With the Build Back Better Act frozen in Congress, Democrats now see their best hope in tackling environmental disparities lies in the Environmental Justice for All Act. On Tuesday, Democratic U.S. Representative Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona pushed the bill forward in a hearing held by the House Committee on Natural Resources, which he chairs.
In more than three hours of testimony, Republicans on the committee pushed back on the bill, groundbreaking legislation that aims to address environmental disparities in vulnerable communities across the country. Grijalva and his co-author, Representative A. Donald McEachin of Virginia, drafted the bill to prioritize environmental justice in federal policy and reintroduced the Act in the House of Representatives last March. The bill was created with the help of an extensive network of stakeholders — including representatives from grassroots organizations that focus on everything from climate justice to industrial pollution in communities that have experienced the health effects of toxic emissions and industrial pollution for decades.
Despite Republican protests that the bill will harm communities reliant on the oil and gas industry for work and taxes levied on these industries to pay for municipal services, Grijalva told Grist it’s time for action to protect the health and well-being of these communities. He said the plan is to move forward in what’s known as the mark up phase — receiving input from congressional members, including amendments — while simultaneously receiving feedback from affected communities. “The input from my Republican colleagues to do nothing is not going to happen,” said Grijalva, noting that they have a choice to either strengthen the bill or kill it. His hope is that Republicans collaborate to strengthen the bill given the lives at stake from ongoing pollution. “It’s an issue that is not going to go away, it’s an issue that potentially affects 40 million people in this country directly,” he said.
During the hearing, Republican Rep. Pete Stauber of Minnesota criticized the act for creating more red tape, opportunities for “radical special interest groups” to file more lawsuits, and for requiring federal agencies to develop more reports and studies. His concern, he said, is that all of this will keep affected workers in these industries on the sidelines. “When it claims to speak to so-called environmental justice, it plainly misses the mark,” said Stauber during the hearing.
It’s those studies and the accompanying data that Laura Cortez, a co-executive director with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice in Los Angeles says are necessary to ensure that the cumulative impacts of pollution in disadvantaged communities are considered before more polluting industries are allowed into communities like hers. “There is no single, evil villain polluter in EJ communities. What I see as one of the largest issues is that municipalities and agencies currently treat polluters on a case-by-case basis without assessing cumulative impacts,” Cortez told the committee on Tuesday.
Democratic U.S. Representative Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona is a co-author of the Environmental Justice for All Act.
Caroline Brehman / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
A life-long resident of Bell Gardens, she noted that she grew up next to railroad tracks with trains that rumbled past at 3 a.m., within five minutes of an oil refinery, a block from warehouses, and attended school next to the 710 freeway, which she said sees 40,000 to 60,000 truck trips daily. Cortez’ community has worked to address soil, air and water quality issues throughout the region, and has found success when partnering with scholars that can quantify the effects of cumulative pollution. But a comprehensive federal approach to examining these impacts is needed, she said.
Grijalva pushed back on his Republican colleague’s claims that the Environmental Justice for All Act jeopardizes economic security, specifically jobs, noting that the critics presented no quantitative facts to support their arguments. On the other hand, he noted, there is extensive research showing the disproportionate effects of environmental contamination — from petrochemical facilities, landfills, waste incinerators, oil refineries, smelters, and freeways — on low-income residents and communities of color. “That’s just the reality and it’s far from coincidence, and I hope my Republican colleagues are not trying to rewrite history,” said Grijalva. “We’re trying to correct history and make sure it doesn’t happen again, and that’s what the bill is about.”
The Environmental Justice for All Act aims to:
Amend the Civil Rights Act to allow private citizens and organizations that experience discrimination (based on race or national origin) to seek legal remedies when a program, policy, or practice causes a disparate impact.
Provide $75 million annually for research and program development grants to reduce health disparities and improve public health in disadvantaged communities.
Levy new fees on oil, gas, and coal companies to create a Federal Energy Transition Economic Development Assistance Fund, which would support workers and communities transitioning away from greenhouse gas-dependent jobs.
Require federal agencies to consider health effects that might accumulate over time when making permitting decisions under the federal Clean Air and Clean Water acts.
While the Biden administration has made some strides over the last year to address the concerns of environmental justice communities through executive orders and via EPA funding to prioritize long-standing contamination in vulnerable communities, legislation is critical to ensure that these priorities are codified into law, said Grijalva.
Last year, Chris Hemsworth took a moment out of training for the sequel to his latest action film, Extraction, to promote the upcoming World Expo in Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, or UAE. In a video featuring flying robots, levitating trains, and what appeared to be a terraformed Mars, the one-time “sexiest man alive” beckoned viewers to “the future.” Silver stallions galloped in the air as Hemsworth danced with a robot in a pink luminescent dress.
“This is Dubai,” his voice boomed. “And this is the world’s greatest show.”
The reality has been less fantastical. In October, opening day festivities at the Expo were marred by visitors fainting from temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. When I visited in late November, they still hovered around 90 degrees in the afternoon. The sugar cane and banana trees planted around the site looked parched, the leaves brown and droopy.
Though the heat may have come as a shock to the international tourists at the Expo, for me it felt familiar. Growing up in the Emirates, I was accustomed to 100-degree days. Summer months in the UAE were usually punctuated with news of construction worker deaths and videos of reporters and residents attempting to fry eggs on the sun-scorched pavement — and often succeeding. Still, after a few years in California’s Bay Area, I couldn’t help but be amazed that a place can be this hot in late autumn.
I had returned to my childhood home to visit family and explore the Dubai Expo. You’ll be forgiven if you haven’t heard of it. Commonly known as a world’s fair, the Expo is an international showcase that takes place once every five years, providing an opportunity for each country to promote its accomplishments and self-image. The Expo typically shows off technological innovations and architectural marvels: The Palace of Fine Arts near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, for instance, is a remnant of the 1915 World Expo and was meant to prove to the world that the city had recovered from the 1906 earthquake.
A traditional band performs in front of Terra, the Sustainability Pavilion at the Dubai Expo on November 27. GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images
The Dubai Expo, which finally opened in October after a year of COVID-related delays and will run through the end of March, is built on a sprawling 1,083-acre site on the outskirts of the glistening metropolis. Each country has exhibits in one of three pavilions dedicated to the broad themes of mobility, opportunity, and, most curiously, sustainability. No expense appears to have been spared to prove the sustainability pavilion’s green bona fides. At its center sits Terra, a saucer-shaped building with solar panels on its roof. Along with 18 solar “energy trees” surrounding it, Terra produces enough energy to sustain itself and is expected to receive LEED Platinum certification. It also collects rainwater and dew that it recycles for use on site.
But as with the UAE itself, a different picture emerges when you scratch the Expo’s sleek surface. While Terra may be producing its own renewable energy, the Expo’s water is supplied by desalination, an energy-intensive process that removes salt from sea water and is primarily dependent on burning oil and gas. And while the Expo is powered by a solar park nearby, Dubai is still reliant on the Al Hassyan coal plant — the only such facility in the entire Middle East.
The UAE rose to global prominence over the last four decades on the strength of oil and gas reserves unearthed in the middle of the last century, and fossil fuels remain responsible for almost a third of the country’s gross domestic product. Though its oil production pales in comparison to larger neighboring rivals like Saudi Arabia, the small Gulf nation nevertheless accounts for about 6 percent of global petroleum exports. Oil funded the country’s rapid growth and famously lavish lifestyles. Today, its per capita carbon footprint is among the highest in the world — higher even than that of the U.S.
The country is nevertheless trying to position itself as a leader on climate action. In 2017, it announced a national climate change plan, and more recently it unveiled plans to produce half of all its energy needs from renewable sources. It aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and just won a bid to host next year’s COP28, the United Nations conference that brings countries from around the world together to coordinate climate action.
Still, the UAE is not kicking fossil fuels anytime soon. Construction of the Al Hassyan power plant began just a few years ago, shortly after the country expanded its environment ministry’s mandate to tackle climate change and as it announced it would teach climate change in schools.
Visitors at the Expo’s sustainability pavilion walk by an exhibit showing rising carbon dioxide emissions. Grist / Naveena Sadasivam
In its energy strategy for 2050, the country expects “clean coal” will provide 12 percent of its energy needs. Another 50 percent will come from “clean energy” — presumably solar — and nuclear power. How the country plans to square emissions from coal and natural gas with its net-zero goal is unclear. After weeks of back-and-forth, a spokesperson for the UAE’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change declined my request for an interview, citing the minister’s busy schedule. The spokesperson did not respond to a request for written responses to questions in time for publication.
What’s more, the country’s net-zero goal ignores an enormous swath of its carbon ledger. In 2020, the UAE’s state-owned oil company announced the discovery of new oil reserves and efforts to increase oil production by almost 20 percent by 2030. A quirk in global carbon accounting rules mean that the petrostate may well cut carbon emissions domestically and reach its net-zero targets while continuing to expand oil and gas exports. Someone will burn those fuels — but as long as it’s not the country that pulled them out of the ground, it doesn’t count against the UAE’s ambitious targets. For this reason, the country’s climate strategy calls into question the meaningfulness of net-zero plans and exemplifies why some scientists oppose net-zero targets altogether.
Ultimately, the UAE’s climate efforts may amount to nothing more than a creative way to extend the shelf life of its oil and gas assets. Every drop of oil that it conserves domestically — where energy is heavily subsidized — can be exported globally at market price.
“They don’t want to be left with a valueless asset in the future,” said Justin Dargin, a Middle East energy expert and a former Harvard University research fellow. “So they’re trying to produce as much as possible and export it before that nail in the coffin for oil consumption.”
The UAE is home for me — although it has never accepted me as one of its own. I’m one of the hundreds of thousands of people whose families immigrated to the country in the 1990s on work visas. After being overlooked for a promotion at the telecommunications company he worked for in southern India, my dad one day declared he was going to find a job in the Middle East. Within six months he moved to Saudi Arabia. When he found a job in Dubai a couple years later, my mom and I joined him. I was five at the time.
As a child, I didn’t understand the tradeoffs my parents made. For college-educated South Asians, the UAE offered career opportunities and economic mobility. It was safe and relatively socially progressive. Home was just a four-hour flight away, and to top things off: No taxes. In exchange, we lived with the uncertainty of being second-class in a country that wanted our labor but offered no safety net. We were on the lower rungs of a social hierarchy that valued native Emiratis and Western expats. We had no path to citizenship no matter how long we lived there. We lived with the knowledge that if the ruling sheikhs woke up one day and decided we were no longer useful to them, we would be on the next flight out. For this reason, my dad converted one of his old briefcases into a go-bag. Stored on a shelf above his neatly-ironed office wear, it held our passports and other important documents. I memorized the briefcase’s code when I was nine.
Photos of Grist reporter Naveena Sadasivam growing up in Dubai. Courtesy of Naveena Sadasivam
None of this struck me as odd growing up, though we spoke in hushed tones when we criticized the rulers because we’d heard a tenth of the population spied for the government. During the summers, we surmised that the government tampered with weather reports because the temperature never officially hit 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), even though it sure felt like it.
It’s only as an adult, having moved out of the country, that I’ve been re-examining my childhood memories. We still don’t really know how many people spy for the government, but we do know that the country has used Israeli spyware to track dissidents and launched a messaging app that covertly spied on users. And while there’s absolutely no evidence the government altered weather reports, it was an easy rumor to believe considering the country’s notoriously harsh conditions for migrant workers doing manual labor. Given the rulers’ determination to build the tallest buildings, the largest malls, and man-made islands, it seemed impossible they’d let a little heat stand in their way, even though we’d heard local laws required outdoor work to halt above 50 degrees C. It was easier to imagine that the government would tweak weather reports instead.
Another reason these rumors seemed believable is that the country has always been obsessed with optics. It has carefully concocted an image that projects luxury, prosperity, and a sort of multicultural progressiveness. Dubai’s ruler has long been a fixture at the Royal Ascot, wearing a sharp top hat and hobnobbing with British royals. When the world’s airlines cut back amenities after the 2008 recession, Dubai’s airline, Emirates, doubled down with first-class cabins, in-flight showers, and lie-flat beds. Emirates continues to sign multi-million dollar deals with soccer clubs in the United Kingdom, a practice it began in the early 2000s. You can’t watch a soccer match any more without seeing a flash of Emirates’ logo on a jersey or on a sideline board on the field. The glitz obscures the harsh reality of life for many who built the country.
At the same time, it’s no exaggeration to say that the UAE — and Dubai in particular — has been a pioneer in the Middle East. When my family moved to Dubai, most hadn’t heard of the city, let alone could correctly point it out on a map. But three decades later, Dubai has become a tourist destination and trade hub, while the UAE is a powerful broker in Middle Eastern politics and a close ally of the United States. So much of its success is a credit to the country’s savvy rulers, who spent billions of dollars in profits from oil and gas exports to turn the dusty desert city into a gleaming metropolis. Its model of development has been inspirational to other Gulf countries.
The Dubai city skyline, as photographed in February 2021. Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
When the UAE developed industrial zones for trade and manufacturing and poured billions into developing Dubai as a tourist destination, neighboring Gulf countries aped the strategy. After Dubai launched the Emirates airline, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman followed suit. After Abu Dhabi signed deals with the Louvre and Guggenheim to build art museums in the city, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia raced to build their own.
The UAE’s latest sustainability efforts may be both a recognition of its role as a regional leader and a public relations ploy to maintain its polished progressive image. It’s already working: After the UAE announced its net-zero target during COP26, Saudi Arabia announced a net-zero target of its own.
Ghiwa Nakat, the executive director of Greenpeace’s Middle East and North Africa office, said that it’s important to view the UAE’s climate efforts in the context of others in the region, where climate change has not been a priority. In this context, “we have to give [the UAE] credit,” she said.
“UAE has always had a pivotal leadership role in the region, and they are very good at challenging the status quo and driving positive change in the region,” said Nakat. “If anyone could drive this change within the region and achieve real zero [emissions], it’s UAE.”
Jim Krane, a longtime Associated Press correspondent who was posted in Dubai and is now a professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas, views the UAE’s attempts to stay ahead of the pack in business terms. “The UAE, and Dubai in particular, have always tried to get first-mover advantage,” he said.
Workers bend rebar at a construction site in Dubai in 2007. KARIM SAHIB/AFP via Getty Images
True to its reputation as a country of superlatives, the largest solar park in the world is being built in Abu Dhabi, the Emirati capital. The UAE has also promised to invest $163 billion in renewable energy by 2050 and has committed to providing $400 million to a fund that helps accelerate the energy transition in developing countries. The fund is managed by the International Renewable Energy Agency, which is headquartered in Abu Dhabi.
The UAE’s investments — in green energy, aviation, tourism, trade, and expanding fossil fuel exports — seem almost perfectly calibrated to get the country to net-zero with as little sacrifice as possible. Like fossil fuel production for export, aviation and shipping emissions are not included in a country’s emission totals. Even emissions from Emirates, which is owned by the Dubai government and is the largest international airline in the world, are not added to the UAE’s carbon footprint. Similarly, shipping emissions from Dubai’s bustling ports are ignored.
“They’ve got a long way to go,” Krane summarized. “But it’s going to be an easier ride for them than it would be for many other countries.”
Even if it overshoots its goals, the UAE is poised to continue contributing to a warming planet. With no exit strategy for oil and gas production and the country’s coffers still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, Greenpeace’s Nakat warned that the UAE’s sustainability efforts could all be for naught. “They have to reduce their exports,” she said, “because even if it’s not burnt locally, the fossil fuel that is exported will have an impact on them.”
As the planet continues to warm, the UAE’s nearly 10 million residents will feel its effects acutely. The Middle East has been warming at a rate twice the global average, and the UAE is already 1.5 degrees C warmer than the preindustrial baseline. Researchers have found that if temperatures continue to rise, extreme heatwaves will make Dubai and Abu Dhabi uninhabitable by 2070.
A view of Burj Khalifa and the Dubai skyline covered by fog during a winter sunset in 2018. Artur Widak/NurPhoto
Summers in the UAE have always been a challenge. Some of my earliest memories are tied to the relentless, draining heat: Sweating through my gray pinafore in elementary school, second showers after school, turning on the cold tap only to be blasted with scalding water. The sweet relief of stepping onto air-conditioned buses in fourth grade. Excitedly waiting for the winter months because it meant barbecues and picnics every weekend.
While the heat was mostly an inconvenience for me, it was deadly for others. At the height of its construction boom, the UAE depended on cheap labor mostly from South Asian countries. (Today, almost 90 percent of the UAE’s residents are expatriates, and half of all migrant workers are South Asian.) Many migrant laborers, particularly those who worked in the construction industry, were overworked, underpaid, and often found themselves trapped in a system of exploitation. With their passports seized by their employers, they were required to work long hours in the punishing heat, where many died of heat stroke. To this day, tallies of worker deaths and their causes are hard to come by.
According to a report by the International Labor Organization, workers lose half of their work capacity as temperatures reach 93 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures routinely approach 120 degrees during summer months in the UAE. As the planet warms, the report projects that the UAE will lose the equivalent of 164,000 full-time jobs due to lost productivity by 2030 — the highest among Arab countries. And that’s not counting how many migrant workers may lose their lives.
Construction workers drink water at a building site in Dubai in 2007. Temperatures in the city regularly exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer months. KARIM SAHIB/AFP via Getty Images
The effects of climate change are also set to alter the UAE’s coastline. The country’s seven Emirates, including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, lie along the coast, and the cities have developed billions of dollars worth of waterfront properties. Dubai has also created entire man-made islands in the shape of palm trees and a map of the world. Luxury hotels, bungalows, and apartment buildings boasting sea-front views line the islands. As the seas rise, both the UAE’s coast and the islands are likely to be submerged. Under one extreme climate scenario, researchers predict that sea levels along the UAE’s coast will rise by 9 meters, flooding most of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
It’s unclear whether Expo organizers considered climate projections in selecting its location. After the Expo winds down in March, the structures built for it are supposed to be repurposed into a “smart and sustainable city” called District 2020. If Dubai executes this plan, it may just put more people in harm’s way. Even a “mild” two-meter rise in sea levels will likely submerge the Expo site.
On the sticky November day I visited, no one appeared to be thinking about such dire futures. In the sustainability pavilion, people seemed thrilled to be outside and marvel at Dubai’s latest architectural wonders. Temperatures were dropping, winter was almost here, and with the Omicron variant still early in its spread, the mood was jubilant. As a group of men in kanduras tested their mizmars and drums, readying to sway to a traditional Emirati folk song, my tour guide leaned in with a bemused smile.
“I don’t know what they told you when you bought the tour,” he half-laughed. “Most people don’t want any sustainability knowledge. You tell them, ‘no water, no food’ — they don’t want that. They want some fun, some entertainment.”
Last year was rocky – to say the least. But as the coronavirus pandemic maintained its grasp on American society, the U.S. managed to continue charging on its path of energy efficiency, according to a new report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE.
The nonprofit research organization’s annual Energy Efficiency Scorecard Progress Report found that in 2021 at least a dozen states passed new clean energy legislation or adopted new energy-saving standards. Notably, the new legislation included incentives for everything from fuel switching and electrification to, encouraging clean heating systems and even strengthening building codes.
“As states emerged from the early months of the pandemic, they turned to electrification and energy-saving standards to help address the growing urgency of the climate crisis,” said Berg.
Seven states – Massachusetts, Illinois, Colorado, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington – passed new energy laws that named electrification as a “growing priority.” At least five states, including the District of Columbia, passed laws requiring energy and water use reductions for appliances. California and New York set goals for all new passenger cars and light-duty trucks to be zero-emission by 2035.
Many states have also put laws on the books to ensure “equitable benefits” from their electrification push, the ACEEE found. These measures, primarily focused on transit, include the creation of transit-oriented affordable housing projects and the electrification of public transit fleets. In New York, the state’s ramped up efficiency and building electrification programs have a goal of 40 percent of the benefits reaching “disadvantaged communities.”
States expect their new programs to receive a major funding boost in the form of President Joe Biden’s $1.2 billion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The legislation is expected to shell out more than $12 billion for low-income household weatherization projects, improving building energy codes, installing electric vehicle charging stations, and a new revolving loan fund for commercial and federal building upgrades.
However, the ACEEE argues more funding could help further ramp up the process and pull the country out of its early pandemic-induced energy efficiency slump. From 2019 to 2020, household energy efficiency actually dipped 1.1 percent nationwide, the scorecard states.Particularly, the report outlines a need for more money to be allocated to rebuild the energy industry’s workforce. Compared to 2019, there are 250,000 fewer industry workers, according to the scorecard.
The scorecard also outlines a need for uniform adoption of codes being pushed by states like California, New Jersey, and Oregon. If more states enacted new clean energy laws, the country would be on a better track to meet its climate goals and support household-level recovery from COVID-19 by lowering “home and business energy bills, generating employment, and lessening the need for imported fuels.”
While putting these codes and laws on paper are wins, the report argues, implementation is still a huge mountain to climb. States are “adopting promising new laws that can reduce harmful pollution and create thousands of clean energy jobs, but they need to vigilantly implement them,” Berg said. Fighting for electrification, the ACEEE asserts, will help reverse the country’s racial and economic inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic.
Recognizing the potential for energy savings will not only reduce emissions, the report states, but will also help the country “bring about a just and equitable energy transition inclusive of all communities.”
On Tuesday, oil giant Exxon Mobil announced that it aims to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. More specifically, it has the “ambition” to reach net-zero emission from its operations within the next 28 years. “We’ve got a line of sight,” Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, said in an interview with the New York Times. “By the end of this year, 90 percent of our assets will have road maps to reduce emissions and realize this net-zero future.” The plan builds on an announcement Exxon made last month that said the company is aiming for net-zero emissions from its operations in the Permian Basin by 2030.
Now, the company has changed its tune, saying it has made a list of 150 modifications to its business practices that would whittle down emissions, like transitioning its operations to renewable energy.
But experts say Exxon’s net-zero plan has a major blind spot: It only covers Scope 1 and 2 emissions — the emissions the company produces directly, while digging for oil, for example, and the emissions produced by the utilities it buys its power from. The plan doesn’t extend to cover Exxon’s largest contributions to climate change. They’re called Scope 3 emissions, the greenhouse gases produced by the companies clustered along Exxon’s supply chain and the emissions produced by customers who buy and burn the company’s oil and gas.
“It’s not the best plan because it’s only targeting a small slice of the company’s overall emissions,” Paasha Mahdavi, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Grist. What’s more, the plan doesn’t stack up to similar net-zero plans from Exxon’s competitors because Exxon hasn’t promised new investments in non-oil activities. Mahdavi, who worked on an analysis of the top 10 major oil and gas companies’ decarbonization plans, said even Chevron, which has a plan that looks very similar to Exxon’s, has promised some investments in renewable energy and other non-oil projects. Exxon’s plan mainly revolves around making their existing oil and gas operations marginally greener.
“Exxon is the only one that has not made any meaningful investments in solar, wind, electric vehicles, renewables, anything,” Mahdavi said. “This announcement fits into that vision of what the future transition will hold. From their perspective, it’s oil and gas.”
There is one silver lining in Exxon’s announcement: It’s taking methane more seriously. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years it spends in the atmosphere. Recent analyses show that the methane that leaks out of active and abandoned oil and gas operations, as well as the methane purposely emitted by gas operators in a practice known as venting, accounts for a much larger slice of warming than previously thought. Exxon’s plan includes resources dedicated specifically to reducing methane emissions and methane flaring. “It’s something they should have done a long time ago,” Mahdavi said, “but at least they’re targeting it, right?”
Over the last few years, Freddie Mac has been cautiously dipping its toes into the green bond market. The government-backed mortgage company first issued green bonds for energy retrofits at apartment buildings in 2019. In 2021, it expanded into single-family homes, and earlier this month, the company announced it had sold $600 million in such bonds.
Freddie Mac and its sister company Fannie Mae own more than 60 percent of home mortgages in the country. The two firms purchase home loans from lenders, pool them into financial products called mortgage-backed securities, and sell them to investors. When the underlying homes are energy efficient or sustainable in some way, the products are referred to as green bonds. In general, green bonds are supposed to finance sustainable projects and investors likely expect that Freddie Mac’s green bonds drive investment in energy-efficient homes. But the devil is in the details.
For one, the Freddie Mac program enrolls mortgages for homes with rooftop solar panels. In states like California, all new construction must be built with rooftop solar. That means a mortgage for any newly constructed house in California would automatically qualify for Freddie Mac’s green program. It also recently began accepting homes with a rating of 60 or lower on the HERS index, an industry standard used to measure energy efficiency. The average rating for the approximately 300,000 homes that were rated in 2020 was 58.
A rating of 60 is a reasonable target compared to goals set by sustainability projects in the past, but it’s insufficient to reach the emissions reductions outlined in the Paris climate accord, said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University. “They need to be in the low 50s.”
The last decade has seen explosive growth in the green bonds market. With economic and regulatory pressure on companies to consider the environmental impact of their products, businesses have used the green bond market as one way to tout their sustainability credentials. For Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the incentive to roll out green products is also coming from the federal government. Last year, the Biden administration rolled out a roadmap to address climate risks in the financial system, including in housing markets.
However, with almost no regulation or policing of environmentally sustainable stocks and bonds, companies have defined their own standards. As a result, whether a green bond is truly financing climate-friendly projects is sometimes difficult to determine. For instance, a Grist investigation of Fannie Mae’s green bond program for apartment buildings found that about 20 percent of properties in the program saw its energy metrics either stagnate or decline after enrollment. And a recent Bloomberg report found that a prominent ratings company that sticks sustainability labels on stocks and bonds doesn’t actually measure the impact of the product on the planet.
Whether Freddie Mac’s program for single-family homes is driving investments in energy efficiency is unclear. The company has not released environmental metrics that can be used to assess the homes’ energy use before and after enrollment in its green bond program. According to a company report, it intends to publish an annual report with the environmental impact of the program, including “quantitative measures and aggregate program results.”
Frederick Solomon, a spokesperson for Freddie Mac, said the company has issued green bonds covering 2,454 mortgages so far and that all of them were cases in which borrowers had refinanced a loan that covered the purchase of solar panels. Solomon defended the use of the HERS index and noted that a Department of Energy review of energy codes in 39 states and Washington D.C. found that only Vermont had a code more stringent than a HERS rating of 60. Still, the company plans to review the threshold every three years, and HERS-scored mortgages will be included in bond issuances “in the near future,” he said.
Keenan said that the program likely provides “an improvement” in energy efficiency because the HERS index requires inspectors to survey the property and measure energy use. “That’s probably a good way to do it,” he said. Still, requiring a HERS rating of 60 or lower gave Keenan pause because it allows the average home in the HERS database to qualify for the green bond program.
It’s one of the reasons CICERO, a Norway-based ratings company that Freddie Mac hired to review its program, concluded that the green bonds “will likely have limited impact in terms of improving the energy efficiency of newly built HERS-rated homes in the US.” CICERO gave the program a “light green” rating, the lowest rating that indicates some measure of sustainability.
“It’s not a bad ambition level,” Christa Clapp, a managing partner and co-founder of CICERO, said of the program’s HERS target. “But it’s not necessarily linked with very substantial emission reductions right now.”
In some ways, the nuclear rally looked like what you might expect. A man in a polar bear costume waved a hand-painted sign. Local politicians and activists gave speeches. A space scientist made everyone cry by asking listeners to take the cosmic perspective: “all of us together on a tiny little planet alone in the blackness.” A celebrity — the singer Grimes in this case — appeared on video and blew a kiss to the protesters. Mothers nursed babies. A man with a green headband and gray ponytail shuffled his Birkenstocks to the music.
But there was one key difference in this assembly in San Luis Obispo, California, near the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant: These environmentalists were working to keep a nuclear facility open, not to shut it down.
“Save the planet!” echoed a cadre of women behind her, all holding the tethers of a van-sized blimp with the words “save clean energy” emblazoned on one side. The dirigible was supposed to represent a fraction of the greenhouse gases likely to be released into the atmosphere if California goes ahead with a plan to close Diablo Canyon’s two reactors in 2024 and 2025.
“We’re on a mission!” squawked the bullhorn.
“To stop all emissions!” answered the activists.
Decades after the previous generation of greens protested to close nuclear reactors, a new generation is beginning to advocate to save those same plants. These activists regard nuclear power – which provides more than half of the country’s clean energy – as a vital asset in the fight against climate change.
Most of America’s nuclear reactors were built in the 1980s and their 40-year licenses are nearing expiration. Now, policymakers are wrestling with whether to begin the arduous license renewal process, or simply shut plants down. Leaders in New York recently made the latter choice, decommissioning the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. But in other cases, pro-nuclear activists have turned the tide.
Isabelle Boemeke, who goes by the social media nom de plume Isodope, organized the rally on December 4 in San Luis Obispo, California. photo courtesy of Isabelle Boemeke
“In Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, they have saved nuclear power plants,” said John Parsons, an environmental economist at MIT who has spent years studying the costs of nuclear power. “In the struggle to actually do something about climate change people have been forced to take a hard look at the numbers — and attitudes about nuclear power have changed.”
For decades, hardly anyone stood up for nuclear energy except the utilities making money off it. This new breed of nuclear advocates is different: They are climate hawks first and support nuclear only insofar as the technology helps them achieve their larger goals. Boemeke, who organized the December 4th rally in California, cheers for geothermal advances just as loudly as nuclear wins. Pete Marsh, who had driven to the protest from Long Beach in his electric car, is a solar contractor, but he didn’t want to see California repeat the pattern of building renewable energy only to wipe out the gains by closing nuclear. “I don’t want to tread water on climate change,” he said.
Americans have slowly warmed to nuclear energy since the days when people associated the word nuclear with war and bombs. Surveys from the Pew Research Center surveys ask people if they support building more nuclear power plants, and the percentage answering “yes” has crept up to 50 percent over the years. In 1983, a researcher for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry association, began conducting surveys asking Americans how they felt about existing nuclear generation. Back in the 1980s, the survey found an even split — about half in favor and half opposed. The researcher, Ann Bisconti, repeated the survey every year since, and found a dramatic increase in the popularity of fission, with 76 percent of Americans in favor of nuclear electricity generation and 24 percent opposed.
A yearly survey has asked people the same question about nuclear power for nearly four decades. Bisconti Research, Inc.
Just five years ago, nuclear energy didn’t seem popular, at least in California. The state had recently shuttered its other nuclear power plant, the San Onofre Generating Station, after one of its parts broke. In 2009, Pacific Gas and Electric, or PG&E, had begun the process of renewing Diablo Canyon’s license for 20 years, but nuclear power was beginning to look like a risky investment. In 2016, the utility, environmentalists, labor, and antinuclear groups negotiated a deal to close Diablo Canyon’s two reactors when their licenses expired in 2024 and 2025.
Closing the facility would take about 15 percent of California’s low-emissions electricity off line — equivalent to scrapping all the wind turbines spinning in the state. As part of the agreement to close the plant, the groups sketched out a rough proposal to build enough renewables to fill the gap. But recently the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that the state is not moving fast enough, and carbon emissions are likely to increase by 15.5 million tonnes over the next decade as the reactors stop producing electricity. The group, however, doesn’t want to keep the nuclear plant open. Instead it — and most of the other big environmental organizations — say the solution is to build batteries and turbines faster. That, they say, would be cheaper than keeping Diablo Canyon running.
Among environmental wonks, the nuclear debate is mostly centered on cost nowadays. Sure, there are still all the other issues lurking in the background: the fears about waste, meltdowns, uranium mining, and the threat of nuclear conflict. Grist has gone deep to understand each of these issues, and the big-picture takeaway is that these problems are real, but tiny when compared to fossil fuel generation. Earthquake-riven California seems like an especially dangerous place to operate a nuclear plant, but engineers designed Diablo Canyon with seismic risks at the front of their minds and a Union of Concerned Scientists analysis showed that plants in South Carolina, Virginia, and Missouri had greater earthquake risk than California’s last remaining plant.
It’s clear that nuclear plants often go way over budget during construction. That’s happened again and again. But at the rally last month, Heather Hoff, who works at the Diablo Canyon plant and co-founded the group Mothers for Nuclear, pointed out that an existing plant already producing energy for a few cents per kilowatt-hour is a different case. “Diablo Canyon is the cheapest of the cheap,” she said.
View of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in Montana de Oro State Park.
Mimi Ditchie Photography
It’s a difficult debate for those not steeped in the nuclear world to understand because each side brings its own numbers to the fray. Diablo Canyon is the perfect example: Nuclear advocates say it’s a bargain, while anti-nuclear groups say it’s ridiculously expensive.
Back in 2016, the nonprofit groups The Utility Reform Network, the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, and Friends of the Earth issued a report suggesting that Diablo Canyon would soon cost nearly $100 per megawatt-hour of electricity it generated. At that price, you could shut down the plant, build enough wind and solar farms to replace it, and still save money.
Instead of arguing against this report, PG&E, which owns Diablo Canyon, embraced it. Usually the nonprofits argue that utilities have lower costs than they are asking ratepayers to cough up (that’s the way the game works: utilities bid high and advocates whittle down their demands), so when these nonprofits made the case that Diablo Canyon’s costs were actually much higher, PG&E saw an opportunity to cash in. It was unclear if the utility would be able to renew the plant’s license with the Fukushima nuclear disaster fresh in people’s minds.
And there was another threat: The state was considering a proposal to make Diablo Canyon build a new cooling system. Diablo Canyon sucks up sea water to cool its reactor, along with lots of plankton, fish eggs, and squid larvae, which don’t survive the trip. Fully upgrading the facility to save these critters – with $6 billion cooling towers – would be prohibitively expensive. There were more realistic options, like building a new water-intake system, or creating an artificial reef to grow sea life elsewhere, but if regulators picked the expensive option, the plant would simply have to shut down. So PG&E agreed to close the reactors. In return it got a payday — a decade where Diablo Canyon’s revenues shot up.
If nuclear advocates have their way and California reverses course and keeps Diablo Canyon open, it’s going to need a lot of upgrades that PG&E decided not to do because the plant was moving toward retirement, said Matthew Freedman, staff attorney for The Utility Reform Network, which advocates for lower power rates.
“You are putting a lot of eggs in one basket,” he said. “A nuclear plant can be a very valuable system resource, but it can also be risky.”. Nuclear plants are big: Diablo alone provides more than a tenth of California’s electricity. If something breaks and the plant closure comes unexpectedly it means a surge in both costs and greenhouse gas emissions, Freedman explained. That’s why he supports the plan to close Diablo Canyon.
But it’s hard to say with certainty that a renewable buildout to replace California’s last remaining nuclear facility would be cheaper than simply keeping the plant running.
“That’s the hope,” Freedman said. “You basically don’t know until you do the counterfactual.”
One reason to be skeptical: Diablo Canyon’s costs have not ballooned in the way that the nonprofits predicted in 2016. In a recent analysis, Parsons, the MIT economist, showed that the environmental groups assumed that costs would swell by 5 percent every year — a compound interest rate that generated towering sums over time. But that hasn’t happened.
Members of the Mothers for Nuclear activist group pulled a blimp to the December 4 rally. Nathanael Johnson
Another study released in November by Parsons and other researchers at MIT and Stanford University suggested that keeping the plant running another 20 years — instead of costing money — would save more than $1 billion a year. Instead of $100 per megawatt-hour, the economists found that Diablo Canyon would cost around $42 per megawatt-hour, even after budgeting $550 million for upgrades. However, that number misses some big expenses, like the plant’s taxes and profits. Adam Stein, the senior nuclear energy analyst for the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank, waded through reams of public documents to factor in the big line-items that the academics missed. Stein’s figure: $52 per megawatt hour, is a reasonable upper bound on the cost of electricity from the plant, less than the cost of geothermal energy and about the same as solar with an hour of battery backup.
V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency & Renewable Technologies and one of the authors of the 2016 report, acknowledged that Diablo’s costs hadn’t spiraled in the way they had projected. But he said, “We think on balance, given the uncertain costs of the nuclear plant going forward versus the relatively known costs of alternatives, that closing this plant still makes sense.”
Recently U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said she supported extending the life of the plant, and two former energy secretaries have agreed it should stay open to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, members of the last two Democratic presidential administrations have been bullish on nuclear in general. At last year’s climate conference in Scotland, Granholm made the case for going further than extending the life of existing plants, proposing that the United States deploy a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors. Back when nuclear war was the greatest existential threat to humanity, peace activists and environmental activists joined hands to stop the nukes. That may have changed as concern over climate change has ratched up.
As the rally in San Luis Obispo wound down, activists reflected on their chances of stopping the shutdown. “Maybe it’s the optimist in me but it feels like a dam breaking, I think we are going to do it,” one said. That will only happen if this scrappy band can convince some leaders. And if they fail, there are more reactors teetering on the verge of political viability in South Carolina, Connecticut, and New York.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Save the nukes? on Jan 11, 2022.
This story is part of Grist’s 2021 Comic Recap — an illustrated look back on some of the year’s biggest climate stories. Read the other installments, click here and here.
This was a big year for pipeline policy. From the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline to states enacting harsh laws to criminalize and curb pipeline protests, the fight to stop oil and gas infrastructure saw major wins — and major losses — in 2021.
Grist / Alexandria Herr
Joe Biden started his term in January by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline via executive order. That’s after more than a decade of Indigenous-led activism against the project.
Grist / Alexandria Herr / Getty Images
But the tough-on-pipelines agenda didn’t last. In May, the Army Corps of Engineers upheld a Trump-era position, allowing the Dakota Access Pipeline to continue to operate, despite the fact that a key permit for the pipeline was canceled by a federal judge.
Grist / Alexandria Herr
Over the summer, protesters flocked to Northern Minnesota where the Line 3 pipeline, which carries tar sands oil across more than 200 bodies of water, threatens Anishanaabe treaty rights and could violate U.S. treaty law.
Grist / Alexandria Herr / Getty Images
Over 900 hundred people were arrested in protests over the summer. Many are facing felony charges.
According to analysis by the Indigenous Environmental Network, Indigenous-led resistance to 21 fossil fuel projects has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to a quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions – or about 400 coal-fired power plants.
Grist / Alexandria Herr
But nationwide, the risks of protesting pipelines like Line 3 and Keystone XL are getting higher, as sixteen states have passed laws since 2017 increasing penalties, including fines and jail time, for protesting pipelines.
Grist / Alexandria Herr
And Biden isn’t moving on either Line 3 or DAPL, despite his climate commitments.
Grist / Alexandria Herr
Despite Biden’s refusal to stop pipelines, there’s still hope: young Indigenous land defenders and water protectors, like 17-year-old Autumn Peltier, continue to fight the construction of oil and gas infrastructure on traditional and treaty territories.
Grist / Alexandria Herr
There’s no doubt protests and legal battles against major fossil fuel infrastructure projects will continue into 2022.
David Dismukes studies the energy industry for a living. As the executive director of the Center for Energy Studies at Louisiana State University, he has spent the last 30 years pinpointing the industry’s challenges and theorizing around it’s rapidly changing future.
This is what he wants you to know: The energy transition from fossil fuels to solar and wind sources is real. “It’s happening and it’s gonna continue to happen.”
“At this point, It doesn’t matter if you’re right, wrong, for, or against,” said Dismukes. “People and industries are making, not just hundreds of millions, but billion-dollar decisions based on the belief that this transition is here.”
It’s creating – and taking away – jobs, swaying the economy, and transforming how we commute. The transition is also killing refineries, to the sounds of praise from environmental groups and uncertainty from the thousands of oil industry workers.
In January 2020, a few months before the first coronavirus pandemic shutdown, the American oil refining industry reached its highest capacity peak in history. It didn’t last long. Within months, six refineries, including the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in Philadelphia – the 13th largest in the country – shut off oil production. By December, U.S. oil consumption reached a 25-year low. In the next two years, Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting group, forecasts that 20 refineries across the globe, including roughly a dozen in the U.S., will cease operations.
No other place in the country will feel this more than the Gulf Coast, where roughly 55 percent of the country’s oil production lies. As of January 1, 2021, there were 51 refineries located in the Gulf states of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, compared to 113 in 1982, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
As of January 1, 2021, there were 14 facilities still operating. Since then, two more facilities, owned by Shell and Phillips 66 respectively, have closed their doors – in part because of a sweeping convergence of COVID-19, severe weather events, and waning demand for oil. To the tune of at least 900 layoffs, the Phillips 66 refinery – the 25th largest oil-producing refinery in America – located in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, announced its closure in early November after experiencing $1.3 billion worth of damage from Hurricane Ida.
In November, Phillips 66 announced the closure of its Alliance Refinery after experiencing $1.3 billion worth of damage from Hurricane Ida.
Handout/Phillips 66
For energy experts and environmental justice advocates, Hurricane Ida offered just another example of the state’s unpreparedness for what lies ahead in the oil and gas industry, namely the growing risk of maintaining oil production in the face of climate change. Increasingly volatile environmental conditions, rising sea levels, and severe weather events – all of which the oil industry has had a role in causing – have made it more costly and dangerous for the industry to operate. Just in California, there are hundreds of pieces of fossil fuel infrastructure expected to flood in the coming decades due to sea-level rise.
“Even if fossil fuels weren’t killing the planet, Louisiana’s oil industry is showing us it’s time to move,” Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a Louisiana-based environmental justice organization, told Grist. “The infrastructure itself can’t be maintained and is both vulnerable to climate change and exacerbating it, which makes our storms worse.”
In the South, in addition to permanently closing one refinery, Hurricane Ida led to at least eight other refineries temporarily shutting down. Under emergency protocols, refineries in the state dumped pollution into the air nonstop for at least 72 hours as 96 percent of the region’s oil production was shut-in, according to estimates by the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.
For at least 72 hours following Hurricane Ida’s touchdown, smoke from Shell’s Norco Facility filled the air.
Jake Bittle/Grist
Louisiana’s seemingly forced – and unprepared – transition from the oil and gas industry offers a blueprint – more like a ‘what not to do’ list – for the rest of the country, advocates like Dismukes argue. For one, Dismukes said, the state has let the industry dictate the transition.
“The transition has become very problematic and challenging for Louisiana,” Dismukes said. “We’ve seen these corporations pencil these closures out 15 ways to Sunday to figure out a way to make it economical just for themselves.”
This leaves residents, workers, and communities in passive mitigation mode rather than allowing them to proactively consider employment and aspects of environmental remediation. This allows thousands of jobs to practically vanish into thin air while cutting millions in tax revenue to local governments. It also means abandoned fossil fuel infrastructure will be more likely to sit idle and unremediated, leaving neighboring communities susceptible to elevated levels of soil and water contamination in the face of severe weather events.
In Plaquemines Parish, the closing of the Phillips 66 plant has already influenced recent budget cuts, including the cutting of ambulance services in the area. “It’s also going to have a trickle-down effect. it will affect us on the government side, our housing market, and our grocery stores,” Plaquemines Parish President Kirk Lepine told a local FOX news station. The refinery accounted for roughly 15 percent of the parish’s tax revenue.
To prevent these economic and social disasters from plaguing communities steeped in fossil fuel production, advocates contend, models of a “just” rather than a forced transition must take place. The concept of a U.S.-based just transition emerged from the intersecting labor and environmental movements of the 1970s. It relies on the idea of employing a “regenerative” economy rather than an extractive one. With that idea in mind, it calls for the end of fossil fuel extraction – which helps to fuel the global economy – and investment into small-scale local production, food systems, and clean energy.
So far, Louisiana has failed to implore this framework. While the state has sustained a forced transition with the closing of many major petrochemical facilities, state leaders have decided to double down on extractive energy sources. “If you look at our state’s plans for industry and jobs in the coming years, it’s still all about petrochemicals, carbon capture, and fossil fuels,” said Rowles. Earlier this month, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards announced a $10 billion partnership with Venture Global LNG, a fossil fuel-based energy company, to develop a liquified natural gas, or LNG, plant. The democratic governor heralded the new fossil fuel plant as being aligned with the state’s net-zero by 2050 goal. In comparison, earlier this year the state of New York blocked two similar plants for being inconsistent with the state’s greenhouse gas emissions targets.
Handout/Phillips 66
The transition from fossil fuel production may look different for many Southern states, but some concepts have to be utilized by them all, advocates say. Local, state, and federal governments must be proactive in facilitating the transition and industry has to be on board. “The scientists are not just saying clearly – but waving their arms frantically – that the time to begin to move seriously to winding down fossil fuel development is now,” Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation at the environmental law firm Earthjustice, told Grist. “That it will be more effective and far cheaper to make those changes now than later.”
If not, a weakening demand coupled with the reality that severe weather events will continue to pummel the country’s coasts, where a vast amount of the country’s oil production lays, will threaten the environment and public health of nearby communities. Unprepared regions may also experience exacerbated levels of unemployment and poverty without clear transition plans and the creation of clean energy jobs.
“We know that our current energy industry is not economically, socially, or environmentally sustainable,” Rowles said. “With two closings in a year, it is really significant and it shows the urgency to invest in cleaning up communities and for our state to get on the renewables train for so many reasons, including the jobs.”
In the immediate future, environmental organizations, local, state, and federal governments could help facilitate a more equitable and environmentally-friendly transition by investing in clean energy job programs. “If you want Big Oil to get up and go and not come back, you have to make these moves in concert,” Dismukes said. The transition must focus equally on building and maintaining new energy infrastructure and cleaning up pollution and contamination from decades of fossil fuel production, much like President Joe Biden’s proposed Civilian Climate Corp and the programs outlined in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Many fossil fuel workers already have the experience needed for the clean energy transition, especially skills necessary for offshore wind production. In a 2020 study conducted in the United Kingdom, 53 percent of oil and gas workers expressed interest in joining the offshore wind sector. And as the job market climbs out of its pandemic lows, there is more than enough labor to train workers in environmental remediation. President Joe Biden’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Michael Regan, agrees; Last month, he traveled throughout the state promising rigorous environmental clean-ups in many affected communities.
“The whole nation needs to be watching what’s happening here,” Rowles explained. “It’s only going to lead to tragic job loss and continued contamination if our elected officials continue to ignore reality. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
In mid-September, beneath a smoky gray sky, California Governor Gavin Newsom stood at a podium in Sequoia National Park. Directly behind him, an entrance sign wrapped in fire-resistant foil resembled a chrome holy cross. After another summer of dangerous heat waves, wildfires, and drought, he was there to offer salvation for the scorched Golden State in the form of a $15 billion climate package.
“California is doubling down on our nation-leading policies to confront the climate crisis head-on,” he announced. But among the 24 climate change-related bills the governor signed into law that day, none would fill a notable gap in California’s climate strategy — a long-term plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
In the past few years, many states have passed new laws requiring that they achieve “net-zero” emissions by mid-century. Virginia, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island all plan to cut emissions across their economies by 80 to 90 percent by 2050, and to offset any remaining emissions using either nature-based solutions known as carbon sinks, like trees and soils, or technology to suck carbon out of the air. Several more states, including Oregon, Colorado, and Minnesota, have legally binding targets to reduce their emissions by at least 75 percent by 2050.
California Governor Gavin Newsom holds up a new climate bill as he speaks about wildfires during a ceremony at the Sequoia National Park near Three Rivers, California in September 2021.
PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images
Many of these laws were passed in response to a landmark report released by an international group of scientists in 2018. The report found that the whole world needed to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 in order to fulfill the Paris Agreement’s promise of trying to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. The planet will not stop heating up until net-zero emissions is achieved.
But although California passed some of the first and strongest laws to tackle climate change in the nation, its legally mandated economy-wide emissions goals stop at 2030.
“We like to talk about how we’re leading the nation in the fight against climate change,” State Assembly Member Al Muratsuchi told Grist. “But increasingly we’re falling behind.”
This past legislative session, Muratsuchi introduced A.B. 1395, a bill that would have brought the state up to speed by enshrining in law a goal to achieve net-zero by 2045. Muratsuchi and his coauthor, Assembly Member Cristina Garcia, worked hard to appeal to diverse constituents by including provisions they thought would serve fossil fuel workers and frontline communities alike. But the bill failed to pass muster with either group and ultimately died on the Senate floor.
The story behind A.B. 1395 highlights one of the biggest areas of tension in the politics of climate change around the world right now: disagreement over the need for carbon capture and carbon removal.
Carbon capture systems can be installed in the smokestacks of power plants and industrial facilities to trap carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere. Carbon removal refers to solutions that siphon carbon dioxide that has already been emitted out of the air, whether by planting trees, or building giant fans that literally suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, known as direct air capture machines.
Courtesy of Carbon180
That landmark 2018 report, and many studies since, have concluded that both carbon capture and carbon removal will be needed to stabilize the climate. But a large contingent of the climate and environmental movement, including researchers, justice advocates, and policy experts, reject these solutions due to concerns about locking in dependence on fossil fuels, further burdening communities with pollution, and wasting time and resources on plans that may never pay off.
As seen in California, the debate threatens to slow climate action at a time when it’s becoming increasingly urgent.
Currently, California has two key laws driving down its emissions. One requires that 60 percent of all electricity in the state come from renewable sources by 2030, and that by 2050, 100 percent of the state’s electricity be carbon-free. The second law applies across the economy — including transportation, industry, and agriculture — and says California must cut total emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
In 2018, then-Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order setting a goal of net-zero emissions by 2045, but until the legislature puts it into law, it is little more than an aspiration. Muratsuchi’s bill would have changed that, but more importantly, it would have put in place rules defining what “net-zero” means in California. The phrase has no single definition and merely implies a balance between sending carbon into the atmosphere and removing it by sucking it back down to Earth. In theory, viable paths for net-zero could involve moving toward an almost entirely renewable energy system — or continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels while building a vast web of infrastructure to vacuum up the related carbon emissions from smokestacks and from the atmosphere.
Muratsuchi’s legislation narrowed the possibilities in two ways. First, it would have required that California cut its emissions by 90 percent, allowing only 10 percent of the state’s remaining greenhouse gases to be offset with carbon removal. Second, it would have put guardrails on the use of both carbon capture and carbon removal.
Gavin Newsom, left, and Al Muratsuchi, right, greet supporters during a campaign stop at Muratsuchi’s office in 2018.
Scott Varley / Digital First Media / Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Images
There are no carbon capture systems or direct air capture machines operating in California today, and there’s a lot of uncertainty about the extent to which they can be economically deployed. But a report on carbon neutrality commissioned by the state found that even if California totally phases out fossil fuels by 2045, carbon capture could still be necessary to cut emissions from industrial facilities that emit carbon dioxide, like cement, glass, and chemical plants.
In this version of the future without fossil fuels and with some carbon capture, the state would still emit greenhouse gases — the equivalent of 33 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year — from refrigerators and air conditioners, agriculture, and landfills. While some of those emissions could be balanced out by enhancing natural carbon sinks like forests, the potential for natural carbon removal is limited. One study estimated that California’s lands could sequester up to about 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year while another estimated that the state’s nature-based carbon sinks could capture up to 25 million metric tons per year. Direct air capture machines are one possible way to make up the difference.
It’s clear that it would be very difficult for California to achieve net-zero without some carbon removal. But most technological carbon removal methods, including direct air capture, are in their infancy, and it’s unclear how much they can be sustainably or economically deployed. Doubts over whether carbon removal solutions will be able to scale up are why A.B. 1395 capped reliance on carbon removal to just 10 percent of emissions.
It did not put any such cap on the use of carbon capture systems to lower emissions, nor did it dictate which types of facilities could install them, or legislate a plan to phase out fossil fuels — features that should have appealed to the fossil fuel industry and its union workers. However, A.B. 1395 did direct a state regulatory agency called the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, to come up with criteria for the use of these systems and rules to ensure they would not have harmful effects on local air quality or public health.
That’s because carbon capture doesn’t necessarily clean up other kinds of smokestack pollution that are more directly harmful to human health than carbon dioxide. The process also requires a lot of energy, and if the energy comes from natural gas, it has the potential to increase local pollution of nitrogen oxides and fine particles.
The bill contained one more constraint: Today, captured carbon dioxide is often sold to oil companies and pumped into old wells to coax more oil out of the ground. The bill would have prevented this from counting as a way to reduce emissions — requiring carbon capture operators instead to just bury the carbon underground for permanent storage. It put similar guardrails on direct air capture systems.
“We wanted to make sure that these were real and verifiable reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and not just excuses to continue to burn and pollute using fossil fuels,” Muratsuchi told Grist.
If you’re not very familiar with California politics, it may come as a surprise that this liberal, Democratically-controlled state failed to pass the kind of long-term climate target that more conservative states like Virginia or Colorado have now successfully passed. But unlike many of the other states with net-zero laws in place, the fossil fuel industry is a major part of California’s economy. It is one of the top 10 oil-producing states in the U.S. and the third-largest refiner of crude oil.
Even though A.B. 1395 left the door open for some continued fossil fuel use by allowing for carbon capture, the state’s building trades unions, which represent fossil fuel workers, came out in full force to fight it. They sent newsletters to members telling them not to support the bill and called in to oppose it during legislative hearings, arguing that cutting emissions by 90 percent would put millions of jobs at risk.
Near Bakersfield, California, an oil pumpjack is silhouetted agaist the sunrise.
George Rose / Getty Images
The building trade unions and the Western States Petroleum Association, which represents oil and gas companies in the West, have formed an official alliance called Common Ground. Muratsuchi said the alliance has consistently killed the legislature’s most ambitious climate bills, pointing to another piece of legislation that died earlier this year that would have banned fracking and required more distance between oil wells and homes. “The oil industry doesn’t want any limits on their business, and the State Building and Construction Trades don’t want any limits on their jobs,” said Muratsuchi.
In addition to citing job losses, fossil fuel workers and industry lobbyists said that A.B. 1395 would stifle innovation in the state — presumably by seeking to regulate the use of carbon capture. (The California Building Trades Council, the Western States Petroleum Association, and several other trade associations and unions that testified against the bill did not respond to Grist’s requests for an interview for this story.) During a hearing on the bill, Timothy Jefferies, the business manager for Boilermakers Local 549, said it would hurt “innovation, technology, and manufacturing designed to meet the climate crisis.” Jefferies warned that California’s burgeoning electric vehicle manufacturing industry could pick up and move to a different state “where manufacturing is offset by carbon capture.”
Many California Democrats are beholden to labor, according to R.L. Miller, a Democratic National Committee member who chaired the state party’s environmental caucus for eight years. She said the building trades unions provide a lot of the muscle to get Democrats elected in the state. They volunteer for campaigns, knock on doors. “You’re lucky if you can get like five climate people to show up,” she said.
But Miller and Muratsuchi both acknowledged another shortcoming that is killing ambitious climate plans in California: The state has not yet made a credible case that climate action will be a win-win for labor — that a “just transition” for workers is possible or likely. “We need to show them what a just transition looks like with real jobs, not just rhetoric,” Miller said, assigning some blame to the renewable energy industry for being hostile to unions. “I think so far, the reality has not yet caught up to the rhetoric that we are using. Which is not to say it’s never going to happen.”
A.B. 1395 never stood a chance without support from labor unions. But the bill also failed to win the approval of several prominent California environmental justice organizations that either opposed the bill or remained neutral. Their rejection of the compromise measures around carbon capture and carbon removal illustrates the challenges of finding a path to carbon neutrality that frontline communities can get behind.
Martha Dina Argüello, the executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, told Grist that carbon capture will increase local pollution and said she had no confidence in the guardrails that Muratsuchi and Garcia had put on their emissions-reductions plan. “We’re very nervous about the linkage of those reductions to a technology we don’t think works and actually continues to push burdens onto low-income communities,” she said.
Martha Argüello, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility LA speaks at a 2019 event in Hollywood, California.
Joe Scarnici / Getty Images
In August, her organization, along with 13 other California-based environmental justice groups, sent a letter to CARB asking it to reject the use of carbon capture and direct air capture in the state’s climate plans altogether. The letter urged the agency to establish a stronger public health framework. “As we think about these big broad goals,” she said, referring to the 2045 net-zero target, “we have to have big broad goals about making the air cleaner where we breathe. Just focusing on carbon doesn’t do that.”
Roger Lin, climate and air counsel for the California Environmental Justice Alliance, echoed Argüello’s argument. He also worries that giving carbon capture the green light as A.B. 1395 did will begin to funnel state resources away from other solutions. “It brings up a bigger issue of, where are the state dollars for innovation going to be invested? Are they going to be invested to perpetuate the existing energy economy that we have with the oil industry, or are we going to invest the innovation dollars into renewables and long-term storage?” he asked, referring to the need to develop batteries that can store energy for the power grid for long periods of time when the sun isn’t shining and the wind dies down.
When asked about the argument that carbon capture might be needed to cut emissions from California’s cement plants, for instance, Lin acknowledged that it’s a tough area to solve. But he wondered whether some of the billions of dollars the Biden administration is pouring into carbon capture research and development could instead be put toward finding alternative ways to cut emissions from cement production.
Argüello questioned whether achieving net-zero emissions was even the best goal for California, considering that there did not seem to be a way to meet it without banking on risky solutions that sacrifice justice and equity. “If we set these targets for which we don’t really have the measures to meet, then we end up using accounting tricks, such as offsets,” she said. “If you want to set goals, then start from ‘we want to end fossil fuel production,’ and work backwards.”
The conflicts that plagued A.B. 1395 are not unique to California. National environmental justice groups criticized the Biden administration’s infrastructure law for funding what they consider to be “false solutions” to climate change like carbon capture and direct air capture demonstration plants. During COP26, the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, swarms of activists marched the streets with signs that said “Net-zero is not zero,” arguing that the goal of net-zero by mid-century allows governments and companies to delay action on climate or obfuscate their plans to cut emissions.
Climate protesters gather in Glasgow, Scotland during the 2021 climate summit .
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Dave Weiskopf, the senior advisor for climate at NextGen Policy, a progressive policy nonprofit, said this is exactly what A.B. 1395 was designed to prevent. Right now, the California Air Resources Board is in the middle of updating its scoping plan, a roadmap that lays out how the state will achieve its emissions goals. Without the explicit instruction to cut emissions by 90 percent, the agency could put forward a plan that relies heavily on carbon removal to cancel out emissions that it deems either too technically challenging, expensive, or politically difficult to cut. “It’s really hard to cut emissions as much and as fast as we’re trying to do, and there’s a lot of pressure to try to find ways out of some of the biggest jams,” said Weiskopf. To him, there’s no reason to believe sucking lots of carbon out of the air will be easier or cheaper.
Another way to prevent net-zero plans from passing the buck is to do what California has already done — set a near-term target. The 2018 report on limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C that kickstarted the net-zero mania assumes that emissions are consistently declining over time starting today. Long-term plans to get to net-zero will not avert catastrophic climate change if carbon reductions don’t start now. Since carbon sits in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, every ton that goes in today helps to determine how bad things will get. “It feels like the whole cumulative element of this is still missing from the policymaker conversation,” said Pam Kiely, the associate vice president of U.S. climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.
To Kiely, California’s sluggishness in setting a net-zero target does not mean that the state has fallen behind or lost its title of climate leader. “California is at a level of sophistication that dwarfs where the conversation is in other states,” she said, explaining that it’s one of the only places that has a suite of regulations in place designed to cut emissions in the near term. “That is leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of other places in the country.”
Recent reviews of California’s climate progress have warned that it’s not currently on track to hit its 2030 emissions target. One, conducted by the California state auditor, found that transportation emissions have actually been increasing. Another study found that in 2017, the state’s forests may have acted as a source of carbon dioxide emissions rather than as a sink, due to increased wildfires. But even conducting these studies and being able to scrutinize the policies it has tested out so far put California ahead of other states.
Weiskopf said he thinks it’s inevitable that the California legislature will pass a carbon neutrality target. But to him, A.B. 1395 was a missed opportunity to do that with the right protections in place.
Muratsuchi said he plans to reintroduce the net-zero bill in the next legislative session, but he’s not sure what form it will take yet. One change he’s evaluating is taking any mention of carbon capture out of the bill. He’s also looking at other potential policies that could facilitate a just transition for fossil fuel workers, like a carbon tax that would fund job retraining programs.
“We need to figure out how to make it a win-win situation for climate action and for good union jobs,” he said. “We need to figure out how to make the just transition work.”
President Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday instructing federal agencies to become carbon-neutral by 2050. The order includes a set of concrete goals to help decarbonize the government’s operations, buildings, and vehicles, from carbon-free electricity by 2030, to the purchase of all zero-emission vehicles by 2035, to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from federal buildings by 2045, among other steps.
“As the single largest land owner, energy consumer, and employer in the Nation,” the executive order reads, “the Federal Government can catalyze private sector investment and expand the economy and American industry by transforming how we build, buy, and manage electricity, vehicles, buildings, and other operations to be clean and sustainable.”
With a spending budget of goods and services of $650 billion every year, the purchase power of the U.S. government has the potential to influence everything from the price of electric vehicles and batteries, for example, to pushing developers to embrace carbon-neutral construction.
The executive order “aligns the government’s enormous buying power with the nation’s climate goals,” John Bowman, managing director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “And it twins with the climate investments embodied in the Build Back Better Act to set the country on the path to achieve the carbon reductions we need.”
The order instructs federal agencies to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent from 2008 levels over the next nine years. It also requires that by 2030, the nation’s 300,000 government-owned buildings must be powered by carbon pollution-free electricity. At least half of that electricity must originate from local sources of clean energy. The U.S. government is currently the largest energy user in the country. The executive order also encourages agencies to authorize the use of their “rooftops, parking structures, and adjoining land” for new clean electricity generation and storage.
In addition to increasing their use of renewable power, Biden is ordering agencies to cut the greenhouse gas emissions of all their existing buildings, campuses, and physical installations in half over the next decade. By 2045, all federal buildings must be carbon neutral. To achieve this, agencies will have to renovate or retrofit existing buildings, taking actions like improving energy efficiency, or, in some cases, by installing solar panels and other carbon neutral technologies on their premises to achieve net-zero.
Newly-built facilities must also avoid carbon emissions. To help with that goal, the current administration will set the first-ever Federal Building Performance Standard, and will create a “Buy Clean” task force, which will identify highly polluting construction materials, like steel or cement, and then make recommendations to acquire lower-emissions materials.
The Biden administration is also tackling the federal government’s massive transportation footprint. The total fleet of the federal government accounts for about 600,000 vehicles, which includes trucks, cars, pickups, and vans. The executive order states that by 2027, all light-duty vehicles purchased by the government must be fueled by electricity and other non-emitting technologies. By 2035, all new vehicle acquisitions, including heavy-duty vehicles, must be completely zero-emissions, if they are available.
Republican leaders criticized the new executive order, arguing it could damage state and local economies reliant on fossil fuel production for jobs and revenue. “President Biden’s strategy is to destroy the economies of Wyoming, West Virginia and other energy-producing states,” Senator John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said in a statement. “With this action, he’s telling millions of Americans who provide most of the energy we use every day that he thinks they should be thrown out of work.”
Some left-leaning environmental groups, on the other hand, argued the order doesn’t go far enough.
The order comes two days after the release of climate-resilience plans by 20 national agencies, including the Department of Justice, NASA, Department of Transportation, and others. These plans will be complemented by annual progress targets that agencies must present to a new office inside the Council on Environmental Quality, or CEQ, which will review, approve, and track them.
“It’s a similar strategy to what China is doing so successfully, leveraging the purchasing power of their government to create demand that markets can meet,” Joshua Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic research group, told the New York Times.
United Airlines deployed what it called a “game-changing flight” last week. In a global first, a United Boeing 737 carrying more than 100 passengers flew from Chicago to Washington, D.C. on a tank of pure “sustainable aviation fuel,” or SAF. But while the stunt demonstrated that flying on pure SAF can be done, it’s unlikely to change the carbon footprint of your next airplane trip.
SAF resembles conventional jet fuel and emits carbon dioxide when it’s burned in a plane’s engine. It’s considered sustainable because it’s refined from material that already exists in the environment, like used cooking fats and plant oils, rather than from fossil fuels that have stored carbon in the earth’s crust for millions of years. That means SAF can potentially have a smaller carbon footprint than crude oil–based fuel when the entire life-cycle emissions of producing it are taken into account.
Neither United nor World Energy, the company that produced the SAF for the flight, has revealed any details about the life-cycle emissions of the fuel used for Wednesday’s flight, but the companies advertise that SAF has the potential to reduce emissions by up to 80 percent compared to conventional jet fuel. The flight also wasn’t fueled entirely by SAF. One of the two engines on the plane ran on conventional jet fuel “to further prove there are no operational differences between the two,” according to United.
The point was less to demonstrate a flight with a lower carbon footprint than to show that SAF technology is now just as good as the fossil-based stuff. Some airlines are already blending SAF into the fuel they use, but the American Society for Testing and Materials, which develops standards for jet fuel, limits blending to 50 percent. Lauren Riley, United’s managing director of global environmental affairs, told Politico that was because of technical problems with earlier generations of SAF. “It’s matured since then, and we are proving that those concerns are no longer relevant,” she said.
SAF isn’t the only early-stage proposal for cutting emissions from flying. Major manufacturers like Airbus are also looking at fueling planes with clean hydrogen, which doesn’t produce any greenhouse gases when it’s burned. Battery technology has not advanced enough to power big planes over long distances yet, but using battery-powered planes for short distances is starting to take off. The shipping company DHL recently announced it was ordering a fleet of 12 battery-powered planes that are expected to be able to carry about 2,600 pounds of cargo over roughly 500 miles on one charge.
In the near term, SAF is one of the few available tools to lower emissions from commercial aviation — but it’s got some serious hurdles to overcome. There are doubts the world could sustainably produce enough SAF to power the entire industry, due to limited supply of the raw materials needed to make it. At the moment, it’s three to four times more expensive than conventional fuel, and there’s hardly any of it on the market. According to the International Air Transport Association, a trade association, about 26 million gallons of SAF will be produced this year. Riley of United said SAF accounts for “far less than 0.1 percent of our total fuel supply in any given year.” United chief executive officer Scott Kirby told Bloomberg Green that converting just 10 percent of the global aviation fuel supply to SAF will require $250 billion in capital. Kirby said the industry couldn’t afford it, and that a “government foundation” was needed.
Experts say another way to cut aviation emissions in the near term, without spending hundreds of billions of dollars, is to issue stronger regulations that require airlines to buy the most efficient planes on the market. The Biden administration recently opted not to develop more effective emissions regulations for aircraft.
But Biden is taking steps to help scale up SAF. In September, the White House announced loan guarantees, research and development funding, and an interagency “Grand Challenge” to increase production of SAF to 3 billion gallons per year by 2030.
The aviation industry supports the measure. Carter Yang, a spokesperson for the lobbying organization Airlines for America, told E&E News, “A tax credit would help build the nascent market for SAF, providing a financial incentive for companies to integrate more SAF into the fuel supply and enabling them to offer it at a price that would allow airlines to use more of it.”
To many Americans, California is defined by its ranging coastline and the sandy beaches and multi-million dollar homes that line its 840-mile stretch. As sea levels continue to rise, it’s no secret then, that the state and its inhabitants are facing a crisis. Hollywood knows this, too, as movie after movie over the last decade has depicted the state’s biggest monuments being taken by the sea.
Lucas Zucker and Amee Raval have bigger fears, however, than the Santa Monica Pier being eaten by the ocean. “People tend to only think about certain destinations, your Malibus and Santa Barbaras — places where celebrities live — these loom large in the public imagination and they shape how policymakers think about sea-level rise,” Zucker, a policy director at Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, or CAUSE, told Grist.
But, Zucker says, if you actually took the 840 mile trip along the coast, you’d see a different reality. “You would see huge swaths of the coast that have been primarily used for heavy industry, commercial shipping, and toxic military bases,” he explained. And those swaths would be home to majority Black and Latino communities, who are no strangers to the effects of pollution and toxic chemicals.
These two environmental justice activists, whose communities are nearly 400 miles apart, represent a group of California residents in predominantly Black and Latino communities that are five times more likely than the general population to live within half a mile of a toxic site that could flood by 2050, according to a new statewide mapping project led by environmental health professors at UC Berkeley and UCLA (including Grist board member Rachel Morello-Frosch). The study outlines more than 400 hazardous facilities that will face major flooding events by the end of the century, exposing residents to elevated levels of toxic water and dangerous chemicals.
The Reliant power plant on the wetlands of Ormond Beach is one of more than 400 toxic facilities in California at risk for severe flooding events before 2100.
Ricardo DeAratanha/LAT via Getty Images
The Toxic Tides project is a first-of-its-kind look at the consequences of sea-level rise on California’s historically neglected environmental justice communities in hopes of urging more federal and state officials to address the expected crisis and transition away from the use of these toxic facilities. “It adds to the urgency,” Raval, policy director at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, or APEN, told Grist. “We’re equipped and supported now with the data and the research to legitimize our community concern and our vision for a just transition.”
CAUSE, based in Ventura County, and APEN, based in Richmond and Oakland, along with three other environmental justice groups and academic researchers, spent three years combing through federal toxic landmark databases in addition to interviewing community members throughout the entire state to produce the new maps. In all, the coalition created a series of searchable maps and databases to weave together California’s flooding hotspots, which industrial facilities face particular risk, and how lower-income communities of color would be disproportionately impacted. The hotspots they found were unsurprising, Raval told Grist, but nonetheless damning.
“We know who the polluters are. The same big polluters that are destabilizing our climate and driving sea-level rise,” Raval said. “When these toxic facilities flood, they will release even more toxins into our air, water, and land.”
The project outlined three major hotspots: Wilmington, Richmond, and Oxnard, California. In Wilmington, a pocket of South Los Angeles dubbed an “island in a sea of petroleum,” at least 20 industrial facilities, landfills, oil terminals, and incinerators are expected to regularly flood this century. In Oxnard, there are at least nine hazardous sites prone to flooding. Up the coast in Richmond, there are more than a dozen toxic sites at risk, including the Chevron oil refinery, which produces more than 10 million gallons of oil every day, making it the 27th biggest refinery in the country.
Wilmington, a small community along the Port of Los Angeles, is home to roughly 20 toxic facilities that are prone to flooding caused by sea level rise.
Adam Mahoney/Grist
Because of the immediate impact to be felt by affected community members, advocates like Zucker and Raval knew how important it was to not just present this data to policymakers, but to the people who live there. This was particularly important in the three areas spotlighted by the project, all of which are home to thousands of non-English speakers. As an environmental justice organizer, Raval says, it’s vitally important to meet people where they are and to meet their specific needs. The group spent months explaining their findings to residents up and down the state in an effort to combine their research “with making those authentic partnerships with community members and advocates who live this reality every day.”
Beyond educating and organizing their communities, the Toxic Tides coalition is actively working to secure funds to help clean up and transition away from these toxic sites, while not reinforcing existing social inequalities and environmental injustices. The groups are advocating for funds set aside in the newly passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s Superfund cleanup provisions to be used on many of the sites outlined in the project. On a state level, the coalition is hoping to leverage California’s recent $30 billion budget surplus to be used on these frontline environmental justice communities.
“We can’t be dismissed or not taken seriously anymore,” Zucker said. “Our communities already knew of all this was going on in our backyards, but now we have the numbers and the data visualizations to back it up to scholars, planners, and elected officials.”
If the Build Back Better Act, Democrats’ $2.2 trillion climate and social welfare bill, passes the Senate later this month, it will come with thousands of dollars in incentives and tax credits for electric cars, solar panels, heat pumps, e-bikes, and even electric motorcycles. A family could get up to $12,500 off an electric car; the federal government would also pay for up to 30 percent of a home installation of solar panels; and individuals who purchase e-bikes could get a credit of up to $900. More than ever before, taxpayers will be incentivized to adopt low-carbon lifestyles: eschewing gas-guzzlers for electric vehicles, putting in energy-efficient windows, or even installing miniature wind turbines on top of their homes.
But will people actually use that money? Researchers say that is the big question. Existing tax credits have significant drawbacks. For one, financial incentives alone are rarely enough to get consumers to go electric or give their homes a green upgrade while low-income households face particular hurdles: Many don’t make enough money to take advantage of the tax credits, or live in rented homes that can’t be easily upgraded.
“Clean energy tax credits overwhelmingly go to high-income households,” said Lucas Davis, a professor of business and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. According to a study by Davis and a co-author, the current batch of clean energy tax credits — which were started in 2006, with the Energy Policy Act, and expanded in President Barack Obama’s financial stimulus package — mostly went to the richest 20 percent of Americans. Between 2006 and 2012, the authors found, the top earners received about 60 percent of all the federal tax credits doled out for electric cars, solar panels, and retrofitting homes to save energy. For electric cars, the disparity was even more extreme: The top 20 percent of earners claimed 90 percent of the credits.
Grist / Getty Images
Davis argues that one of the major problems is that existing tax credits are “non-refundable.” That means that if Americans don’t owe enough in income tax, they can’t claim the full credit. In some cases, like with home solar panel installation, the credit will simply roll over to the following year, but in other cases, like with electric cars, some buyers will simply be out of luck: A taxpayer with less than $66,000 in income won’t make enough money to get the full credit.
That’s particularly pernicious given that low-income households often have to spend a much higher proportion of their wages on energy costs, sometimes up to three times more than their richer counterparts. Low-income households often are less energy-efficient, and have older heating and cooling systems that cost more to run. Odette Mucha, the mid-Atlantic regulatory director for the nonprofit organization Vote Solar, estimates that 40 million Americans who own their own homes — and so could install rooftop solar panels — don’t make enough in income to qualify for the current solar tax credit.
Some of these problems could be fixed if the Build Back Better Act passes in the Senate. In the bill’s current form, both the electric vehicle tax credit and the credit for solar panels and home efficiency improvements will be refundable. That means that households who don’t owe enough in taxes will simply get a check from the Internal Revenue Service for the remainder of the credit. For things like solar panels, there’s also a provision for “direct pay,” so that groups without any tax liability — schools, cities, or tribes — can also take advantage of the credit.
But there may be other hurdles as well. Holly Caggiano, a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University, says research shows offering cash often doesn’t do enough to substantively change behavior. “You have all of these findings that are kind of surprising,” she said. “Experimental studies show that we offer people money and it actually doesn’t make a difference.”
In one study of households in India, for example, people who were offered cash for conserving energy paradoxically used more energy than those who were encouraged to conserve without a financial incentive. Other research has found that paying people to reduce energy use can be effective — but is slightly less effective than non-monetary strategies, like showing people how their energy use stacks up compared to their neighbors’.
It’s also difficult to estimate how effective tax credits are for boosting purchases of things like electric cars and solar panels. One study estimated that the EV credit was responsible for about 30 percent of electric car sales; others have estimated that it only contributed around 17 percent. Davis’s study on clean energy tax credits found that the solar panel credit coincided with a huge growth in residential solar installations — but that “we simply don’t know how much of this growth would have occurred absent the federal tax credit.”
Caggiano says that the best indicator for the success of the tax credits may be how they are rolled out at the community level. Studies show that people are more likely to buy electric vehicles if their neighbors have them while other research has demonstrated a similar effect for solar panels. If local community organizers and governments encourage the roll-out of the new technologies, these so-called “neighbor effects” may help Americans get on board.
How consumers are first introduced to the credits may make an impact as well. Caggiano notes that some Americans formed strong negative associations about “Obamacare,” but said they supported the Affordable Care Act. “The individual provisions in Build Back Better poll much higher than the overall package,” she said.
Ultimately, the tax credits are likely to increase demand for low-carbon technologies — but they will probably make the biggest impact among high-income taxpayers and those already tuned in to environmental issues. But to reach its zero emissions goal by 2050, the U.S. is going to need solar panels and EVs everywhere — not just in the hands of the wealthy.
The energy infrastructure company Tallgrass Energy Partners announced Friday it is canceling a $2.5 billion oil export terminal and pipeline project in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, citing climate, economic, and cultural concerns. The proposal had faced years of fierce opposition from residents and environmental groups, who argued the facility would be built atop a historic burial site of enslaved people, further exacerbate climate change, and impact nearby ecological restoration efforts, partially blocking the flow of important sediments in theMississippi River Delta.
The Kansas-based company said in a press release that it is “withdrawing the current air permit application” for the site, and is considering alternative commercial development options.
The proposed export terminal would have sat on the west bank of the Mississippi River near the town of Ironton, with the capacity to hold up to 20 million barrels of oil. But the 200-acre site encompassed part of the former St. Rosalie Plantation, which used slave labor to grow sugarcane from 1828 to 1859, according to news site Bayou Brief. Most of Ironton’s residents are descendants of the enslaved Black people forced to work on the plantation. Over the last two years, archaeologists hired by the company have found 13,000 artifacts from the plantation, including pieces of human bones and fragments of inscribed tombstones, according to NOLA.com.
“My ancestors are buried at St. Rosalie,” Reverend Haywood Johnson, Jr, pastor at Ironton’s Saint Paul Missionary Baptist church. said in a press release earlier this year.
Plaquemines Port executive director Sandy Sanders told NOLA.com that market changes likely helped to finalize Tallgrass Energy’s announcement. Just two weeks ago, Phillips 66 decided to shut its 2,400-acre oil refinery in the parish and convert it to a fuel terminal. The company said that the damages from Hurricane Ida in August — which submerged the facility under 5 feet of water — would be too expensive to repair in the current energy market, according to the Associated Press.
The project also would have sat next to the Mid Barataria Sediment Diversion project, an essential area where the state is working to restore and save Louisiana’s remaining southeastern wetlands, part of the state’s ambitious $1.4 billion coastal restoration plan. The diversion would re-route freshwater, sediment, and nutrients into the Barataria Basin to help restore its ecosystems. The oil terminal could have reduced the amount of sediments entering the channel, slowing down the ecological recovery, activists warned.
Additionally, Tallgrass Energy estimated in its air permit application that the oil terminal would release 500,000 tons of greenhouse gases every year, as well as emit other harmful gases like benzene. If the project had been approved, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or LDEQ, would have ignored “the harm from air pollution to the nearby communities of Ironton, Phoenix, Myrtle Grove, and Wood Park,” Mike Brown, an attorney with the environmental group Earthjustice, said in a press release earlier this year.
“As we strive to find a balance between the need to decarbonize and the need for safe, reliable, and affordable energy, nearly every infrastructure decision we make is guided by our decarbonization objectives,” Tallgrass spokesperson Phyllis Hammond told NOLA.com.
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Amid the recent skirmishes over revising the reconciliation bill, known as the Build Back Better Plan, lawmakers once again skipped a chance to reform the General Mining Law of 1872.
Under this outdated law, hardrock miners can extract profitable minerals such as gold and silver from public lands without having to pay any federal royalties. Though it has been challenged several times over the past few decades, mainly by Democrats, the law has not been significantly updated in the nearly 150 years since its passage.
In August, a House committee, chaired by Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., tried to modernize the legislation by adding language to the reconciliation bill to establish federal royalties of between 4% to 8% on these mines. This would have been the most consequential update that the mining law has received in the nearly 15 decades since President Ulysses S. Grant signed it into existence.
However, hardrock royalty reform never even reached a vote thanks to Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Joe Manchin, D-W.V., who made his personal fortune in coal mining. Manchin initially signaled support for the royalty provisions in October when he spoke in front of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, stating that he could “never imagine that we don’t receive royalties on so many things we produce in this country.” But he later reversed course and reportedly promised Cortez Masto that he’d block any mining royalties, effectively killing reform before it even reached the full Senate. On Nov. 4, royalty reform was officially out of both the House and Senate bills.
These senators’ actions all but guarantee that the U.S. public will continue to miss out on billions of dollars in revenue that could have supported the Build Back Better Plan’s priorities, including paid family leave and important climate investments. The bill also would have held companies accountable for cleaning up the abandoned mines that pockmark the West. Instead, mining companies will continue to exploit public land for their own financial gain.
The General Mining Law of 1872 law was passed in the wake of the mid-19th century California gold rush as part of a push to encourage white settlement of the West. Previously, prospectors sometimes staked claims to land without the permission of the federal government, let alone that of the Indigenous people who were being dispossessed of the land in question.
In order to regulate the blossoming industry, Congress passed a few early mining laws beginning in 1866. The General Mining Law of 1872 took their place. It established the location system, which permitted individual miners and corporations to stake claims to mineral discoveries on the public domain, on land that had never been in private ownership.
A long list of royalty-free minerals besides gold and silver fall under this “location-system” regulation, including lithium and copper, which are becoming more valuable due to their use in green energy technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles. The industry has extracted some $300 billion worth of these minerals from public lands since 1872, according to Earthworks. And though mining companies have evolved tremendously since the days of digging with pickaxes and now use some of the largest machinery on earth, the return they make to the American public remains as paltry as ever.
This is why a broad base of critics from conservation organizations to lawmakers think it is high time to reform the 1872 law. Currently, the government earns hardrock mining fees for things like registration and annual maintenance, which generated about $71 million in revenue in fiscal year 2019, but it’s a small amount compared to the money that would be derived from royalties.
The industry has extracted some $300 billion worth of these minerals from public lands since 1872, according to Earthworks.
Kennecott Copper Mine near Salt Lake City in Utah.
For example, in September, the House Natural Resources Committee proposed a new royalty that would have raised $2 billion over 10 years. And that’s likely a conservative estimate: The federal government has no data on the amount or value of the hardrock minerals extracted from public lands, which account for more than 80% of the mineral mines on federal lands, according to the Government Accountability Office.
In contrast, mines operating under the more heavily regulated leasing system, for resources like coal and oil shale, account for just 17% of mining on federal lands, but generate much more revenue through royalties. In fiscal year 2018 alone, they brought in $550 million. Coal is by far the primary revenue generator under leasing-system mining.
The proposed reforms also would have added a reclamation fee for abandoned mines and increased the yearly maintenance fee for claims from $165 to $200 per claim, adding another combined $1 billion in revenue over the next decade.
This money could, among other things, provide funding to address a myriad of environmental and health threats across the Western U.S. caused by past mining. Before the 1970s, for example, companies abandoned mines once work was complete — leaving behind tens of thousands of often-toxic scars on the land that could cost over $50 billion to address.
Attempts to reform the General Mining Law have been going on for years, but a well-funded network of lobbyists and special interest groups has continued to thwart any success. Mining interests regularly spend north of $16 million annually on lobbying; this year, they’ve already spent over $13 million.
The National Mining Association spent the most in 2021, coming in at $1.5 million, according to data from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit campaign finance and lobbying watchdog organization. Several companies that would be directly impacted by mining law reform have lobbied against it, including Newmont Corp., a gold-mining company that has invested over $800,000 to fight efforts to change the law.
This helps explain why one ongoing effort to reform the law — the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act — has stalled in recent years. Democrats have introduced the legislation in Congress at least six times since 2007. The bill’s most recent iteration, in 2019, failed amid a major industry-led lobbying blitz. Among those fighting it were mining giant BHP Group and the National Mining Association, which targeted the bill in a $1.2 million lobbying campaign.
And mining industry lobbyists have power beyond their financial influence: They are also intricately linked to the government. According to OpenSecrets, nearly 65% of the industry’s lobbyists previously worked in the government, many in positions related to mining.
The lobbying campaigns help illuminate why Manchin, who said in October that it was time to bring the “outdated law into the 21st century” was willing to suddenly reverse course. According to OpenSecrets, he received more campaign donations from the mining industry than anyone else in Congress, raising nearly $50,000 from the industry in the current fundraising cycle. Cortez Masto’s campaign also benefited: Both the National Mining Association trade group and Barrick Gold Corp., one of Nevada’s largest mining companies, have recently donated to her campaign.
Nevada’s economy depends on gold mining; nearly $8.2 billion worth of the metal was extracted in the state in 2020. Cortez Masto’s predecessor, former Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, was against any challenges to the 1872 Mining Law, calling them “ill-conceived reform efforts that would have hurt rural Nevada” in a 2009 op-ed. It seems that Cortez Masto is picking up right where Reid left off, protecting the industry in an attempt to keep rural voters.
Neither Manchin nor Cortez Masto responded to requests for comment.
This story was produced in collaboration with the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan independent watchdog that investigates and exposes waste, corruption and abuse of power.
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice used coal to propel himself into public office in the coal-friendly state, but a few hundred miles away his association with coal is not so positive. Earlier this month in Kentucky, the billionaire politician and his son-turned-business partner were personally fined $2.9 million by the state for failing to reclaim three of their Eastern Kentucky mines, a process that makes them environmentally safe for redevelopment.
The proprietor of the Greenbrier Resort owns more than 50 coal mines and businesses and has faced fines before — along with community opposition — for failing to pay taxes and suppliers, inadequately implementing mine safety requirements, and ignoring court-ordered environmental remediation work.
He joins other high-ranking elected officials, such as Senator Joe Manchin and Congressman Michael McCaul, who are in the business of passing climate legislation while having interests in the fossil fuel industry. Justice’s attorneys claim the missed deadline that prompted the most recent fine is not his fault; the coronavirus pandemic made it impossible to safely get the reclamation work in time.
“It’s always been our intent to complete this work,” said Richard A. Getty, who represents the Justices, in a statement following the ruling. However, as the state made clear in its ruling, various deadlines had passed before COVID-19 and at least one site had been left untouched since 2015.
This most recent fine adds to more than $15 million in taxes and safety penalties he has owed state governments for his coal mines across six states, according to a 2016 NPR investigation. That analysis revealed Justice’s mines as a hotbed for workplace injuries, holding the most unpaid safety violations of any American-owned coal operator.
It also comes on the heels of a recent announcement that Justice’s company was attempting to acquire new permits to resume mining and reclamation work at four surface mines that were previously closed. The new fine, however, forces the company to be listed in a federal violator system that will prevent them from getting new permits or amending existing permits until the violations are cleared up — prohibiting the company from cashing in on a 50 percent rise in coal production in Kentucky this year.
Coal is loaded onto a truck at a mine on August 26, 2019 near Cumberland, Kentucky.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
The fine might also just happen to turn the tide in improving environmental and safety habits in the region, too, says Willie Dodson, a field organizer with the environmental labor group Appalachian Voices. “Regulators have been giving these companies just second chance after second chance for too long,” Dodson told Grist. “It is clear now, that to stop these companies from trying to squeeze more money out these dying mines at the expense of the community and jobs, states need to start revoking permits and going after the full array of personal and corporate assets held by these billionaires.”
Not only will it ease the taxpayers’ burden by forcing the Justices to foot the bill, it’ll also create hundreds of jobs. Kentucky, one of the poorest states in the country, has nearly a dozen counties with a poverty rate above 30 percent, nearly triple the national average. An analysis by Appalachian Voices found that reclamation work at Justice’s mines alone would employ 220 to 460 workers for five years. A big boost is expected soon, at the hands of the recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. According to the Reclaiming Appalachia Coalition, the $11.3 billion earmarked in the law for abandoned mine cleanup will result in nearly 3,000 jobs and $7.45 billion in economic output across Appalachia.
The practice of leaving coal mines unreclaimed and abandoned isn’t unique to Justice’s operations. Today, the once economically vibrant state is left with the remnants of a dying industry: more than 20,000 abandoned coal mines. According to Appalachian Voices, roughly 55,000 acres of these abandoned mines are unreclaimed — meaning they did not go through an environmental remediation process — and another 139,000 acres are partially unreclaimed.
“Companies like Justice’s have been breaking promises for years,” Dodson said. “The way forward is for the regulators to bring down the hammer and hire contractors to reclaim the mines and now they have the support to do so.”
The newly signed law could have quick implications on the environment as unreclaimed mines pose a huge threat to both the environment and the people who live in proximity to them. Unreclaimed mines pose a huge threat to both the environment and the people who live in proximity to them. Mining alters the physical landscape, disturbs ecosystems, increases the likelihood of landslides, and contaminates groundwater with toxic chemicals and heavy metals.
From 2016 to at least 2018, an unreclaimed mine in Pike County, Kentucky owned by Justice’s family, caused multiple flooding incidents, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage, destroying homes, and depositing potentially hazardous materials from the mine in people’s yards, according to reporting from the public broadcasting collaborative Ohio Valley Resource.
In 2018, then 81-year-old Betty Short slipped and broke her collarbone outside her home as a result of a Justice mine-induced flood, which she told the Ohio Valley Resource continued to haunt her. “You’re really afraid to lay down and go to sleep at night,” she said in 2018. “It’s like a nightmare. You never know what’s going to happen next.” The mine, which was scheduled to be completely reclaimed by 2015, is still not reclaimed as of November 2021.
Justice first inherited ownership of his coal operations following his father’s death in 1993. In 2009, he sold some of his coal business to the Russian company Mechel for nearly $600 million. Then in 2015, the same year he declared his candidacy for governor as a Democrat, following a massive drop in the price of coal, he bought back his business for just $5 million — less than one percent of the earlier price. Two years later, Justice, infamously, rejoined the Republican party at a Donald Trump rally reportedly to get in good with Trump, who favored the coal industry.
From the very beginning, Dodson says, it has been evident that Justice’s agenda was to “squeeze as much money out of his mines by running roughshod over the regulations, externalizing out costs, and then just walking away.”
It’s a process that is widely utilized across the region. Since coal production started its steady decline in Appalachia, beginning in the 1990s, businesses, like Justice’s, have followed a template to profit off of dying mines before abandoning them, often leaving them unreclaimed for years. Due to historically lax relationships with regulators, coal operators have been allowed to cut losses by short-changing workers’ pensions, ignoring relatively-expensive safety procedures, and delaying costly environmental remediation processes before ultimately declaring bankruptcy and sticking taxpayers with the bill. But the impact is felt most intensely on the “spectacularly sick and retired mine workers and their communities,” Carl Pope, the former Executive Director of the Sierra Club, wrote in 2016.
However, with the right attention to ensuring environmental justice with economic opportunities and jobs, the new influx of federal support might just stop the practice in its tracks. “For years, there has been no accountability,” Dodson said. “It has hurt the communities where I work and it’s hurting people that I care about.”
“Now we can work towards taking over any of these mines where it’s appropriate and hiring people to reclaim them,” he added, “focusing our attention on the environmental impacts of mines and the community impacts of needing reclamation.
After months of negotiation, President Joe Biden finally signed the long-awaited $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law on Monday afternoon. While the bill has been whittled down considerably compared to Biden’s initial $2 trillion proposal, the bipartisan agreement is a much-needed victory for the president — in part because, in the administration’s view, it commits the country to its largest-ever environmental justice investment.
Although Biden’s initial infrastructure spending vision was touted for the ways it could help mitigate climate change, the bill signed on Monday focuses heavily on conventional transportation infrastructure: Bridges, roads, ports, and airports would all see substantial investment. Nevertheless, according to the White House, roughly $240 billion is expected to be spent advancing environmental justice, a pillar of Biden’s campaign platform.
“These long-overdue investments,” according to an administration fact sheet shared exclusively with Grist on Monday, “will take much-needed steps to improve public health, reduce pollution, and deliver economic revitalization to communities that have been overburdened, underserved, and left behind.”
According to the document, the deal secures $55 billion to expand and revitalize household drinking water systems; $21 billion to clean up sites plagued by historic pollution, reclaim abandoned mining lands, and cap orphaned oil and gas wells; $66 billion to modernize and expand the country’s public transit and rail networks; $17 billion for port infrastructure and $25 billion for airports to make needed repairs, reduce emissions, and electrify operations; and over $50 billion to protect communities against droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and floods.
“This will be a major boom to local economies in our region,” said Lyndsay Tarus of the Kentucky-based labor organization The Alliance for Appalachia last week. “This funding means thousands of jobs to clean up environmental hazards, and it will lay the foundation for countless jobs in future thriving economies.”
Not all stakeholders are pleased with the final legislative product, however.
“The infrastructure bill spends a lot of money but fails to target it to the needs of the day: building strong economic centers, providing equitable access to opportunity, addressing catastrophic climate change, improving safety, or repairing infrastructure in poor condition,” said Beth Osborne, director of the advocacy organization Transportation for America.
The deal is also intended to jumpstart the so-called Justice 40 initiative, through which the Biden administration committed to ensuring that 40 percent of government sustainability investments benefit the country’s most pollution-burdened communities. A senior administration official involved in the legislation confirmed to Grist that the implementation of the infrastructure bill will fall in line with the Justice 40 guidelines outlined by the administration in February and will be able to be tracked through an implementation scorecard, which is expected to be released by the White House early next year.
Justice 40 has been sidelined for months as the White House has been slow to advance a critical program meant to delineate which communities face the most pressing environmental problems (and therefore which communities should be targeted for Justice 40-related funding). It remains to be seen whether the funding enabled by the infrastructure bill will force the White House to make headway on this initial Justice 40-related task, which was expected to be completed in July.
For those who remain unsatisfied by the climate- and justice-related provisions in the infrastructure package, an additional $1.85 billion social policy and climate investment package remains on the table in the House of Representatives. That measure, if it makes it out of the House and to the Senate, could be blocked by conservative Democrats, scuttling its chances of passage in the face of unified Republican opposition.
Eleven years ago, a human rights violation complaint arrived at the Business and Human Rights Resources Centre, or BHRRC. The London-based nonprofit monitors the activities of more than 10,000 companies around the world, and receives complaints about abuses every day. But this one was different: For the first time, the grievance involved a renewable energy project. Soon after, similar complaints began trickling in year after year. They warned that solar, wind, and hydroelectric companies were taking over land, restricting access to water, violating Indigenous people’s rights to prior and informed consent, and denying decent wages for workers.
Between 2010 and 2021, the center received more than 200 allegations of human rights violations linked to the renewable energy sector. “It became concerning,” said Mark Hays, a senior consultant at BHRRC.
Last year, Hays and his colleagues established a way to analyze and score the “human rights policies and practices” of 15 of the world’s biggest renewable energy companies. They found that on average, the companies scored just 22 percent for their human rights practices across their supply chains. Last week, the group released its second analysis, saying the findings “should set off alarm bells.”
Although there was a slight increase in the average score to 28 percent, that number still “implies major human rights risks for communities and workers,” the report says. “Abusive business models, and the loss of trust they generate, put at risk the much-needed energy transition our futures depend on.”
The abuses include land rights disputes in places like Chile and Ethiopia, and the killings of several Indigenous activists opposing a hydroelectric power plant in Guatemala. Other examples include the violation of the right to prior and informed consultation with Indigenous communities in Kenya, Mexico, and Morocco, among others; legal harassment against wind turbine opponents in Taiwan; and reports of underpaid migrant employees in offshore wind farms in Scotland.
“It’s a very interesting report, timely and relevant,” said Susana Batel, a researcher studying social justice issues in the energy transition at Lisbon University.
Researchers at the Business and Human Rights Resources Centre asked three basic questions: Do these companies explicitly recognize they have to respect human rights? Do they try to address potential conflicts before they happen? Do communities have mechanisms to be heard by the company — and will they receive relief in case a violation occurs?
Human rights scores for 15 of the world’s largest renewable energy companies. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre
Seven out of 15 companies scored more than 50 percent for their human rights policies, and eleven improved their performance compared to the first report. Iberdrola, the second-largest wind energy company globally, along with hydro, biomass, solar, and thermal energy producer Acciona Energy and Portugal-based utility company EDP, scored more than 80 percent in these basic indicators. NextEra, the world’s largest wind and solar energy company, state-owned Power China, and Georgia-based utilities company The Southern Company scored the lowest –all of them with less than 5 percent.
“[After the first report,] we heard positive remarks from some companies saying, this is actually helping us make the case internally for a stronger set of policies,” Hays said. “It’s clear by how they’ve altered their policies, they’ve really taken to heart some of the key guidance.”
Beyond these basic indicators, however, scores plummeted across the board. Researchers dug deeper, looking at factors that imagine “what a just renewable sector that fully embraces and realizes human rights could and should look like,” Hays said. They include labor rights of workers mining rare minerals and building the technologies in factories, the land rights of those impacted by the projects and its supply chain, the rights of environmental defenders living in the projects’ areas, the wastesolar panels and turbines will generate once decommissioned. It also includes issues like the transition to net-zero carbon emissions of the companies themselves.
The analysis found that none of the 15 largest renewable energy companies have a formal policy acknowledging the rights of human rights and environmental defenders. This is particularly concerning at a time when attacks against environmental defenders have reached record-high numbers, Hays said.
The lack of land rights recognition is also distressing, he said. None of the companies have policies in place that explicitly address how they will respect land rights, and only five companies partially complied with fair relocation policies. Similarly concerning, the report points out, is the lack of acknowledgment of Indigenous people’s rights to consultation when these projects occur in their lands. Conflicts around these issues have been widely reported in Mexico’s Tehuantepec Isthmus and Colombia’s Wayúu Indigenous reservation, among other sites.
It might be tempting to compare these companies’ impacts with those of the fossil fuel industry. Even if gas, oil, and coal rate significantly worse in similar, yet not as comprehensive, evaluations of basic human rights policies, Hays advises against it. “Comparing sectors is tricky because the impact of a coal mine on waterfalls or on the atmosphere is different from the impact of a wind farm or a solar array,” he said. “But if you’re an Indigenous community that has been displaced from your lands, if it’s a coal mine or a solar farm, the end result is the same: you are displaced.”
The similarities between human rights violations between fossil fuel companies and renewables are not new for researchers in this area, Batel, of Lisbon University, said. “The key problem is that the renewable energy transition is being performed in the same model that caused the climate crisis,” one that links infinite economic growth and production of goods to progress, the researcher explained. “For [the model] to exist, we have to continue to exploit places and a lot of communities and ecosystems.”
Getting out of that model will mean an economy that stops prioritizing growth and consumption and refocuses on human wellbeing instead, said postdoctoral researcher Alexander Dunlap, at the Center for Development in the Environment at the University of Oslo. Other possible avenues, Dunlap said, include energy autonomy for communities everywhere and a say in the decision-making process of these projects. Others advocate socializing wind, so the benefits of the energy transition will reach everyone.
“We have to keep in mind that the renewable energy transition is creating and reproducing injustices,” Bates said. Focusing on “changing the technology and energy sources will not bring a just transition.”
Soon after taking office, President Joe Biden announced a plan to cut emissions in half by the end of this decade. So far, conservative members of his own party have been the biggest obstacle to achieving progress on climate change. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of two crucial Democratic swing votes in the Senate, succeeded in removing the most aggressive climate policy from Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which is still being negotiated.
But a greater obstacle looms on the treacherous path to reining in greenhouse gas emissions, one that the White House won’t be able to negotiate with: the Supreme Court.
Under former president Donald Trump, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, ensuring a conservative supermajority for decades to come (unless Democrats pass a law to expand the number of seats on the bench). The effect of the court’s new ideological makeup on climate policy will be put to the test next year.
In order to understand what the Supreme Court could do to Biden’s climate agenda, we need to go back to something that happened under former president Donald Trump. In 2017, Trump directed his EPA to review former president Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, finalized in 2015, which sought to cut emissions from the power sector 32 percent by 2030. It took Trump’s EPA two more years to complete its alternative to the Clean Power Plan, a coal-friendly proposal called the Affordable Clean Energy rule that would have reduced emissions from the power sector just 0.7 to 1.5 percent by 2030. The rule offered suggestions for how power plants could become more efficient, but didn’t impose any specific limits on emissions or require electric utilities and power plant operators to shift to renewable energy.
On the last full day of Trump’s term, a divided three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit tossed Trump’s rule and sent it back to the EPA, soon to be staffed by Biden appointees, to redo it from scratch. Trump’s EPA, the court said, had devised its new rule through a “tortured series of misreadings” of the Clean Air Act.
But the Supreme Court may now decide that those series of misreadings aren’t so tortured after all. Last Friday, the Court announced it will review four petitions filed by two Republican-led states and two coal companies. The petitioners are appealing the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling and asking the Supreme Court to limit the EPA’s power to regulate emissions.
“How we respond to climate change is a pressing issue for our nation, yet some of the paths forward carry serious and disproportionate costs for states and countless other affected parties,” a brief filed by the attorney general of West Virginia, one of the states petitioning the Supreme Court, stated. “The court should intervene now.”
The Supreme Court’s decision to review the petitions baffled onlookers. The Biden administration asked the court to wait to review the case until it had proposed a rule to replace Trump’s Affordable Clean Energy rule. The court is going ahead with the review anyway, which means it won’t have a new rule from the Biden administration to consider. “It’s extremely surprising,” Michael Gerrard, professor of environmental law at Columbia Law School and founder of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told Grist.
Legal experts say there are likely two ways the review, which is expected to take place over the course of next spring and summer, could go.
Option one: The Supreme Court will invoke the “major questions doctrine,” which is a tool for how courts interpret and review statutes such as the Clean Air Act. The doctrine states that where a rule will have “vast economic and political significance,” courts shouldn’t defer to an agency’s interpretation of that rule and should ensure that Congress has “spoken clearly” about its intent to allow the agency to make the rule.
The major question at hand is “What’s the role of EPA in regulating coal-fired power plants?” Gerrard said. “Or, even more broadly, what’s the role of the EPA in regulating the energy system?” That’s such a huge question that it requires Congress to “speak clearly” to it before an agency can start regulating it.
Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act directs EPA to establish emissions standards for stationary sources of air pollution that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” such as coal plants. And it says the agency should do so through the “best system of emission reduction.” But what qualifies as the “best system”? Section 111(d) doesn’t say.
Trump’s EPA argued that Section 111(d) required the agency to only regulate greenhouse gas emissions right at their source by, for instance, requiring a coal plant to add carbon capture technology so that its emissions don’t float into the atmosphere. Requiring that kind of targeted intervention is called “regulating in the fenceline.”
The D.C. District Court disagreed, ruling that EPA doesn’t have to take such a narrow approach to regulating emissions. That ruling left the door open for the agency to take a more holistic approach to greenhouse emissions by imposing measures “outside of the fenceline,” such as potentially requiring electric utilities to include renewables in their power mix. That’s what Obama’s Clean Power Plan essentially did by requiring states to create their own plans to green their electricity mix. The Supreme Court blocked Obama’s plan not long after it was introduced in 2016 by putting a temporary stay on it before a federal appeals court could even review it — an unprecedented development. At the time, the court said the plan couldn’t move forward until all legal arguments had been heard, preventing the plan from being enforced.
The Supreme Court will now review the D.C. District Court’s decision to toss Trump’s rule. If the Court sides with the petitioners — West Virginia, North Dakota, the North American Coal Corporation, and Westmoreland Mining Holdings — its ruling would limit the Biden administration’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from industry in a systemic way.
“Section 111(d) is one of the most important tools under existing statutes to control emissions from coal-fired power plants,” Gerrard said. “There’s a concern that EPA may take that tool out of the toolbox. There’s also a concern that the Supreme Court might go even further in reducing EPA’s powers.”
That brings us to option two. The court may opt to look at the case through the “nondelegation doctrine” lens. The nondelegation doctrine says that laws violate the separation of powers when they delegate authority that shouldbelong to Congress to an administrative agency (in this case, the EPA) without adequate guidance. The idea is that Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act itself fails to give enough direction to the EPA. In other words, the issue at hand in this scenario is not what kind of authority EPA has over power plant emissions, but whether the statute that gives EPA that authority in the first place is even valid. If the Supreme Court goes after Section 111(d) directly, then Biden’s EPA may not have statutory authority to enact its own Clean Power Plan or otherwise regulate emissions from power plants.
Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said that the chances of the Supreme Court pursuing this course of action are slim, because it would set a legal precedent that could undermine the way Congress delegates power to federal agencies. “It is an outside chance,” he said. It’s far more likely that the court will require EPA to regulate in the fenceline instead of making rules that would force electric utilities to shift to greener sources of energy. Or the court could affirm the D.C. Circuit’s position, which was that Section 111(d) does not require the EPA to limit its authority to the fenceline. The first outcome would close the door on sweeping emissions regulations for U.S. power plants, while the other would illuminate a path forward for the Biden administration to introduce a Clean Power Plan 2.0.
“In my view, the question of how EPA can exert authority over greenhouse gas emissions is what’s at stake in the case,” Burger said. “The question of whether EPA can exert authority over greenhouse gas emissions may come up, but let’s hope it doesn’t.”
Members of the G20, a collection of the world’s largest economies, announced Sunday they would stop financing coal production abroad and aim to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Missing from this commitment, however, was a pledge to curb the use of coal within their own borders.
The announcement came at the end of the G20 summit in Rome, where leaders met to discuss and negotiate some of the world’s biggest issues, including climate change. Coal combustion is the single biggest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions — and members of the G20 represent the world’s largest coal producers and consumers, including the European Union, Australia, and China.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi celebrated the new commitment, saying at a press conference that, “Now, for the first time, the whole of the G20 recognizes the scientific validity of the one-and-a-half-degree goal and they commit themselves with a sufficiently significant language.”
But environmental leaders and climate policy experts criticized the pledge for its failure to address domestic coal use, as well as its vague promises ahead of the United Nations’ COP26 conference, which started in Glasgow this week.
“If the G20 was a dress rehearsal for COP26, then world leaders fluffed their lines,” Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said in a statement. She called the communiqué “weak” and “lacking both ambition and vision.”
Scientists point out that current global commitments are not enough to halt global warming to 1.5 degrees C, and that the planet is actually on the path to 2.7 degrees C by the end of the century. That warming would result in more frequent intense fires, heat waves, flooding, food production challenges, and other catastrophic impacts.
In Glasgow, world leaders are meeting to carve out a way to curb climate change — it’s the most important climate conference in several years. But the commitment G20 nations have brought to the meeting isn’t what some were hoping for.
UN Secretary António Guterressaid in April that the wealthiest countries should phase out coal by 2030. Everyone else, by 2040.
Guterres also said that countries should come to COP26 with “concrete proposals that ease access to greater finance and technological support for the most vulnerable countries.” Instead, nations making up the G20 are showing up empty handed without specific financial agreements or ambitious coal end dates.
China, Australia, Russia, and India were among countries that pushed back on an end date during the G20 summit. “We are not engaged in those sorts of mandates and bans,” said Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. “That’s not the Australian government’s policy; it won’t be the Australian government’s policy.”
President Joe Biden loves electric cars. Whether he’s zipping around a racetrack in Ford’s electric F-150 truck or promising that half of all cars sold in the U.S. will be electric or plug-in hybrids by 2030, the 46th president has made it clear that he wants to break the country’s addiction to gas-powered vehicles.
There’s a very solid reason for that: Today, less than 1 percent of the country’s 250 million cars, trucks, and vans are electric. If America is going to zero out its carbon emissions, that number has to go to 100 percent in just a few decades.
The good news is that Congress is poised to make it way, way easier for Americans to give up their gas cars for smooth, silent, all-electric ones. Last week, the White House released a framework for the Build Back Better Act, the $1.85 trillion budget bill that will also be the largest climate measure in American history. And nestled in the framework is a gangbusters improvement to the nation’s EV tax credits that could nudge millions of Americans to swap out their 2005 Honda Civic for a brand-new Nissan Leaf.
America has had EV tax credits since the presidency of George W. Bush, though they came with some caveats. In the current system, purchasers of a new EV or plug-in hybrid car get up to $7,500 off of their income taxes, with the amount scaled based on the size of the car’s battery. But the credits are non-refundable, meaning that if you don’t have $7,500 in tax liability — i.e., if you make less than about $66,000 a year — you won’t get the full credit. That has resulted in quite a few disappointed and confused EV buyers. There are also only a set number of credits available for each automaker; Tesla and General Motors, for example, have already used up all their available credits.
If they pass, the new EV tax credits will make the old credits look stingy. For electric cars that are assembled in the U.S. with union labor and U.S.-made batteries, consumers will get up to $12,500 off their taxes. (If you buy a car not made in the U.S., you can still get up to $7,500 off.) And, for the first time, the credit will be refundable. Let’s say you only owe 10 grand in taxes, but qualify for the entire $12,500 tax credit: The Internal Revenue Service will give you the full $2,500 in cash back.
The credit will also be transferable — meaning that car companies could offer potential buyers the tax credit right at the dealership. No waiting for the following April to file taxes; a Chevy Bolt could be cut in price from $34,000 to $21,500, just like that. “That’s an absolutely tremendous provision,” said Jay Friedland, senior policy advisor at Plug In America, a nonprofit that advocates for EV drivers.
There are a few caveats that would keep the tax credit aimed at helping the middle-class, rather than the super rich. (The old EV benefit was largely claimed by people making over $100,000 a year.) According to the latest text of the bill, the new benefit could only be used on cars that cost up to $55,000, vans that cost up to $64,000, and pick-up trucks that cost up to $75,000. Those are about middle-of-the-road prices for current electric vehicles. And there are income limitations too — for individuals who make over $400,000, the credit shrinks progressively.
The revamped credit could lead to an enormous surge in Americans buying EVs. The average cost of a gas-powered car is around $35,000; the average cost of an EV is $55,000. (Most of that cost difference is ultimately canceled out, since EVs cost less to run, but people can still get sticker shock.) The benefit would cut that difference in more than half, and manufacturers would also be under pressure to make their cars cheaper to qualify for the credit. “I think across the board, you will see significant acceleration” in EVs purchased, Friedland said.
The fate of the new measure, however, is tied to the reconciliation bill, which is still struggling through Congress. Moderate and progressive Democrats are still sparring over when, exactly, the bill will come to a vote, and how it will link up with its sister legislation, the bipartisan infrastructure plan.
If the bill succeeds, America will be well on its way to Biden’s 2030 EV goal. But first, it has to pass.
Let’s say that you want someone to do something. Like mow the lawn, for example, or stop spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and heating the planet to increasingly intolerable temperatures. There are two ways to go about it: You can create penalties, like withholding a weekly allowance, or in the case of big polluters, charging them higher taxes. Or you can create incentives — a payment for lawn-mowing, or a boost to sources of renewable energy.
For decades, most experts have assumed that U.S. climate policy should include both. Without some sort of tax on carbon dioxide emissions or a mandate to generate electricity to clean sources, the thinking goes, the country simply cannot be certain that emissions cuts will happen in the time allotted. (The Biden administration has promised to slash carbon pollution by 50 to 52 percent by 2030, and to zero by 2050.)
Now, however, as Congress grapples with a trillion-dollar reconciliation bill, that thinking has been thrown into jeopardy. The bill was supposed to be the biggest climate step ever taken by the United States. But thanks to some opponents in the Senate, all that’s likely to be left in the bill are incentives — and, as President Biden prepares to travel to Glasgow, Scotland, for the next U.N. climate summit, it’s not clear that those incentives will be enough.
Democrats only have 50 votes in the Senate — the slimmest possible majority. And earlier this month, Senator Joe Manchin threw cold water on Biden’s plans to create the Clean Electricity Payment Program, which would reward utilities that switched to clean energy sources and penalized those that kept emitting fossil fuels. According to the modeling group Energy Innovation, the program, often called the CEPP, would have accounted for approximately 20 to 35 percent of the total emission cuts in the reconciliation plan until 2030, or 250 to 700 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
The senator from West Virginia is now reportedly taking aim at the final “stick” in the reconciliation bill, a fee on emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than CO2 in the short term. The methane fee would have provided an additional 12 percent of the emissions cuts in the package.
That leaves the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats with only carrots to work with: tax incentives for renewable energy, nuclear, and carbon capture; tax credits for electric vehicles and car chargers; and cash for a host of other carbon-cutting priorities. The $150 billion that was allocated to the clean electricity program will likely be moved toward this array of incentives, with the final climate part of the package expected to come with a price tag of around $500 billion over 10 years.
Experts say that putting tax credits and other spending measures in place of the CEPP would still cut emissions — just not as much. According to Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat from Illinois, the incentives could “maybe make up half” of the emissions cuts promised by the clean electricity program. But there’s no promised timeline: The CEPP committed the country to wiping out carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2035. “There’s nothing else we can do that actually commits to that schedule,” he said.
Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the nonprofit Third Way, says that tax credits can go a long way but come with much greater uncertainty. “The market is far from perfect,” he said. “Leaving it to incentives means that the deployment of clean energy is a lot less even.” The places that need to decarbonize the most — like Manchin’s coal-rich state of West Virginia — are the least likely to respond to lower taxes.
All that means reaching Biden’s stated climate goal of cutting emissions in half will likely be out of reach just based on the reconciliation bill and its cousin, the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That doesn’t make the goal impossible, however; according to modeling last week from Rhodium Group, the U.S. could still hit the target if virtually everything else goes right.
But what a big “if.” Twenty-five states would need to set their own binding targets to reach 100 percent clean electricity, and the Biden administration would have to ramp up executive actions curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Those executive actions could be overturned by future administrations, and states have been sluggish on implementing strict carbon cuts.
Still, there are reasons to be optimistic. According to a report from the nonprofit research group Resources for the Future, a ten-year extension of clean energy tax credits could go a long way toward decarbonizing the country’s electricity even without the CEPP. Currently, fossil fuels provide about 60 percent of America’s electricity; with tax credits, the report estimates that number would be cut in half by 2030. Not enough to reach Biden’s carbon-cutting goals — which would have fossil fuels providing 20 percent of electricity by then — but close.
Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Oakland-based think tank Breakthrough Institute, says that ensuring new incentives are “technologically neutral” would also get the Biden administration closer to its target. That means supporting nuclear power as well as renewables, and ensuring that the country’s remaining nuclear plants — which provide around 20 percent of the country’s electricity — keep running for at least another decade.
Ultimately, the choice of carrot or stick matters doesn’t matter as much as cutting emissions, period. While something like a carbon tax or clean electricity program may be the most efficient way to slow global warming, that doesn’t mean Congress will pass either of them. And at the moment, anything is better than nothing. Leah Stokes, a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says that binding regulations on emissions are hard to get passed anywhere, not just in the United States. Incentives, she said, will be a big start that can be followed up with more action later.
“I have Lenny Kravitz stuck in my head,” she said. “‘It’s not over til it’s over.’”
When Daranda Hinkey, a 23-year-old member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe in northern Nevada, gazes across the austere expanse of old growth sagebrush 25 miles southwest of her tribe’s reservation, she doesn’t see Thacker Pass, the future site of America’s largest lithium mine. She sees Peehee Mu’huh, or “rotten moon,” the Paiute name for a place made sacred by the bones of her ancestors.
According to stories told by elders, Peehee Mu’huh got its name many generations ago, when Paiute people were massacred there by members of a warring tribe. Later, a second massacre took place: On September 12, 1865, the 1st Nevada Cavalry snuck into a Paiute camp in the Thacker Pass area before dawn and murdered dozens of men, women, and children in cold blood. This massacre, which is described in government survey documents, contemporaneous news articles, and eyewitness accounts, appears to have had just one adult survivor: Ox Sam, Hinkey’s great-great-great grandfather.
Hinkey is one of the founding members of Atsa Koodakuh wyh Nuwu, or People of the Red Mountain, an organization formed by members and relatives of the Fort McDermitt Tribe who want to stop Lithium Nevada Corporation from placing a mine on land they believe is a mass grave. Most of the People, as members of the group call themselves, are blood relatives of Ox Sam and feel a special connection to this place. “We’re all descendants of a survivor,” Hinkey told Grist. “We feel like we were meant to be here at this time, fighting for the land.”
Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Hinkey and her family are not the only ones who want to protect Thacker Pass. In recent months tribes throughout the region, as well as state and national organizations representing Native Americans, have spoken up in opposition to the lithium mine, citing the cultural, historical, and spiritual significance of the land, concerns over environmental impacts, and a lack of tribal consultation. While the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, sent letters to four nearby tribes notifying them about the mine during the federal environmental permitting process in late 2019 and 2020, none of those tribes’ leadership offered input before the agency formally approved the mine in January. Other tribes that have ancestral ties to Thacker Pass weren’t contacted at all.
Janet Davis, the chair of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, said that the BLM’s outreach to the tribe about the mine was inadequate. “One letter and some emails to the THPO [Tribal Historic Preservation Officer] during the pandemic when she was furloughed does not constitute ‘meaningful consultation,’” Davis wrote in an email to Grist. “If the BLM permits the mine at Thacker Pass it will mean our history and culture have been destroyed.”
The conflict starkly illustrates the tradeoffs involved in tackling climate change in a business-as-usual way. According to the International Energy Agency, demand for lithium could rise forty-fold by 2040if the world rapidly embraces electric vehicles, which use lithium-ion batteries. Over its 41-year projected lifespan, Lithium Nevada expects the Thacker Pass mine to generate up to 80,000 tons of lithium carbonate a year — equal to roughly a fifth of global lithium production in 2020. But Native opponents on the front lines of mining say that the price of that lithium is too high.
“Annihilating old growth sagebrush, Indigenous peoples’ medicines, food, and ceremonial grounds for electric vehicles isn’t very climate conscious,” said Arlan Melendez, the chair of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, a tribe in Nevada whose members have cultural ties to Thacker Pass.
While the BLM contacted the Fort McDermitt Tribe’s leadership about the mine last year, Hinkey wasn’t aware of the project until after it was approved and she read about it in the news. In March, Hinkey traveled to Thacker Pass with several family members to see the land for herself. There, she met Max Wilbert and Will Falk, two non-Native environmental activists who had been camped out protesting the mine since January. After speaking with them and seeing where the mine would be built — on land filled with traditional foods of her people, like chokecherries and mule deer — Hinkey felt compelled to take action.
In late March, Hinkey and her family set up their own protest camp at Thacker Pass and began inviting others to join them. Native people from around the area started coming to Thacker Pass to gather traditional food and medicine, conduct ceremonies, and protest the mine. At camp, elders shared what they had been told about the area: how their ancestors used Thacker Pass to travel through the mountains, how they hid from U.S. soldiers there when Native Americans were being rounded up and sent to live on reservations in the late 19th century, and the tragic history buried in these soft, lithium-rich soils.
Visiting Thacker Pass “opened people to speak their story,” Hinkey said. “It has brought so many people together, especially after COVID and being apart.”
Members of the Fort McDermitt Tribe and supporters gather for a circle dance for healing during a gathering in opposition to the proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
That includes tribes headquartered hundreds of miles away, like the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. Melendez says he only learned about the mine in the spring when concerned elders from the Fort McDermitt Tribe reached out. “Our tribal council had no idea” about the scale of the project, Melendez said. “We felt that was unacceptable.”
In July, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and the People of the Red Mountain intervened in a federal lawsuit against the mine. In August, the Burns Paiute Tribe, headquartered in southeastern Oregon, joined the suit as well. The lawsuit, launched by a rancher and several environmental groups in February, alleges that the BLM illegally ignored potential impacts on water resources and threatened wildlife like the greater sage grouse when it approved the mine. The tribes, meanwhile, are alleging that the agency violated the National Historic Preservation Act by failing to consult them.
So far, things haven’t worked out in the tribes’ favor. In September, U.S. District Court Judge Miranda Du denied their motion for an injunction to stop Lithium Nevada from carrying out an archaeological survey of Thacker Pass without further consultation. In her opinion, Du wrote that while there was “no question BLM could have done more” to consult tribes, the agency made a “reasonable decision” about which ones to contact. Du also felt the evidence presented in court for a massacre at Thacker Pass — government survey notes from 1868 describing “Indian skulls” scattered across nearby land — didn’t prove human remains are present in the area Lithium Nevada will disturb. The tribes are now appealing her decision, citing new evidence that they claim shows that the 1865 massacre occurred “at least partially” within the project area, including an eyewitness account Ox Sam gave to American labor organizer Big Bill Haywood.
Even if the tribes lose their appeal, Du has yet to rule on the merits of the underlying case, which will determine if the BLM’s permit was legal or not. Lithium Nevada is also waiting on a state water pollution permit before construction of the mine can begin, as well as an “eagle-take permit” from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The local opposition at Thacker Pass is “very alarming to the mining industry,” said Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College in Rhode Island who studies the lithium industry. Nevada, Riofrancos said, is perceived by miners to be “the most friendly jurisdiction in the world” due to lax regulations and a “perception that you don’t get militant resistance” there.
“With Thacker Pass, what you’re seeing is the potential for more community-level opposition to stall, and potentially obstruct, a mine considered to be really strategic to the U.S.,” Riofrancos said. “It represents a renewed era of protest in Nevada.”
A spokesperson for Lithium Americas Corporation, Lithium Nevada’s parent company, told Grist the company is “committed to doing the pre-construction work right and has engaged a highly experienced archaeological firm,” Far Western Anthropological Research Group, “to follow strict standards when handling any artifacts found.”
Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
“We’re thrilled members of the Ft. McDermitt tribe will work alongside Far Western Anthropological Research Group to monitor the project and ensure Native American interests are respected,” the spokesperson wrote.
Fort McDermitt tribal chair Maxine Redstar declined to be interviewed for this story. But in past interviews, Redstar has described the challenge of balancing competing viewpoints about the mine within her tribe. Some tribal members appear interested in the jobs and job training Lithium Nevada is offering, while others might be swayed by the company’s promises of a larger economic boost for the region. Redstar herself has expressed optimism at the prospect of well-paid mining jobs for her small, rural community, but she has also voiced concern over a lack of consultation on the cultural significance of Thacker Pass in correspondence with the BLM.
Lithium Nevada declined to comment on either the BLM’s tribal consultation process or its own efforts. But in court documents, the company describes a more than decade-long history of outreach to local community members, including local tribes, about the mine. The BLM and its parent agency, the Department of the Interior, declined to comment for this story.
Whatever the courts decide about the mine, opponents seem committed to resisting it. Protestors continue to camp out at Thacker Pass, spread the word on socialmedia, and hold awareness-raising events. On September 12, roughly 100 people showed up to commemorate the 1865 massacre. Hinkey says the “one person” the People are most hoping to attract the attention of is Debra Haaland, the first Native American secretary of the Interior Department and a longtime champion of Native rights.
“Her administration, the Biden administration, says they are going to have their ears open more and listen to what Indigenous people have to say,” David Hinkey, Daranda Hinkey’s great-uncle, told Grist. “Now is the time to step in.”
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Current plans to cut global carbon emissions will fall 60 percent short of their 2050 net zero target, the International Energy Agency has said, as it urged leaders to use the upcoming COP26 climate conference to send an “unmistakable signal” with concrete policy plans.
In its annual World Energy Outlook, redesigned this year as a “guidebook” for world leaders attending the summit in Glasgow, the IEA predicted that carbon emissions would decrease by just 40 percent by the middle of the century if countries stick to their climate pledges.
The organization said the difference between current plans and the change necessary to reach the net zero target was “stark”, requiring up to $4 trillion in investment over the next decade alone to bridge the divide.
The IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol told the Guardian that major economies recovering from COVID-19 were already missing the opportunity to spur investment in clean energy.
“We are witnessing an unsustainable recovery from the pandemic,” he said, pointing to sections of the report that show coal use growing strongly, contributing to the second-largest increase in CO2 emissions in history.
Birol called for developing economies in particular to make tougher commitments to reducing carbon emissions. But he said this could not happen without leaders of wealthier nations attending COP26 taking steps to unlock the flow of money into emerging economies, by applying pressure on private investors.
“I’d like to see world leaders… come together and give a political message to the world that we are determined to have a clean energy future.
“[They should say] we are determined, if you invest in old energy sources, dirty energy sources, you are risking to lose your money. If you invest in clean energy, you’ll make handsome profits.”
The IEA’s outlook estimates that 70 percent of the $4 trillion investment required to reach net zero must flow into emerging markets and developing economies.
Birol said the most powerful world leaders could make it a “mandatory task” for organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to prioritize clean energy projects in those countries, acting as a catalyst for private capital.
The crisis has highlighted the danger of relying on fossil fuels subject to price volatility, but also the fact the region still relies heavily on gas, with renewables as yet unable to meet energy needs.
The IEA said the price crunch had given “advance warning” of the risk of moving too slowly towards renewables. Birol condemned as “inaccurate and misleading” recent claims that the energy price crisis had been partly caused by efforts to make the transition. “We will see that in a clean energy world, the shocks coming from doubling of oil and gas prices will be much less felt by consumers,” he said.
Despite the IEA’s warnings about inadequate progress towards net zero, the organization – set up by major economies in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis – said much of the extra investment required to reach the target could be done relatively easily.
More than 40 percent of the required reduction in emissions could come from measures that “pay for themselves,” the IEA said, such as improving efficiency, limiting gas leakage, or installing wind or solar in places where they are already cheap and efficient.
The IEA also pointed to the potential economic opportunities of net zero. It said existing pledges to reduce emissions would create 13 million jobs but that stepping up the measures to meet the target would double that figure.
The required investment would create a market for wind turbines, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, electrolyzers and fuel cells of well over $1 trillion a year, comparable with the current oil market, it said.
For more than a decade, researchers and journalists have tried to lay bare the PR machine employed by fossil fuel companies to delay climate action. Science historian Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt detailed the critical role some scientists played in denying the soundness of climate science. Later, an investigation by InsideClimate News revealed that while Exxon denied climate change publicly, its own scientists were aware for decades of how fossil fuels warm the planet.
Political leaders have long cited economic research on how taking action on climate change would be prohibitively expensive. President Donald Trump even used the findings as part of his reasoning to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.
But who exactly is behind that economic research? Legal expert, physicist, and now science historian Benjamin Franta, of Stanford University, decided to take a deeper look. He recently published his findings in the journal Environmental Politics: Since the late 1980s, economists at private consulting firms, funded by the fossil fuel industry, have played a key role in shaping public discourse about climate policy in the U.S., hawking flawed research and spreading disinformation everywhere from newspapers to congressional testimonies. In an interview with Grist, Franta discusses economists’ role in the fossil fuel industry’s PR campaign, and why these relationships flew under the radar for such a long time.
“For decades, [these] economists have been inflating the cost of action,” Franta said, “and downplaying the cost of inaction.”
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity
Q. What inspired you to do this particular research on the economic think tanks that have influenced climate policy?
A. It happened by accident. About four years ago, in 2017, I was doing research for one of my graduate history classes at Stanford about the American Petroleum Institute and its history with regard to climate change. I was downloading large collections of newspaper articles and I noticed that it wasn’t just the denial of climate science that the industry was promoting, it was these economic talking points as well. I also noticed that the economic experts or sources that the industry cited tended to be the same few people over many years, often Charles River Associates, an economic consulting firm. As I was doing all this research, then-President Trump announced that the U.S. was going to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. He cited economic statistics that sounded a lot like what I’d been reading from newspaper articles in the 1990s. The study was written by some of the exact same people I had been reading about.
Q. Who were these people, and what were their strategies?
A. I tried to track all the activities that I could from the economic consulting firm Charles Rivers Associates. Every time a major climate policy was proposed, these economists would be there, writing newspaper articles and giving testimony in front of Congress. From carbon tax conversations in the Clinton administration to [opposing] international treaties, like the Kyoto Protocol and the COP meetings. They also worked to defeat the cap and trade bills that were proposed throughout the 2000s in the U.S. When that was basically defeated, and climate policy became an issue for the states, like in California, they would go to address the California climate policies too.
There is one advertorial in the New York Times, an advertisement presented as a news article, from March 6, 1997. This was around when the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated. The piece iss called “Stop, Look and Listen before we leap,” and it starts off: “International efforts to deal with climate change are lurching from speculation towards actions that could wreak havoc on nations, even as the underlying science and economics continue to signal caution.” It represents this two-prong strategy that the industry used again and again, where it would cast doubt on the science and say, “Well, actually, we don’t know if climate change is happening, or if it’s from fossil fuels.” And then they would go, “And even if it does, it’s too expensive to act.”
Q. Were these statistics peer-reviewed? How credible were they?
A. It’s a very corrupt process where the industry pays the consultants to come up with the result that the industry wants. And they can’t give anything else because their model can only produce this outcome. It’s not a peer-reviewed publication, the details are not even available to other economists to scrutinize because their models are proprietary. And then it’s printed in newspapers, like the New York Times, and it’s given in congressional testimony to senators and representatives, where it’s passed off — often by the oil companies that paid for it — as independent, rigorous research when it was neither one of those things.
Q. You mentioned that the models are designed in a way that rigs the game from the start. Can you explain that?
A. Basically, the model starts off assuming that the economy is already optimal, and is already working the best that it can. When you assume that, then the inevitable outcome of any policy to intervene in the economy is, by definition, going to cost money instead of saving money. And of course, that’s not a logical outcome. These economists were assuming things like that renewable energy will always cost eight times more than fossil fuels, even 100 years into the future. They ignored all the benefits of avoiding climate change. Without any sort of evidence, they would say things like, “Climate change is not going to hurt the economy until around the year 2100.” They only add the costs of moving away from fossil fuels.
Q. Did anyone catch those errors in calculations back when they were done?
A. Some people did notice at the time. When I’m reading the historical record, I’ll sometimes see somebody like Florentine Krause, director of the International Project for Sustainable Energy Paths, say, “Hey, it looks like these models were designed to come up with this answer.” But these were lone voices in the wilderness.
Q. We’ve been talking for years about science denial, and how companies like Exxon publicly denied the problem even when their own scientists were warning them of the changes underway. Why do you think the contributions of economists to this disinformation campaign have been able to fly under the radar for so long?
A. These economists weren’t completely alone in their approach. Charles River Associates was simply the preferred source for the industry. We might laugh at some proclamations in these economic reports, like that climate change is not going to hurt us until the year 2100. But what surprised me the most is that I found even more outlandish things said by prestigious professors at universities like Stanford, heads of departments, who themselves were getting a lot of funding from the oil and gas industry. They used their academic credentials to kind of launder their bad science.
Q. Has the strategy changed or mutated in more recent years? Are the same economists writing reports today like the ones you found in the 1980s and 1990s?
A. A lot of the consultants working on climate left Charles River Associates around the same time, and they ended up at NERA, or National Economic Research Associates. That was actually the firm that produced the report that former President Trump cited to justify leaving the Paris Agreement. So the firms change, and sometimes the people change, there are new people that get involved over time, and others retire. But the basic strategy has stayed largely the same for over 30 years now.
Q. What do you think should be the main takeaway from these new findings?
A. For decades, economists have been inflating the cost of action, and downplaying the cost of inaction. And largely, they’ve been doing that based on an outmoded economic paradigm. Just because a lot of people have built their careers based on this approach, it’s not a good enough reason to keep doing it, if it’s hurting us.
To help Michigan reach its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced last month that the state will construct the nation’s first wireless electric vehicle charging road — a one-mile stretch in the Metro Detroit area.
“Michigan was home to the first mile of paved road, and now we’re paving the way for the roads of tomorrow,” Whitmer said in a press release, “with innovative infrastructure that will support the economy and the environment.”
A wireless EV road works like this: As a car drives over it, the vehicle’s battery is charged by pads or coils built under the surface of the street using magnetic induction. It doesn’t give the car a full charge, but it helps add some additional mileage to a vehicle before its next complete powering up.
The project is still in the very early stages: The Michigan Department of Transportation began accepting proposals for the project on September 28. Until one is selected, it’s unknown exactly where the road will be, what it will look like, the precise cost, or how soon it could be operational. But some are questioning whether the project is worth it. Is it the best use of funds in a state with poor transit and crumbling infrastructure? And how will it even work, particularly in a place with harsh weather extremes like the Midwest?
“It’s just not feasible or economically viable,” said Chris Mi, chair of the electrical and computer engineering department at San Diego State University who is an expert on electric vehicle charging. A one-mile demonstration is doable, he told Grist, but at the larger scale there are several practical and economic barriers.
Making new cars compatible with a wireless charging road tacks on thousands of dollars to the cost of a vehicle. “You have to build a receiver that is capable of receiving that kind of power,” Mi said, a price tag that could be high enough that no one would buy the car. Current electric vehicles would not be able to utilize the new road without purchasing an after-market receiver.
“We are encouraged by the state’s enthusiasm for electrification and look forward to continuing to work with the state as this project progresses,” Daniel Flores, a spokesperson for General Motors told Grist. “But it’s too early to comment on details that are still in development.”
Mi also estimated that a driver would gain just seven to 10 miles of charge from driving 60 miles per hour on the one-mile road, assuming a charge rate of 120 kilowatts per hour. It has yet to be decided, however, what rate the new Metro Detroit road will charge — it could be lower than the engineer’s estimate.
Weather is another major issue. “Michigan in the winter gets potholes all over the place, which means any of the wireless transmission systems you buried down in the road will be damaged in a couple of years,” Mi, told Grist, having researched wireless charging at the University of Michigan for several years.
According to the Michigan Department of Transportation, $1.9 million has been allocated for the new wireless charging road. A similar project built in Sweden in 2018, the world’s first,cost $2.4 million.
That’s a good chunk of money in a state that ranks 36 for transportation quality out of all U.S. states, according to an analysis by U.S. News. Some transportation advocates argue that it might make more sense to direct funds into improving Michigan’s current public transit systems instead. Using buses, light rail, and subways can result in a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions for a two-person household. But, in Michigan, it’s hard to use the transit that already exists.
Until 2017, Detroit was the largest metropolis in the U.S. without surface rail transit. Since its completion a few years ago, the new system’s been wrought with issues, from extreme delays to slow speed to being shut down for much of the COVID-19 pandemic. Detroit’s bus system struggles too, and has gotten worse during COVID. Over the past year and a half, the city’s bus system has reduced routes and hours, increased regular wait times, had delays up to three hours, and in some cases the buses never come at all.
In Detroit, 92 percent of public transit riders are of color. For these riders, unreliable transit threatens their ability to keep jobs, attend appointments, get groceries, and pick up kids.
“It’s an equity issue,” said David Gifford, who created a guide to transit in Detroit and is on the board of Transportation Riders United, a local advocacy group. He told Grist that while Michigan subsidizes automakers and electric vehicle programs, it tells bus riders they have to pay for improved service themselves. “It’s very unfair, the way we fund our transportation,” he said.
Mi told Grist it would make more sense to build wireless charging stations at bus stops. The bus would stop for a few minutes, charge up, and go on its way. With such a system, the city’s buses would be cheaper too, because their batteries wouldn’t need to be as big. Or, Mi said, Michigan could try wireless roads at rest stops along the highway.
Todd Scott is a member of the Council on Climate Solutions for the State of Michigan, a group that advises Governor Whitmer on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and transitioning toward a carbon neutral economy. In the work he’s done with the Council, he told Grist he’s seen a “strong bias towards just producing more electric vehicles versus actually reducing carbon emissions.”
“There’s an unwillingness to even accept our responsibility for the situation that we’re in today,” he said. “It’s almost as if the climate crisis is seen as an economic opportunity for Michigan to make and sell more stuff, rather than a climate crisis that we need to deal with.”
This story is part of the series Getting to Zero: Decarbonizing Cascadia, which explores the path to low-carbon energy for British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. This project is produced in partnership with InvestigateWest and other media outlets.
A little over ten years ago, Vancouver city officials outlined a big, ambitious goal: to become the greenest city in the world by 2020. To learn what happened next, watch the video above or read staff reporter Shannon Osaka’s article on Vancouver’s journey to become the greenest city in the world.
We know how to decarbonize energy production with renewable fuels and land transportation with electric vehicles. Blueprints for greening shipping and aircraft are being drawn up. But what about the big industrial processes? They look set to become decarbonization holdouts — the last and hardest CO2 emissions that we must eliminate if we are to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. In particular, how are we to green the three biggest globally-vital heavy industries: steel, cement, and ammonia, which together emit around a fifth of anthropogenic CO2?
Our modern urban environments are largely constructed from concrete — which is made from cement — and steel. Most of our food is grown through the application of fertilizer made from ammonia. These most ubiquitous industrial materials are produced at huge expense of energy and carbon dioxide emissions.
Their staid industries have prospered for over a century using largely unchanged manufacturing processes. But the urgent need to produce green ammonia, steel, and cement is starting to shake them up. Research is providing new options for fundamental changes to chemical processes. And in recent weeks, leading players have announced major initiatives in each of these three crunch industries.
Two emerging technologies are advertising themselves as the “solutions” to decarbonizing problem industries. One is carbon capture and storage (CCS), which aims to capture stack CO2 emissions and bury them in geological structures such as old oilfields or salt mines. The other is “green hydrogen,” made by splitting water using renewable energy. Some see green hydrogen as the dream fuel of the future, powering everything from planes and power stations to homes and heavy industry.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in June that “clean hydrogen is a game changer,” because it “will help decarbonize high-polluting heavy-duty and industrial sectors.”
But both technologies face technical criticism and accusations of hype. CCS is accused of being designed more to prolong the future of fossil-fuel industries than to decarbonize the world’s economy. And even green hydrogen, which is essentially a conveyor of renewable energy, seems pointless for applications where the renewable energy can be used directly — by plugging in electric vehicles, for instance.
Yet each may have a role in certain industries, industry analysts say. “Primary steel and ammonia production are sensible entry points for green hydrogen,” Falko Ueckerdt of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research told Yale Environment 360. Hydrogen is very efficient at fueling high-temperature industrial processes, for instance, so green hydrogen could sometimes be the real deal for heavy industries that currently require fossil fuels as part of the process (steel), already use hydrogen (fertilizer), or need the high temperatures hydrogen is good at producing (cement).
Let’s take each of these industries. What do they need to decarbonize?
Steel manufacture is currently responsible for 11 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Most production starts by burning coal with iron ore in a blast furnace. The coal generates heat but is part of the chemical process in the furnace. It strips oxygen from the ore to make pure iron, known as pig iron, which is turned into steel in an electric arc furnace. But the waste product — from combining carbon in the coal with the oxygen in the ore — is large quantities of carbon dioxide. The entire process emits an average 2.2 tons of CO2 for every ton of steel.
So what can be done to reduce these emissions?
Concrete being poured last October at the site of the Winthrop Center, a skyscraper under construction in Boston.
DAVID L. RYAN/THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES
More efficient use and recycling of the product should always be the first avenue pursued. Recycling avoids the blast-furnace stage, with its heavy emissions. The scrap is fed into an electric arc furnace, which typically produces only 0.3 tons of CO2 for every ton of steel. Emissions could be reduced further by switching away from fossil fuels to produce the electricity. But the potential gains from recycling are limited, according to analysts. Around 85 percent of discarded steel is already collected for recycling. But steel’s long in-service life means that this recycled scrap still makes up only around a third of total steel production, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Widespread adoption of CCS could potentially further reduce emissions. But bigger gains may arise from abandoning the blast furnace altogether. The main alternative approach for making pig iron is to run a huge direct electric current through the ore. This process, known as electrolysis, is how bauxite ore is turned into aluminum. The energy demands are huge, but without the need for coal as part of the process itself, that energy could come from a low-carbon source, such as green hydrogen. So green hydrogen is seen as vital to green steel.
This hydrogen route is currently being tried in Europe, under state subsidies, by both ArcelorMittal, the world’s second-largest steel manufacturer, and in a project announced earlier this month in the Netherlands by India-owned Tata Steel.
It could catch on. An attractive approach would be to make the hydrogen on the same site as the steel. It represents a “huge opportunity” for Australia, which has both big iron ore mines and plentiful solar energy, according to Jessica Allen and Tony Honeyands of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, “It would boost our exports, help offset inevitable job losses in the fossil fuel industry, and go a long way to tackling climate change,” they argued in a recent blog post.
The manufacture of ammonia fertilizer has been one of the fastest-growing industries worldwide over the past half-century. It was the bedrock of the agricultural green revolution of the late 20th century and today nourishes the crops that feed 40 percent of the world’s population. Fertilizer is by far the main use of the 176 million tons of ammonia produced annually.
Ammonia is made using the Haber-Bosch process, invented by German chemist Fritz Haber in 1908. It won him a Nobel Prize a decade later. The process is in two stages. First it manufactures hydrogen, usually from natural gas; then it synthesizes the hydrogen with atmospheric nitrogen. To do this requires breaking the tight bonds that hold together molecules of nitrogen in the air, and that requires high pressures and temperatures of around 500 degrees C.
Both hydrogen production and ammonia synthesis are energy-intensive. The entire process, carried out in giant industrial plants, emits roughly two tons of CO2 for every ton of ammonia and is responsible for around 2 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Fertilizers are one of the most wastefully used of all high-carbon products. Less than half of what is poured onto fields gets anywhere near roots — a proportion that has been falling in recent years, according to Xin Zhang, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland. This not only causes unnecessary CO2 emissions, but also floods the natural environment with nitrogen — creating algal blooms in rivers and dead zones in the oceans, and damaging biodiversity almost everywhere. So using fertilizer more efficiently should be a high priority.
But beyond that, both stages of the fertilizer production process need to be decarbonized. The first stage, making hydrogen, should be the most achievable. In April this year, the world’s largest ammonia manufacturer, CF Industries, announced plans to “green” part of the hydrogen production at its largest production complex, in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. It is installing German-made equipment to make hydrogen by splitting water, using renewable energy.
Decarbonizing the second stage, ammonia synthesis, requires a major improvement on — or replacement of — the existing process. Justin Hargreaves at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, says catalysts are key to the process. They are necessary to break the strong bond of the nitrogen molecule so the element can combine with hydrogen.
A tractor sprays fertilizer on a wheat field in North Yorkshire, England.
STEVE ALLEN TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
The Haber-Bosch process uses an iron catalyst. But ever since its invention, the game has been on to find something that works efficiently at lower temperatures and pressures. “Tackling low-temperature ammonia synthesis is one of those holy grails of chemistry,” says Levi Thompson, a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan. But the chemical necessary to achieve this has so far eluded researchers.
“Nature does it,” Hargreaves told e360. “Nitrogen fixation by bacteria in plant roots happens under ambient conditions, with no high temperatures or pressures. But rates of production are too slow to be practical for large-scale production.” The hope is that the right catalyst could change that. “It is a big prize, if we could do it,” Hargreaves said.
Plenty of industrialists are in the game. A Japanese company, JGC, has a trial plant at Fukushima combining solar energy to make green hydrogen using a new ruthenium catalyst that it has developed for ammonia synthesis. The company claims to have cut the pressure needed for manufacture by three-quarters. Another Japanese team, headed by Hideo Hosono at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, is championing a lanthanum-cobalt catalyst. He claims it cuts the temperature required to 400 degrees C.
Some foresee future processes that ditch the conventional Haber-Bosch process entirely. In June, Doug MacFarlane and colleagues at Monash University in Australia, announced success in developing an electrochemical process for breaking the nitrogen bonds that could produce ammonia at room temperatures. They say the key was the addition of phosphonium salt, which dramatically speeded up reactions.
The third carbon dinosaur — and potentially the most difficult to reform — is Portland cement, so named because it resembles a building stone quarried on Portland, a peninsula in southern England. It was invented in 1824 by an English stonemason called Joseph Aspdin. The manufacturing process mixes chalk or limestone (calcium carbonate) with clay and cooks the mix in a kiln at 1450 degrees C, triggering chemical changes that create a hard solid, called clinker, which is combined with gypsum to make cement. The cement is then mixed with aggregates and water to create concrete.
The high temperatures in the kiln require a lot of energy, typically gained from burning fossil fuels that emit CO2. In addition, when the calcium carbonate is converted in the kiln, the main by-product is yet more carbon dioxide. When the kiln fuel is coal, kilns emit around one ton of CO2 for every ton of cement manufactured.
Every year more than 4 billion tons of Portland cement are produced worldwide, more than half a ton for every inhabitant on the planet. It makes our world of dams, roads, bridges, tower blocks, sea walls, and parking lots. And it is responsible for around 8 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
How to change this? While most of the world’s steel gets recycled, very little of its concrete does. Buildings could be designed to be taken apart again and their components used again. But few are. When wrecking-ball teams arrive, little of the rubble they create finds any future use, other than landfill or as aggregate. That needs to change, says Brian Norton of the Dublin Institute of Technology. “Buildings … should be designed to be easily disassembled at the end of their use.” Or we could use other construction materials, such as sustainably sourced timber.
But what of the cement production process itself?
If the coal in the kiln were replaced by green hydrogen, that could cut overall CO2 emissions — but only by about a third. So something needs to be done to get rid of the CO2 generated by the production process.
One means is CCS to capture the CO2 emissions. The IEA, in a recent report on pathways to net-zero, saw CCS contributing up to 55 percent of potential emissions reductions in the industry by 2050. Another way is to find industrial uses for the CO2. Earlier this month, French cement producer Vicat announced plans to divert 40 percent of the CO2 from its kiln at Montalieu-Vercieu near Lyon to manufacture methanol to fuel new containers ships being built by the world’s largest shipping line, Maersk.
Cement factories in China along the Yangtze River.
TIM GRAHAM / GETTY IMAGES
But there are also decarbonizing options for changing the raw materials of the cement production process. The IEA says that potentially as much as half the clinker in cement could be replaced with other materials, ranging from raw limestone to fly ash from power stations, discarded tires, and domestic refuse.
More radically, German researchers in a study published last month suggested that at least half of the limestone in the kiln could be replaced by alumina-rich clay, known as Balterra clay, that often overlies geological reserves of bauxite, the raw material of aluminum. Herbert Pollmann of the Martin-Luther-University in Germany says this calcium sulphoaluminate cement both avoids the CO2 emissions from firing calcium carbonate and cuts firing temperatures from 1450 degrees C to 1250 degrees C. “Our method not only releases less CO2 during the chemical conversion, but also when heating the rotary kilns,” Pollmann says, potentially reducing overall emissions by two-thirds.
Another potential solution, invented 20 years ago by Australian industrial chemist John Harrison, replaces limestone with a similar rock, magnesium carbonate, often known as magnesite, found in the mineral magnetite and in mixtures with calcium carbonate such as rocks known as dolomite, which roast at much lower temperatures, around 650 degrees C, so requiring only half the energy. But Harrison says magnesium carbonate’s biggest benefit is the ability of the resulting concrete to absorb atmospheric CO2 while in use.
This “carbonation” carries on as long as the material is exposed to the air, potentially recapturing all the CO2 released when it was made. Thus, he says, structures made of his “eco-cement” could act rather like a tree — constantly taking up CO2.
Regular cement also carbonates, but Harrison says his version continues much longer. This contention was challenged five years ago when a study suggested carbonation of conventional cement was greater than generally realized. Unnoticed by climate scientists, the study found, “existing cement stocks worldwide absorb approximately one billion tons of atmospheric CO2 each year.”
Still, Michael Taylor of the London-based Mineral Products Association believes Harrison’s invention has potential value. Its main problem, he suggests, may be the notorious conservatism of the cement industry. Initial costs for new formulations are high, and providing the durability of the finished product could take decades. “Innovators … experience this conservatism as a considerable barrier, and may believe it has been raised simply to frustrate their objectives,” Taylor says.
It is a familiar problem. But, as with steel and ammonia, political pressure for greener processes could change that.
For years, environmental researchers have been trying to understand if providing a decent living for everyone on Earth would be at odds with reaching our most ambitious climate goals. After all, eradicating poverty means consuming more energy: paving new roads, building hospitals and schools, and providing decent housing with clean water and heating. Some researchers have even argued that the world needs to decide “what level of poverty we’re OK with” if we want to stay on track with reaching climate goals.
New research, however, finds that eradicating poverty while still meeting global climate targets may not be such a lofty ideal after all.
The paper, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, calculates how much extra energy nations need to guarantee that everyone has access to “decent living” by 2040. Building the new infrastructure needed to eradicate poverty means spending a total of 290 exajoules in the coming years, the study found, or less than three-quarters of our current annual global energy use. (One exajoule = 174 million barrels of oil, or 277,777 gigawatt-hours of renewable power). Maintaining the services that keep people out of poverty would require an extra 69 exajoules each year after 2040.
To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, nations must spend no more than 600 exajoules each year by 2050, according to previous estimates. The scientists said that while economies like the United States, European Union, and China will still need to reduce their energy consumption and emissions, the new findings indicate there is plenty of room in a climate-conscious global energy budget to lift populations out of poverty.
“The message is quite optimistic for once,” said Joel Millward-Hopkins, a sustainability researcher at the University of Leeds who was not involved in the study. “What the findings do is put into perspective how little energy use you would actually need to eradicate poverty.”
About 689 million people live under the extreme poverty line (meaning subsisting on less than $1.9 per day), or about 9.2 percent of the global population, most of them living in sub-Saharan Africa. The pandemic sank an additional 115 million people into poverty, according to the World Bank. Yet there’s little research connecting the international commitment to “eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere by 2030” made by members of the United Nations in 2015’s Sustainable Development Goals, with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement signed that same year. “[This paper] kind of fills the gap that was missing,” Millward-Hopkins said.
To reach their conclusions, the scientists first had to decide what indicator of poverty they wanted to use, said Jarmo Kikstra, an energy and climate researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and lead author of the new study. They decided to use a universal definition for decent living standards, which considers people’s access to things that ensure basic human wellbeing — material items such as transportation, shelter, clothing, and food, as well as immaterial things for health and socialization, like schooling and access to communication services like Wifi.
Then, they amassed as much data as they could find for every country from different sources, like the World Bank and national surveys. The researchers ran the data through formulas that took into account the regional differences between countries — in warmer areas, for example, people might need cooling in their homes, but less clothing or access to heated housing than in colder places, Kikstra explained. Likewise, in large, sparsely populated countries like Mongolia or Australia, people might travel longer distances more regularly than people in smaller, more dense countries like Fiji.
Kikstra and his colleagues soon found they had some serious data gaps they needed to fill. “There is not really that much data on how much people travel, for example,” he said. Coming up with what constitutes decent healthcare (Health centers? Hospital beds? The number of doctors available?) and education was also tricky, Kikstra told Grist. In those cases, the scientists used previous research that calculated how much energy is used per dollar spent on healthcare or education, and then multiplied those numbers by the amount of money needed to build new infrastructure.
Using this approach, they found that the actual number of people who don’t have a decent living is larger than the World Bank’s poverty estimates. The numbers were particularly problematic in sub-Saharan Africa, where 60 percent live below decent living standards. In that region, less than 20 percent of people had access to clean cooking, cold storage, and means of transport.
To reverse that trend, governments in sub-Saharan Africa would need to triple their energy expenditures in the coming decades, the study found, an extremely unlikely scenario considering that energy use in the region has been stalled for two decades. “It surprised me how big that implementation challenge really is,” Kikstra said. “If you are growing super fast [economically], perhaps it is not so difficult to provide people with enough energy. But most countries in sub-Saharan Africa have not seen that kind of energy growth.”
The paper, Millward-Hopkins said, is an incomplete picture of the possibilities of human well-being. After all, it doesn’t include aspects like security or access to things like art and recreation. But that doesn’t mean the research is not valuable, he said.
“If some historian looked back in 150 years and [found this paper, they would] say, ‘Oh, they kind of knew this was possible, but then they let billions of people just really suffer.’ I think that’s important.”
For the last four months, the Line 5 pipeline running under the Great Lakes has been carrying 23 million gallons of oil and gas each day, defying orders from Michigan’s Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, that the line be shut down. Protests have ensued. The Bay Mills Indian Community has banned the pipeline’s owner, Enbridge Energy, from its land. And Enbridge and Whitmer have been ordered into mediation by the court. The saga has grabbed national headlines, serving as the latest example of the fight over the future of fossil fuel infrastructure in the United States.
Now, new testimony from scientists has revealed the implications of future plans for Line 5, including the construction of a tunnel over part of the pipeline and the continued flow of oil through the system. According to the analysis, the tunnel project and pipeline could contribute an additional 27 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere annually, and generate $41 billion in climate damages between 2027 and 2070.
The testimony was provided by Peter Erickson, a senior scientist and climate policy director for the Stockholm Environment Institute, as well as by Peter Howard, an economic policy expert at New York University’s School of Law. The findings were submitted in a case before the Michigan Public Service Commission, which is deciding whether to grant Enbridge Energy a permit to encase a portion of Line 5 that runs through the Straits of Mackinac, an environmentally sensitive channel connecting Lake Michigan to Lake Huron. It’s the first time any Michigan agency has agreed to consider greenhouse gas emissions in its analysis under the Michigan Environmental Protection Act.
“By enabling the continued, long-term production and combustion of oil, construction of the project would work against, and therefore be inconsistent with, the goals of the global Paris Agreement and Michigan’s Healthy Climate Plan,” Erickson said in the testimony.
Michigan’s Healthy Climate Plan was created by Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 to develop new clean energy jobs and put Michigan on track to achieving carbon neutrality by mid-century. The goals of the Paris Agreement are to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius before catastrophic climate changes occur. To reach that goal, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that global oil production and use must decrease by 3 percent annually through 2050.
“Enbridge is likely to argue that there is no feasible alternative,” Margrethe Kearney, senior attorney at the Environmental Law & Policy Center, told Grist. But according to Elizabeth Stanton, founder of the Applied Economics Clinic, and other economic experts who testified in the permit case, Michigan’s energy needs can be met without the fossil fuels pumping through Line 5, mainly with electrification and renewable energy.
Enbridge is expected to submit its testimony to the Michigan Public Service Commission in December. A decision will be made in 2022.
In other Line 5 news this week, mediation between Governor Whitmer and Enbridge officially ended on Tuesday without a settlement. Whitmer ordered Enbridge Energy to shut down Line 5 by May, citing concerns of a possible spill from the 68-year-old pipeline. But Enbridge refused, and today Line 5 continues to carry millions of gallons of oil each day.
The court-ordered mediation that began in April was a standard procedure to attempt to resolve the issue outside of court. The groups had an original expected end date of August but pushed it back to September. Now, with still no final settlement reached, the mediator plans to submit an additional report with recommendations, something that Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel says violates the terms of their position as mediator. Nessel has filed a complaint asking the judge to prohibit or disregard any additional reports filed by the mediator.
Against the backdrop of the conflict in court, protests against Line 5 continue. Earlier this month, groups united internationally to demand that the Canadian government stop supporting Line 5. Canadian officials, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, citing economic concerns and energy security, have urged the court to stall the shutdown of the pipeline, which transports oil from western Canada to Michigan and on to eastern Canada.
“This is sort of the moment when the climate issue is really coming to a head in Michigan,” Kearney told Grist, referencing Whitmer’s commitments to reducing carbon emissions and recent flooding and other severe weather events in the state likely made worse by climate change. “We have an opportunity to say, ‘Let’s not build more fossil fuel infrastructure.’”
