar Alliance, are likely to drive further interest in clean polysilicon.
Efforts to make solar manufacturing more sustainable shouldn’t detract from the need to deploy solar power as quickly as possible, says Garvin Heath, an energy sustainability researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL. Across the entire life cycle, NREL researchers have found that solar PV already generates 10 to 20 times lower carbon emissions than fossil fuel energy sources like gas and coal. Solar is already a critical tool for fighting climate change, regardless of manufacturing emissions.
At the same time, the industry should do everything in its power to keep its emissions as low as possible, considering how little carbon we have left in the bank to avoid crossing dangerous climate thresholds.
“We shouldn’t stop deploying PV because we want to make it better,” Heath said. “We should deploy as much as possible and make it better.”
This storywas originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Deskcollaboration.
Canadians stand to lose over $100 billion in the energy transition as investors around the world continue to pour money into fossil fuel assets that will eventually become worthless, a recent international study finds.
Many of the identified losses will come through people’s pension funds and investments. People with their retirement savings tied up in funds like the Canada Pension Plan, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, or the Alberta Investment Management Corporation are at risk of seeing their savings threatened if an energy transition is not well managed given how deeply invested in fossil fuels many pension plans are.
To avoid the more serious impacts of climate change, the world must rapidly move away from oil, coal and gas. As that transition happens, fossil fuel assets — like the equipment used to extract oil and gas, not to mention the oil and gas itself — will lose their value. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, sought to understand who will take the financial hit as oil and gas production worldwide becomes unprofitable.
By tracing more than 40,000 of these assets back to their ultimate owners, the authors found investors risk losing as much as $1.76 trillion globally. The study does not predict a crash but rather compares two scenarios — what investors currently expect from their investments and what it would take to hold onto the Paris Agreement’s goal of preventing the planet from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius — to identify the amount of cash at risk of never materializing. It only considered resources used in oil and gas production, meaning that number could grow if things like pipelines and refineries were included.
People living in global financial powers like the United States and the United Kingdom have the most money at risk from transition — an exposure of roughly $350 billion and just over $125 billion, respectively. The British Virgin Islands and Hong Kong came third and fourth, with Canada rounding out the top five.
More than half the fossil fuel assets examined by the study — worth roughly $950 billion — are owned by individuals through vehicles like pension funds, the authors found. The majority of these assets are not located in rich countries like France, Germany, Japan and Australia. However, most of their owners are, the study finds, meaning there is “a potentially perverse incentive in the financial sector of these wealthy countries” to slow climate action.
In other words, financiers in rich countries are investing in fossil fuels to make money in the short term, but the more cash goes into these investments, the more those people stand to lose later on as the world stops using oil and gas.
“On the one hand, they benefit from these profits that are flowing and have an interest in keeping them alive,” said the study’s lead author, Gregor Semieniuk, an assistant research professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in an interview with Canada’s National Observer. At the same time, he added, investors are risking big losses because their fossil fuel investments could quickly become worth a lot less if the world transitions to clean energy sources like solar and wind at the speed necessary to keep global warming under 2 degrees C.
Canada — one of the world’s top fossil fuel producers — has oilfields and production equipment worth more than $145 billion. But because so much of the country’s oil industry is foreign-owned, some of that risk belongs to investors outside the country. When you trace the ownership of oilfields and production equipment — both in Canada and beyond — back to Canadians, the study found, the money investors stand to lose is actually around $100 billion.
“Canada is actually one of the countries that comes out owning less of the financial assets than the physical assets,” Semieniuk said. Still, Canadians shouldn’t take that as great news because the country is among the hardest hit by an energy transition. “Canada, with its tar sands, is pretty much on the losing end,” he said.
No matter what, phasing out the oil and gas industry, which must happen to limit global warming, will involve some financial pain. In Canada, banks and other financial firms have pumped over $900 billion into the coal, oil and gas industries since the Paris Agreement was signed. If the country acts quickly to address climate change, they are unlikely to see those investments pay off as expected.
However, there is an even higher price to pay for continuing to invest in fossil fuels. A report published last year by the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices estimated the damage to infrastructure like roads, buildings and power lines caused by climate change will cost roughly $30 billion a year.
Advocacy group Shift: Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health executive director Adam Scott said the energy transition won’t be a straight line.
“It will be very sudden and unexpected,” he said. An oil and gas company’s value is “unlikely to trend down over the course of 10 years. It’s more likely to fall off a cliff when the market realizes what’s going on.”
Pension funds especially need to get better at understanding their risk exposure, Scott said. To date, their focus has been on the physical risk to their investments — fires, floods, and other climate impacts that could threaten profitability. Pension funds remain “largely blind” to the risks posed by an energy transition that could see their investments lose significant amounts of money, he said.
A recent report from Shift found deep entanglements between executives who run pension funds and the fossil fuel sector. The study found seven of Canada’s top 10 pension funds have at least one director who also serves on the board of directors of a coal, oil, or gas company, complicating efforts to align long-term investments with a climate-safe future.
Last fall, a company called Summit Carbon Solutions started holding meetings in towns around the Midwest. Its goal was to introduce residents to a 2,000-mile, $4.5 billion pipeline called the Midwest Carbon Express, which would carry carbon dioxide from ethanol refineries in Iowa to North Dakota, where the gas would be injected underground rather than released into the atmosphere. Ultimately, Summit hoped landowners would sign contracts called “voluntary easements,” allowing the company to bury its pipeline on their property.
While hundreds signed up immediately, others were more cautious, hoping for more information or a better price. Now, those holdouts are facing another prospect: the use of eminent domain, the legal tool that allows the seizure of private land for public good. It’s a tactic that’s long been tapped for other pipeline projects in the Midwest, and Summit has filed preliminary permits that could allow the company to request permission to use eminent domain in the future.
That doesn’t sit well with many landowners along the pipeline’s route. In town hall meetings and public hearings over the past few months, a growing number of people have come out against the proposal and potential legal tactic, complicating Summit’s plans to build the largest carbon dioxide pipeline network in the country.
Opposition to the project – and other recently proposed carbon pipelines – is nothing new. Residents and activists have raised concerns about safety hazards, a sentiment echoed in May by the Biden administration. Environmental groups, meanwhile, have pointed out the dubious climate benefits of carbon pipelines and resulting carbon capture and storage, or CCS, saying it will lock in additional fossil fuel use and divert resources from the transition to renewable energy.
Landowners and activists gather on the steps of the Iowa Statehouse on April 19, calling for passage of legislation to ban eminent domain for carbon pipelines. Courtesy of John Aspray, Food & Water Watch
But eminent domain has become an issue around which an “unlikely alliance” of farmers, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, scientists, and environmentalists have rallied, said Mahmud Fitil, an organizer with the Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous activist network. The legal tactic was used to complete previous oil pipeline projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, which “left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths,” Fitil said. Now, rural conservatives and environmental groups are fighting the same battle against carbon pipelines.
“You would never find these groups of people gathering together for any reason,” Fitil told Grist. “And they’re coming together in opposition to this carbon pipeline.”
Eminent domain is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, allowing governments to seize private property as long as they compensate the owners. In states like Iowa, this right extends to private companies, too. Although it’s historically been used to construct infrastructure like highways and natural gas lines, some environmental advocates believe eminent domain could be an important tool in the renewable energy transition, allowing electric transmission lines to be built quickly to transport solar, wind, and hydropower energy across the country.
Using it, though, requires utilities and private companies to prove that a project is in the “public interest” — and many people in the Midwest don’t feel that carbon pipelines fit that description, said Don Kass, a farmer and chairman of the Plymouth County Board of Supervisors in northwest Iowa.
“I do not consider this to be a public utility … [just] because somebody’s making money on it, and people see that there’s some advantage,” Kass said. He’s not against pipelines in general, but believes it should be up to each individual landowner to decide whether to sell their land or not for the price that they’re being offered.
Although carbon pipelines would cross multiple states, the greatest concerns about eminent domain have so far come from Iowa, where three pipeline companies announced projects last year that would collect carbon dioxide from ethanol plants around the state. But strong relationships between politicians, lobbyists, and pipeline companies have made fighting the projects an uphill battle, organizers say. A bill that would have prevented the state from granting eminent domain rights to private projects like carbon pipelines stalled in the Iowa legislature earlier this year, despite bipartisan support.
In response to these legislative setbacks, organizers have taken a more grassroots approach. According to Food and Water Watch, a national nonprofit that’s organizing against the carbon pipelines, 32 out of 52 counties that would be impacted by the proposed pipeline projects have filed objections with the Iowa Utilities Board. The board will ultimately decide whether to grant Summit and the other companies, Navigator Ventures and Wolf Carbon Solutions, a permit to use eminent domain. (So far, only Summit and Navigator have applied for permits with the board, and none have officially requested to use eminent domain).
The groups rallying behind their opposition to eminent domain all have different reasonings, said Emma Schmit, a senior organizer for the Iowa chapter of Food & Water Watch. Some worry about the pipelines’ impact on climate change and the environment as well as potential safety hazards, and think fighting eminent domain will prevent the projects from being built. Rural conservatives, meanwhile, believe in the right to protect their private property. “They don’t want to be seeing these private corporations, Wall Street-backed industry, taking our land for their own use,” Schmit said.
Landowners in Iowa also remember their previous experiences with the Dakota Access Pipeline. The project was completed in 2017 despite pushback from farmers, who worried about the impact its construction would have on agriculture. Their concerns were validated earlier this year: A study from Iowa State University found that crews building the pipeline compacted the soil so much that crop yields along its route dropped by as much as 25 percent.
“During our first meeting on this issue, we made a point to say that we’re all affected by this, we all have different reasons for caring about this issue,” Schmit said. “But no matter what your view on this is, we can all agree that it’s bad, and we have to stop it. And we can only stop it when we come together.”
This diversity of viewpoints can sometimes cause friction. The property rights argument can be “controversial,” Fitil said, “particularly amongst Indigenous people, given that all the land is stolen in this nation from the rightful owners, the Indigenous folks that made this land home long before European contact.” But organizers nevertheless felt it was important to have a unified strategy, and have managed to convince some Indigenous leaders to join in their opposition. Schmit said the failure to bring landowners, tribes, and environmentalists together was one of the reasons they lost the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
An ethanol refinery in Chancellor, South Dakota. Proposed carbon pipelines would connect ethanol producers across the Midwest to underground carbon dioxide storage sites in North Dakota.
AP Photo/Stephen Groves
Proponents of the CO2 pipelines have made the case that the projects will support Iowa’s powerful ethanol industry, which buys 57 percent of the state’s corn and produces 27 percent of the country’s ethanol. Companies also have a financial incentive to sequester carbon thanks to federal tax credits like 45Q — which Mother Jones estimated would earn Summit $7.2 billion over 12 years — and state programs like California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which allows ethanol plants and carbon pipeline companies to sell the carbon they’re saving as credits to polluters. The federal government has also supported carbon capture as a way to reduce carbon emissions, while Congress established a low-interest loan program for CO2 pipelines last year.
Summit told Grist its priority is getting landowners to sign voluntary easements, rather than using eminent domain. About 30 percent of landowners along the proposed Midwest Carbon Express route have already made deals with the company.
“Opposition groups continue to raise this topic in order to distract from the fact that they want to eliminate the ethanol industry and undermine production agriculture,” Summit said in a statement through a spokesperson. “Fundamentally, the Summit Carbon Solutions project comes down to the future of these two industries, which are both so critical to our economy.” The other two pipeline companies with proposed projects in Iowa, Navigator Ventures and Wolf Carbon Solutions, did not respond to requests for comment from Grist.
Schmit said this early in the process, activists are still “throwing everything possible at the wall” and seeing what sticks. Organizers have hung banners off of freeway overpasses, rallied in front of the Iowa State Capitol, set up billboards in rural areas, and held meetings in communities where pipelines are expected to cross. Reaching residents along the pipeline’s proposed route has been difficult, though, because Summit has sued to stop the Iowa Utilities Board from releasing the full list of landowners that will be potentially impacted by the project, said Wally Taylor, an attorney for the Sierra Club in Iowa.
Taylor emphasized that even if eminent domain is granted, landowners can still band together at the county level and demand concessions from the company, including greater compensation — which might ultimately discourage the pipelines from being built. After the Iowa Utilities Board granted a permit allowing the Dakota Access Pipeline to use eminent domain, he said, many people gave up and granted voluntary easements. Activists said they have learned from that mistake.
“They said, ‘Well, there’s nothing we could do, we’ll just go ahead and take our money,’” Taylor said. “But we’re really trying to convince the landowners that if they hold out, they can stop this.”
A bright yellow building with bold green trim hums with activity in Caguas, a city sprawled across a mountain valley south of San Juan, Puerto Rico. In a spacious kitchen, volunteers chop vegetables and cook rice for community meals. Down the hall, visitors browse racks of free and discounted produce, canned beans, and bottles of oil. Outside, beneath a large metal awning, retirees soak in calming music as they take part in a stress-relief workshop.
The community services on offer here at the Centro de Apoyo Mutuo, or Mutual Support Center, are made possible by the 24 solar panels mounted on the rooftop. Two lithium-ion batteries the size of suitcases are kept in a windowless storage room, allowing the center to stay open on cloudy days and in the evenings. The building doesn’t use any electricity from the utility grid.
Nearly five years ago, after Hurricane Maria tore a path of devastation across the United States territory and all but destroyed Puerto Rico’s electricity system, residents in Caguas reclaimed what had for decades been an abandoned Social Security office. They ripped out moldy carpet, scrubbed the walls and began providing food and supplies to neighbors.
“This was a space that wasn’t serving the people, and now the community has taken it over,” Marisel Robles, one of the center’s organizers, says on a muggy day in early May, just weeks before the start of the next Atlantic hurricane season.
Robles guides me up a thin metal ladder to the rooftop of the one-story building, pushing aside tree branches sagging with brown seed pods. Saúl González, a volunteer and local solar installer, joins our expedition. The three rows of solar panels form a “mosaic” of different makes and models, all of them donated by nonprofit organizations, he explains.
Raúl González, left, and Marisel Robles help maintain the solar system on the Mutual Support Center’s rooftop in Caguas, Puerto Rico.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
With 6 kilowatts of solar capacity and 30 kilowatt-hours of battery storage, the system can typically meet the center’s power needs. Occasionally, members cut the lights and fans during the day to save electricity for an evening dance class. Still, Robles says it’s better than running expensive, polluting diesel generators or depending on the island’s electric grid — which, despite years of post-hurricane repairs, remains prone to routine outages, sweeping blackouts, and frequent voltage surges that fry people’s appliances. In early April, the entire island lost grid power for three days after an aging electric breaker caught fire on the southern coast.
“Sometimes, we hear the ‘boom’ of people turning on their diesel generators, and that’s how we know the power went out in town, because here we still have power,” Robles says, looking out over the tops of neighboring buildings. “For us, it’s like a victory every day this happens, because we feel like we did something right.”
The Mutual Support Center is not unique in its ability to produce its own clean energy. A rising number of Puerto Ricans are installing solar panels and batteries on their homes and businesses, fed up with the unstable electric grid, high electricity bills, and the state-owned utility’s reliance on fossil fuels. As of January 2022, some 42,000 rooftop solar systems were enrolled in the island’s net-metering program — more than eight times the number at the end of 2016, the year before Hurricane Maria struck the island, according to utility data. Thousands more systems are operating but are not officially counted because, like the center’s unit, they aren’t connected to the grid.
Spearheaded largely by residents, business owners, and philanthropies, the grassroots solar movement sweeping the island is happening despite headwinds from the territory’s centralized utility — which claims it’s working to advance the island’s clean energy goals but continues investing in fossil fuels. Solar proponents say that, for the technology to reach most of Puerto Rico’s 3.2 million people, the government and its utility will need to more fully participate in what has largely been a bottom-up energy transformation. With billions of federal recovery dollars set to flow to Puerto Rico, they argue that now is the time for public policies and investments that shift the island away from an outdated model of large, far-flung power plants to one that supplies clean electricity close to where people need it.
The vulnerability of Puerto Rico’s centralized system became painfully evident in September 2017, when the island was hit by two consecutive disasters.
Hurricane Irma narrowly skirted the island on September 7, leaving more than a third of all households without power. Many residents still didn’t have electricity when, on September 20, Hurricane Maria barreled ashore. The storm carved a diagonal 100-mile path from southeast to northwest, mowing down the island’s transmission lines and inundating infrastructure. Maria damaged, destroyed or otherwise compromised 80 percent of the island’s grid.
Without electricity, daily life ground to a halt. Schools shuttered, banks closed, supermarket food spoiled, and drinking water supplies slowed to a trickle. One study estimated that more than 4,600 people died as a result of the storm, including those who couldn’t operate their oxygen machines, refrigerate vital medications like insulin, or stay sufficiently cool in the sweltering heat. In some places, power wasn’t restored for more than a year after the hurricane.
“Maria made life very difficult. It was like a new beginning for many of us,” recalls Atala Pérez, who lives in Caguas and volunteers at the Mutual Support Center.
Pérez says she went more than six months without any electricity in her home. With no fan or air conditioner, she spent many restless nights in the sticky heat, slapping away mosquitos. Tired of waiting in line for eight hours to buy a bag of ice, she grew used to drinking tepid tap water. She could still cook but couldn’t keep any food in the refrigerator. “I didn’t have any backup power,” she says, standing inside the yellow building’s makeshift supermarket. “I was simply without electricity, and I had to adapt.”
The ferocity of Hurricane Maria would’ve battered any electric grid. But Puerto Rico’s power system was uniquely unprepared for the disasters that struck.
After years of economic recession, the island’s government had amassed $72 billion in debt. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, the state-owned utility, had filed for bankruptcy months earlier. The economic crisis compounded decades of documented missteps, neglect, and ill-advised practices at PREPA. With its workforce slashed in half, the utility had delayed routine maintenance. Warehouses that should’ve stored spare equipment for use in emergencies instead had empty shelves.
In Maria’s aftermath, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency allocated $3.2 billion to restore power to the island. Utility crews worked tirelessly to install concrete towers where wooden poles had snapped like twigs and to string up wires where old ones lay entangled on the ground. Yet the problems that plagued Puerto Rico before the storms — mismanagement, corruption, the island’s challenging geography — ultimately served to slow and complicate recovery efforts. Much of the work since Maria has focused on resurrecting and extending the life of the existing grid.
In 2020, Puerto Rico signed a 15-year deal that transferred the publicly operated transmission and distribution system to Luma Energy, a private consortium of Canadian and U.S. companies that now operates the grid and handles reconstruction. PREPA remains in charge of producing and procuring electricity.
In its latest quarterly report, Luma said it made significant improvements in the first three months of this year, replacing hundreds of aging utility poles and enrolling more than 21,000 rooftop solar customers in net metering, a program in which utilities pay solar-equipped households for the electricity their panels supply to the grid.
Nonetheless, the consortium is facing widespread backlash from residents, who blame it for rising electricity bills and continued outages. In San Juan, thousands of protestors have marched past Luma’s headquarters and the governor’s mansion holding signs declaring “Fuera Luma” or “Out with Luma.” Similar posters are plastered on billboards near Luma’s office in Mayagüez, on the island’s western coast.
For many Puerto Ricans, rooftop solar systems offer a way out of an endless cycle of disruptions and disappointment. Energy experts estimate that thousands of new solar arrays are hooked up every month. As of January, households in particular had installed at least 225 megawatts of combined solar capacity, equal to about 5.5 percent of total residential electricity demand, according to a recent report.
“The transformation is happening at a scale that is very satisfying to see,” says Arturo Massol Deyá, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico who co-authored the report and the executive director of Casa Pueblo, a community organization that helps people access solar power.
“We call this an energy insurrection,” he adds. “Even though in California and other states, you have incentives to help people [go solar], in Puerto Rico, we don’t. And yet people are doing it here because we’re confronting climate change in a hard way, and we’re confronting a utility that people can’t rely on.”
One of the most striking examples of the bottom-up transformation of Puerto Rico’s energy landscape can be found in Adjuntas, a tranquil town that sits high up in the island’s central mountain range. Casa Pueblo is located here, in a stately pink building near the town’s main square. The organization installed solar panels on its rooftop in 1999 and is now spearheading a first-of-its-kind community-scale solar initiative.
Over a dozen businesses near the palm-tree-studded plaza put solar panels on their rooftops last year, totaling about 200 kilowatts in capacity. This August, they’ll also install a total of 1 megawatt-hour of battery storage capacity. Participants will share the solar electricity they produce and draw from the interconnected batteries, which tie the installations together like a mini power plant.
Gustavo Irizarry, the owner of Lucy’s Pizza, slides into a yellow dining booth on a recent cool and quiet evening. His unassuming pizzeria hugs a corner of the main square, its rooftop solar panels visible from the sidewalk.
Gustavo Irizarry, owner of Lucy’s Pizza, heads an association of solar-powered businesses in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
When he’s not running the shop or ferrying pizzas along steep, winding roads, Irizarry leads the Community Solar Energy Association of Adjuntas. The group, in a sense, acts like a utility. Participating businesses pay a fixed monthly rate for the solar electricity they consume. The association uses that money to cover the project’s operation and maintenance costs, and also to help lower-income families and rural stores to install their own solar-and-battery systems.
“The hardest part is explaining this philosophy to people in the business community, who compete with one another or who plan to retire in a few years,” says Irizarry, who, at 39, is the association’s youngest member. “My role is to convince them that what we’re doing will help our planet and our people last longer.”
Lucy’s Pizza served as a safe haven during Hurricane Maria, when massive landslides buried highways and complicated relief efforts in Adjuntas. For weeks, it was the only place in the isolated town of 18,000 people where residents could get a warm meal or charge electronics. Irizarry says the shop spent around $17,000 during that period just to fill its generators with diesel fuel, which was hard to find on the supply-constrained island.
The community-scale solar system should enable businesses to keep their lights on for at least a week if the utility grid goes down again. “Our mission is to be able to cover people’s basic needs during a catastrophe, so that they can come to us to get food, ice, charge their phones [and] their medical equipment, and get internet,” Irizarry explains as hungry customers trickle past us. A cashier calls out names over the loudspeaker, sliding warm takeout boxes over the counter.
Grid operator Luma Energy isn’t involved in the project, but it hasn’t interfered either, participants say. However, many other partners are contributing to the effort. The U.S.-based Honnold Foundation has led a $1.7 million investment in the project, an amount that includes donated panels and batteries, electrical contracting work and technical support, says Cynthia Arellano, the foundation’s project manager for the Adjuntas initiative.
Engineers from the University of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories are helping to fine-tune the software programs and electronic controls that will do the unseen work of managing electricity flows between the businesses. Experts from both institutions are studying the project closely to see how the system might be replicated in other towns and regions across the island.
“If you start sharing energy between all your neighbors, you can create these kinds of solutions and get stronger against the next hurricane,” says Fabio Andrade, an associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico’s campus in Mayagüez.
Andrade heads the university’s Microgrid Laboratory, which is helping to develop the Adjuntas initiative, as well as two small microgrid projects in the communities of Maricao and Castañer. While the term “microgrid” is often used broadly to describe any small-scale electricity system with storage — such as solar panels and batteries — the concept more accurately refers to a group of interconnected systems, he says. Together, these systems can hook up to the grid, supplying electricity and also using utility power when the grid is working well. Crucially, microgrids can detach and operate independently when disruptions occur.
Fabio Andrade, seated at a table made from a solar panel, studies microgrids in Mayagüez, Puerto, Rico.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
Since Hurricane Maria, researchers and policymakers in Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland have called for building resilient microgrids across the island to support — or potentially even supplant — the centralized electricity system. In a room tucked inside a faded green Cold War–era building, Andrade and student researchers experiment with different microgrid scenarios. They replicate the flow of power from wind turbines, solar panels, electric car batteries and the main grid and analyze how microgrids might respond to rising voltage levels, errant frequencies, or shrinking or surging power supplies.
“We need to understand how all of this is working,” Andrade says, adding that his research draws from his own experience of living without power for three months after Hurricane Maria.
“Microgrids can give you the minimum electricity you need for survival,” he says.
The Puerto Rican government has taken some steps to help realize this vision of cleaner, more resilient power. The Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, which regulates the island’s energy system, recently adopted rules allowing microgrids to connect to the main grid. Other reforms ostensibly make it easier and faster for individuals to enroll their rooftop solar systems in net metering.
Nevertheless, the island has far more work to do to achieve its mandate of 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, which the governor’s office set in 2019. Only about 5 percent of the island’s electricity comes from renewable sources. Petroleum is the grid’s largest fuel source, representing 48 percent of electricity generation in April. Puerto Rico’s reliance on imported diesel has led to surging electricity bills in recent months as global oil prices climb. That fuel, along with the island’s gas and coal plants, continues contributing greenhouse gases and pumping harmful air pollution into communities.
In March, after lengthy delays, regulators conditionally approved 884 megawatts’ worth of large-scale renewable energy projects, which should raise the island’s total share of renewables to 23 percent by the end of 2024. Officials have said they’re working to accelerate the slow-moving permitting process to meet Puerto Rico’s near-term goal of achieving 40 percent renewables by 2025.
At the same time, though, Puerto Rico is expanding its investments in fossil fuel infrastructure.
In 2019, PREPA awarded U.S. company New Fortress Energy a $1.5 billion contract to convert two oil-burning power plant units in San Juan from petroleum to gas. The deal also included building an import terminal for liquefied natural gas, which began operating in San Juan’s harbor in 2020 — before the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had authorized the project. Last year, the commission ordered New Fortress to retroactively apply for a permit, though the gas company is pushing back in court.
Puerto Rican officials have said converting the San Juan units to gas provides cleaner, cheaper fuel for the grid. Energy experts and environmentalists who oppose the contract say investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure only detracts from the government’s goals to curb emissions and improve resiliency.
Posters declaring “Fuera Luma,” or “Out with Luma,” appear in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, near an office of Luma Energy, the private consortium that operates the island’s grid.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
“We’re in a climate crisis that’s growing worse every day,” says Daniel Muñoz, a homeowner in University Gardens, a quiet neighborhood of one-story houses in San Juan. “Our generation, we should make the change [to renewable energy] now, because if not, the crisis will become a total disaster.”
Last year, Muñoz banded together with 21 of his neighbors to put solar panels and batteries on their individual houses. The systems aren’t tied together as in a microgrid. But by negotiating as a group, the neighbors secured a discount of roughly 20 percent with a local solar installer, shaving thousands of dollars off the cost of each installation.
Muñoz and his neighbor Victor Santana take me up to Santana’s rooftop to see the 26 blue solar panels installed there. Santana leads the neighborhood association and helped organize the collective solar effort. He says he paid $27,000 for the solar panels and two lithium-ion batteries, which can cover all of his household’s energy needs.
The University Gardens project is the first of its kind in Puerto Rico, though hundreds of communities on the U.S. mainland have negotiated similar bulk-purchase discounts with the help of nonprofit Solar United Neighbors. The Washington, D.C.-based organization recently partnered with Cambio, an environmental group in San Juan, to guide Santana, Muñoz, and their neighbors through the solar-buying process.
“We wanted to help improve the environment and also make our community a little more resilient,” Santana says over the din of squawking — vibrant green parrots called cotorras bounce up and down in a nearby tree. So far, his solar setup has spared him from two major blackouts: the islandwide outage that occurred in April and another disruption that swept San Juan last year after a fire broke out at the city’s Monacillos substation.
Now the homeowners say they want to help organize a second bundled solar purchase for other neighbors, particularly older, retired residents living on fixed incomes and grappling with rising electricity bills.
In Puerto Rico, some 43 percent of people live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Covid-19 pandemic has further exacerbated widespread unemployment in the tourism-dependent economy. In the absence of a robust public policy facilitating access to clean energy, groups like the University Gardens neighbors are working to share their resources with residents who otherwise can’t afford to install their own rooftop solar systems.
“Right now, only well-off people and industries can get their own localized generation, and the majority of people can’t,” says Ruth Santiago, an environmental attorney who lives in the south coast city of Guayama and serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “This is very much a social justice and equity issue.”
Energy access isn’t just about enabling people to produce power at home. It’s also about improving the resilience of essential services, especially in the face of the worsening impacts of climate change.
Sergeant Luis Saez leads the fire department in Guánica, a sunbaked city near the turquoise waters off Puerto Rico’s southwest coast. Firefighters serve the municipality of some 16,000 people and respond to calls on the tourist-packed beaches and in the dry forest, where thousands of fires erupt every year. The Guánica station also connects far-flung units in remote towns to larger urban stations with more trucks and firefighters.
“Our whole computer dispatch system, telephone system, radio communications — all of that needs power,” Saez says. “If we don’t have communications, we can’t do our jobs.”
Sergeant Luis Saez, left, and Edgardo Gelabert Santiago are on duty at the solar-powered fire station in Guánica, Puerto Rico.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
The sergeant steps into the garage where, beside the big red fire engine, four Tesla Powerwalls are attached to the wall. The lithium-ion batteries store electricity from the 52 solar panels sprawled across the building’s rooftop. Should the clouds roll in and the grid go down, the station’s essential systems could run just on battery power for about a week, he says.
Firefighters couldn’t receive calls immediately after Hurricane Maria, so they had to patrol the area looking for emergencies or wait for people to walk in. A similar scenario unfolded in January 2020 after a series of earthquakes left Puerto Ricans in the dark for days. Guánica was near the epicenter of one of them — a magnitude-6.4 earthquake that seriously damaged Puerto Rico’s largest power plant, an oil and gas-burning facility located just down the coast.
“There was no power, so we didn’t know where to go,” Saez recalls. Across from the fire station looms a forested hill with a deep scar from where a chunk of earth collapsed. “We just started seeing where people screamed and where people needed us. That was a bad moment.”
The Guánica station’s solar-and-battery system replaces the few small diesel generators that firefighters previously used in emergencies. Solar Responders, a nonprofit organization, helped install and maintain the system using a $277,000 grant from AbbVie, a pharmaceuticals manufacturer in Puerto Rico. Fifteen other fire stations have similar systems, though the nonprofit aims to put solar panels and batteries in all of the island’s 96 stations, says Hunter Johansson, the founder and CEO of Solar Responders.
There’s no doubt that Puerto Rico’s rooftop-solar movement is enabling many houses and facilities to avoid persistent outages and become more resilient in the face of disasters. But solar advocates emphasize that the current approach isn’t enough to meet the energy challenges facing the island.
“What people are doing now is…voting with their feet, so to speak,” says Agustín Irizarry, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico who works with the Microgrid Laboratory in Mayagüez (and has no relation to Gustavo Irizarry of Lucy’s Pizza).
“They are installing the systems themselves. And that’s a problem,” the professor says. “If we do this collectively, by investing the public money wisely, it will be cheaper for everyone. And the poor will have access to it as well.”
Earlier this year, the Biden administration reached a deal with Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi, a Democrat, that will steer $12 billion in federal recovery funds to help modernize the outdated electric grid and move toward renewable energy, in line with the territory’s goals of getting to 100 percent renewables by 2050.
For Irizarry and other experts, the federal funding represents a crossroads for Puerto Rico’s energy future. As they see it, if the majority of those dollars are spent resurrecting transmission towers and building more far-flung power plants — even those powered by the wind and sun — then the island will have missed an opportunity to create a more nimble system dominated by local power generation.
Santiago, the environmental attorney, argues that the public utility PREPA should use much of that $12 billion to install solar panels and storage systems on buildings. The utility would still charge customers for the electricity they consume, except that the power would come from distributed systems instead of fossil fuel power plants. The idea is that “people continue to pay their bills, but they have access to resilient, locally sited renewable energy that doesn’t depend on transmission,” she says. “That’s the only way we see that most low and middle-income people will have access to these systems.”
More high-level participation in local solar development would also allow utility planners, regulators, and communities to install systems more strategically, creating interconnected microgrids that serve entire neighborhoods or regions, instead of only individual buildings. “If you coordinate this from the very beginning and make sure that all the equipment can talk to each other, it requires less investment,” Irizarry says.
Until that happens, however, groups like the Adjuntas business association and University Gardens neighbors are left to create ad hoc solutions that expand access to clean energy to those who can’t afford it.
Back in Caguas, the Mutual Support Center is already supplying solar electricity to its neighbor. Standing on the yellow building’s rooftop, Marisel Robles and Saúl González point to a small cultural museum across a common courtyard. The center’s solar panels can connect by wire to the museum, keeping its lights on whenever the center produces more electricity than it needs.
“In Puerto Rico, right now the model for moving to renewable energy is, save yourself if you can, or save yourself if you have the resources,” González says. “We’re trying to see how we can change that situation.”
On Monday night, more than 200 activists tuned into a “rapid response” Zoom call organized by the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. It was a chance to regroup after a rollercoaster week where it looked as though a DSA-authored climate bill might make it through the state legislature.
The bill, called the Build Public Renewables Act, soared through the New York State Senate last Wednesday. After a zealous eleventh-hour push by grassroots organizers to garner support in the Assembly, it appeared to have the 76 “yeas” required to send it to the governor’s desk, and then some. But on Saturday, Carl Heastie, the Democratic speaker of the Assembly, brought the year’s legislative session to a close without ever giving his colleagues a chance to vote on it.
“We need to consider this as the beginning of our movement as opposed to the end,” Zohran Mamdani, a state assembly member from Queens, said on the Monday call.
Supporters of the bill painted it as a climate package that would have sped up the pace at which renewable energy comes online in New York state. But beyond that, it would have opened the door for a larger role for publicly owned power, testing whether giving the government more ownership over the clean energy transition can deliver in ways that the private market hasn’t.
It’s an idea that’s been gaining ground with climate advocates around the country as they grow increasingly frustrated that energy systems are not moving away from fossil fuels quickly enough. They argue that publicly owned power companies, which are not beholden to shareholders and do not have the same profit motive as their private counterparts, can enable a transition that’s faster, more affordable, more worker-friendly, and more accountable to communities.
“The state is not on pace to meet the goals of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act,” the state’s landmark 2019 climate law, “because the state’s goals are completely predicated on private market actors,” said Robert Carroll, a State assembly member and the bill’s lead sponsor, before the close of the legislative session. “So what this does is makes NYPA a larger actor in that universe, it adds another competitor. And when you add another competitor, I think you’re gonna see projects that otherwise would not have been built getting built.”
NYPA is the largest state-owned power utility in the United States and currently provides nearly 25 percent of New York’s electricity. Its customers are primarily commercial and institutional buyers like hospitals, colleges, businesses, local governments, and public housing authorities, but it also sells power to private utilities like Con Edison through the wholesale electricity market.
Seventy percent of the power it generates comes from hydroelectric dams. But it also owns or contracts with more than a dozen power plants that run on oil and natural gas. Under the most recent version of the Build Public Renewables Act — the one that almost passed — NYPA would have to retire those plants and transition to 100 percent clean energy by 2030. The bill also would expand NYPA’s customer base, requiring the utility to serve all state-owned buildings by 2030 and all municipally owned buildings by 2035, meaning it would have to build enough renewables to replace its fossil fuel plants and then build some more. Under current law, NYPA’s ability to build and operate new renewable projects is severely restricted — the bill would give it broader authority to do so.
“Why would you not use the power of NYPA?” said Johanna Bozuwa, executive director for the nonprofit Climate and Community Project, who authored a report that supported the bill. “You have a sleeping giant in New York state that could be used to deploy renewable energy. We need to be using as many levers as we can, and to take NYPA out of that calculation, I think would be a loss.”
The New York Power Authority’s Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant in Lewiston, New York.
John Moore/Getty Images
Whether New York is currently on track to meet its legally mandated target of 70 percent renewable energy by 2030 is disputed. On Thursday, while activists were making calls to get the bill on the floor in the Assembly, Governor Kathy Hochul announced 22 new utility-scale solar contracts. According to the press release, the state now has more than 120 wind and solar projects under development that it says could eventually get New York to 66 percent renewable electricity.
But activists are skeptical that the state’s existing system is working, pointing to the fact that New York’s grid is currently only at 4 percent wind and solar (and about 25 percent hydropower). “There’s a lot of new announcements, but shovel hitting ground and actually building out the renewables isn’t happening at the scale we need right now,” said Aaron Eisenberg, an organizer with Public Power NY, a coalition that championed the bill. The state’s new Office of Renewable Energy Siting, which was created to speed up permitting, has only approved four projects since it began reviewing them in early 2021.
The Public Power NY coalition believes NYPA would be able to build projects more quickly than private developers because siting and permitting could be streamlined and new community engagement processes laid out in the bill are designed to tamp down the opposition that many private developers have faced. Advocates also argue that renewable energy projects developed by NYPA would be able to inject cheaper power into New York’s electricity system than private developers because it has access to cheap capital to build new projects through the municipal bond market and does not need to turn a profit.
But there are other challenges facing renewable development in New York, according to Anne Reynolds, the executive director of Alliance for Clean Energy New York, a wind and solar industry group that opposed the bill. She said renewable developers are facing delays connecting to the grid, tax agreement negotiations, supply chain problems, and a need for new transmission lines to bring the new clean power to customers. “These are real problems, and the Build Public Renewables Act doesn’t solve — or even help — with any of them,” she said.
A solar farm in Calverton, New York.
Steve Pfost/Newsday RM via Getty Images
Ultimately, the bill would be an experiment — not a full transition to public power, but a test of whether NYPA could actually build things any faster or cheaper. Plenty of experts and observers doubt the strategy. Big green nonprofits that are active in New York climate politics like Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council were neutral on the bill.
But with enthusiasm for public power growing around the country, Bozuwa thinks that passing the Build Public Renewables Act would help other campaigns gather steam. “The fact that it even got this close is a sea change when it comes to the types of energy policies that are being put forward,” she said.
On Monday, Speaker Heastie, who blocked the vote on the bill, put out a statement acknowledging its broad support (though he also asserted it was not enough to pass the bill, despite proponents’ claim of the contrary). In a move with little precedent, he is convening a hearing on July 28 to examine aspects of the bill including “capacity to meet goals, potential costs of needed infrastructure, and impacts on consumers and taxpayers, acquisition costs.” (Bill hearings typically occur before the legislative session ends, not after.)
If not, the activists plan to continue to pressure elected officials in the upcoming Democratic primaries and to bring the bill to the floor again next year.
The expansion of liquefied natural gas export terminals in the United States — up to 25 projects currently underway — could end up emitting more than 90 million tons of greenhouse gases in a year, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, a non-profit that analyzed state and federal permits. That figure is roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution produced by 20 coal-fired power plants, and does not include emissions that would result from the extraction and end use of the gas itself.
The Environmental Integrity Project calculated emissions from LNG projects that are proposed and seeking permits, fully authorized and soon to begin construction, or currently under construction. There are seven LNG export terminals operating in the United States today, which would mean — should all of the new projects become operational — more than a four-fold increase in such facilities by 2028.
Since the start of the Ukraine conflict in March, a number of legislators have demanded an immediate increase in domestic natural gas production, ostensibly to cut into Russia’s power in the oil and gas market and to reduce pressure on household budgets strained by high gas prices. Some European nations have found themselves in a challenging position with regard to imposing sanctions on Russia, because they are highly dependent on Russian fossil fuel exports to meet their energy needs.
However, as Grist reported last month, environmental justice activists are concerned that American legislators are using the Ukraine crisis as a reason to secure new oil and gas contracts to appease corporate interests. Increased production, processing, and transportation of LNG poses a significant threat to frontline communities who live near the facilities. Just this week, an explosion at the Freeport LNG plant in Quintana, Texas provoked great alarm within the surrounding community.
Furthermore, Russian sanctions have contributed to gas prices shooting up continuously since March, but they’re not the sole reason for $5-a-gallon. Another major contributing factor is simply an uneven road to recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, OPEC cut production of oil to balance plummeting prices due to global lockdowns, and global producers have not been able to ramp up production enough to meet the demand of a world returning more or less to normal activity.
All but one of the 25 LNG projects analyzed by the Environmental Integrity Project were underway in some form before the Ukraine conflict began, although the report details a significant increase in new international contracts for the existing and under-construction facilities over the past three months. The one new project proposed since February, a New Fortress Energy export terminal proposed to be built off the coast of Louisiana, is currently seeking approval and permitting with an ambitious goal of being operational by early next year. It would be the first offshore export terminal in the United States.
Another processing facility included in Environmental Integrity’s report, a LNG plant proposed in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania by New Fortress Energy, has been at least temporarily blocked. In late March, the environmental interest groups Clean Air Action, Penn Future, and the Sierra Club sued to have the plant’s air emissions permit revoked, due to concerns about air and water pollution. In a settlement, New Fortress Energy agreed to stop construction and let its current permit lapse, which would require the company to restart the permitting process anew to be able to resume construction. This development has thrown a wrench in plans for a LNG export terminal in Gibbstown, New Jersey, which is largely dependent on the Wyalusing facility and is also included in the Environmental Integrity report.
In news that could jump-start the American solar industry, mired for months in a U.S. Commerce Department investigation, the Biden Administration announced Monday that it will waive tariffs for solar panel imports from four Asian countries over the next two years.
The countries are Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Both solar and environmental groups welcomed the move.
“We applaud President Biden’s thoughtful approach to addressing the current crisis of the paralyzed solar supply chain,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, in a statement. “Today’s actions protect existing solar jobs, will lead to increased employment in the solar industry and foster a robust solar manufacturing base here at home.”
Auxin Solar, a small California-based solar company, triggered the Commerce probe when it claimed that panels from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam were actually from Chinese manufacturers trying to bypass U.S. tariffs. Companies have been worried that they may have to pay retroactive tariffs on panels from those four countries, leading to hesitation in investment.
Lawmakers and advocates have said the claims have no merit and threaten to create critical delays in the U.S. solar industry. A recent report said that as many as two-thirds of U.S. solar projects were affected by the investigation. Because of the industry-wide delays, some planned shutdowns of coal plants have had to be pushed back. Monday’s announcement is designed to boost the solar industry, which is crucial to climate adaptation efforts and the energy transition.
The announcement also authorizes the DPA to produce solar panel parts, building insulation, equipment for making and using clean electricity-generated fuels, and power grid infrastructure like transformers. “With the new DPA authority, DOE can help strengthen domestic solar, heat pump and grid manufacturing industries while fortifying America’s economic security and creating good-paying jobs, and lowering utility costs along the way,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm in a statement.
The Biden administration announcement also highlighted the national security benefits of the plan, saying that increasing domestic production will reduce dependence on foreign oil and gas, especially from Russia and other areas of conflict. “Reducing America’s dependence on gas and oil is critical to U.S. national security,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks.
Even as the move marks an important step towards clean energy, Democrats’ climate agenda, including the Build Back Better Act, remains in jeopardy. But despite the challenges, many advocates see Monday’s announcement as a step in the right direction. “President Biden’s action will restore certainty to the solar market and speed our transition to clean energy,” said Martin Hayden, Vice President of Policy and Legislation at Earthjustice, in a statement. “We applaud the President’s inclusion of heat pumps in the use of the Defense Production Act as a significant leap forward to supply American homes with a cleaner, more affordable source of heating and cooling.”
Around noon one day in January 2019, a dam containing waste from a Brazilian iron mine collapsed, releasing 3.4 million tons of sludge. The cascade killed 272 people and flattened houses and buildings for miles, including the mine’s offices and cafeteria, before emptying into the Paraopeba River in southeastern Brazil.
Such disasters have been increasing in frequency and severity, according to a new report on mining waste management. Published by a trio of environmental groups on Tuesday, the report calls for revamping the industry’s standards. It comes as mining companies around the world ramp up the extraction of minerals needed to transition from fossil fuels to forms of cleaner energy.
Mining produces a lot of waste, often toxic: byproducts like lead or arsenic leached from the earth, chemicals like ammonia and cyanide, and processed rock or wastewater. These so-called “tailings” are stored in vast, sludgy pools as big as lakes and contained by earthen dams. According to Earthworks, MiningWatch Canada, and the London Mining Network, which authored the report, current industry standards are far from adequately protecting people and the environment. Their report is backed by an international coalition of more than 150 community groups, environmental organizations, Indigenous communities, and scientists.
Extreme rainfall driven by climate change stresses these structures, known in the industry as tailings dams. “Addressing the problems of mine tailings management is more urgent than ever,” said Jan Morrill, Earthworks’ tailings campaign manager, in a release. “We must prioritize safety over cost.” Dams should be designed to endure the most extreme weather and seismic events possible at any given location, the report said.
At the same time, the rush toward renewable energy is driving up the need for minerals like copper or cobalt, used in wind turbines, rechargeable batteries, and electric vehicles. The authors estimate that demand for these commodities will rocket by 300 percent to 8,000 percent in the next 30 years. Over time, the quality of ore has also declined, forcing companies to process twice as much earth to obtain the material they seek — doubling the amount of waste produced than before.
These factors, combined with weak industry regulations, are putting pressure on the thousands of waste dams thought to be in existence. The collapse of the Brazilian mine, owned by the company Vale, in 2019 is one of the most catastrophic in a string of failures that have occurred worldwide. Just four years earlier, a breached iron dam — also Vale-owned — in nearby Mariana, Brazil, killed 19 people. A year before that, a pool of toxic green waste — the size of New York’s Central Park — at a gold-copper mine in British Columbia poured into surrounding lakes, creeks, and forests.
Among the authors’ recommendations for strengthening the dam standards are regular monitoring and inspection of the waste facilities; obtaining ongoing consent from neighboring communities; and annual evacuation drills with community members in case of a ruptured dam. They said new waste dams shouldn’t be built if companies can’t ensure safe evacuations.
Better yet, the report said, don’t use waste dams at all: “The safest tailings facility is one that is not built.” While some mining may be necessary to foster new technologies, the current trends aren’t sustainable, the report warns. Companies should develop methods to recycle scarce minerals or extract them from unconventional supplies like wastewater.
As Tropical Storm Olivia bore down on the island of Maui in September 2018, Kaliko and her family grabbed their most important belongings and fled. The storm inundated the island with more than a foot of rain, and the floodwater lifted Kaliko’s home from its foundation and washed part of it away. Now, 11-year-old Kaliko is one of 14 youth suing the State of Hawaii for failing to adequately reduce greenhouse gas emissions to protect them from the worsening dangers of climate change.
In a lawsuit filed yesterday, the young plaintiffs allege that the director of Hawaii’s Department of Transportation, Jade Butay, the department itself, Governor David Ige, and the State of Hawaii are violating their constitutional rights by failing to reduce emissions from the transportation sector. In Hawaii, the state constitution has guaranteed each person since 1978 “the right to a clean and healthful environment.” Climate change threatens that right. But when it comes to decarbonizing the state’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions — transportation — the plaintiffs say state leadership has been asleep at the wheel.
“What we want is for the Transportation Department to start doing the things it’s already supposed to be doing to help mitigate climate change,” said Leināʻala Ley, an attorney with Earthjustice and a co-counsel for the case.
The Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment, and Governor Ige’s office declined to comment on the pending litigation.
The State of Hawaii recognizes that climate change is an existential threat. Last year, it became the first state in the U.S. to declare a climate emergency. Three years before that, Governor Ige signed a law committing the state to becoming carbon neutral by 2045. In many ways, Hawaii has been a climate leader — but not when it comes to the transportation sector. If the state continues on its current trajectory, by 2030 the emissions will have increased by 41 percent from 2020 levels, according to the state’s most recent emissions report.
Earthjustice and Our Children’s Trust — the two organizations representing the 14 plaintiffs — chose to focus on the Department of Transportation because there is much more it could and should be doing, Ley said. There are statutes that require the agency to take steps to cut emissions, like reducing vehicle miles traveled and improving pedestrian and bike pathways, “but the state Department of Transportation isn’t meeting any of these goals and mandates that are already on the books,” Ley said.
Leināʻala Ley, an attorney for Earthjustice, stands in front of the Supreme Court of Hawaii the morning the lawsuit was filed.
Marti Townsend / Courtesy of Earthjustice
“We have the tools in our hands to fix the climate crisis, we just have to have the political will to do that,” she added. “This lawsuit can help push the government in the right direction.”
Today’s youth have the most to lose if we don’t act quickly to address climate change. The personal stories of the youth plaintiffs, who are between 9 and 18 years old and come from across the Hawaiian Islands, illustrate how climate change is already affecting the region. Fourteen-year-old Navahine and her family maintain a fishpond, but polluted runoff from unusually heavy downpours and rising sea levels threaten the Native Hawaiian practice. “If urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are not made, these lands will most likely be underwater within my lifetime. And if that happens, our legacy and our future on this island will be lost,” she told Grist.
Ka‘ōnohi, 15, is a diver and spearfisher, but ocean acidification and rising temperatures have caused wide-scale bleaching and die-offs of Hawaii’s once-vibrant reefs. Others have had their homes threatened by intensifying storms, their roads washed away by flash floods, and their food and water security torn away by the changing climate.
In previous cases, youth have sued the federal government and other state governments over climate inaction. In 2015, 21 young people filed a lawsuit against the federal government in a case called Juliana v. United States, or Youth v. Gov. Five years later, a federal appeals court dismissed the lawsuit, writing that the issue should be addressed by the executive and legislative branches, rather than the courts, but now the plaintiffs have filed an amended complaint.
Recently, activists have been trying a different tactic, filing lawsuits in places like Hawaii, where the state constitution guarantees the right to a clean and healthful environment. Similar cases are also pending in Utah and Montana, but the outcomes are still uncertain.
As kids, it can be frustrating “to constantly feel like our voice isn’t heard in these big conversations about our future,” said Navahine, the lead plaintiff. “These decisions that are made regarding climate change are going to impact my generation and the generations after us the most.” She sees this lawsuit as a way for her and her peers to make their voices heard.
Though it feels a bit overwhelming, she said, “I do know that it’s the right thing to do. And I really hope that it makes an impact.”
As global emissions continue to rise, the idea that the world will likely overshoot its climate targets is increasingly becoming a reality. In response, a growing contingent of companies have been looking to a technology known as “direct air capture,” or sucking carbon dioxide from the air, to help curb climate change. On Tuesday, this nascent industry got a boost when dozens of companies, nonprofits, foundations, and universities formed a coalition to organize the carbon removal industry and bring together people who have so far been thinking about and working on direct air capture in isolation.
Carbon removal technology is a growing but still controversial component of the global response to climate change. In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations’ top climate body, said that keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius will require removing some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And despite opposition from some environmental advocates, groups like the DAC Coalition believe direct air capture is one way to meet those climate goals.
The new group, known as the Direct Air Capture Coalition, is registered in the U.S. as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization but will have a “global focus,” according to Axios. Members include for-profit companies such as Climeworks, which opened the world’s largest carbon-capture facility in Iceland last year, along with “partners and observers” like the nonprofit World Resources Institute and New York University’s Energy, Climate Justice, and Sustainability Lab. The goal, according to the group’s website, is to bring together leaders from the technology, business, finance, government, and civil society sectors to “educate, engage, and mobilize” the world toward carbon removal.
“There is no single nonprofit organization that is focused on accelerating deployment and doing so in a way that is effective, that is sustainable and that is equitable,” Jason Hochman, the coalition’s co-founder and senior director, told the news site Protocol. “So we’re trying to change that.”
Carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, is a broad category that encompasses both natural solutions and technology. Ecosystem-based strategies include creating “carbon sinks” by planting trees or restoring wetlands that pull carbon from the air and sequester it in biomass, water, or soil. Technologies like DAC are another component, using large fans to suck in air and a chemical reaction to filter out the pure carbon dioxide, which would then be piped to underground storage areas around the country or turned into products like concrete.
A direct air capture plant in Iceland built by Climeworks, of which Stripe and Microsoft were early customers.
Halldor Kolbeins/AFP via Getty Images
Direct air capture technologies have not yet been tested on a large scale, and can be prohibitively expensive, costing several hundred dollars to remove a metric ton of carbon dioxide. But local governments in states like Colorado and Arizona have already begun to move forward with carbon removal. And the federal government has supported the idea, too; last week, the Department of Energy announced that it intends to fund a $3.5 billion carbon capture and storage program as part of last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
The initiative would create four regional DAC hubs that would each capture and store at least 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. But according to the department, “CDR will need to be deployed at the gigaton scale” by the middle of the century — capturing 1 billion metric tons of CO2 annually, approximately the amount produced by 250 million vehicles.
The Department of Energy promised that it would “emphasize environmental justice, community engagement, consent-based siting, equity and workforce development” in developing CDR projects, and said that this strategy would need to go hand-in-hand with decarbonizing the economy. But environmental justice groups like the Climate Justice Alliance criticized the decision to promote carbon removal technologies, arguing that funding should instead support “real and proven” renewable energy projects in areas that are most affected by pollution.
“The mere promise of DAC technologies acts as cover for continuing fossil fuel extraction and use, resulting in continued harm to frontline communities,” Basav Sen, the Climate Justice Project Director for the Institute for Policy Studies, said in a press release. “It is also a dangerous gamble, since we are already in the midst of a severe climate crisis, and the promise of DAC may never materialize and only harm frontline communities in new, unacceptable ways.”
Instead, the alliance has called on President Joe Biden to ban new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, stop approving fossil fuel projects, and declare a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which would allow the government to fast-track renewable energy development.
Hochman told Protocol that the DAC Coalition wants to play a role in getting these regional hubs off the ground, although the organization won’t be engaging in direct lobbying. The group’s next steps include holding a summit in the fall, with the goal of developing a strategy to guide the industry through 2030.
For the past year, Roishetta Ozane has been trying to stop new liquified natural gas, or LNG, export terminals from being built in southwest Louisiana. “We are already inundated with LNG and oil and gas,” said the clean energy organizing director with Healthy Gulf, who lives in the town of Sulphur. “We’re surrounded by it.”
Ozane, who lost her home to back-to-back hurricanes in 2020, was already fighting the growing number of terminals, where companies supercool and condense natural gas to load it onto specially-built tanker ships. Now, the ripple effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine are making her work even more urgent.
Ozane and other climate and environmental justice advocates fear that the industry is using the war to lock in long-term sales contracts and financing for a flood of new export terminals. They say this would do little to alleviate the current energy crisis, but could push climate targets out of reach and threaten nearby communities at every step of the supply chain — from fracked wells, to pipeline compressor stations, to massive LNG export terminals. While some Americans are hurting due to high gas prices and inflation, frontline communities could end up paying with their health and lives.
“If we bring in all these LNG facilities, they’re not going to start operating for a few years. But then, when they start, we’ll have to deal with them for 30 years,” Ozane said. “That’s why we’re fighting this.”
A petrochemical plant flares near the FEMA trailer where Roishetta Ozane and her family currently live in Sulphur, Louisiana.
Roishetta Ozane
In response to the war in Ukraine, last week the European Union announced an ambitious plan to slash its use of Russian natural gas by two-thirds by the end of the year. Some of the gap in supply will be addressed by reducing demand and accelerating clean energy projects, but Europe is counting on LNG from the U.S. to replace a large portion of the Russian gas.
U.S. producers were already ramping up sales to the E.U., even before Russia’s invasion began. In December, at least two ships carrying U.S. LNG diverted mid-transit to deliver gas to Europe, instead of their original destinations in Asia, to take advantage of record-high prices. In mid-March, the Department of Energy allowed two LNG terminals in Louisiana and Texas to boost exports, meaning every export terminal in the U.S. is now operating at maximum capacity.
Still, a chorus of voices from the oil and gas industry has been demanding that the Biden Administration remove restrictions on oil and gas development, including new LNG infrastructure. In a statement, Mike Sommers, the president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, called on the administration to pursue “meaningful policy actions to support global energy security, including further addressing the backlog of LNG permits, reforming the permitting process, and advancing more natural gas pipeline infrastructure.”
The problem with these talking points is that the federal government is not holding back LNG development. The U.S. has eight existing LNG export terminals. An additional four are under construction, and the federal government has issued permits for 12 more, according to data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Integrity Project’s Oil & Gas Watch.
Those 12 aren’t moving ahead yet, but it’s not because of anything that the Biden Administration is doing. “It has been investors that have been standing by the sidelines,” Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said during a recent panel discussion. LNG export terminals are multi-decade investments, and in recent years, it hasn’t been clear to investors that there would be enough long-term demand to justify funding new terminals.
Southwest Louisiana is the epicenter of the LNG export boom.
Grist
But now, things are shifting. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of natural gas has become more volatile, and buyers want to sign long-term contracts to secure more stable prices. Before, the financial outlook for LNG export terminals seemed uncertain. Now, “we are starting to see that certainty flow in,” Williams-Derry said.
It’s possible that the long-term contracts will give investors the confidence to back the pending facilities, and that more will be built. Williams-Derry also expects U.S. gas production to continue to increase, but not so quickly that it tanks prices.
Meanwhile, communities at every stage of the U.S. supply chain are worried about what this means for their lives and their health.
Lois Bower-Bjornson, her husband, and their four children live in Washington County, Pennsylvania — by far the most heavily fracked county in the state. “This is just locking me, my family, my community into more dirty energy, instead of a cleaner alternative,” said Bower-Bjornson, who serves as a field organizer for the Clean Air Council.
Bower-Bjornson’s home is within 5 miles of more than 20 active fracking wells. In 2019, she and her family participated in a study that found high levels of numerous hazardous chemicals associated with fracking in their bodies.
“It’s frightening,” said Bower-Bjornson. “It just becomes something that you live with, but, you know, it’s always on your mind.”
Lois Bower-Bjornson walks near a fracking site close to her home in Washington County, Pennsylvania.
Courtesy of Lois Bower-Bjornson
Beth Weinberger, director of research and policy at the Environmental Health Project, has been tracking the public health effects of fracking in Pennsylvania since 2012. She notes that numerous health studies have linked proximity to fracking operations with an increased risk of asthma, skin disorders, cardiac problems, preterm births, low birth weight, and childhood leukemia. If gas production continues to rise, “it just means more of the same,” said Weinberger.
At the opposite end of the pipeline, if the gas industry succeeds in building more LNG export terminals, that means more of the same for Ozane and her community, too.
Ozane and her six children lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana, before Hurricanes Laura and Delta destroyed their home two years ago. Since then, they’ve been living in a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, in the next town over. Every morning when Ozane steps out her front door, she sees a skyline filled with petrochemical plants, smokestacks, and flares. “Some days it smells like eggs. Some days it smells like a really strong smell of Clorox or chlorine. Some days there’s this chemical smell that you really can’t put your finger on,” she said.
Already, LNG export terminals are adding to that pollution burden. About 10 miles down the road from where Ozane lives, the Cameron LNG terminal releases sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, fine particulate matter, and carbon monoxide. Further south, Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal began operating in January. Since then, “it has flared nearly continuously, sometimes with a 300-foot flame with black smoke at the end of it,” said James Hiatt, a former oil and gas worker who now serves as a coordinator for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “It really makes you think, how could this be clean energy in any sense of the word?” he said.
The Cameron LNG terminal during the week in August 2020 when Hurricane Laura slammed into the Gulf Coast.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images
The flaring makes Ozane uneasy. “The plants will say, if you see a flare, that means you’re safe, because if the flare is going, that means the systems in place are working. But yet, we see the flare, we see the smoke, we see the steam, and we know that we’re inhaling whatever they’re releasing,” she said. On top of that, “each individual plant is talking about their individual emissions, but what happens when you put all of those emissions together? What are we breathing in?” she asked.
Southwest Louisiana was already the epicenter of the LNG export boom, and now companies are proposing even more terminals there. For Hiatt, that raises serious questions about safety. Lining the coast with LNG infrastructure degrades wetlands — a natural buffer against storm surge from the hurricanes that regularly slam the coast — making nearby homes more susceptible to flooding.
And then there’s the risk of explosions. “To put massive amounts of natural gas in these huge storage tanks and think that you can out-engineer Mother Nature in a way that’s not going to cause some catastrophic fire or explosion over the course of the next 30 years? How many storms can these things withhold?” Hiatt asked. In 2018, the Sabine Pass LNG export facility in Cameron Parish had to shut down two LNG storage tanks after workers discovered gas was leaking from numerous cracks. It was a near-miss that could have resulted in an enormous explosion.
Ozane and Hiatt are both worried about what’s happening in Ukraine, and about the looming gas shortage this winter. But like Bower-Bjornson, they don’t think that locking their community into decades worth of more pollution from the oil and gas industry is the right answer. Even if the proposed terminals are able to secure funding, it typically takes around three years for them to come online. Rather than doubling down on fossil fuels, they hope Europe will rapidly reduce demand and switch to clean energy sources. “We cannot put their fight on our backs by making ourselves a living sacrifice,” Ozane said.
Behind James Hiatt, a coordinator for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a tanker loaded at the Cameron LNG terminal heads out to sea.
Carlos Silva for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade
Opposing anything that the oil and gas industry wants to do in southwest Louisiana is an uphill battle. People like Ozane and Hiatt have been working to educate their neighbors on the industry’s expansion plans and the harms they would bring. They’ve been asking regular people to speak up at meetings and write public comments to prevent the permitting of even more export terminals. They’re also advocating for policy changes at the state and federal level.
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought that this was locked in and we were screwed,” said Hiatt. “We’re not there yet. I mean, we’re at the threshold,” he continued. To him, when it comes to both preventing new LNG terminals from being built and taking action on climate change, “our actions and our inactions today matter in a way that maybe they haven’t mattered as much previously,” he said. He understands that people need jobs, but hopes the region can switch to a more sustainable industry, like offshore wind. “We’ve got to do something different,” he said.
The way Ozane sees it, southwest Louisiana is facing two existential crises right now: pollution from the oil and gas industry and climate change. Every morning when she wakes up, she asks herself: “Am I doing enough to save this place for my children?”
“They have every right to drink the water, to fish in the lakes, to go to the beach and enjoy the sands, to go shrimping, to enjoy the festivals and the music and the culture,” she said. “I’m going to do everything that I can to protect it for them.”
In 1942, when Mary Abo was 2 years old, the U.S. government arrested her father and took the rest of the Abo family from Juneau, Alaska, to the Minidoka prison camp in the desert of south-central Idaho. The United States had just entered World War II. The five members of the Abo family spent the next three years in the sprawling, barbed wire-enclosed camp, where Mary briefly attended nursery school before convincing her mother to keep her in the barracks during the day. In 1945, as World War II drew to a close and after the Supreme Court ruled that detaining “loyal citizens” was unconstitutional, the family reunited in Juneau, and her father re-opened his cafe.
Decades later, Mary and her older sister Alice returned to Minidoka, a historic site now managed by the National Park Service. Alice had been reluctant to make the trip, but as the sisters sat on the stoop of the barracks, like they once did as children, she admitted it had been a good, although difficult, visit. They leaned into the wind, sweet with sage, that kicked dust into their eyes and brought memories from the past. “It’s flat as far as you can see,” Mary said. “The only thing you can hear is the wind that whistles. We need that silence.”
Now, the two sisters, Mary’s daughter, and scores of other Japanese Americans with ties to Minidoka fear the quiet and open plains may be broken. Last August, Magic Valley Energy, a subsidiary of the New York-based private equity firm LS Power, proposed building the 1,000-megawatt Lava Ridge Wind Project on 76,000 acres in and around historic Minidoka, mostly public land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. It’s the second time Minidoka has crossed paths with LS Power, whose plans to construct 400 towering wind turbines would more than double Idaho’s wind energy output.
Lava Ridge is the kind of development that the Biden administration wants to see more of: renewable energy on federal lands. To meet his goal for a carbon-free grid by 2035, President Joe Biden wants to permit 25,000 megawatts of new land-based renewable energy ventures in the next three years. The Bureau of Land Management thinks it’s uniquely positioned to help, and has started a process to make federal land leases cheaper for solar and wind energy developers. But in the high desert of Idaho, these forces have drawn clean energy companies to what Minidoka survivors and their descendants consider sacred ground.
“It’s not just a historic site,” said Robyn Achilles, executive director of Friends of Minidoka, the nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. “This is about people. The site is about respecting and honoring the memory of our friends and family who suffered from this unconstitutional mass incarceration.”
A Minidoka survivor and her granddaughter, an NPS park ranger, tour the park’s newly opened visitor’s center in Feb. 2020.
National Park Service/Richard Alan Hannon
Two months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II, the government began imprisoning some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, more than 13,000 of them at Minidoka. Minidoka was one of 10 such prison camps, the locations of which were chosen because they were remote and could be developed for agriculture. More than two-thirds of the imprisoned were American citizens, while many of the others had lived in the U.S. for decades but were denied eligibility for naturalized citizenship. Since there were so many incarcerees — too many to transport by bus — the government placed the camps near railroad lines.
Coming from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California, many incarcerees found Idaho to be an unfamiliar, punishing land. David Sakura, who was born in western Washington and imprisoned at 7 years old, calls it “America’s Siberia.” While his father was serving with the Military Intelligence Service at Fort Snelling in Minnesota, Sakura was weaving through sagebrush with his mother and little brothers, watching for rattlesnakes as they made their way to picnic in the shade of the looming guard tower. (There were so many rattlesnakes that every year, men made a contest of hunting them down.)
David Sakura (far left) with his family at Minidoka. Courtesy of David Sakura
Today, the land surrounding Minidoka attracts wind developers because the same railways that ferried prisoners to Idaho run along transmission lines that can shuttle electricity across western states. And it’s mostly farms and fields — a legacy of the Japanese Americans who cleared, irrigated, and started farming the land.
Dan Sakura, the son of David Sakura and a conservation consultant for the Friends of Minidoka, said southern Idaho is seeing a “wind rush.” According to Sakura, the region, which is managed by the Bureau of Land Management’s Shoshone Field Office, has lax land-use rules, since the region’s management plan hasn’t been updated in 36 years, making it among the oldest in the country. Whereas current plans have guidance for managing visual resources, like striking plants, unique rock formations, and rich colors in soil and rock, there’s no such rules in the old plan. Besides Lava Ridge, Magic Valley Energy recently proposed a second project next door in Twin Falls County, and there’s another underway north of that. The National Park Service estimates that 324 of the 400 proposed wind turbines — each, at up to 740 feet tall, taller than the Washington monument — would be visible from Minidoka’s visitor center, encroaching on almost a third of the view.
This isn’t the first time that the Friends of Minidoka have taken on LS Power. In 2009, the private company wanted to build a transmission line that would have cut right through the national park site. The Friends of Minidoka and the National Park Service fought back, and the line was ultimately rerouted. So last August, when the Bureau of Land Management published its intent to evaluate the wind proposal, the nonprofit was surprised to learn that Magic Valley Energy had come up with a project that they feel threatens Minidoka.
Luke Papez, the project director, said Magic Valley Energy did, in fact, have the Friends of Minidoka in mind when they developed their proposal; that’s why they planned to put the turbines as far as they did from the park. “Since then, we are now understanding that even with that amount of offset, there remains concerns,” Papez said. “We are happy to hear those concerns out and see what can be done.”
Minidoka under construction in 1942.
National Archives
In a letter inviting community members to participate in the federal land agency’s public comment period last fall, Wade Vagias, the National Park Service superintendent of Minidoka, said that the facility — with its new roads, substations, and transmission towers — would damage the site’s historical integrity. “The isolated and undeveloped setting was a defining characteristic of the unjust incarceration experience at Minidoka,” he wrote. The project “would fundamentally change the psychological and physical feelings of remoteness and isolation one experiences when visiting Minidoka NHS.”
Dan Sakura and other Minidoka survivors and their descendants have asked the federal government to find a new site for the wind farm. An Interior Department spokesperson said the agency “is reviewing the proposed Lava Ridge Wind Energy project with broad partner and stakeholder engagement that includes Japanese Americans interested in potential impacts to Minidoka, Tribes, and the National Park Service,” referring to tribes including the Shoshone-Bannock, which have said the development would violate their off-reservation treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather.
Sakura said that he and other members of his organization support clean energy. “We’re not like billionaires on Cape Cod that don’t like to look at wind turbines,” he said. He recognizes the pressing threat of climate change, but characterized their fight against Lava Ridge as a matter of protecting their heritage.
Mary Abo’s husband looks at a memorial to the 4,000 Issei, or Japanese immigrants, incarcerated at Minidoka.
National Park Service/Richard Alan Hannon
When the government began shutting down the camps in 1945, it handed out pamphlets with tips for a “successful relocation,” advising people to avoid gathering in big groups or speaking Japanese in public. “That experience of living in camp made them feel ashamed and less worthy,” said Achilles, whose parents both survived imprisonment. “Those things contributed to how survivors behaved after camp and how they raised their children. So we see it in the second, third, and fourth generations.”
For those who found it too painful to speak about their time in camp, annual pilgrimages to Minidoka offer an opportunity to share memories, seek community, and heal. They think wind turbines would disrupt the solemnity of the site, as well as diminish the park’s educational mission. Minidoka illuminates the fragility of civil rights and an ugly chapter of racism in U.S. history — a lesson as relevant as ever, they say, amid rising reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans. Eighty years since it was built, Minidoka remains isolated. Dwarfed by vast desert and distant mountains, visitors get a glimpse of what it might have been like to be imprisoned there.
Papez said that Magic Valley Energy is eager to find a collaborative solution. “We do not want to have a project that devalues, in any way, the importance of that site,” he said. “We do feel that there’s a solution here that can respect the Japanese American community’s connection to Minidoka that still allows for this important renewable energy facility to be able to make its contributions going forward.”
Magic Valley Energy has already moved the wind farm’s location before: Two potential sites were dismissed largely because they’re important habitats for the declining greater sage-grouse.
Historic barrack and mess hall at Minidoka National Historic Site in present day.
National Park Service/Stan Honda.
The Bureau of Land Management is currently putting together its environmental impact statement, the draft of which is expected this summer. In the fall, the agency plans to release the final version, with a decision to follow soon after. It could approve or deny Magic Valley Energy’s proposal, or offer an alternative arrangement, like one farther from Minidoka, with fewer or shorter turbines.
To David Sakura, the wind project is much too close. One of the turbines would stand about a mile from his old barracks, 15-8-E. To this day, he remembers the address; children committed them to memory so they wouldn’t get lost in the maze of buildings.
“Minidoka is a sacred place where our spirits come back and speak to us,” Sakura said. “We would like to preserve that and make sure that our children, our children’s children, and our great-grandchildren will be able to speak with the spirits that are left behind in Minidoka.”
It’s looking to be a hot summer for just about everyone in the United States. And there’s not much hope for rain to ease the heat. That’s according to the latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate scientists, released Thursday.
From June to August, unusually hot temperatures are expected across all 50 states, particularly the Southwest and Northeast. Much of the country is also expected to have a dry summer.
“Typically La Niña favors warmer than normal conditions over much of the West,” said NOAA meteorologist Johnna Infanti, referring to the climate pattern currently influencing weather in the U.S. It involves cooler sea surface temperatures and strong east-to-west winds in the Pacific Ocean, and it affects weather around the globe.
NOAA’s forecast offers little relief to the West, an area gripped by a 22-year-long megadrought, estimated to be the worst in 1,200 years. Scientists noted that California just had its driest January to April on record, with 3.25 inches of rain. That same period was the third-driest yet for Nevada and Utah. While forecasters expect these conditions to persist, the drought also appears poised to crawl east, with most of Iowa and eastern Texas likely to develop drought conditions this summer.
Extended drought has states worried, since it ratchets up their wildfire risk. Fires have already scorched New Mexico this month, weeks before the fire season peaks in June. Scott Overpeck, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, told the Guardian, “We have been seeing the writing on the wall, in the sense that we know with the drought conditions that it is going to be a rough season.”
Prospects for a hot, dry summer also have the people who operate electric grids concerned. This week, the North American Electric Reliability Corp., known as NERC, which monitors the grid across the U.S. and Canada, issued a sober assessment for the season, underscoring the challenges of keeping the power running against the backdrop of extreme weather driven by climate change. As temperatures spike, demand for electricity soars as people turn on their air conditioning. But with drought crippling hydropower generation, there’s less available power to meet demand.
That means an unreliable grid. When there isn’t enough power, operators set off outages, rolling blackouts, to avoid long-term damage to the grid. About two-thirds of the U.S. is vulnerable to a shaky supply this summer, according to the NERC assessment. During extreme events, like the Pacific Northwest’s heat wave last year, when temperatures set new records for three days straight, that can be lethal. Washington state alone estimates that 100 people died from the heat wave alone last summer, making it the deadliest weather-related event in state history.
The highest risks are in the upper Midwest and southern states directly east of the Mississippi River. There, NERC’s report said, retiring power plants, climbing demand, and low winds strain the power supply. Plus, an important transmission line running from Illinois to Arkansas that was damaged by a tornado last December is still out of service. Elsewhere, drought in Missouri River Basin states hampers the gas, coal, and nuclear plants that use river water to stay cool.
The East Coast will likely get an early taste of summer heat this weekend: A heat wave bringing the hottest temperatures since last August is expected to bake states from North Carolina to Maine. If that’s not enough to worry about, the grid watchdog identified two more hurdles this summer: supply chain woes that slow major transmission projects and the possibility of Russian cyberattacks.
The Department of the Interior will not hold sales of oil and gas leases for millions of acres off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico, the agency confirmed on Wednesday. That’s good news for the climate, but experts warn that the U.S. is still not doing nearly enough to limit new oil and gas production to keep warming below catastrophic levels.
The department dropped its plan to lease about a million acres in Cook Inlet in Alaska due to a “lack of industry interest,” Interior spokesperson Melissa Schwartz said in an email to the Washington Post. Two more lease sales planned for the Gulf of Mexico will also be canceled, she added, due to a lack of time and legal issues.
The federal government’s current offshore development plan expires at the end of June. Once it lapses, the Department of the Interior cannot issue any new offshore leases until a new plan is in place. The federal government is legally required to create a new plan, but the Biden administration hasn’t proposed one yet, meaning lease sales likely won’t resume until 2023 at the earliest.
Before the election, President Biden promised voters: “No more drilling on federal lands, period.” In January 2021, he signed an executive order pausing oil and gas leasing on public lands and offshore waters. But then 13 states with Republican attorneys general sued the administration, and a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the temporary moratorium.
After that ruling, the administration went ahead with an 80-million-acre lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico. But then, complicating matters further, a federal judge in Washington D.C. invalidated the leases, finding that the Department of the Interior had not taken the effects on the climate into account when issuing them.
Last month the Biden administration resumed selling leases for oil and gas drilling on 145,000 acres of public lands, but raised the royalty rate that oil and gas companies must pay the federal government by 50 percent.
Republican politicians and oil industry leaders used the news of the canceled offshore lease sales to pounce on President Biden, accusing him of restricting oil supplies and not doing enough to rein in high gas prices. Congressman Bruce Westerman, a Republican from Arkansas who sits on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement: “I can’t imagine a more tone-deaf, shortsighted decision that jeopardizes our economic and energy security without doing a single thing to help the environment or the American people.”
But even if the lease sales had gone ahead, the wells would not have produced oil for years, doing little to ease prices today. And it’s not the federal government that’s preventing oil companies from bolstering supply right now. Rather, the industry itself has chosen not to increase production from wells and leases that they already have. After years of relatively low fuel prices and the shock of the pandemic, oil companies are now raking in record profits. ExxonMobil reported profits of $5.5 billion last quarter — twice as much as the company brought in during the same period a year ago. Chevron’s quarterly profits surged to the highest amount in nearly a decade ($6.3 billion), and Shell reported its highest quarterly earnings ever ($9 billion).
While companies have little incentive to increase supply now, they do plan to continue developing new sources of oil and gas in the future. The same day that the Department of the Interior called off the lease sales, The Guardian released a bombshell investigation revealing that major oil and gas companies have plans to develop 195 new projects across the world that would generate the equivalent of about 18 years worth of current global emissions. Twenty-two of the planned projects in the U.S. would contribute more than a fifth of those emissions.
If these projects around the world go ahead — as it appears they will, barring significant action from governments — they will blow up any chance we have of keeping warming below catastrophic levels.
Last year, the International Energy Agency made it clear that nations around the world need to immediately halt new coal, oil, and gas development. While the Department of the Interior’s announcement that it will not lease millions of acres off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico is a step in the right direction, it’s clear that the U.S. is not yet on track to substantially reduce emissions.
California Governor Gavin Newsom announced ambitious goals last July for reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions ahead of schedule. Newsom called for the California Air Resources Board, the state’s top climate regulator, to “evaluate pathways” for the state to become carbon neutral by 2035 — a decade earlier than planned — as well as phase out the extraction of oil entirely. The risks from extreme heat, sea level rise, and impacts on environmental justice communities make it urgent to act quickly, he said, because “we don’t have time to delay.”
On Tuesday, that strategy hit a roadblock when the agency, or CARB, released its draft plan for meeting the state’s emissions targets. It categorically rejected Newsom’s 2035 carbon neutrality goal as too expensive, arguing that sticking to 2045 was more reasonable. In order to meet the more advanced target, the state would have to phase out gas-powered cars earlier than currently planned, the agency found, as well as remove fossil fuel infrastructure like natural gas appliances from homes and buildings.
“The modeling shows that the ambitious target towards 2035 does result in some significant costs that will have significant economic impacts,” CARB Chair Liane Randolph told reporters in a virtual meeting, according to E&E News. “When you’re trying to transition away from fossil fuels, you need to replace that activity with something else. … The 2045 target allows us to fold in those costs over time.”
Instead, CARB called for reducing petroleum use by about 90 percent by 2045, and making up for any remaining emissions by “expanding actions to capture and store carbon,” including new methods for drawing carbon out of the atmosphere that have yet to be proven on a large scale. It also lays out how California can meet its legally mandated goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, which would include widespread electrification and an end to fossil fuel infrastructure in all newly constructed buildings.
CARB’s governing board will now have to vote on the plan, which will be finalized by the end of the year. But scaling back the state’s more assertive climate action could be one indication of the difficult road ahead for decarbonization, as the country moves toward slashing greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. The governor’s office hasn’t said whether the recommendation will drive Newsom to walk back his carbon neutrality target.
“California is on the front lines of the climate crisis and the Governor remains bullish on our aggressive climate goals,” a spokesperson for the governor’s office told Grist over email. “The Governor welcomes the release of CARB’s draft Scoping Plan and looks forward to engaging on the finalization of the state’s climate plan.”
California’s emissions reduction objectives were originally set by the previous governor, Jerry Brown, who in 2018 issued an executive order requiring the state to achieve carbon neutrality “as soon as possible, and no later than 2045.” Newsom followed up by banning the sale of gas-powered vehicles after 2035, and directed CARB to investigate how the state could end oil extraction by 2045. He then announced the 2035 carbon neutrality target in July 2021 and instructed CARB and the California Public Utilities Commission to study how they could achieve this accelerated goal.
CARB’s draft plan says that it “starts — and ends — with a focus on communities that continue to be burdened by air pollution and will be hardest hit by the impact of climate change and rising temperatures.” But environmental justice groups criticized the document’s recommendations, saying that delaying the move toward carbon neutrality would be detrimental to the health of vulnerable Californians and the climate.
Some also criticized what they saw as undue influence from oil industry groups like the Western States Petroleum Association, or WSPA, which has spent over $17.5 million lobbying the California Legislature and other state officials since 2019, the Daily Kos reported in February. The WSPA and other oil and gas corporations and trade associations, including oil giant Chevron and the gas company Sempra Energy, spent $6 million in the first quarter of this year alone.
The plan is “disastrous for climate and leaves working class Californians behind,” Martha Dina Argüello, the executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles and co-chair of CARB’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, said in a press release. “At a time when California needs to be phasing out fossil fuels, our top air regulators are bowing to fossil fuel lobbyists at the expense of our health and future.”
Environmental groups also took issue with the plan’s continued reliance on natural gas as a “transition fuel” that’s less polluting than oil or coal but still a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. The plan calls for building the equivalent of at least 33 new large gas power plants, according to estimates from Sierra Club California, and “relies on expensive and unproven technology” in the form of carbon capture and sequestration to meet its emission reduction targets.
“Although CARB staff seem to recognize the urgency of the climate crisis in their presentations to the Board each month, the draft scoping plan does not have that same sense of urgency,” Brandon Dawson, director of the California branch of the Sierra Club, said in a statement. “CARB must select a pathway to carbon neutrality that is faster and delivers significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and adverse health impacts.”
In 2020, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden made a promise to voters. “No more drilling on federal lands, period,” he said. “Period, period, period.”
Last week, Biden broke that promise. His administration announced it was opening up public land to new oil and gas leases, several months after suspending those types of leases.
Biden officials have a handy excuse for the reversal. In the summer of 2021, a federal judge in Louisiana struck down the Biden administration’s pause on new oil and gas leases on public lands. Climate advocates were furious when the White House announced the new leasing plan last week, but senior officials, citing the 2021 ruling, said their hands were tied. Biden’s new leasing plan opens up approximately 144,000 acres for new drilling, 80 percent less acreage than the Department of the Interior had originally evaluated for leasing. It also hikes up royalty rates on new leases from 12.5 percent to 18.75 percent. The Biden administration tried to balance its leasing move by releasing a report yesterday that shows it is on course to produce enough renewable energy to power roughly 9.5 million homes by 2025. Some climate activists weren’t sold.
“This is the Biden administration caving to the fossil fuel industry and directly breaking the promises he made on the campaign trail,” Collin Rees, a U.S. program manager at the climate group Oil Change International, told Grist, referring to Biden’s new leasing plan.
Biden’s latest decisions don’t have much to do with meeting (or not meeting) his climate goals. They’re not even really about reducing gas prices. Opening up new acreage for drilling won’t affect gas prices for at least a year; it certainly won’t have an impact as soon as the summer, when gas demand peaks.
So what’s it really about? “It’s a political move,” Paul Bledsoe, a strategic advisor for the Progressive Policy Institute and a former climate advisor for President Bill Clinton, told Grist. Nearly all of Biden’s domestic energy policies these days are centered around controlling the way American voters perceive his administration. Biden, Bledsoe said, “is playing a four-dimensional game of chess.”
An aerial view of an oil derrick in the mountains of Western Colorado.
grandriver/Getty Images
Those moves will do little to nudge gas prices down in the short term. But that’s not really the point. “I think the White House’s view is: ‘We’re in a bit of a crisis, we need to check every box,’” Bledsoe said. “The domestic leasing was one of those boxes. I think we’re done now, there’s going to be no more focus on additional near-term supply policy. He’s done everything he can do.”
Bledsoe argues that the Biden administration had to make these tough decisions, and not just because inflation and high gas prices will hurt Democrats as they head into a tough midterm election cycle. Biden’s ultimate goal is to get Democrats to repackage and pass a slimmer, more climate-focused version of his Build Back Better Act. That act, which was passed by Democratic lawmakers in the House last November and included $320 billion in clean energy tax credits, stalled out in the Senate after two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kirsten Sinema of Arizona, indicated they couldn’t get behind it. Recently, Manchin has hinted that he’s open to supporting the climate portion of that bill, reinvigorating discussions around the legislation in the Senate.
Despite the strange optics of a pro-climate president boosting fossil fuels, Bledsoe doesn’t think Biden’s recent decisions are at odds with the president’s climate vision. If Biden shows American voters and the Senate that he has done everything he can to alleviate rising gas prices in the short term, he said, perhaps he can convince lawmakers to turn to the arduous task of rejiggering Build Back Better into something that can pass.
“I think the president can now argue that he’s done everything he can to alleviate near-term gasoline prices, now let’s focus on medium and long-term energy prices and driving down those costs,” Bledsoe said. But the clock is ticking. If Democrats are going to pass the climate portions of Build Back Better before the midterms, then they need to start writing up a new bill now. “It can’t be done overnight,” Bledsoe said. “I’m starting to worry that the clock is running out.”
Rees, the climate advocate, doesn’t buy the argument that increasing oil and gas production now will ultimately help Biden achieve his climate goals. “It’s one thing to try to boost production in the very short term but the big question mark for us is whether you’re locking in new production and expanding the fossil fuel industry,” he said. “Nothing is worth locking that in and it’s certainly not clear that doing so will help him pass a climate bill.”
In the past few months, fossil fuel prices have done exactly what someone who cares about climate change might want: They went up. And up. And up. Since January, the average retail price for gasoline nationwide has jumped by almost a dollar per gallon; across the country, drivers are spending at least $12 more every time they fill up their tanks. One Mobil station in Beverly Hills, California, made headlines when its “super” gasoline hit nearly $8 per gallon.
These price increases — brought about by the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Russia provides roughly 10 percent of the global supply of oil) and a continuing rebound in demand from the COVID-19 pandemic — have had deleterious effects on American consumers, who are already struggling with sky-high inflation. But some have suggested that the rising cost of oil could have a silver lining. Transportation is the largest source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for almost 30 percent of the country’s carbon footprint. Could rising gas prices change American driving enough to help curb global warming?
The answer, unfortunately, is complicated. It’s not enough for gas prices to just go up — American consumers also have to reduce their gasoline use, either by electing to use alternative methods of transportation (buses, bikes, trains) or switching over to electric vehicles. (The cost of filling the “tank” of an electric vehicle via home charging is only around $16, compared to about $50 a tank at current gas prices.)
There are a few promising signs of such a shift. Online searches for electric vehicles more than doubled during the most recent gas price hike, and the surging cost of fuel may make some Americans think twice before purchasing a new gas-guzzling SUV. But historically, when faced with high gas prices, U.S. drivers complain and blame the sitting president — and don’t fundamentally change how much time they spend on the road. In other words, gasoline is a relatively “inelastic” commodity in economic terms. According to data from the U.S.Energy Information Agency, for example, while gas prices in early 2015 increased by 30 percent compared to the previous year, vehicle miles traveled dipped by just 3 percent.
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at the Columbia Business School who is currently on leave from New York University, says that in the long run, increasing oil prices could cut driving emissions — but only if prices are rising in a predictable way over the long term. One way to do that is by increasing gas taxes, or state and federal fees levied on each gallon of gas that fund highway maintenance, public transit, and other infrastructure projects. “If the government sets a price then you can expect that it’s doing it for a reason, and that it’ll stick around,” he explained. And there is evidence to back this up: According to an analysis that tracked consumer behavior from 1966 to 2008, Americans reduced their gasoline consumption three times more when facing gas tax increases compared to simple price fluctuations.
But at the moment, state and federal governments are doing the opposite: signaling to consumers that they will bail them out if prices get too high. Last month, President Joe Biden announced that he would release 1 million barrels of oil a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for six months, boosting supply and putting downward pressure on price. Earlier this week, the president also authorized the sale of gasoline blended with 15 percent ethanol. Some Congresspeople have suggested creating a federal gas tax “holiday,” to quickly cut prices by 18.4 cents. Connecticut, Georgia, and Maryland have already suspended their state gas taxes, while New York, New Jersey, and West Virginia are considering similar moves.
Gas analysts say these holidays are digging the U.S. deeper into a hole of fossil-fuel dependence. Patrick de Haan, head of petroleum analysis at the tech firm GasBuddy, argues that tax holidays increase demand, putting even more pressure on a limited supply of fuel. After Maryland instituted its gas tax holiday, de Haan calculated that gasoline demand in the state spiked by 28 percent, compared to a nationwide increase of about 9 percent. Georgia similarly saw a 13 percent increase. “Giving out gas cards and tax holidays is akin to handing a bottle of Jack Daniels to someone that’s already drunk,” de Haan tweeted. “It enables high prices and high demand.”
There are other proposals as well. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, for example, has suggested sending a $400 rebate to all Californians who have a vehicle registered in the state. Wagner says that rebate may be better than a gas tax holiday — since it doesn’t directly encourage driving — but it still has flaws. Car-owners are generally higher income, and so the rebate will be putting money into the pockets of state residents who already have more cash. The best option, Wagner argues, is actually raising the gas tax so that driving is more in line with its environmental costs, and then returning the profits of the tax directly to low-income citizens.
And there is ample evidence that current gas taxes — whether at the state or federal level — are not high enough to account for the damages of driving to human health and the planet. The federal gas tax hasn’t been increased since 1993. Since then, the value of that 18.4 cents has declined by almost two-thirds, thanks to inflation and improved fuel economy in cars. “The right gas tax would be about a dollar a gallon,” said Gilbert Metcalf, a professor of economics at Tufts University. “I suspect maybe higher than that because of climate change.”
Politicians, however, are stuck between a rock and a hard place. When gas prices are high, political approval ratings tend to drop, endangering re-election campaigns and putting lawmakers on edge. Some Democrats — including President Biden — may see lowering gas prices as a necessary political tool to increase the chances of stronger climate action later on.
Still, Wagner sees subsidizing fossil fuels in any form as a dangerous game. Lowering the price of gasoline, he warns, will almost certainly result in increased demand and increased emissions. “It’s very rare in the real world that the Econ 101 answer is the right answer,” he said. “But this is one of those times.”
In mid-March, about 80 people gathered in the auditorium of a local high school in Licking County, Ohio, a rural area about 40 minutes outside the state capital. The public hearing, set up to discuss a proposed 350-megawatt solar project, lasted more than four hours.
Supporters of the project said it would bring in much-needed tax revenue for local schools and promote energy independence in a state reliant on coal and natural gas. Opponents raised concerns about the loss of 1,880 acres of prime farmland, the impact on property values, and the potential environmental effects of the development.
“It’s becoming like the Hatfields and McCoys,” one resident told the Newark Advocate at the meeting, referring to the infamous feud between two families in Appalachia in the late 1800s. “This is destroying the community. Family members are pitted against each other. Church members are pitted against each other. And it’s neighbor against neighbor.”
The United States is experiencing a boom in utility-scale renewable energy projects, as solar and wind prices continue to fall and the Biden administration pushes for a fossil fuel-free electricity sector by 2035. Throughout the process, developers seeking vast expanses of cheap land for utility-scale facilities have faced pushback from the likes of Massachusetts fishermen, coal plant supporters, and environmental groups concerned about desert tortoises. Now, rural communities around the Midwest are mobilizing to restrict or ban large renewable energy projects. Experts say that some residents have been swayed by misinformation about the health impacts of solar and wind. But for most, the issue is tied to concerns about the loss of agricultural land in a region long-defined by its farming roots.
In March, researchers from Columbia Law School found that 121 local governments in 31 states have developed restrictions on new renewable energy projects, a 17.5 percent increase from just six months ago. About half of those local laws are in the Midwest. A congressman from Wisconsin proposed a nationwide ban on tax incentives that encourage renewable energy development on farmland, while community groups have packed local meetings to oppose solar and wind farms in Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa. One Michigan man filed recall petitions against all five members of his township board, saying they failed to properly regulate wind and solar development or “provide sufficient protections for the health, safety, and welfare” of residents.
Solar energy in particular has taken a lot of the heat, even in states that have long embraced wind. Iowa was the first state to generate more than 30 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, and has more wind energy installed than any other state except Texas. But while farming can take place alongside wind turbines, solar farms typically take agricultural land out of large-scale production. In response, Iowa legislators introduced a bill earlier this year that would have prevented solar farms from being built on land that’s considered particularly good for farming — about two-thirds of the state’s counties.
The bill would also require solar panel fields to be at least 1,250 feet away from the nearest neighboring landowner. Iowa law only requires oil and gas wells, by contrast, to be 330 feet from any nearby property.
Rural residents are far from united in this opposition, said Lindsay Mouw, a clean energy policy associate at the Nebraska-based nonprofit Center for Rural Affairs. Many support renewable energy projects because of the extra income they provide, especially as farming becomes less financially viable and soil becomes increasingly degraded. But while every rural landowner is able to decide for themselves whether or not to sell their land to renewable energy companies, those choices can affect others nearby who may not feel the same way, Mouw added.
“I think it’s more of a concern of neighboring landowners who do not want to see their farmland surrounded by solar panels and have this idyllic vision of Iowa … being a corn-producing state,” Mouw said.
Some Midwestern states, such as Indiana, have encouraged wind and solar development, only to face pushback from farmers and local officials who wanted local control over renewable projects. Other opponents are not actually farmers, but residents of suburban communities affected by urban sprawl from nearby metropolitan areas and concerned about the impact of renewable energy projects on their views and property values, said Kerri Johannsen, energy program director for the Iowa Environmental Council. (Though the impact on home values varies – studies from Europe found that wind turbines and solar panels decreased nearby home prices by 2 to 5 percent, but others from Massachusetts found no significant difference.)
A solar farm sits within agricultural land in Ohio. Nicholas Smith / Getty Images
Behind a lot of this opposition are social media campaigns spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation, particularly about the health effects of wind and solar. Fears about wind turbine noise causing birth defects or shadows from turbine blades inducing seizures – neither of which have scientific backing – permeate Facebook groups where residents organize against renewable projects, a report from National Public Radio found.
“It is a new process, and there’s just a lot of unknowns,” Mouw said. “It’s a big challenge for county commissioners to become experts on the renewable energy industry.”
Though restrictive bills such as those introduced in Iowa or Kansas haven’t seen much progress, opposition at the local level can still discourage renewable development. Some developers have canceled or moved projects in states like Indiana, where more than 30 counties have policies restricting solar or wind development, according to the Indianapolis Star-Tribune. And with pushback ramping up, the next question is whether the U.S. will be able to meet its renewable energy goals without local buy-in, Johannsen said.
“The transition to clean energy is so important for our future, that I do get concerned when I see policies proposed that could stop or stifle renewable development here,” Johannsen said. “At the same time, I’ve been immersed in some of these conversations long enough to feel optimistic that we’re going to be able to keep moving forward.”
In February, on the eve of the release of a major new report on the effects of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, several of its authors met with reporters virtually to present their findings. Ecologist Camille Parmesan, a professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, was the first to speak.
Scientists are documenting changes that are “much more widespread” and “much more negative,” she said, than anticipated for the 1.09 degrees Celsius of global warming that has occurred to date. “This has opened up a whole new realm of understanding of what the impacts of overshoot might entail.”
It was a critical message that was easy to miss. “Overshoot” is jargon that has not yet made the jump from scientific journals into the public vernacular. It didn’t make it into many headlines.
But just days earlier, the topic generated extensive debate when Parmesan and her coauthors went over their findings with government representatives from around the world. And next week, after the IPCC releases another big report on climate solutions, you may just start hearing about it more and more.
“Remember this word: overshoot,” Janos Pasztor, the executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative and the former United Nations assistant secretary-general on climate change, wrote in an op-ed published in January. “It will gain increasing importance as the herculean difficulty of reducing emissions to net zero and removing vast stores of carbon from the atmosphere become clearer.”
The topic of overshoot has actually been lingering beneath the surface of public discussion about climate change for years, often implied but rarely mentioned directly. In the broadest sense, overshoot is a future where the world does not cut carbon quickly enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels — a limit often described as a threshold of dangerous climate change — but then is able to bring the temperature back down later on. A sort of climate boomerang.
Here’s how: After blowing past 1.5 degrees, nations eventually achieve net-zero emissions. This requires not only reducing emissions, but also canceling out any remaining emissions with actions to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, commonly called carbon removal. At that point, the temperature may have only risen to 1.6 degrees C, or it could have shot past 2 degrees, or 3, or 4 — depending on how long it takes to get to net-zero.
A carbon removal facility in Iceland that came online in 2021. It captures carbon dioxide directly from the air and pumps it underground. Climeworks
The global temperature will begin to stabilize, but it will not decline. So next, nations will aim to scale up carbon removal even further. This will lower the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and bring the temperature on earth back down below 2 degrees C, if not to 1.5, or even lower, by the end of this century.
This possibility of overshoot was first conceived by scientific models that map out potential pathways for climate policy. And in the realm of a computer model, overshoot is a success story. We may fail to meet global climate targets in the next few decades, but hey, we can always turn things around and achieve them by 2100. But Parmesan and other scientists are warning that overshoot should not be considered lightly. While the rise in temperature is theoretically reversible, many of the consequences of a temporarily hotter planet will not be.
In a sense, we are on the pathway to overshoot right now. Warming is already dangerously close to 1.5 degrees, emissions are not going down, and existing policies put the world on track to warm 3 degrees by the end of the century. Policymakers are also beginning to seriously invest in carbon removal research and development, however, these solutions are still nowhere near being able to turn temperature rise around.
When I reached out to Parmesan to ask about her statement in the press conference, she was eager to talk about overshoot. “It’s so important, and really being downplayed by policymakers,” she wrote. “I think there’s very much an increased awareness of the need for action,” she told me when we got on the phone. “But then they fool themselves into thinking oh, but if we go over for a few decades, it’ll be okay.”
A protestor during COP26 in Glasgow. Current policies put the world on track to warm by nearly 3 degrees by the end of the century. Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The effects of overshoot could undermine climate solutions
The February report was part of the sixth major assessment of climate science by the IPCC, a body of hundreds of scientists convened by the U.N. The assessment is published in three volumes that look at the physical science of climate change, the effects of a warming planet on ecosystems and people and how to adapt to them, and the options for cutting emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere. That third volume will be released next week.
Parmesan said the IPCC’s recent impacts report shed light on two key risks of a future period of overshoot that she felt people were not paying enough attention to. The first is that some impacts will be irreversible, like the loss of coral reefs and species extinctions. “Global warming coming back down is not going to bring you that species back,” she said.
Though Parmesan did note that for many threatened species, “the shorter the overshoot, the lower the overshoot, the less likely they are to actually go extinct.”
Sea-level rise is also irreversible — the heat collecting in ice sheets and the ocean will continue to drive sea-level rise long after the temperature is stabilized or even lowered. Not to mention the possibility of losing entire nations and cultures to the sea, or the mass loss of human life from a world with more dangerous heat waves and storms.
A coral reef suffering from bleaching. Warming of 1.5 degrees C could destroy up to 90 percent of tropical reefs. Alexis Rosenfeld/Getty Images
But the second risk throws the whole possibility of eventually reversing global warming into question. This is the part that stirred up confusion and controversy prior to the IPCC report’s release, when scientists were going over their findings with government delegates.
It has to do with climate feedbacks — changes to natural systems caused by climate change that then exacerbate climate change. The report documents countless examples that scientists are already observing. Insect outbreaks and wildfires are killing trees, causing huge releases of greenhouse gases from forests. Heat and drought are causing some parts of the Amazon rainforest to release more carbon than they suck up — even in intact, old-growth areas that have not been disturbed by agriculture or development. Arctic permafrost — frozen, carbon-rich soil — is thawing and beginning to release the carbon stored within. Scientists estimate that there is five times as much carbon stored in permafrost than has ever been emitted by humans.
Scientists say it is still possible to stop or even reverse these feedbacks with aggressive cuts to fossil fuel emissions and by actively restoring ecosystems. Walt Oeschel, a biologist at San Diego State University who first discovered that Arctic permafrost was becoming a net source of emissions in the 1980s, said that in northern Alaska, the permafrost is more than 1,000 feet thick, and for the most part, it’s just the surface layer that’s melting and releasing carbon. “But it’s going to get harder and harder to ameliorate or to reverse the longer we wait,” he said.
This is the crux of Parmesan’s second warning. Once some of these processes get chugging along, they may reach a point where it becomes impossible to stop them. “Humans can control human actions, but humans cannot control the biosphere’s responses to climate change,” she said. “And we’re witnessing responses that are going to make it harder and harder and harder for humans to get global warming down.”
Coastal erosion eats away at the ice-rich permafrost underlying the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
USGS
If permafrost and rainforests begin pumping carbon into the atmosphere, the possibility of achieving net-zero, or even net-negative emissions would become a much bigger uphill battle. Even if we develop significant carbon removal capacity, these feedback emissions could make trying to remove carbon from the atmosphere feel like trying to shovel the walkway in the middle of a blizzard.
Scientists cannot pinpoint a specific temperature, or how long of an overshoot period may lead to unstoppable emissions from these systems. “But we can tell you these processes have already started,” said Parmesan. “And the longer they go on, the higher the warming, the longer the warming, the harder it’s going to be to reverse.”
Wolfgang Cramer, a co-author on the IPCC impacts report, said that when they explained this to government delegates, the discussion grew thorny. Some felt that talking about this would discredit the idea that we can aggressively cut carbon later in the century and reverse global warming. “It was seen as a way to be policy prescriptive,” Cramer said. “As if we wanted to tell them that if you don’t get it now then there’s no point in trying later.”
But to him that missed the point. “We’re just telling you that you may find it harder to come back later in the century than you think,” he said. “We were just making a case against delaying action.”
From models to policy
A future with overshoot is not some niche idea. Parmesan said the impression she gets from global climate talks like COP26 is that this is what some policymakers are planning for. “They have been talking about it as though okay, this isn’t great, but, you know, this is probably what’s going to happen,” she told Grist.
It’s unclear whether that was the case when world leaders signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, promising to limit warming to “well below 2 degrees” and “pursue efforts” to stay below 1.5 degrees. David Morrow, the director of research for the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University, said it struck him at the time that 1.5 was an aspirational target, something that people took less seriously then than they do now.
Then-Secretary of State John Kerry holds his two year-old granddaughter while signing the Paris Agreement in 2016.
“I think it was what climate ethicist Steve Gardner calls ‘bearing witness’ to our collective failure in climate policy,” he said. “It was small island states pointing out, 2 degrees is a death sentence for us. We are not willing to accept that and so we want you to acknowledge this 1.5 degree target.”
Keywan Riahi, director of the energy program at the Austrian research institute IIASA and a prominent climate modeler, speculated that 1.5 degrees would not have been on the table in Paris if it wasn’t for climate models that showed pathways to bring temperatures back down after a peak.
Overshoot scenarios dominate the climate modeling literature. In a 2018 IPCC report, researchers analyzed more than 200 modeled climate action pathways that would keep warming under 2 degrees by the end of the century. Only nine of them avoided going beyond 1.5 degrees. For those nine, it wasn’t even a sure bet — the likelihood of staying below that threshold throughout the 21st century was only 50 to 66 percent.
There are a few reasons for this. One is time. Morrow said modelers build in an assumption that climate action will ramp up gradually, rather than accelerate dramatically in the near term and then level out. We’re already dangerously close to 1.5 degrees, so that gradual process doesn’t do us any favors. And because the goal of these models is to achieve a specific temperature far away in 2100, they can make up for the slow start by ratcheting up climate policies, as well as negative emissions, later in the century.
Riahi said another reason was cost. The models are designed to find the most cost-effective way to achieve temperature targets. “The quicker we reduce emissions, the higher the cost will be,” Riahi explained, “because we have a lot of long-lived fossil-based infrastructure which would need to be prematurely phased out if we really try to accelerate and achieve zero emissions early.”
But now, modelers are beginning to try a new approach where instead of studying how to achieve end-of-the-century outcomes, they are looking at how to cap global warming at a specific maximum level. Last year, Riahi published a paper in Nature exploring the costs and feasibility of achieving temperature targets with no or limited overshoot. Contrary to the argument that gradual climate action is more cost effective, he found that the upfront investments needed to limit overshoot would bring long-term economic gains.
But these models, which are underpinned by climate science, still do not take into account the climate feedbacks that Parmesan and her co-authors are warning about. She said there’s still not enough data to plug those observations in.
That’s important to keep in mind next week, when the IPCC releases its next report on the topic of climate change mitigation. The report will evaluate our options for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, with and without overshoot. It will also wrestle with the risks of presuming that we will be able to remove significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and evaluate the promise of various options for doing so.
Scientists say sea level rise is one of the irreversible impacts of an overshoot scenario. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Parmesan felt that the government delegates started out thinking she and her co-authors were exaggerating, but after two weeks of discussion, they started to get it. “They actually started realizing, Oh, we’ve seriously underestimated the risk of overshoot. And it’s like, yes, you have. That’s the whole point.”
It might not seem like a very challenging idea that climate change will bring irreversible impacts. Of course there are irreparable consequences of a future with more drought, heat, floods, and fires.
Cramer laughed when I put this to him. “You’re right,” he said. “It is actually not very complicated. You’re probably right that most people will understand it as soon as you talk to them about it. I think where there’s a sense in talking about it is to make people aware that the current engagement for reducing emissions is insufficient. We actually need to get emissions down now. Every 10th of a degree counts.”
President Joe Biden proposed a $5.8 trillion budget on Monday that would boost funding for federal environmental agencies, invest in climate research and resiliency, and support environmental justice programs.
Though the document is only a draft and will undergo significant changes before being approved by Congress, it represents a sharp shift in priorities from the previous administration. The budget for fiscal year 2023, which begins in July, includes $11.9 billion for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, and $17.6 billion for the Department of the Interior, both increases from Trump-era budget cuts that gutted federal environmental enforcement.
The increased funding will allow the EPA to upgrade drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, particularly in underserved communities; improve air quality; clean up hazardous waste; and study the health and environmental effects of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.” It would also support on-the-ground efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase climate resiliency by providing $100 million in grants to states and tribes.
Biden’s budget was praised by EPA Administrator Michael Regan as well as members of the Environmental Protection Network, a coalition of former EPA staffers and appointees.
“Congress needs to respond to the President’s [fiscal year] 2023 EPA Budget request by providing robust support to rebuild our nation’s environmental protection infrastructure,” David Coursen, a former EPA attorney, said in a press release. “A fully funded EPA will be better poised to address the existential threat of the climate crisis and advance environmental justice for vulnerable fenceline communities, communities of color, and low-income and Indigenous communities who have long been overburdened by air and water pollution.”
The budget also proposes $48.2 billion for the U.S. Department of Energy as the Biden administration seeks to prioritize domestic clean energy production, including $200 million to support solar panel manufacturing and $5 billion in loan projects to “avoid, reduce, or sequester greenhouse gas emissions.” It’s unclear how much of this would support carbon capture and storage projects such as carbon dioxide pipelines, a controversial strategy that environmental groups have said hinders the transition to renewable energy.
Many of the proposed investments are in energy efficiency and electrification, with funding to help weatherize and retrofit low-income homes; connect tribal households to the electricity grid; and purchase electric vehicles for the federal fleet, including the United States Postal Service, which has faced criticism for a recent decision to replace most of its vehicles with gas-powered trucks.
Biden’s 2023 budget includes investments in domestic solar panel manufacturing.
Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
There’s also funding for climate research, including over $900 million for the National Science Foundation to track how climate change is affecting communities in the U.S. Part of the Department of Energy’s budget would include $9 billion for clean energy research, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture would receive $6 million for its climate hubs, which study how farmers can adapt to climate change and reduce their carbon emissions.
The National Park Service, which faced steep budget cuts under the Trump administration and has lost more than 3,000 staff members in the last decade even as visitor numbers have soared, would see a more than 10 percent boost in funding under the new budget. That includes $31 million for the President’s long-touted Civilian Climate Corps, a program that would put people to work making national park infrastructure more resilient to climate change.
“We know that while our parks are hit hard by climate, they can also be part of the solution, but resources and staff are necessary to make real change,” Theresa Pierno, President and CEO of the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, said in a press release.
More than $9 billion would go to job creation and economic revitalization programs in communities affected by the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. And the budget doubles down on Biden’s promises to support environmental justice, with nearly $4.5 billion going to EJ programs as part of Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which dedicates 40 percent of federal climate and clean energy spending to underserved communities.
Despite its emphasis on domestic clean energy production and “green” jobs, the proposed budget also includes hundreds of billions in defense spending, a major contributor to climate change. In a statement announcing the budget, Biden called for “one of the largest investments in our national security in history,” particularly in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But the U.S. military, which is not obligated to report its emissions under the Paris Agreement, already uses a significant amount of fuel to power its aircraft and ships. As a result, it emits more greenhouse gasses than many entire countries — a major obstacle to achieving net-zero emissions, as the U.S. has pledged to do by 2050.
Even with these increases in spending, Biden said the budget would halve the deficit from the last year of the Trump administration, thanks in part to new taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
This storywas originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Deskcollaboration.
Last April, the cryptocurrency world announced its own virtual iteration of the Paris Agreement: the Crypto Climate Accord. The alliance bills itself as “a private sector-led initiative for the entire crypto community focused on decarbonizing the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry in record time.” Its goal is to transition the crypto industry to renewable energy sources in time for the 2025 United Nations climate conference. By 2040, it seeks to “achieve net-zero emissions for the entire crypto industry.”
Why does crypto need its own climate pact? Because it has a massive carbon footprint, one that’s kept growing as interest in cryptocurrencies — not to mention the sheer number of cryptocurrencies — has grown. A 2019 study in the science journal Joule estimated that, at the lowest bounds, Bitcoin’s power consumption emitted about 22 million metric tons of carbon dioxide the previous year. For context, that’s about 10 percent of the global railway sector’s annual emissions — and it’s just for one currency, even if it’s a major one. Such figures are a bad look for the industry’s public image, which is why phrases like “green crypto” and “clean crypto” are suddenly popping up everywhere, fueling efforts like the new climate accord. Crypto’s dirty reputation is an existential problem — so for the sake of both the planet and the industry, it’s worth examining how the many, many “clean” crypto initiatives, currencies, blockchains, and marketplaces for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, actually stack up.
Crypto’s primary energy issue arises from the dominant method of mining coins, known as “proof of work.” I’ve previously explained how proof of work operates on chains like Ethereum: To earn coins, which are heavily encrypted in blocks in order to ensure security and authenticity, miners use their processors to solve complex puzzles for individual blockchain entries. Their systems have to figure out a particular block’s matching “key,” which is a code written by an algorithm, and match their own guesses to the block until they find the correct code line. Standard processing units are usually too inefficient to keep up with such needs, while the processing machines that are more energy-efficient can usually only be used for Bitcoin mining. These more economical processors tend to have a short life span, so when they die, they simply pile up as e-waste. That’s all just for extracting the coins, mind you — sending them to other users for transactions also requires hefty amounts of electricity, as the majority of the computers cued in to the blockchain must verify each transfer in order to ensure its legitimacy.
This applies to any asset minted and transferred on a proof-of-work blockchain, such as NFTs on Ethereum. According to the most recent estimates from the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, a data project headed by Dutch economist Alex de Vries, a single transaction of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency uses about 2,157 kilowatt-hours of energy, an amount that could power one household for about 74 days. In 2021, there were roughly 95 million total transactions, adding up to emit an estimated 65 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and exceeding the annual emissions of Papua New Guinea. China and Kazakhstan, formerly Bitcoin-happy nations, have straight-up halted crypto farming within their borders in order to take care of this energy problem. According to a Citigroup report, the energy now used for global Bitcoin operations is about 66 times greater than it was in 2015.
The Crypto Climate Accord wants to start fueling crypto with renewables as opposed to fossil fuels, but at the moment, that simply isn’t an option. We don’t have enough renewable energy around the world to meet climate goals even without taking crypto into account; running crypto systems will require that major countries have surplus renewable-produced energy. Already, areas with dedicated green power sources for crypto, like the Nordic states, are running low on the surplus power capacity required for digital mining. Bitcoin’s energy use has shot up over the past year, and Scandinavia’s supply of excess power — about 30 terawatt-hours in an average year — is projected to decline as governments redirect it toward the development of fuels like hydrogen, while also exporting clean power to the rest of Europe.
Few countries have majority-renewable-powered grids, and those that do, like Iceland and Denmark, already use much less energy than the countries that tend to be major crypto hubs, like Nigeria and the Philippines. The countries friendliest to crypto have decades to go before they meet the clean energy benchmarks required to power most of their regions and clean up their emissions — much less hold enough excess capacity to regularly mine Bitcoin. (Before China banned crypto mining last year, it provided the largest source of renewable energy for crypto operations.)
So there are a lot of “green crypto” initiatives that are easy to dismiss as pure hype. At the same time, there are many digital traders, artists, engineers, and true believers who have been working for years, out of genuine concern, to try to build and scale solutions to crypto’s environmental problem.
One of their biggest tools at hand involves alternative mining programs. In 2012, two developers introduced a new practice known as “proof of stake” to help make ledgers’ transaction fees cheaper and scale crypto mining to a level Ethereum couldn’t yet reach. Proof of stake is less energy-intensive than proof of work, since it doesn’t require every miner to be online in order to verify transactions. Instead, certain participants — those who’ve been in a given network longer than others and have the most currency invested into a collective “staking pool” — are randomly selected as “validators,” who can verify transactions and update the blockchain. If they execute their high-knowledge duties sufficiently, they will gain tokens; if they go offline or validate bad transactions, they can lose their privileges and their coins. An offshoot of proof of stake known as delegated proof of stake allows users to pour their currencies into staking pools that can each be attached to a particular “delegate,” who’s directly elected by network denizens by a vote. These delegates are assigned block by block in the system; no one leader may hold the reins for too long.
The primary benefit of proof of stake is the fact that not as many processing units are needed to run mining operations; Ethereum estimates this can slash energy requirements by up to 99 percent. There’s a similar benefit to proof of authority, the method invented by one of Ethereum’s co-founders and championed in Damien Hirst’s massive NFT drop. The difference between proof of authority and proof of stake is that validators are preapproved to validate transactions based on their reputation in the market rather than by just their value holdings, and these validators are not allowed to verify consecutive blocks.
That sounds promising from the outside. But those drawn to crypto for the security and “decentralization” may not care for proof of stake or proof of authority as much. It’s far easier for a bad actor to dominate a proof of stake space than a proof of work one, since for the former you’d only need to hold more than half the currencies on hand, while for the latter you’d need to control more than half the hardware infrastructure. And it’s easier for validators and delegates in proof of stake systems to keep gaining coins than it is for other users; plus, the technical skills required for such roles have a high barrier to entry. Some users think this ruins the whole point of crypto, which is ostensibly to democratize a financial system that runs parallel to fiat currency — per a recent Guardian report, “a majority of bitcoiners remain adamant that [proof of stake] is not a worthy replacement for [proof of work].” That may explain why, 10 years after its introduction, proof of stake’s most popular networks and currencies, like Tezos and Solana, are still nowhere near as dominant in the market as proof of work–based ledgers are.
What about climate-conscious miners who favor Ethereum and proof of work’s security but not its power consumption? The “Guide to Ecofriendly Cryptoart” mentions a few potential fixes within Ethereum itself. Lazy minting is the practice of delaying the actual creation of an NFT on the relevant ledger until it is purchased; though it’s more cost-effective for NFT creators, it’s not necessarily much more energy-efficient. “Bridges” allow users to transfer their data from one blockchain ledger to another if they wish, which certainly provides a useful offramp but doesn’t fix the issues within ETH. So-called sidechains and Layer 2 scaling solutions allow Ethereum to be “bridged” to parallel blockchains that may use proof of stake, giving such chains a core security while not necessitating the same high-cost and high-energy transactions for mining and trading tokens. Yet all this still lets ETH off the hook for its energy-intensive nature.
At this point, it’s difficult to see an immediate fix to crypto’s energy woes, more than 12 years after it debuted. To be fair, many crypto evangelists make the accurate point that video gaming, streaming, and other data-heavy internet habits are also extremely energy-intensive; a 2019 report from the California Energy Commission found that video gaming within the state alone consumed about as much electricity as the entirety of Sri Lanka.
Still, each of the aforementioned activities is a unique source of entertainment as well as of cultural and informational value. Crypto, on the other hand, is a speculative asset that requires mass faith and collective buy-in over regulation and universally established commerce. If you believe in crypto’s mission but worry for our natural environment, it’s certainly more advisable to work in a proof of stake system than a proof of work one. But then you’re working in a system that negates some of the very benefits of security and decentralization crypto was intended to offer — and that still has a carbon footprint all its own, even if it doesn’t equate to Bitcoin’s. Just because one system isn’t as environmentally ruinous as another doesn’t mean that the system is itself “green.” Add to all this the scams and fluctuating values that rock crypto on a regular basis, and it becomes increasingly difficult to see just what it is we’re doing here.
