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.’”
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed one of the nation’s most ambitious state-level clean energy plans into law on Wednesday.
“After years of debate and discussion, science has prevailed, and we are charting a new future that works to mitigate the impacts of climate change here in Illinois,” Pritzker said in a statement.
The Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, or SB 2408, puts Illinois on track for a carbon-free power sector by 2045 and 100 percent clean energy by 2050. It includes equity and electric transportation provisions, holds utilities accountable, and increases funding for renewables. The legislation makes Illinois the first Midwest state to require a carbon-free future, joining California, Hawaii, New Mexico, New York, Virginia, and Washington.
Jeff Deyette, the director of state policy and analysis for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy program, said the bill is unique because it goes beyond clean energy targets by centering communities and people in a way that other states’ commitments haven’t.
“This could serve as a catalyst to Congress, to show there’s an urgency here to act,” said Deyette. “What Illinois has shown is that diverse stakeholders can come together.” He added that Illinois is the first major coal-producing state in the nation to commit to a carbon-free future.
The new law calls for the shutdown of all of the state’s fossil fuel plants by 2045, increases community solar funding five-fold, and expands energy efficiency programs, especially in disadvantaged communities. Over $115 million will be invested in funding job hubs, career development, and support for small business owners in environmental justice communities. An additional $78 million will go to electric transportation targeted towards disadvantaged communities, things like rebates for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure.
“I was just really pleased that we were able to [agree to] close all of the coal and natural gas plants by 2045,” said Jennifer Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council.
Advocates say that while they wanted even more money for equity work in the final law, what Illinois passed still has the most ambitious clean energy equity provisions in the country.
“The number of equity programs that are in here are so important,” Walling told Grist. The law includes programs like contractor incubators to help train workers of color, as well as wraparound services to address barriers to employment like child care and transportation.
“It’s really the holistic nature of it that makes it as nation-leading as it is,” said Christie Hicks, lead counsel on energy markets and utility regulation for the Environmental Defense Fund. “The Midwest has been ignored as a place where climate and clean energy progress are a top priority, but they are.”
Illinois came close to passing an earlier version of a new clean energy law during its last legislative session that ended in May, but a last minute debate over whether or not to close the Prairie State Coal plant derailed agreement on the bill. Prairie State is one of the 10 biggest industrial carbon dioxide emitters in the United States. In the bill passed by state legislators earlier this week, and signed into law by Governor Pritzker, Prairie State will be required to slash its emissions by 45 percent by 2038, and to close altogether by 2045.
Another topic of hot debate during the last session was subsidies for nuclear power plants owned by the Illinois-based utility Exelon. Exelon had threatened to close some of the plants if they weren’t given subsidies, which would have threatened Pritzker’s clean energy timeline goals. In the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, Exelon will receive $700 million over the next five years to keep three nuclear plants open. The subsidies will fall on customers, adding an estimated $2 to $15 to their monthly energy bills, according to estimates made by Democrats on the lower end and estimates on the higher end made by AARP Illinois.
Opponents of the bill have raised concerns about rate hikes to customers, including State Senator Steve McClure, who said in a statement that the bill is the biggest rate hike in Illinois history and would reduce the stability of the power grid, as well as take away property rights for landowners.
Representative Mike Murphy was similarly concerned about increased rates for the city of Springfield residents, due to the law’s required closing of Springfield’s municipal coal plant.
J.C. Kibbey, a clean energy advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he hopes Illinois’ new law inspires other Midwest states to pass their own clean energy bills. “The impacts of climate change are hurting us everywhere,” Kibbey said. “The Midwest is warming faster even than the rest of the country and we’re feeling the impacts here in the form of floods, droughts, and heat waves.”
He added, “I hope that it shows that climate change, and clean energy are important, politically salient, and winning issues in the Midwest.”
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Windfarm installations are expected to double to record global levels this year, after a short-lived COVID-19 slowdown, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, or GWEC.
The group’s annual report found that the world’s offshore windfarm capacity grew by 6.1 gigawatts (GW) last year, down slightly from a record 6.24 GW in 2019, but would rebound to more than 12 GW in 2021 powered by an offshore wind boom in China.
China led the world in new installations for the third year in a row with more than 3 GW of offshore wind grid connected in 2020, and remains on track to surpass the UK as the world’s biggest offshore wind market by the end of the decade.
The world’s second largest economy connected more than 3 GW of offshore wind to its electricity grid last year, almost half the global total, while installations in smaller Asian countries such as Taiwan and Vietnam stalled due to COVID-19 delays.
GWEC has forecast a fresh record year for offshore wind growth in 2021 as China’s wind industry rushes to install 7.5 GW before the expiry of government subsidies at the end of this year.
The future of the industry’s growth is also expected to be powered by a record year for offshore wind financing, according to the report, after the $8 billion investment in the world’s biggest offshore windfarm off the United Kingdom’s Yorkshire coast.
The Dogger Bank offshore windfarm, to be built by SSE and Norwegian energy giant Equinor, will use the biggest turbines in the world to generate enough renewable electricity to power 4.5 million UK homes.
Ben Backwell, the chief executive of GWEC, said the offshore wind industry has continued “to break records, reduce prices, and innovate to new heights and depths” while generating socioeconomic benefits.
“But as the G20 recognized at its most recent summit, we are in a climate emergency and we can no longer be content with simply breaking records — the scale of growth we need to achieve for the future of our planet goes beyond anything we have seen before,” he added.
GWEC expects the offshore wind industry to deliver 235 GW of new capacity over the next decade under current government policies, more than seven times the existing global offshore wind total, but warned that the pace of growth will need to accelerate to meet global climate targets.
The report has called for “a step-change in political action” in order to streamline planning and permitting regimes and reduce red tape.
Under an analysis undertaken by the International Energy Agency and the International Renewable Energy Agency, the world may need up to 2,000 GW of offshore wind by 2050 to have a chance of keeping global temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels, which is crucial to avert catastrophic levels of global heating.
“The offshore industry believes they can meet this challenge, but there is a clear target and policy gap that countries need to fill for the industry to deliver,” Backwell said.
The world’s largest plant capable of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and stashing it securely underground has officially been switched on.
About half an hour outside of Reykjavik, Iceland, nestled between green, rolling hills sits an array of eight rectangular steel boxes arranged in a U shape. Each box, about the size of a shipping container, holds fans and filters that pull in air and trap carbon dioxide molecules. Heat piped into the boxes releases the CO2 from the filters, after which it is combined with water and pumped deep underground. There, the CO2 that was once helping to warm the atmosphere reacts with basalt rock and will turn into stone over the course of two years.
This network of boxes, fans, and pipes is called Orca, and it is a partnership between Climeworks, a company that designs and operates “direct air capture” machines, and Carbfix, a company that turns CO2 into stone. As of Wednesday, Orca has begun removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for anyone willing to pay the price.
Climeworks
It is a major milestone for the carbon removal industry, which could become essential to keeping the planet at a livable temperature. Plants like Orca can be used to offset greenhouse gas emissions that are near-impossible to eliminate, like those from agriculture, and they might also eventually help reverse global warming.
The companies behind Orca claim that it can capture and store up to 4,000 metric tons of CO2 per year. Not only is it the largest direct air capture plant in the world, but it is also the only one that both runs on renewable energy — it sits on the site of the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant — and securely stores carbon underground. Thanks to these features, Climeworks boasts that over its whole lifespan, including construction, operations, and recycling, Orca will re-emit less than 10 percent of the carbon dioxide it captures. (Other proposed or operating direct air capture plants run on natural gas and sell captured CO2 for use in products like soda that eventually re-emit it, or to oil companies that use it to edge more oil out of the ground.)
A Carbfix injection well that neighbors the Orca plant.
Climeworks
The price, however, is steep. Individuals can pay between $8 and $55 per month to remove 85 to 600 kilograms of CO2 from the atmosphere per year, which translates to roughly $1,100 per metric ton. In the past, the company has named costs between $600 and $800 per metric ton, though Bloomberg Green reports that those rates are for bulk buyers like Bill Gates.
An example of the rock that forms when the CO2 reacts with basalt
Climeworks
While it’s the first of its kind, Orca’s 4,000 tons per year is nowhere near a climate-relevant scale. Estimates of how much carbon removal the world might need to deploy to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement range from 1.5 million metric tons per year to 15 million.
A key trade-off that might limit the potential of direct air capture is that it requires lots of energy to separate CO2 from the ambient air. During an event unveiling Orca on Wednesday, Climeworks cofounders Christophe Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher were cagey when asked what the plant’s energy use and costs are.
“The simple answer is today, we just don’t know,” said Wurzbacher. “The Orca plant will tell us, but not today. It will tell us in a year, two years from now about how the economics work out at that scale, how the performance works out — that includes energy consumption.”
An aerial view of Orca
Climeworks
A FAQ section on Climeworks’ website states that the expected energy consumption for scaled-up machines is approximately 2,650 kilowatt-hours to capture just one metric ton of CO2. That’s about a quarter of the energy the average U.S. household consumes in a year.
The company’s goal is to get the price down to $200 to $300 per metric ton by the end of the decade. Gebald alluded to plans in the works to build a new plant within the next two to three years that will be 10 times larger than Orca. Its name? Mammoth.
Editor’s note: Climeworks is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The finance minister of Iraq, one of the founding members of the global oil cartel OPEC, has made an unprecedented call to fellow oil producers to move away from fossil fuel dependency and into renewable energy, ahead of a key OPEC meeting.
Ali Allawi, who is also the deputy prime minister of Iraq, has written in the Guardian to urge oil producers to pursue “an economic renewal focused on environmentally sound policies and technologies” that would include solar power and potentially nuclear reactors, and reduce their dependency on fossil fuel exports.
Along with the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, he wrote: “To stand a chance of limiting the worst effects of climate change, the world needs to fundamentally change the way it produces and consumes energy, burning less coal, oil and natural gas… If oil revenues start to decline before producer countries have successfully diversified their economies, livelihoods will be lost and poverty rates will increase.”
U.S. President Joe Biden controversially called for OPEC to increase oil production further last month, to keep oil prices from rising and assist with the U.S. economic recovery. His plea was rejected.
The Guardian understands Wednesday’s OPEC meeting may also discuss the climate crisis, in an unusual move for the fossil fuel producers, before vital U.N. climate talks called COP26, scheduled for Glasgow in November.
Allawi and Birol suggested current oil price volatility, driven by the pandemic, was only the beginning of problems for producers. The climate crisis will not only require a move away from oil, but will strike the Middle East and North Africa particularly badly, where rising temperatures are already causing severe problems.
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA)recent global roadmap to net zero by 2050 found that global demand for oil was likely to plunge from more than 90 million barrels per day to fewer than 25 million by 2050, resulting in a potential 85 percent drop in revenues for oil-producing economies.
“In a region with one of the youngest and fastest-growing populations in the world, economic hardship and increasing unemployment risk creating broader unrest and instability,” Allawi and Birol wrote.
An alternative to remaining tied to increasingly volatile oil prices would be to invest in renewables, especially solar power. “The energy sector could play a role here by making use of the region’s vast potential for producing and supplying clean energy,” they wrote.
Iraq is a founder member of the cartel that includes many of the world’s biggest producers, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Nigeria, and several other African oil-producing states. The OPEC+ grouping also includes Russia and some smaller producers. Most have been hostile to calls for action on climate change, while some have been dismissive of climate science and Saudi Arabia, in particular, has frequently been obstructive to U.N. negotiations on global climate action.
The IEA warned in May that for the world to stay within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the lower limit set out in the Paris Agreement — to which all OPEC members are signatories — then all new oil exploration must cease from this year.
Asked about the findings, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the energy minister of Saudi Arabia, told reporters after an OPEC meeting in June: “I would have to express my view that I believe it is a sequel of [the] La La Land movie … Why should I take it seriously?”
However, some oil producers have taken a more dovish stance. Oman, which is no longer an OPEC member, is pursuing hydrogen as a potential low-carbon fuel for the future. UAE is also working on hydrogen, and boosting renewables, and recently inaugurated a new nuclear plant. Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan are among other countries in the region with sizeable renewable energy programs.
Birol, one of the world’s leading energy economists, told the Guardian: “More than at any point in history, fundamental changes to the economic model in resource-rich countries look unavoidable. Countries in the region have been making some efforts on the energy transition. There are promising initiatives [among oil producers], but as is the case for many other countries around the world, reaching net zero emissions will require much stronger actions and much greater international collaboration.”
He added: “The IEA has been warning for many years that countries that rely heavily on oil and gas revenues need to move quickly to diversify their economies away from fossil fuels to keep pace with the transition to clean energy. The impact of COVID on the oil market last year gave us a fleeting image of what the region’s economies could look like in the future in a world where demand for oil and gas is structurally weaker — and where countries do not take serious measures to diversify their economies and increase their resilience.”
On Wednesday oil prices fell slightly after analysts said they expected OPEC to stick to its plan of gradually increasing oil production.
Medical professionals around the country rallied on Tuesday against the expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 crude oil pipeline, calling it a threat to human and planetary health.
“The health of Minnesotans is at risk,” said Teddie Potter, director of planetary health at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, addressing a crowd in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Tar sands oil threatens the health and wellness of future generations; we must stop the line.”
Enbridge has said the upgrade is needed for safety reasons, to reduce maintenance needs, and to “create fewer disruptions to landowners and the environment.” But opponents from the medical community disagree. According to Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate, or HPHC — the advocacy group that organized Tuesday’s nationwide protests — the project poses both immediate and long-term threats to Minnesota communities and Indigenous peoples, whether from an oil spill or from the pipeline’s contribution to climate change.
Vishnu Laalitha Surapaneni, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota who helped organize the rally in St. Paul, told Grist she is particularly worried about the pipeline’s potential impact on water quality. “We’re in the Land of 10,000 Lakes,” she explained, using Minnesota’s unofficial nickname. “This is not something that is compatible with healthy water.”
In the case of an oil spill, Surapaneni and others have raised concern about the tar sands oil that will be transported through Line 3, a heavy kind of crude oil known as bitumen. To facilitate its flow through pipelines, Enbridge mixes bitumen with a diluent — a proprietary concoction whose specific ingredients are a trade secret. But if Enbridge’s diluent is anything like other companies’, HPHC says it likely contains a mixture of carcinogens such as benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene, collectively known as BTEX. Enbridge’s response to Grist’s request for comment did not name the ingredients in its diluent.
There may also be threats from spills of drilling fluid, the substance that Enbridge has been using to lay new sections of pipeline into the ground across Minnesota. Already, Enbridge is under investigation by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency for having spilled drilling fluid 28 times at 12 river crossings. Although Enbridge has said that the drilling fluid is nontoxic and that the spills had “no impacts to any aquifers nor were there downstream impacts,” geologists and environmental experts remain concerned. Spills elsewhere in the country — albeit larger than those in Minnesota — have polluted wetlands and drinking water, and can harm river and wetland ecosystems.
Migizi (Red Lake Nation) stands in front of a police line during a ceremony and demonstration for the water at an Enbridge drill site on the Red Lake River. August 3, 2021.
Chris Trinh / Indigenous Environmental Network
Surapaneni also stressed that the rallies on Tuesday were executed in solidarity with Indigenous water protectors, who have led the fight against Line 3 and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Environmental advocates say that Enbridge’s construction on Anishinaabe territory threatens Indigenous sovereignty and violates Native treaty rights, in part by jeopardizing healthy ecosystems that support tribes’ abilities to fish, hunt, and cultivate wild rice.
“I see it as my responsibility to take a stand,” said Taysha Martineau, a water protector from the Fond du Lac Reservation who spoke at the St. Paul rally. “If they build Line 3, they might as well bury me beneath it. … I will do everything in my power to make sure that no oil flows through that pipe.”
Martineau and many of the health professionals also raised the problem of gender-based violence at construction sites. According to the website for the movement against Line 3, the so-called “man camps” that are built to house pipeline construction workers — most of whom are male — put Indigenous women at a heightened risk of sexual violence and other violent crime. “It is an everyday nightmare for Indigenous mothers all across Turtle Island,” Martineau said, using an Indigenous name for North America. “We don’t know which one of us is next, and it’s a fear we face every day.”
One of the most common refrains from Tuesday’s rally in St. Paul, was that the expanded Line 3 pipeline would hurt public health by contributing to climate change. If the project were completed, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with Line 3 would be equivalent to those produced by 38 million cars — a massive amount of carbon that would require a forest more than twice the size of California to sequester. The planet-warming consequences of these emissions, physicians at the rally warned, would exacerbate health problems for Minnesotans and the broader U.S. population — but especially for lower-income and nonwhite communities.
“I’ve already seen it impact my patients,” Kelly Morrison, an obstetrician and state representative for Minnesota who was invited to speak at the St. Paul rally, told Grist. She cited increasing rates of asthma in Minnesota, as well as cardiovascular and pulmonary issues that have been made worse by wildfire smoke. This year, smoke from fires in Canada — fueled by climate change — has brought some of the worst air quality that the Twin Cities have ever seen.
Morrison noted that Tuesday’s demonstrations were emblematic of a growing willingness within the medical profession to highlight the connections between human and planetary health — “a real sea change for the good,” she said. The Lancet, a leading medical journal, has called climate change the “greatest global health threat facing the world in the 21st century,” with the potential to erase recent decades of health gains from economic development. According to the World Health Organization, global temperature rise may cause a quarter of a million deaths between 2030 and 2050 due to increased heat stress, malnutrition, and diseases like malaria.
While physicians, Indigenous leaders, and policymakers addressed the crowd in St. Paul, a delegation of health care professionals led a short march to the Army Corps of Engineers’ office. They intended to deliver a letter addressed to President Joe Biden, urging him to revoke federal permits for Line 3, but were denied entry to the building. Other groups around the country also attempted to deliver letters to their local offices.
“As a health professional, I see it pure and simple: Climate change is a public health issue,” Surapaneni said. “We need health professionals out of our clinics, out of our hospitals and labs, out in the community and raising our voices.”
This storywas originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
After spending more than 700 days under house arrest, a human rights and environmental lawyer was found guilty last month of criminal contempt in a legal saga that has demonstrated the deep-rooted conflicts of interest layered throughout the judicial system when it comes to climate justice. In Steven Donziger’s conviction, the initial judge who referred him to trial, the second judge who was asked to lead the trial, and the private prosecutors who tried him all had deep ties to Chevron, the company Donziger had won a landmark multibillion-dollar ruling against.
The story began in 2011 when Donziger brought litigation against Texaco (now Chevron) in Ecuador for the harm it caused the Indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the fossil fuel company decided to deliberately discharge 16 billion gallons of toxic waste from its oil sites into rivers, groundwater, and farmland. A refusal from Chevron to adhere to environmental regulations — which earned the company an extra $5 billion over 20 years — led to more than 30,000 Ecuadorians being directly harmed by the oil giant’s actions, the judges in that case found. The case Donziger led made it all the way to the Ecuador Supreme Court, and successfully secured $9.5 billion in environmental damages for the Amazonian communities in a historic climate justice decision.
Chevron never paid those billions of cleanup dollars to Ecuador, and instead launched a legal attack on Donziger in the Southern District of New York, where Judge Lewis A. Kaplan found Donziger guilty of bribery and fraud in a trial without a jury. Kaplan, a former corporate lawyer, held financial investments in Chevron at the time of the decision. When Kaplan required Donziger to turn in his computer, phone, and other personal devices (including passwords) to the court and thus to Chevron, and Donziger refused citing violations to attorney-client privilege, Kaplan charged him with six counts of criminal contempt under Rule 42. As required by that rule, Kaplan was disqualified from hearing the ensuing contempt case, but not before bypassing local rules and hand-selecting the judge and picking the private prosecutors who would oversee the case. He chose District Judge Loretta Preska, who has served on the advisory board of the Federalist Society, a group to which Chevron has been a substantial donor.
In a letter sent to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts at the end of last month, Senators Ed Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse brought into question specifically the use of private prosecutors in the contempt case against Donziger. The three prosecutors that Kaplan appointed, Brian Maloney, Sareen Armani, and Rita Glavin (who is also Andrew Cuomo’s personal lawyer), were all at the time with the law firm Seward & Kissel. That firm had represented Chevron as recently as 2018. “These prosecutions,” the senators wrote, “are highly unusual and can raise concerning questions of fundamental fairness in our criminal justice system.”
Indeed, the apparent conflict of interest the private prosecution had is directly at odds with Supreme Court precedent. In the 1987 decision of Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils, the Supreme Court ruled that, when it comes to private prosecutors pursuing criminal contempt cases, they “certainly should be as disinterested as a public prosecutor who undertakes such a prosecution.”
“Public confidence in the disinterested conduct” of the private prosecutor, the court warned, is essential to maintaining the integrity of the judicial system. That means that even the appearance of interest on the part of the private prosecutor can be considered a violation of Vuitton.
“Appearances are really functionally important for the rule of law, and for our judiciary,” said Guha Krishnamurthi, an associate professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. Krishnamurthi argues that one of the “biggest protections” of the criminal justice system is a disinterested prosecutor who can determine whether or not pursuing a case is to the benefit of the criminal justice system. The fact that a public prosecutor is accountable to the government and to the public, he says, reinforces this protection in a way that private prosecutors do not.
“I think it’s such a clear abuse that it violates the defendant’s constitutional right to due process. You can’t have someone who’s got a conflict of interest, who has personal reasons for wanting to see a person they’re prosecuting convicted,” said Louis Raveson, a professor of law at Rutgers Law School and the founder of the university’s Environmental Law Clinic. “That’s not an appropriate procedure, and, in my view, it’s not a constitutional procedure.”
“This is a perversion of justice, the whole idea that you can have a lawyer who previously worked for Chevron then prosecuting Donziger in the criminal case,” said Martin Garbus, Donziger’s attorney and a prominent veteran of human rights litigation. “It’s clear that it violates the law. … If you look at the body of law that deals with disinterest, people are disqualified for something far, far less than the involvement here.”
Raveson acknowledged that in certain instances, like police brutality cases or other times when the government is being asked to prosecute itself, private prosecutors can be truly beneficial. A private prosecutor there would likely be necessary in order to ensure disinterest and justice, as the public prosecutor works for the government. Often, though, they’re used in cases like Donziger’s, after a disinterested public prosecutor declines to pursue the charge and the judge decides to move forward anyway. “That’s all the more reason that judges need to err on the side of no possibility of a conflict,” Raveson said. Speaking of the Donziger case, he added, “It appears that a conflict is almost inevitable … and clearly that’s not by accident.”
When it comes to the decisions that could prevent one of the largest climate justice judgments of the past decade from taking effect, such appearances of conflict of interest are incredibly significant — and could be detrimental to future climate justice litigation.
“It’s scary going after a large corporation [and] it’s scary going after governments because they have so much power and so much influence that they can do a lot of damage to someone’s life,” Raveson said. “If the lawyers who bring [environmental justice cases like Donziger’s] are subject to biased determinations as to whether or not they should be punished … it’s going to have a deterrent effect on lawyers to bring these kinds of cases.”
Such a deterrence could have massive consequences for the climate, especially at a time when, as this week’s new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed, the world is barreling further toward climate catastrophe, a crisis that is driven in no small part by fossil fuel companies like Chevron. “It’s up to the judiciary to really ensure that that kind of chilling and deterrence … doesn’t happen,” Krishnamurthi added. “And the way you do that is by having more than just the formality of the rules, [but] having a true fidelity to conflicts of interest and disqualifying where necessary.”
Most of the time carbon dioxide gets all the attention as the most villainous of greenhouse gasses, and the industries that pollute the atmosphere with methane would like to keep it that way. The new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, however, presents the data on this secondary greenhouse gas that makes its impact inescapable.
The panel of scientists singled out methane for special attention in this report saying that, in addition to eliminating carbon-dioxide pollution, “strong, rapid and sustained reductions in CH4 [methane] emissions would also limit the warming effect resulting from declining aerosol pollution and would improve air quality.”
It’s easy to play statistical games and downplay the role of methane when figuring out its contribution to climate change, because — while it is much more potent than carbon dioxide — it can break down after a decade, while CO2 can last in the atmosphere for thousands of years. The IPCC report cuts through that complication by zeroing in on the warming observed so far, and showing which greenhouse gases have captured that excess heat. As you can see in the graph below, carbon dioxide is the primary problem, but methane has played a big role.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th Assessment
This caught the eye of Matthew Hayek, who researches the environmental effects of food production at New York University, because agriculture — his area of study — is the largest source of methane emissions (with livestock the chief culprit).
“There’s no brand new information in the report, but there are important refinements and new emphasis. And part of that new emphasis is on methane,” Hayek said.
As a 2020 study showed, methane leaks out of gas pipes and oil wells. It bubbles out of swamps and rice paddies. It seeps from landfills. It gurgles out of the stomachs of livestock, and rises off their manure.
Courtesy of the Global Carbon Project
It’s nearly impossible to stop the methane emissions that naturally come from plants rotting in wetlands, but there are ways of solving most of these problems. Regulators could crack down on leaks, or simply crack down on fossil fuel use. Landfills can capture the gas and use it for fuel. When it comes to agriculture, one of the biggest solutions would be to shift diets away from beef, dairy, and other methane-producing foods. But that last proposal draws immediate backlash from the folks who work in animal agriculture, not to mention meat lovers.
“Meat is an intensely personal issue in a way that fuels are not,” Hayek said, “so you have corporate lobbying playing with societal norms.”
Animal agriculture lobbyists like to point out that methane emissions, though high, have remained steady even as ranchers turn out more hamburgers, milk, and steak. But as the new IPCC report makes clear, it’s not the change in emissions from year to year, but the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that determines how much the world heats up.
It’s not a secret that subsidies for fossil fuels get in the way of decarbonization. Nations from the G20 group —including the U.S. — have pledged to phase out inefficient tax breaks for the fossil fuels industry.
And yet, every year, the U.S. federal and state governments pour around $20.5 billion in subsidies into the oil and gas industry. But there are few concrete numbers that quantify the impact of these subsidies in the nation’s efforts to meet its climate goals. So Ploy Achakulwisut, a climate policy researcher at the Stockholm Environmental Institute, embarked on a project to put a tag on it.
Her team found that, as Achakulwisut puts it, “these [subsidies] are either bad or bad.”
Her research, published in Environmental Research Letters, puts a number on the effects that 16 tax breaks and exemptions will have on 1,000 new U.S. oil and gas production fields projected to be built before 2030. The paper shows that if fossil fuel prices stay high, most of the subsidies — 96 percent in oil, 87 in gas— will go directly to the pockets of investors as profit. And if prices go down, these subsidies will help 60 percent and 74 percent of new oil and gas fields to remain profitable. The authors estimate that by helping the industry stay profitable in either scenario, these subsidies could add 150 million tons of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere in 2030.
“We have to reduce emissions, but we also have to stop doing things that increase emissions; these things go hand in hand,” said Daniel Bresette, director of the non-profit Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and who wasn’t involved in the study. “This report helps demonstrate how what we’re doing now is exacerbating the [high-emissions] situation that we’re in right now.”
The research took “many, many hours of programming,” Achakulwisut explains. Before even getting started, the team had to define what they would consider a subsidy. They used the World Trade Organization’s definition because it allowed them to include benefits that are not explicit tax breaks, like state and federal help in paying well cleanup costs or the public coverage of road damage costs. The team found 16 subsidies dating back decades. Simultaneously, they went into a database that includes all the gas and oil fields that are projected to be built from 2020 to 2030, around 1000. Then, they tested the profitability of each field in 20 different price scenarios, with and without each individual subsidy.
Unsurprisingly, the team found that the Accelerated Deduction Intangible exploration and Development Costs tax break (IDC) had the biggest effect of all evaluated supports for the industry. The tax break is a 1916 exemption that allows oil companies to deduct the cost of new wells from their taxes, which could bump up the annual growth of oil and gas investments by 11 and 8 percent, respectively.
But, since they went with a definition of subsidies that allowed them to include indirect benefits as a subsidy, they were able to make interesting points about other forms of government support for the industry, Bresette points out. Transferring part of the costs of closing and cleaning up wells to the government, the team found, made every new well $60,000 cheaper (and that value doesn’t even account for the health and environmental costs associated with abandoned wells.) Over time, a series of complicated loopholes has left 2 million unplugged oil and gas wells in the U.S., with cleanup costs of billions — around $10 billion in states like Texas, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma, which have large inventories of abandoned wells.
“We’ve been talking about phasing out fossil fuel subsidies for years and years,” Achakulwisut said. “We just hope that this kind of analysis, and with all the ongoing efforts to phase out fossil fuels, will just compel policymakers to finally take action.”
If you look at state-level action on climate change in the United States, Texas might seem like an immovable elephant. It has the highest greenhouse gas footprint in the country, emitting twice as much as California, which has 10 million more people. Between oil and gas extraction, refining, and petrochemical production, the fossil fuel industry in Texas employs about 450,000 people, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and has significant political sway. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature has barely acknowledged that climate change exists, let alone passed laws that would help fight it — to the contrary, it recently passed laws to fend off attacks on fossil fuels.
But those facts belie notable shifts underway in the state’s economy and culture. Texas has built more wind power than any other U.S. state. Its biggest cities, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin, all have climate action plans that aim to reduce emissions to net-zero by mid-century. Recent research has shown that the oil and gas industry no longer drives economic growth in the state. And Texas oil and gas workers — who are often cast as obstacles to climate action — have started to come to terms with the idea that the energy transition is underway.
On Wednesday, dozens of unions attending the Texas AFL-CIO’s annual convention, including those with members employed in the oil and gas industry, voted to endorse a series of recommendations for Texas to reduce emissions while creating good-paying jobs and ensuring fossil fuel workers aren’t left behind.
“We get these narratives that the fossil fuel unions are against climate action,” said Mijin Cha, a professor at Occidental College who researches just transitions and worked on the Texas recommendations. “I think it’s a lot more complicated than what we hear.”
The recommendations were developed by the Texas Climate Jobs Project, a new offshoot of the Texas AFL-CIO, in collaboration with researchers from Cornell University’s Worker Institute and in consultation with 27 Texas unions from a range of industries. They aim to cut carbon from almost every part of Texas’ economy, proposing ambitious targets to build wind and solar farms and geothermal power plants, upgrade the state’s transmission grid, reduce energy consumption in buildings, install solar panels on schools, extend broadband internet access, expand high-speed rail, and electrify school buses and government-owned vehicles.
For Texas’ vast industrial sector, which is responsible for 42 percent of the state’s energy-related emissions and is much harder to clean up, the report recommends that the state do more to support the development of technologies to capture carbon from smokestacks as well as directly from the air.
These are key ingredients in many climate plans, but the report goes further, adding job creation estimates for each recommendation and describing how labor leaders can use these targets as opportunities to fight for good-paying, union jobs.
For example, a “Buy Texas” program for electric school buses and government-owned vehicles could spur local manufacturing of electric vehicles and create 3,401 jobs. Building out the required electric vehicle charging infrastructure to support those vehicles could create 1,307 jobs in construction and electrical line upgrades. The report suggests that unions could develop a national standard or certification for electric vehicle charging station installation and maintenance, ensuring these jobs are filled with skilled union labor. Taken together, the recommendations in the report would create an estimated 1.1 million jobs directly over the next 25 years, and an additional 2 million jobs indirectly.
Lara Skinner, the director of the climate and labor program at Cornell’s Worker Institute, which conducted the research for the report, said these kinds of analyses are frequently missing from climate conversations. “There’s been a real focus on the carbon impact of proposals,” she said, “and not enough emphasis on what type of jobs are these activities going to create, what are the quality of these jobs, are they actually going to help reverse inequality.”
Only 4.8 percent of Texas workers belonged to unions in 2020, which is half the national average of 10.7 percent. While proponents of clean energy often paint the energy transition as a huge opportunity to create jobs, so far most of those jobs have not been unionized. Skinner said that across the country, fossil fuel power plants have about a 20 percent unionization rate, whereas wind farms have a 6 percent unionization rate and solar power plants only 3 percent.
But in some states, unions have made inroads into clean energy. Skinner worked with unions in New York state on a similar climate jobs report after Hurricane Sandy. The campaign that came out of it successfully lobbied for a state target of 9 gigawatts of offshore wind and prevailing wage and project labor agreement requirements for renewable energy projects of a certain size.
Wayne Lord, who consulted on the Texas report, is the business manager for Plumbers Local Union 68, which is part of a larger union that represents pipefitters who work on pipelines. He said his members understand the transition is coming and needed. “We’ve had extremely rough hurricanes, then we turn right around and we have a freeze that crippled the whole state. We know something’s got to be done,” he said. Lord said he sees new opportunities for plumbers in water efficiency upgrades, installing new energy-efficient heating, cooling, and ventilation systems, and installing systems to clean the dust off of solar panels. Pipefitters could find work on new pipelines that carry carbon dioxide captured from the smokestacks of industrial plants to places where it can be stored underground.
Lord said just because unions are backing these recommendations doesn’t mean there won’t still be tensions with environmental groups around fossil fuel projects. He said he doesn’t see traditional energy sources ever fully going away.
Lee Medley, former president of the United Steelworkers Local 13-1, who also consulted on the recommendations, agreed that fossil fuel jobs will not go away entirely because he believes oil and gas will continue to be used to make plastic. But he wants to make sure that as some of his members’ jobs go away, they are retrained for jobs that pay just as well.
“There’s a lot of claims of a lot of jobs, but nothing guarantees them as union jobs or well-paying jobs,” he said. Medley said he’s skeptical about the estimates of how many jobs these various recommendations will create. “But at the same time, if I’m not involved, I won’t be able to affect those numbers,” he said.
The AFL-CIO vote was just a first step. Bo Delp, executive director of the Texas Climate Jobs Project, said it’s his job now to take these recommendations and turn them into a reality. “The next steps are to work with many of these labor unions that have provided feedback on this report to help make that happen,” he said.
This story was reported by Grist and in collaboration with
In January, Tampa was set to become the 12th city in Florida to set a climate goal to transition to 100 percent clean energy. But that was before the natural gas industry and Republican state lawmakers got involved.
Tampa City Councilman Joseph Citro had worked for months with environmental groups and local businesses ona non-binding resolution — more of a North Star for the city than a mandatory policy. As part of its clean energy goal, the resolution supported a ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure including pipelines, compressor stations, and power plants.
No state-level policies in Florida require reducing planet-heating emissions, and some federal and state lawmakers deny the science of human-caused climate change. So it’s been up to cities and towns to do what they can, like buying electric school buses and powering municipal buildings with renewable energy. Increasingly, local governments are ramping up their ambitions.
That fight was about to come to Florida this year, just as Citro was finessing the final language on his city resolution. Republican state Senator Travis Hutson of Palm Coast introduced bills that would make Citro’s Tampa proposal illegal. Hutson wanted to prohibit cities from passing any policies aimed at regulating energy infrastructure or fuel sources.
Smoke billows from a coal-fired power plant located on Florida’s West Coast, south of Tampa. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
The effect in Tampa was immediate. Within two days, an aide to the Democratic mayor of Tampa texted Councilman Citro urging him to pull the resolution. “You don’t want your resolution to be the impetus to overturn decades of sustainability work in cities across the state, and currently Tampa is being blamed for it,” strategist Marley Wilkes wrote in a text message obtained in a public records request by the nonprofit watchdog Energy and Policy Institute and shared with Grist and ADAPT. Citro obliged, issuing a statement that he would pull his resolution and instead support a narrower plan from Mayor Jane Castor to power city-owned buildings with renewable energy by 2045. Representatives for the mayor and Citro both declined to comment for this story.
But withdrawing the resolution didn’t stop what was in motion at the statehouse.
Lawmakers approved Hutson’s bills, and Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed them in June.Florida law now prohibits local governments from taking “any action that restricts or prohibits” energy sources used by utilities. (It also voids any such existing local policies, except in cities that own their utilities, like Jacksonville, Orlando, and Tallahassee.) And it prevents local officials from banning gas stations or requiring gas stations to install electric vehicle chargers.
Environmental advocates in Florida fear that the new laws are so broad that it’s not clear what local governments will be able to do about their energy-related emissions. For example, are local incentives for solar development prohibited because they might restrict natural gas-generated electricity?
“This is probably all going to get litigated at extreme expense to local taxpayers,” said Jonathan Webber, deputy director of the environmental advocacy group Florida Conservation Voters.
The Florida bill sponsors said they were responding directly to Tampa’s proposed resolution. Polk County Representative Josie Tomkow, a Republican co-sponsor in the Florida House of Representatives, argued during a committee hearing about one of the bills that “activists across the nation, even right here in Florida, are pursuing bans on natural gas as an energy source,” noting Tampa in particular.
“Tampa was used as a talking point for industry to justify ‘why now,’” said Brooke Errett, an organizer for Food and Water Watch.
Burning natural gas for heating and cooking in buildings contributes about 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and transporting it from oil and gas fields to buildings also emits heat-trapping methane. Because of that, cities have started to pass laws banning new natural gas appliances or encouraging all-electric homes.
The gas industry sees such efforts as an existential threat. In addition to backing the state preemption efforts, it has waged a lobbying campaignto convince lawmakers that gas can be a part of a “clean energy” future. So far, 24 state legislatures have considered or passed laws that preempt local governments from restricting the use of natural gas in buildings.
Emails obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute and shared with Grist and ADAPT, as well as campaign contribution records, illustrate how Florida gas companies supported the bills preempting local climate action and the lawmakers who sponsored them.
In Florida, the Tampa gas and electric company TECO registered six lobbyists to advance the preemption bills. TECO did not respond to requests for comment.
TECO also appears to have contributed, at least indirectly, to Hutson’s campaign. In October 2020, TECO gave $30,000 to Voice of Florida Business, a political action committee (PAC) that has pooled millions of dollars from the utilities industry in the last decade. That same day, Voice of Florida Business then sent $5,000 to a PAC associated with Hutson. It sent another $5,000 in March. In January, TECO also contributed $88,000 to a PAC called Associated Industries of Florida, which sent $5,000 to a second Hutson PAC in February.
Sen. Travis Hutson, R-St Augustine, presents a gambling bill during a special session, May 18, 2021 in Tallahassee, Fla. (AP Photo/Steve Cannon)
AP Photo/Steve Cannon
Tomkow, a co-sponsor of the legislation, also received two $1,000 campaign donations, from TECO and another utility, Florida Public Utilities, in October. Neither lawmaker responded to requests for comment.
Additional records obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute demonstrate the industry’s lobbying efforts at both the local and state level. For example:
TECO scheduled a January meeting with the mayor’s office to discuss the Tampa resolution
Lobbyists from the oil and gas trade group the American Petroleum Institute who backed the state preemption bills were scheduled to meet with Citro five days before he pulled the city resolution
A letter from the president of the Port of Tampa Bay, A. Paul Anderson, to the port’s board of commissioners outlined efforts by the Port of Tampa Bay — a major gateway for fuel imports — to weaken the resolution. “We have remained in constant communication with the councilman and his colleagues on the council in an effort to educate them of the negative effects this resolution will have on our tenants, our business, and our community’s economy,” the letter said, noting that port staff were participating in “weekly strategy calls to coordinate our with state partners.” A Republican lawmaker who co-sponsored one of the House bills, Tom Fabricio of Miramar, said the port was one reason he backed the legislation, calling it a “major hub through which the entirety of central Florida is supplied with [gasoline].”
Investor-owned utilities are not the only ones who support local preemption. At least one city-owned utility was pushing for the legislation as well. In January, the public affairs manager for Clearwater Gas, a municipally owned gas utility in Clearwater, emailed the utility’s executive director, Chuck Warrington, saying that they should talk to their state senator about Hutson’s preemption bill. “If this guy gets it through I will send him money for his reelection campaign,” Kristi Cheatham Pettit told Warrington. Warrington in another email noted that the Florida Natural Gas Association, a trade group, was “championing” the legislation. Neither Clearwater nor the association responded to requests for comment.
As far back as May 2019, the city of Clearwater was strategizing against efforts to limit gas use, including trying to hold meetings with cities and counties that were pursuing resolutions similar to Tampa’s. Warrington expressed concerns about climate efforts by the U.S. Conference of Mayors and argued for utilities to “aggressively” present their stance “with the same vigor as the extreme environmentalists.” m
During hearings about the bills, Hutson, who lives in St. Augustine, denied that they would prevent cities from pursuing renewable energy and said they were instead meant to give state officials a say in Florida’s clean energy agenda. Yet renewable energy proposals have met stiff resistance in the Legislature.
Democratic Senator Lori Berman of Boynton Beach said several bills she’s worked on to increase solar energy have either not gotten a hearing or failed to win enough support to pass.
“I think these [preemption] bills are part of a continuing effort on the Florida Legislature to thwart individuals from having their own solar energy and to protect the electric utilities, often at the expense of renewable energy sources,” Berman said.
Florida cities that are trying to cut their emissions differ in their interpretations of how the preemption bills will affect them.
Richard Kriseman, the Democratic mayor of St. Petersburg — the first city in Florida to set a goal of 100 percent renewable energy — said his city will be hamstrung. St. Petersburg had begun to develop new city codes to make buildings ready for solar power and electric vehicle charging.
“At this point, there’s no point in us moving forward with putting those in place,” Kriseman said.
But John Regan, the city manager of St. Augustine, which is in Hutson’s district, said the bills would not have an impact on the city’s current climate plans. Regan said the city never had the authority to tell the electric utility, Florida Power & Light, how to generate electricity.
“The market and federal law will dictate those issues,” he said.
St. Augustine spends $5 million to $10 million every year on projects to address flooding and reduce emissions by reducing its energy consumption. Thus far it has mainly focused on installing motion-sensing lights and solar-powered parking kiosks, and making city-owned buildings more energy efficient, rather than mandating changes through its building codes.
In Tampa, Citro plans to re-introduce his resolution in early August after giving it a major facelift.
“They do want to still have a bold vision put forth through the resolution, but without triggering anything that may cause the utilities to sue,” said Errett, of Food and Water Watch.
“It’s going to be, most likely, a lot more of an aspirational call to action,” she said.
A little over a decade ago, Solyndra was the hottest thing in solar power. Solyndra was so exciting that then-President Barack Obama, who was trying to create green jobs while pulling the country out of the financial crisis, decided to give the company a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.
Solyndra, Republicans said, was the perfect example of everything that was totally wrong with Obama’s plan to boost clean energy with government-issued loans. But what about the rest of the loans the Obama administration gave out? And what should the purpose of such a loan program even be? Reporter Shannon Osaka crunches the Department of Energy’s numbers and answers what really happened to the government’s green loan program.
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A Biden administration plan to force the rapid uptake of renewable energy would swiftly cut planet-heating emissions and save hundreds of thousands of lives from deadly air pollution, a new report has found amid growing pressure on the White House to deliver a major blow against the climate crisis.
Of various climate policy options available to the new administration, a clean energy standard would provide the largest net benefits to the United States, according to the report, in terms of costs as well as lives saved.
A clean energy standard would require utilities to ratchet up the amount of clean energy, such as solar and wind, they use, through a system of incentives and penalties. The Biden administration hoped to include the measure in its major infrastructure bill but it was dropped after compromise negotiations with Republicans.
But the new report, conducted by a consortium of researchers from Harvard University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Syracuse University, suggests it would be the most effective tool in reaching a White House goal of 80 percent renewable energy use by 2030. Joe Biden has said he wants all electricity to be renewable by 2035.
A clean energy standard to reach the 80 percent goal by the end of the decade would save an estimated 317,500 lives in the U.S. over the next 30 years, due to a sharp reduction in air pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas. In 2030 alone, 9,200 premature deaths would be avoided once the emissions cut is achieved. The number of lives saved would be “immediate, widespread and substantial,” the report states.
A total of $1.13 trillion in health savings due to cleaner air would be achieved between now and 2050, with air quality improvements most acutely felt by black people who currently face disproportionate harm from living near highways and power plants.
Every state in the U.S. would gain better air quality, the report found, although the greatest benefits would go to Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, all states with substantial fossil fuel infrastructure.
The rapid switch to renewables would cost around $342 billion until 2050, via capital and maintenance costs, although fuel costs would dwindle as renewables are cheaper to run than fossil fuels. The study added, however, that the financial benefits from addressing the climate crisis would dwarf this figure, at nearly $637 billion.
“The cost are much lower than we expected and the deaths avoided are much higher; there really is a huge opportunity here to address climate change and air quality,” said Kathy Fallon Lambert, a study co-author and an air quality expert at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
“This would be a huge leap in ambition and we’d see that in the health impacts, there would be millions of fewer asthma attacks, for example. And this doesn’t even consider the health impacts from heat and other climate-related causes.”
Lambert said a clean energy standard would be “extremely effective” at slashing emissions, far more so than other proposals such as a carbon tax.
Biden is facing pressure from environmentalists, as well as major companies such as Apple and Google, to implement the new standard after it was dropped from the infrastructure bill. The president has said the measure will be included in a new reconciliation bill that can pass along party lines, although that will require every single Democratic senator to vote for it, which will prove a challenge.
The White House is determined this will happen however, with Gina McCarthy, Biden’s top climate adviser, saying the measure is a “non-negotiable” in the next infrastructure package.
“We need to make sure that we’re sending a signal that we want renewable energy and that it’s going to win,” McCarthy told Punchbowl News last week.
The math of climate change is unforgiving. Scientists estimate that the world can only emit a few hundred billion metric tons more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere before crossing a significant threshold: warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. That’s the limit nations decided to strive for under the Paris Agreement. While a few hundred billion metric tons may sound luxurious, at current emissions rates, we could blow through that budget in the next decade.
If global warming surpasses 1.5 degrees, the climate could theoretically be returned to safer levels later on with negative emissions technologies — various methods to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stash it in trees or soils, in rock formations underground, or in long-lived products like cement.
But even the most promising negative emissions solutions are not yet ready for this job, no matter how big or small it ends up being. They are nascent, expensive, and energy-intensive, and their impact can be hard to verify. There’s debate among scientists, policymakers, and activists about whether they will ever be able to clean up the atmosphere at the scale that some proponents suggest. Many in the debate are also concerned that this whole prospect of cleaning up the atmosphere later creates a moral hazard by reducing ambition to cut emissions today.
In a 2016 paper, climate scientist James Hansen and colleagues wrote that delaying mitigation today with the idea that we can fix the climate later “sentences young people to either a massive, implausible cleanup or growing deleterious climate impacts or both.”
For Johannes Bednar, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, one of the biggest problems with this prospective future clean-up job is that there won’t be any way to pay for it.
“If we don’t have a plan right now what to do in the future, then we can be pretty sure that we won’t be achieving the Paris Agreement temperature goal,” said Bednar. “We need a strategy, and we can’t wait.”
Bednar and his colleagues have a novel proposal for addressing this issue, which they describe in a paper published in the journal Nature on Thursday. It lays out a way to tie every ton of CO2 emitted, starting now, to a party responsible for cleaning it up later through a financial tool called a Carbon Removal Obligation, or CRO. You can think of a CRO as a carbon debt, or IOU. One way they might work would be for a country’s central bank to issue a controlled amount of CROs to private banks. Polluting companies would then obtain those CROs as an option for complying with regulations that put a cap on their emissions. Like a mortgage, the CRO wouldn’t cost anything up front — but the company would have to pay interest on it until they eventually “pay it back” by removing that ton of carbon from the atmosphere.
“It takes that burden of removal, and it moves it forward in time to the near term,” said Marcus Thomson, a climate modeler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a co-author of the paper. He said CROs could be “an enforcing agent to make sure we don’t just load the future with our problems today.”
Rather than requiring companies to do something about their emissions immediately, which today often leads to the purchase of cheap, spurious carbon offsets, the CRO system would recognize that effective, affordable methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere are not yet available. The authors argue that it could help build a market for negative emissions and phase them in more quickly.
The researchers find that CROs would not only solve the issue of atmospheric clean-up but could have valuable ripple effects. For example, they could encourage steeper emissions cuts today if companies find that reducing their emissions is cheaper than paying interest on CROs. That means less negative emissions will ultimately be needed, addressing concerns that large-scale deployment of these solutions will be unsustainable.
“That is the result we really need; that’s the most important outcome,” said Kate Dooley, a climate policy researcher at the University of Melbourne who has written about the need to consider intergenerational climate justice when it comes to negative emissions.
But Dooley also had substantial concerns about the idea. For one, it mirrors current cap-and-trade carbon pricing programs but doesn’t address any of the problems that plague those programs. She said the European Trading System, for instance, has not achieved significant emissions reductions due to loopholes in the cap on emissions, difficulties enforcing it, and industries lobbying to get free allowances to emit. Also, who will pay if these companies go bankrupt and default on their CROs? Polluting companies have a history of evading clean-up costs through bankruptcy.
“Putting the obligations for, essentially, planetary health, and thinking that monetary policy is going to deliver that I think is pretty scary, with what we’ve seen,” said Dooley, referring to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bednar acknowledged the risk that these debts could end up bundled, resold, and abstracted through financial markets the way that mortgages were leading up to that crisis. “This is the main challenge,” he said. (Carbon removal is already being financialized and traded through existing programs.)
To combat that risk, Bednar said the number of CROs on the market would need to be tightly controlled and remain traceable at all points in time. Banks would also need to learn to assess the costs and practical challenges of removing carbon from the atmosphere.
If companies don’t pay off their carbon debts, he said, or viable negative emissions technologies don’t emerge, banks could simply decide CROs are too risky and stop issuing them, or raise interest rates to levels that companies are unwilling to pay. Bednar acknowledged that in the early days the system would need to be built on trust that viable solutions to remove carbon from the atmosphere will emerge. “If you don’t see these things happening within the next 10 years, then carbon debt will be restricted to what is feasible,” he said.
While Dooley thought the idea was interesting, she pointed to other recent papers that seek to address some of the same issues by instead strengthening net-zero plans. Rather than making vague promises to be “carbon neutral” by 2050, countries and companies could be encouraged or required to set earlier, binding emission reduction targets, publish implementation plans, and describe how they will either maintain net-zero or even go net negative.
“The only lowest-risk option is reducing emissions as quickly as we can,” she said. “The next decade is really critical in reducing emissions, absolutely critical. If we haven’t totally turned that ship around, we’re not going to fix the problem with [negative emissions.]”
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A study has revealed that renting clothes, long touted as one of the “answers” to fashion’s sustainability crisis, is worse for the planet than throwing them away.
The study, published by the Finnish scientific journal Environmental Research Letters assessed the environmental impact of five different ways of owning and disposing of clothing, including renting, resale and recycling.
It found that renting clothes had the highest climate impact of all. The hidden environmental cost was found to be delivery and packaging costs. Renting involves a large amount of transportation, taking the clothes back and forth between the warehouse and the renter. Dry cleaning is also harmful to the environment.
Renting clothes has been thought of the sustainable and frugal alternative to fast fashion, popularized by companies such as Rent the Runway and public figures like Carrie Symonds, who rented her wedding dress and her outfits for the G7 conference. Gwyneth Paltrow is on the Rent the Runway board and Ralph Lauren has announced a rental range.
The growing sector, which according to GlobalData it is going to be worth nearly $3.2 billion by 2029, has been touted as a possible solution to fashion’s environmental crisis. A report by the World Economic Forum this year suggested that the industry generates 5 percent of global emissions.
Liza Summer / Pexels
However instead of solving fashion’s environmental crisis, renting should be recategorized. “We should think of renting like second-hand shopping,” said Dana Thomas, author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes. “[It’s] not something we do all the time, instead of buying our clothes and swapping out outfits nonstop, but on occasion, when the need arises, like proms [or] weddings.”
The study found many rental brands misuse the term “circular economy” – the system where clothes are passed from person to person before being recycled – as a form of greenwashing. “No executive wants to overhaul their business, and that’s what ‘going green’ will require, not tweaks but an entire overhaul,” said Thomas. “They are too focused on short-term gains to invest in long-term benefits.
“Only regulation will solve that problem. No company, in any industry, will volunteer to take a loss for the sake of the planet. They’ll do so when it’s the law. The biggest obstacle is greed.”
The new study suggests that if rental companies change their logistics to make them more climate friendly, renting would, environmentally, be on a level with reselling. It also found that the most sustainable way to consume fashion is to buy fewer items and to wear them for as long as possible. “You want to be sustainable? Buy less, buy better,” Thomas said.
Thousands of cargo ships cross the oceans every single day, carrying everything from cars and clothing to plastic pellets and garden gnomes while their giant engines pump greenhouse gases into the air. The shipping industry plays a starring role in global trade, and as its emissions continue to swell, regulators are starting to consider an ambitious yet contentious idea: making shipping companies pay for their pollution.
The International Maritime Organization agreed at its meeting in June to discuss proposals to put a price on ships’ emissions at the IMO’s next meeting in October. In the slow-moving, bureaucratic realm of shipping, even this subtle move was seen as a big step. The last time the United Nations agency formally debated “market-based measures” was eight years ago, and the effort was ultimately abandoned amid widespread disagreements.
Since then, the industry’s annual emissions have risen by nearly 10 percent, according to the IMO’s latest research, contributing nearly 3 percent of the global total. If ships keep burning oil instead of switching to zero-carbon alternatives, those numbers are expected to soar in coming years as more vessels ply more routes, undermining the larger global fight to rein in greenhouse gases.
Experts say existing policies to curb fuel consumption and improve energy efficiency haven’t done enough to steer the industry toward a cleaner course. Much stronger measures are needed not only to slash emissions from existing ships but also to ensure new vessels are designed to operate in a decarbonized world. “It’s just becoming more and more urgent” for the IMO to act, said Aoife O’Leary, the London-based director of international climate for the Environmental Defense Fund. At past IMO meetings, activist groups like Ocean Rebellion have found their own way of pressuring regulators: spilling fake oil outside the London headquarters.
Making polluters pay
The main proposal on the IMO’s October agenda comes from the Marshall Islands and Solomon Islands — two countries especially vulnerable to rising sea levels and severe drought brought on by climate change.
The Pacific island nations have proposed requiring shipping companies to pay $100 for every metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent they emit, starting in 2025. The price would then ratchet up every five years, making it increasingly expensive to use dirty diesel fuels and cheaper to use cleaner options, such as ammonia, hydrogen fuel cells, next-generation sails, and shoreside charging infrastructure where ships can plug in.
The concept already exists for other businesses. Around the world, nearly 60 national and local carbon pricing schemes encompass power plants, oil refineries, and steel mills. In Norway, ships pay a tax on emissions of nitrogen oxides, a harmful air pollutant. The funds are used to invest in pollution-reducing measures like building battery-powered ferries.
The proposal would use the money raised to help countries most vulnerable to climate change adapt and decarbonize. It would also help shipping companies shift from dirty fossil fuels and develop and deploy emerging (and expensive) alternatives.
“This gives renewable technologies the chance to compete with well-established, high-polluting fossil fuels that threaten our islands,” Albon Ishoda, the Marshall Islands ambassador to the IMO, recently wrote about the proposal.
The Marshall Islands has spearheaded the charge for climate action within the IMO. The country is home to the world’s third-largest ship registry and depends on cargo ships to import food, medicine, and other essentials. Yet Ishoda and others have warned that unchecked emissions pose an “existential threat” to the low-lying archipelago of 79,000 people. In 2018, the Marshall Islands played a key role in establishing the IMO’s first targets for cutting greenhouse gases. Now it’s pushing to ensure ships actually meet those goals.
A full-throttle shift
The IMO’s climate strategy calls for reducing the carbon intensity of international shipping by at least 40 percent by 2030, compared to 2008 levels. (Carbon intensity is a measure of a ship’s CO2 emissions, linked to the amount of cargo carried over a voyage.) The U.N. agency also wants to cut the industry’s total annual emissions in half by 2050.
At a June meeting held over videoconference, IMO members adopted short-term measures that require existing ships to meet energy-efficiency standards, as well as improve their carbon intensity by 2 percent every year between 2023 and 2026. Environmental groups and other critics said the policies fell well short of what’s needed to meet the organization’s own ambitions — let alone limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times.
“What has been done up until now is like business-as-usual,” said Michael Prenh, who represents the Solomon Islands in IMO negotiations. “So somebody has to make a proposal that will actually do something.”
Industry analysts and even some prominent companies have backed pricing carbon emissions to accelerate investments, both in alternative fuels and the infrastructure required to produce, store, and distribute those fuels.
Trafigura, a global commodities trader, is pushing for a levy between $250 to $300 for every metric ton of carbon emitted — the amount researchers say is needed to overhaul the way ships operate. Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping line, has called for a $150 carbon tax. “Fossil fuels cannot keep being cheaper than green fuels,” said Søren Skou, Maersk’s CEO, in a LinkedIn post last month. An industry-led initiative aims for a $2 tax on every metric ton of marine fuel.
Such initiatives face strident opposition from other shipping companies and countries that rely on exports. Argentina, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia have warned that stronger climate policies will hurt their economies by making it more expensive to send food, metals, oil, and other commodities on ships. The Cook Islands, which depends on freighters for essential imports and inter-island transport, worries that it will raise the cost of living.
Advocates say the funds collected from a levy could help lessen any blow to countries that are hit the hardest. Prenh and O’Leary both noted that the proposed $100-per-ton levy is well within the normal price variations for shipping fuels, which can swing between $200 to $600 per metric ton. The industry, in other words, is used to absorbing extra costs when oil prices rise.
Figuring out how the carbon price will work and how funds should be distributed “is going to be a fight,” Prenh said. Proponents hope to reach an agreement by 2023 — a tight timeline by IMO standards.
Under pressure
The brewing carbon price debate comes as the regulator is facing growing public scrutiny.
In early June, days before IMO negotiators convened, the New York Times published an investigation that found the U.N. agency has “repeatedly delayed and watered down climate regulations” at the behest of companies and industry groups. And a new documentary by European journalists, called “Black Trail,” accuses the shipping industry of “polluting with impunity.”
European Union officials, frustrated by the IMO’s slow pace, are moving to include cargo ships in Europe’s Emissions Trading System starting next year. The cap-and-trade scheme already limits emissions from power plants, manufacturing facilities, and airlines. Shipping represents a significant share — about 13 percent— of the EU’s total emissions from transportation. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Biden administration said it will push the IMO to strengthen its goals, from cutting emissions in half by 2050 to zeroing them out entirely.
“If the IMO wants to remain relevant, it’s going to have to step up,” O’Leary said.
California just made a massive order for clean electricity.
On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a plan that requires utilities to buy 11.5 gigawatts of zero-carbon electricity by 2026. That’s a lot: Between a third and a fifth of the electricity California is using at any given moment.
“This is a landmark decision, I don’t think it is hyperbole to describe it as such,” said Commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen. The directive calls for “an unprecedented amount of clean energy,” he said.
It’s an especially significant decision because it’s not primarily intended to boost clean energy, but to ensure that California doesn’t have blackouts.
In the past, many states have boosted renewable energy with subsidies or mandates, but when it came to the basic job of making the lights go on when you flip the switch, they fell back on fossil fuels. But on Thursday, with a unanimous vote, California’s Public Utilities Commission enshrined the plan to bolster its electrical capacity so much with clean energy — like geothermal plants, and solar panels backed up by batteries — that it reduces the risk of its grid going dark. Renewable energy has finally gotten its moment to step into the spotlight, said John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies.
“We are now thinking about renewables to meet our needs — not just to check the box,” he said.
The commission ordered the massive addition of gigawatts because California has been bumping up against the limits of it’s electrical system. Last summer, when a heatwave engulfed the region, and air conditioners began gobbling up electricity, demand exceeded the available supply and the people managing the grid had to shut down power to swaths of the state.
California’s demand for electricity is rising at the same time that the state’s old coal plants are shutting down. And California’s last nuclear plant, which has long accounted for 8 percent of the state’s electrical generation, is slated to shut down in 2025. Persistent droughts mean that there’s less water to spin hydroelectric turbines.
“The bottom line is that we need more capacity,” said James Sweeney, an energy economist at Stanford University who wrote a book on California’s 2001 electricity crisis. “We’ve been running close to the margin for a while now. If you are too close to the margin and you are hit with a heat wave, and a drought — which sounds like California today — you could be in the soup.”
It makes sense for California to order up more power plants, but Sweeney isn’t convinced that it makes sense to completely exclude new fossil fuel plants from the mix. The most influential role that California can play in cleaning up world emissions is in providing proof of concept. Prove that it can be done cheaply and other states and countries will copy the California model, he said. “If you create a model and the cost is too high, you will create reasons for them not to follow you,” Sweeney said.
Nobody knows for sure how much this order for new generation will raise electrical rates. After the Utilities Commission makes a decision like this, the individual utilities have to go out and pay for new power plants, batteries, or programs to reduce peak energy demand. Those things cost money, leading to higher rates. In the long run, White said replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy should reduce costs. Sweeney agreed that in some cases that would be true. But he added, “If clean energy were always cheaper they wouldn’t have to tell the utilities they have to buy clean energy, they would be doing it anyway.”
On video chat, Ban Ki-moon is almost preternaturally kind. “Thank you for your interest in my life story and my philosophy,” he says, smiling serenely. At 76, the former secretary-general of the United Nations — who completed his final term in December 2016 — still wears the rimless glasses familiar from thousands of news wire photos. One of the most famous features Ban and two other diplomats on December 12, 2015, clasping their hands in celebration of the approval of the Paris climate agreement.
Ban likes to say that he is a “child of war” and a “man of peace.” As a child, he fled the city of Cheongju with his family during the Korean War: In his new memoir, Resolved: Uniting Nations in a Divided World, he recalls traveling 15 miles to safety on foot with his father, siblings, and mother, who had given birth just three days before. As an adult, his quiet, make-no-enemies political strategy eventually raised him to the position of secretary-general of the United Nations, where part of the job is mediating between warring powers (Russia, Ukraine) and navigating sticky diplomatic situations (the Iran nuclear deal).
But one of Ban’s most significant interventions may have been in the frustrating, and at times seemingly fruitless, battle against rising temperatures. Since 2006, when he first ran for secretary-general, Ban has been outspoken about the threat of climate change. He has joined Jane Goodall and Al Gore in a New York City climate march; his permanently affixed smile has graced many international negotiations on global warming, including those that led to the Paris Agreement, which Ban calls “my proudest accomplishment.”
He sums up his philosophy on how to stop the world from boiling up in three words, which are simple to the point of being platitudes: passion, compassion, and perseverance. “I have been very persistent,” he says, still smiling.
Leading the United Nations is a strange job. The secretary-general simultaneously wields a great deal of power, and almost none at all. According to the U.N., the role is of a “chief administrative officer,” which calls to mind pencil-pushing and personnel management; former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, envisioned the position more grandly, calling it a “world moderator.” The secretary-general has few enumerated powers, but they are expected to use their “good offices” — i.e., their relationships and the prestige of the U.N. — to serve as a go-between for world leaders and as a mouthpiece for the organization as a whole.
Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon raises his hands in celebration with France’s President Francois Hollande and other diplomats after the adoption of the Paris Agreement on December 12, 2015.
Francois Guillot / AFP / Getty Images
It’s perhaps this ambiguity in the secretary-general position that makes talking to Ban about climate change feel so odd. Many people think about the warming planet as a technical problem, replete with questions about electricity generation, gas-guzzling cars, and airplanes burning jet fuel — but for the former secretary-general, all those complications were distilled into diplomacy: a promise here, a private dinner there. In Resolved, he notes that international negotiations on climate change after the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (the Paris Agreement’s troubled predecessor) had become a kind of “Gordian knot,” with China, India, and the United States all ducking responsibility. His only recourse was to do what the secretary-general always does: talk. “I spoke about some aspect of climate change basically everywhere I went, from one hundred-watt radio stations in Central Africa to security forms in Central Asia,” he writes. “I did not shy away from raising climate change, even with known skeptics.”
The result was a series of encounters with world leaders that seem both lucky and capricious. In the memoir, Ban recounts one of his first meetings with President George W. Bush, in which — contra Ban’s U.N. advisors — the secretary-general dared to briefly bring up climate change. Bush reacted defensively, pointing the finger at China instead. Embarrassments followed: Ban invited Bush to a climate summit, where the U.S. president refused to speak; later, Bush left an informal U.N. dinner as soon as he had given his own remarks.
Despite the rough start, however, Ban and the former president became friendly over the years, and at a key moment in international negotiations on climate change in Bali in 2007 — when countries were struggling to lay out a “road map” to what would become the Paris climate agreement — the U.S. delegate called Bush for advice. “Do what Ban wants,” the president reportedly told her.
The same patient approach appeared to work on President Barack Obama, who, not unkindly, referred to Ban in his own memoir as the “nerdy kid who’s too nice to reject.” Ban tried — and ultimately succeeded — in getting Obama to attend the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen, and chased the president to make a promised $2 billion contribution to a fund to help developing countries switch to clean energy.
At other moments, Ban’s delicate brokering helped to pull negotiations back from the brink. In 2015, on the final day of negotiations in Paris, the delegate from the small Central American country of Nicaragua unexpectedly blocked the deal. Ban, along with French President François Hollande, desperately called Pope Francis, hoping that the pope would be able to convince the Catholic country to join the agreement. But there was no answer from the Vatican, and the delegate suggested a deal: The country would play along if Ban agreed to visit Nicaragua before the end of the year. Ban agreed. “I would have done anything,” he says. The save cleared the path to a final agreement.
It’s strange to think that these microscopic negotiations — what Ban describes in his book as “cajoling, reasoning, guilting, and just plain wearing governments down” — are part and parcel of what it takes to move the world away from fossil fuels. The Paris Agreement, for all its flaws (it is non-binding, and it relies on countries to set and meet their own emissions goals), seems to be working. After former President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the United States out of the agreement in 2017, not one other country exited, despite fears that the absence of the U.S. would cause the treaty to fall apart. And earlier this year, the U.S. re-entered the agreement, and President Joe Biden’s promise to cut U.S. emissions 50 percent by 2030 triggered a set of nations to ramp up their own emissions cuts.
Ban is relentlessly positive in the face of these developments. “I am grateful for his leadership,” he says of Biden, adding that “multilateralism is now back on track.” (Gratitude is a common theme for the former secretary-general: In his book, the word “grateful” appears 36 times, and “gratitude” another 11.) Still, he is well aware of the urgency of climate change — and the areas where global governments continue to fall short.
“We really don’t have much time left,” he says. The world, he points out, has already warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, bringing the planet perilously close to the 1.5 degree C threshold that developing countries and small island nations had hoped to avoid. And developing countries, which have contributed the least to the climate crisis, are still waiting for promised financial support. Rich countries like the U.S., Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany had promised to contribute $100 billion to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations effort to help developing countries phase out fossil fuels and adapt to warming temperatures, by 2020 — and then another $100 billion every year thereafter. So far, the fund only has received $80 billion.
“It is morally wrong — it is an injustice — for those countries who have not done much to contribute to the current situation to bear the brunt of the responsibility,” Ban says. For the first time in our conversation, he seems upset. “I am sometimes very disappointed and angry.”
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The nations that make up the G7 have pumped billions of dollars more into fossil fuels than they have into clean energy since the COVID-19 pandemic, despite their promises of a green recovery.
As the UK prepares to host the G7 summit, a new analysis reveals that the countries attending committed $189 billion to support oil, coal, and gas between January 2020 and March 2021. In comparison, the same countries – the UK, U.S., Canada, Italy, France, Germany and Japan – spent $147 billion on clean forms of energy.
The support for fossil fuels from seven of the world’s richest nations included measures to remove or downgrade environmental regulations as well as direct funding of oil, gas and coal.
The analysis from the development charity Tearfund, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and the Overseas Development Institute showed that the nations missed opportunities to make their response to the pandemic greener. In most cases, money provided for fossil fuel industries was given with no strings attached, rather than with conditions requiring a reduction in emissions or pollution. The analysis found that eight in every 10 dollars spent on non-renewable energy came without conditions.
This included lifelines that were thrown to the aviation and car industries, which received $115 billion from the G7 countries. Of that money, 80 percent was given with no attempt to force the sectors to cut their emissions in return for the support.
Only one in every 10 dollars committed to the COVID-19 response benefited the “cleanest” energies such as renewables and energy efficiency measures.
The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, will open the G7 summit in Cornwall on June 11. He has said he wants to unite the nations to “build back better” from the coronavirus pandemic to create a greener, more prosperous future. As well as the G7, the UK has invited South Africa, Australia, India, and South Korea to take part.
The analysis of the actions of the seven major western economies in the last 15 months reveals they are not yet investing at sufficient scale in technologies that support fast decarbonization of their economies, and they have not created green jobs at scale in response to COVID-19.
Paul Cook, the head of advocacy at Tearfund, which operates in some of the poorest countries in the world most affected by global heating, said: “Every day, we witness the worsening consequences of the climate crisis for communities around the world – farmers’ crops failing; floods and fires engulfing towns and villages; families facing an uncertain future.
“Choices made now by the G7 countries will either accelerate the transition towards a climate-safe future for all, or jeopardize efforts to date to tackle the climate crisis.”
The G7 countries are among the most polluting in the world. They represent a 10th of the world’s population but are responsible for almost a quarter of CO2 emissions.
“Their actions can set the scene for success or failure at the UN climate talks being hosted by the UK in November,” Cook said.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedented amounts of public money were spent by nations; it is estimated that the 50 largest world economies committed at least $14.6 trillion to fiscal stimulus measures in 2020. The authors said that well-designed and targeted stimuli could be used as a springboard for launching low-carbon societies.
The report analyzed the support the seven nations, plus the four others invited to attend the summit in Cornwall, gave to five energy areas: the cleanest energy, such as wind and solar; clean energy that may still rely on fossil fuel power, such as electric vehicles; fossil fuel energy with conditions; fossil fuel energy without any conditions; and other energy sectors including biofuels and nuclear.
The greatest support given by G7 countries was to transport. Bailouts were given to companies including Air France, British Airways, Ryanair, easyJet, Lufthansa, Japan Airlines, Alitalia, Renault, and Honda. The financial support would end up sustaining highly polluting industries for decades to come, with very little pressure to “go green,” the authors said.
Since the bailouts, some G7 countries have increased their commitments to cleaner energy, including rail and electric vehicles. But the report said: “Investments in the transport sector remain significantly skewed towards fossil fuels and are at odds with G7 commitments to build back better.”
The propping up of the oil and gas sectors was particularly evident in Canada and the U.S., both major oil and gas producers. As well as direct support, both countries rolled back environmental regulations on fossil fuel companies.
Some G7 nations made positive steps towards halting support for dirty industries. In February, Italy extended a ban until September this year on fossil fuel drilling. The UK and France brought in policies designed to end international support for fossil fuels. The UK has also announced a ban on new petrol and diesel cars by 2030.
“These actions should serve as a precedent for other G7 countries,” the report said.
This month, in the first comprehensive study of the journey to net zero, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that pledges by governments, even if fully achieved, fell well short of what was required to bring global energy-related CO2 emissions down to net zero by 2050 and give the world an even chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as the Paris agreement states.
When President Joe Biden unveiled his $2.25 trillion “American Jobs Plan” in early April, many climate activists breathed a (small) sigh of relief. Although the plan was smaller than the $10 trillion progressive Democrats had proposed spending on revamping the country’s infrastructure, it was, in many ways, a Green New Deal in miniature. It included huge spending on clean energy, a civilian jobs program known as the “climate corps,” and a push to get electric cars on the road all across America. It was without question Biden’s primary plan to cut carbon emissions. The only one. The big one.
Now, however, there is rising concern that the “big one” may not be so big after all. Key features of the bill — like a requirement to produce electricity from clean sources, or hundreds of billions of dollars in support for electric vehicles — are in contention as Republicans and Democrats tussle over the price tag. And without them, the country’s chance of cutting carbon emissions 50 percent by 2030 — as Biden recently promised at his international climate summit — is basically zero.
“We need the full American Jobs Plan,” said Lena Moffitt, campaigns director at Evergreen Action, a climate-focused policy group.
Over the past couple of weeks, progressives and climate activists have watched with dismay as the Biden administration and key Democratic leaders have engaged in a protracted back-and-forth with Congressional Republicans. Biden’s original plan was for $2.25 trillion in spending; after negotiations, he slimmed it down to $1.7 trillion. (A lot of money, but still probably not enough to address the 6.5 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions the U.S. spews into the atmosphere every year.) Republicans came back with a counteroffer that they claimed included $928 billion in funding for highways, roads, and public transit; Democrats, frustrated, protested that only about a quarter of that would be actual new spending.
If this all seems like a lot of hullabaloo over numbers, it is … and isn’t. The result of these negotiations — layered though they are in political posturing — might very well determine whether the U.S. can come even close to Biden’s carbon-cutting target. The U.S. Congress has not passed anything that could remotely be called a “climate bill” since 2009; it has never passed anything with as many clean energy provisions as have been promised in the American Jobs Plan.
Take, for example, one of the plan’s hallmark policies: a clean electricity standard, a requirement for the country’s utilities to produce all of their power from carbon-free sources by 2035. (Picture the nation’s dying coal and natural gas plants replaced with solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal loops, and a new generation of nuclear plants.) According to modeling from the Environmental Defense Fund, that standard — combined with investments in the electrical grid and tax credits for building alternative sources of power — would get the U.S. more than halfway to its new emissions goal.
Then there is the $174 billion for jumpstarting the process of replacing America’s roughly 248 million gas-powered cars with electric ones. (Part of that money would go to tax credits, which can help Americans pay the higher up-front cost of owning an EV; another chunk would go toward building a gigantic network of charging stations where all those electric cars could plug in.) Not to mention the money the plan earmarked for research and development into clean energy, the climate corps jobs program, and on and on.
The problem for Biden is that Republicans in Congress don’t seem to want any of that. Their near-trillion dollar counteroffer is focused on “traditional” infrastructure, like roads, highways, and bridges. It gives almost no funding to clean energy, electric vehicles, or research and development. “The climate aspects of the Republican proposal are basically negligible compared to what needs to be done,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, told me. “It’s an old-fashioned bridges and highways proposal with a little climate ‘purfling’ along the edges.” (Purfling, it turns out, refers to the decorative edge on a string instrument.)
Republicans’ chief negotiator on the infrastructure plan, Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, speaks during a news conference. Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc / Getty Images
Republicans’ unwillingness to get on board with the full American Jobs Plan isn’t a surprise; many Democrats have long assumed that, in order to pass climate policy, they would have to do it on their own, likely by making use of a Congressional loophole known as “budget reconciliation” in order to bypass the filibuster. (In the era of partisan gridlock, budget reconciliation — normally just a way to quickly adjust big budget bills — has increasingly been seen as a way to pass key policy.) But all the Democratic talk of (hypothetical) bipartisanship on infrastructure may be costing them valuable time to act on the (very real) threat of climate change.
“My experience has been that at the end of the day, Lucy tends to pull the football away from Charlie Brown,” Whitehouse said. Democrats, he pointed out, have only 18 months before next year’s midterm elections — when many Republicans think they will be able to retake the House. “As that time bleeds away, it becomes harder and harder to see how we get onto a safe climate pathway,” he said.
There is always the possibility that Democrats could work with Republicans on a watered-down infrastructure package, one built of mostly highways, bridges, and roads, and then follow up with a Democrats-only clean energy bill that goes through the tricky budget reconciliation process. Josh Freed, the director of climate and energy at the policy think tank Third Way, told me that he believes moderate Senate Democrats — like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, widely considered to be the crucial 50th vote on any Democrats-only legislation — will be motivated to pass any remaining clean energy components of the American Jobs Plan that way even if they don’t make it into the infrastructure package.
“I think that regardless of what happens with [infrastructure], there’s enough stuff that Manchin supports and wants to see passed because it’ll help West Virginia,” Freed said.
But, for climate activists who remember President Barack Obama’s failed efforts to pass climate legislation, any amount of waiting seems deeply dangerous. In 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, an effort to pull the country out of the Great Recession, which included $90 billion for clean energy and was intended to be step one of slowing the pace of climate change. A bill enacting an economy-wide limit on carbon emissions was supposed to come later. But this second step got tied up in the Senate, and the Obama administration prioritized healthcare reform instead. Since then, average global temperature has increased by about 0.7 degrees Celsius — and the U.S. has still not passed a single piece of climate legislation.
Whitehouse said he has always expected Congress to pass both an infrastructure bill and a budget reconciliation bill — and in a perfect world, they would be planned simultaneously, so that the budget reconciliation bill, with all its clean energy provisions, doesn’t get held back by cross-party negotiations over infrastructure. “But,” he added, “I’m not sure it’s a perfect world.”
This story was originally published by The Conversation and is reproduced with permission. You can find the original article here.
As nations gear up for a critical year for climate negotiations, it’s become increasingly clear that success may hinge on one question: How soon will China end its reliance on coal and its financing of overseas coal-fired power plants?
China represents more than a quarter of all global carbon emissions, and it has spent tens of billions of dollars to build coal power facilities in 152 countries over the past decade through its Belt and Road Initiative. Roughly 70% of the coal plants built globally now rely on Chinese funding.
That’s a problem for the climate. The International Energy Agency warns in a new analysis that if the world hopes to reach net zero emissions by 2050, widely seen as necessary to meet the Paris climate agreement goals, there should be no investment in new fossil fuel supply projects or in new coal-fired power plants that don’t capture their carbon emissions. Shortly after that report came out, the G7 group of leading industrialized democracies called for an end to international financing of unabated coal projects on May 21, 2021.
A chart showing the countries that are financing new coal-fired plants.
The Conversation/The European Commission
U.S. presidential special climate envoy John Kerry was asked pointedly about China’s progress on climate change when he testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in mid-May.
Chinese President Xi Jinping had called climate change a “crisis” during a world leaders’ summit on climate change a few weeks earlier, but Kerry said talks between the two countries grew “very heated” over China’s continued insistence on financing coal-fired power plants around the world.
While he stopped short of saying it explicitly, Kerry made the U.S. position clear: China’s climate pledges won’t be credible or legitimate until it stops overseas coal financing. “We’ve got five more months left to get them to embrace something we hope you will view as legitimate,” he said. “We’re not there yet.”
China has been the world’s largest carbon emitter for 20 years. It’s been responsible for 28% of the world’s carbon emissions for the past decade. That number hasn’t budged, despite rapid growth of China’s renewable energy and clean tech industries.
One of the central reasons is coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Coal accounted for 58% of China’s total primary energy consumption as recently as 2019 – even as coal use was collapsing elsewhere. China currently operates 1,058 coal plants, roughly half of all coal plants worldwide. To meet even its modest climate goals, it will have to shut down more than half of them, according to a recent analysis by TransitionZero, a U.S.-based thinktank.
But will it?
China has incentive to cut emissions. With air pollution choking some of its largest cities, it has shuttered dozens of old coal facilities in recent years, and has subsidized renewable energy projects, both domestically and globally.
It has also made a strategic decision to export its industrial and manufacturing might across the globe under its Belt and Road Initiative. Japan and South Korea, which traditionally financed overseas coal projects, have started to abandon them, and China sees opportunity. Nearly all of the 60 new coal plants planned across Eurasia, South America and Africa –70 gigawatts of coal power in all – are financed almost exclusively by Chinese banks.
It’s clear that China is juggling energy security and economic growth concerns. That’s why analysts were surprised when Xi announced in late 2020 that China would be carbon neutral by 2060, a decade earlier than planned, and make sure its carbon emissions peaked before 2030.
Seasoned climate negotiators are watching what China does with coal today – not just the pledges it makes that are 10 or even 20 years in the future.
The U.S.-China climate relationship was central to reaching the Paris climate agreement, Todd Stern, former U.S. climate negotiator, has said. Failure to revive such engagement “would have grave national security consequences in the United States and around the world.”
A graph mapping countries with the most CO2 emissions from fossil fuels since 1990.
The Conversation/European Commission
But talk isn’t action. The world will expect both to commit to measurable actions ahead of the United Nations climate summit in November. Countries are expected to strengthen their pledges this year – hopefully enough to keep global warming in check.
I worked in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations and have been involved in climate change issues for several years. It’s clear that if China and the U.S. don’t lead the way, the world won’t get on track to meet the Paris climate goals.
China has reason to cooperate on climate change
China is already planning for a world in which fundamental natural resources like water and food grow scarce because of climate change. For example, when China saw a looming threat to its ability to grow enough soybeans, due in part to climate change, it went from importing virtually no soybeans to importing more than half the soybeans sold on Earth. I outline the reasons for this tectonic shift in my book “This is the Way the World Ends.”
China also sees economic opportunity in solving the climate crisis. It is mining raw materials essential to battery storage solutions at the heart of a global renewable energy industry; building cheap electric vehicles as fast as it can for domestic and foreign consumers; and aggressively subsidizing solar panel manufacturing and exporting those panels worldwide.
China lost the tech revolution race that defined the global economy of the 20th century. It does not intend to lose the renewable energy and clean tech revolution that will define the 21st.
But even that imperative has not kept China from financing the world’s reliance on coal-fired power. Which is why climate negotiators hope China does more than make promises for the future. Ending coal financing overseas would be a serious first step in that direction.
The online payment software company Stripe announced on Wednesday that it is spending $2.75 million to support six early-stage carbon removal projects in its second annual round of carbon removal purchases.
Carbon removal is a category of climate solutions that are designed to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keep it out for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Experts say finding ways to do this, in addition to cutting emissions of CO2, will be necessary to limit runaway climate change. But outside of “nature-based” solutions like storage carbon in trees and soils, which are limited by demand for arable land, there really aren’t any carbon removal options available at a meaningful scale yet.
In 2019, Stripe decided to try to change that by making a commitment to spend $1 million per year on nascent carbon removal solutions. The company announced the first round of projects it was funding last May. The inaugural winners included Climeworks, a company that makes “direct air capture” machines that pull CO2 out of the air, and Charm Industrial, a company that turns plants into “bio-oil” and stores it underground. Since then, Stripe has given its software customers the option to donate a portion of their profits to carbon removal, too. With that extra funding, Stripe has upped its ante.
The six new projects employ six totally different methods to capture and store carbon. A U.K.-based company called Mission Zero has developed a system that captures CO2 directly from the air and injects it underground. The process is unique in that it does not require heat, only electricity, and it boasts a potentially smaller physical footprint than other direct air capture methods.
On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps the lowest-tech solution came from the Future Forest Company. Future Forest is conducting research on grinding up rocks made of basalt, which naturally absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, and spreading them on the forest floor at a test site in Scotland. Past research has shown that the process could speed the uptake of CO2 in the basalt and be beneficial for forest growth.
Combining elements of these two methods is a company called Heirloom, which is taking a mineral called magnesium carbonate — the chalky stuff that rock climbers put on their hands — and baking it at a high temperature. The process produces a stream of CO2 gas that can be piped underground for storage, as well as “oxide minerals,” which can reabsorb CO2 from the atmosphere and then be reused to repeat the process.
Two of the companies receiving orders from Stripe are working on ocean-based carbon removal. Running Tide, which is based in Maine, is experimenting with growing kelp, which it says takes up carbon 20 times faster than trees, and then sinking the kelp into the deep ocean. Seachange, based out of the University of Los Angeles, is working on a process that extracts CO2 from seawater using electricity.
The sixth company, CarbonBuilt, is a bit of an anomaly, in that it focuses on putting carbon dioxide to use in products. The company takes CO2 gas and embeds it in concrete, helping to lower the carbon footprint of the material. CarbonBuilt recently won $7.5 million from the XPrize foundation after demonstrating its technology at a coal plant in Wyoming. Today, the company is using CO2 captured from fossil fuel–fired power plants and industrial sources, so it isn’t actually removing carbon from the atmosphere, but it could use the same technique with CO2 from a direct air capture system in the future.
As with its first round of funding, Stripe hired a cohort of scientific advisors to provide feedback on the project applications. But this time, in addition to looking at whether the ideas were scientifically sound, Stripe also judged the applicants on how they were thinking about engaging with the public and about environmental justice.
“I found it pretty innovative that they were even trying to do this,” said Holly Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo and one of Stripe’s scientific advisors. The application asked who companies’ stakeholders are, whether companies had engaged with them yet, whether companies had made any changes to their projects based on those engagements, and if their project had any environmental justice implications.
While all of the ideas getting funding from Stripe have been proven in a lab, they are at different stages in terms of the technical, economic, and regulatory aspects of scaling up, and there’s no guarantee they will all be able to deliver the carbon removal Stripe paid for. On their applications, several of the companies noted that a federal price on carbon would be the No. 1 thing that could help them reach their full potential, because it would create demand for their services. Right now, a federal tax credit called 45Q is the only national subsidy for carbon removal in the U.S. Some carbon removal companies can also sell credits on California’s statewide cap-and-trade market.
In some cases, the science is in relatively early stages, too. With Running Tide, for example, there is no established methodology yet to measure how much CO2 this kelp-sinking endeavor actually sequesters. During a presentation of the projects on Wednesday, Shannon Valley, one of Stripe’s scientific advisers who is a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, said that this is still an active area of research. In the case of the Future Forest Company, Stripe is supporting a trial that will improve the scientific understanding of the ecosystem and hydrological impacts of “enhanced weathering.”
“A clearer sense of how this actually works in the field is crucial for understanding whether or not enhanced weathering could play a viable part in the world’s carbon removal portfolio,” said Ryan Orbuch, a member of Stripe’s climate team, during the presentation on Wednesday.
Buck said that it’s unlikely that altruistic spending on carbon removal from tech companies like Stripe will be enough to bring any of these ideas to scale without more federal support. “They can play this catalytic role that they’re trying to play, but to get things actually built at scale requires the government,” she said. “So people shouldn’t be misled into thinking that the problem is solved because they’re exploring this space.”
There is a universe in which Hurricane Sandy didn’t create quite so much devastation back in 2012; where the waters, which surged deep into subway tunnels and left parts of New York City in the dark for days, left some parts of the tri-state area unscathed.
And that universe, according to scientists, is one without climate change.
Superstorm Sandy destroyed half a million homes, killed 159 people, and caused $62.5 billion in damages. And, according to a new study out Tuesday in Nature Communications, 13 percent of its costs can be attributed to human-caused sea-level rise. In other words, without warming temperatures and rising seas, tens of thousands of homes would have gone untouched, and $8.1 billion of damages would not have occurred.
“Climate change is already hurting us much more than we realize,” said Benjamin Strauss, chief scientist at the research and communications nonprofit Climate Central and one of the study’s authors. (Strauss was also once a member of Grist’s board of directors.)
Linking climate change to disastrous weather events like droughts, hurricanes, or floods is always tricky: Terrible storms happened before people started mucking with the global thermostat, and they’ll continue even if countries start to get their emissions under control. But scientists have long said that warming temperatures can make certain types of weather — heat waves, severe droughts, and floods — more likely or more severe.
Nine years after Sandy made landfall, though, scientists still aren’t positive if the fourth-costliest hurricane in U.S. history was made more likely by warming temperatures. So Strauss and his co-authors took a different tack. Instead of investigating whether warmer temperatures affected the likelihood of the hurricane itself, they focused on whether the damage done by Sandy — the homes flooded in New York City or the piers destroyed in New Jersey — had been made worse by human-caused sea-level rise.
To do so, researchers simulated two different universes: One with the higher sea levels brought on by human carbon emissions and one without. First, they analyzed how much seas had risen in the New York area thanks to climate change. “When ice melts from glaciers or from Greenland, that water doesn’t get evenly distributed around the world like peanut butter on a piece of bread,” Strauss explained.
The scientists estimated that without human emissions of greenhouse gases, the sea level in the tri-state area would be about 4 inches, or 9.6 centimeters, lower than it is today.
They then used a giant simulation from the Army Corps of Engineers to model how Hurricane Sandy would have unfolded with lower sea levels, tracking how the water would have spilled into Manhattan, the Jersey Shore, and Long Island. Finally, the researchers took those results and deployed a Federal Emergency Management Agency model to estimate damages that flooding would have caused — and compared them to the damages simulated under actual sea levels.
Strauss and his co-authors found not only that sea-level rise brought on by humans was responsible for approximately 13 percent of Sandy’s damages, but also that without those four extra inches of water, around 71,000 people would not have been affected by Hurricane Sandy’s flooding at all. (The researchers did not attempt to account for any deaths caused by the storm.)
And that, according to Strauss, may actually be an underestimate. Thirteen percent was a mid-range approximation; the damages from sea-level rise, he said, could be as high as $14 billion (or as low as $4.7 billion).
Antonia Sebastian, an assistant professor of applied hydrology at the University of North Carolina who was not involved in the research, called the paper “exciting.” While other studies have attempted to link climate change to extreme flooding, she said, “This is one of the first papers I’ve seen that really takes it a step further and looks at what that means in terms of total damage.”
At the same time, Sebastian cautioned that it can be very difficult to model damages caused by flooding. The FEMA model that the researchers used, for instance, didn’t accurately simulate the $62.5 billion costs of Hurricane Sandy; in fact, Philip Orton, a research associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology and another author of the recent paper, said that it underestimated the cost by a factor of six.
In some ways, that’s to be expected. The model only looked at the depth of flooding in residential and commercial buildings, and left out damages to infrastructure like subways or bridges. So, Orton said, researchers didn’t rely on the FEMA model to estimate the exact costs of Sandy, but instead used it as a “scaling factor” to compare the different possible damages with and without anthropogenic sea-level rise.
Still, the study is a good start for scientists looking to put a price tag on disasters brought on by warming temperatures, vicious hurricanes, and rising seas. Similar research could be used in court against oil companies. Maui County in Hawaii, Hoboken, New Jersey, and Charleston, South Carolina have already filed lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for damages from sea-level rise, as have several cities and counties in California.
Orton, who was living in New Jersey when Sandy hit, said that the research felt personal. “We had flooding within half a block of where we live,” he told me. “I saw firsthand how people’s lives were dramatically changed.”
Shaun Meehan was burned out. It had been about a year and a half since he left his job at an aerospace company to found a clean energy startup in San Francisco with three of his friends, but the path to success he’d once envisioned had crumbled. Sitting in their tiny conference room, nicknamed the “Pineapple Room” for a tropical rug that covered the floor, in the summer of 2019, he and his co-founders faced their primary investor to deliver a grim update.
For a while things had been looking up for Charm Industrial. The friends, all engineers by training, had designed a machine that could turn agricultural waste, like almond shells, into renewable hydrogen fuel. They’d even found a partner, the owner of a fueling station for hydrogen-powered cars, who wanted them to build a pilot plant at his facility. But the process of leaving the lab and entering the real world suddenly lifted the veil on all the economic, regulatory, and logistical challenges the startup had yet to solve.
Meehan had lost confidence that Charm could deliver on a large scale. It felt like their boat was leaking. And in that moment of doubt, he nearly blew everything up.
“I was just like, ‘I don’t know if I would invest in Charm,’” he recalls telling their investor that day. “I was looking at the data, I was looking at the economics of trucking, I was looking at the economics of moving the hydrogen, and I was like, this doesn’t close.”
But the investor was undeterred. “I’m investing in the team — I’m investing in the ability for you guys to figure it out,” Meehan said the venture capitalist told them. It’s a sentiment that Meehan has since learned is common in cleantech finance.
About six months later, Charm landed its first major deal. They had figured it out — but what they figured out had nothing to do with hydrogen.
Meehan and his friends were pitching a new idea. Charm would use the same technology, but instead of turning plants into a useful energy product, it would offer a service. The company would take those almond shells and other types of biomass, convert them into a carbon-rich oil, and inject the oil deep underground.
Shaun Meehan pours bio-oil into a beaker. Courtesy of Charm Industrial
Strange as it may sound, demand for this service — a form of what’s called “carbon removal” — was just beginning to grow. And in less than a year, Charm went from a struggling alternative fuel startup to one of the most credible carbon removal companies on the market.
To prevent the most devastating effects of climate change, it’s essential to cut greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out fossil fuel use. But even if the world aggressively electrifies cars and buildings and generates enough clean energy to power them all, experts say there are likely to be residual emissions from activities that are harder to decarbonize, such as farming, aviation, and chemical production.
That’s where carbon removal comes in.
The term refers to actively pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it in soils, plants, rocks, and within the Earth’s crust. Compensating for those hardest-to-eliminate emissions with carbon removal could help bring warming to a halt before it becomes much more dangerous.
This balancing act between lowering emissions and removing carbon is usually described as achieving “net-zero.” But scientists also envision versions of the future where, on a planetary scale, we’re able to draw more carbon out of the atmosphere than we emit, achieving “net-negative” emissions to lower global average temperatures to safer levels. Additionally, some international climate experts have argued that wealthy countries like the U.S., which is responsible for more of the CO2 that’s in the atmosphere today than any other country, should aim for net-negative emissions across their economies as soon as possible, allowing poorer nations to reduce their emissions more slowly.
An overview of carbon removal methods. National Academy of Sciences
There are, however, enormous obstacles to removing enough carbon from the atmosphere to make a dent in any of these goals. Earth is rich with existing carbon “sinks” that already draw down CO2, like forests, soils, and wetlands. The potential to expand them is limited by demand for land; the risk of fire, pests, deforestation, and other disturbances; and a lack of robust standards for measuring and monitoring the CO2 they remove. Engineering approaches that scrub CO2 directly from the air and pump it underground are currently energy-intensive and wildly expensive.
With the mercury on the globe’s thermometer inching ever upwards, these challenges are emerging from the shadows of scientific journals and entering the mainstream. Big Tech, in looking to reduce its carbon footprint, has begun thumbing its nose at traditional carbon offsets. Instead, companies like Microsoft and Amazon are opening up their wallets to fund the most promising carbon removal solutions. “The world must build a carbon removal market on an unprecedented scale and timeline, from nearly scratch,” Microsoft wrote in its 2020 environmental sustainability report. By investing in early-stage solutions, Microsoft and its peers say that they hope to make more reliable and affordable options available down the road.
So when Charm began marketing its strange plan to bury plant oil in March of last year, it was entering a mostly barren landscape, with money up for grabs, and offering something few of its competitors could: the promise of removing carbon permanently, reliably, and potentially on a grand scale.
Before it was a hydrogen business, or an oil business, or really a business at all, Charm was an idea for an art project. One of the company’s founders, Kevin Meissner, wanted to build a shrine of sorts to human-induced climate change.
Meissner had worked in the aerospace industry for six years but no longer felt there were impactful problems left to solve in that space. He became interested in carbon removal, which he felt was a societally important but underdeveloped technology. To him, plants seemed like the best place to start, since they’re cheap and suck up carbon dioxide all on their own through photosynthesis. So he began looking into converting plants into something called biochar, a charcoal-like substance made by heating organic material in an environment without oxygen. Studies have shown that biochar can potentially sequester carbon for hundreds of years.
The big question for Meissner was what to do with the biochar he made. He dreamed up an idea for an art installation that would make the intangible idea of climate change more tangible for people. For example, it might contain a chunk of biochar equivalent to the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere by taking a cross-country flight.
“I think that building a monument to climate change in the form of some temple that memorializes humanity’s past sins of polluting would be really poignant,” said Meissner.
Meanwhile, Meissner’s friend Peter Reinhardt had also become interested in carbon removal. Reinhardt is the co-founder and CEO of a startup called Segment, which helps companies manage customer data, and was looking for a way to offset his company’s emissions. Meissner and Reinhardt teamed up in 2017 and began exploring different ideas for a carbon removal business, like burying biochar in old coal mines or selling it as a soil additive to farmers, since research has shown it has the potential to improve soil fertility and water retention. They came up with the name Charm as a portmanteau of “char” and “farm.”
But after about a year’s worth of Saturdays spent researching, Meissner and Reinhardt couldn’t quite figure out a business model for the char. Instead, they decided to focus on producing hydrogen. The pivot wasn’t as drastic as it sounds. Biochar is made through a process called “pyrolysis,” a chemical reaction that also produces byproducts like hydrogen gas and a substance called “bio-oil.” Depending on how slowly or quickly the biomass is heated, and to what temperature, it’s possible to fine-tune the results to get more or less char, gas, or oil.
Charm Industrial’s pyrolyzer in May 2019. Courtesy of Charm Industrial
Hydrogen is mainly used in refineries and to make fertilizer, but there’s a growing market for hydrogen-powered vehicles, and experts say it could eventually be used as a climate-friendly fuel for power plants and industrial facilities. That’s because hydrogen doesn’t release any greenhouse gases when it’s burned. However, today hydrogen is responsible for about 2 percent of global CO2 emissions, because most of it is made from gas and coal. Producing hydrogen from plants cuts those fossil fuels and their emissions out of the picture.
Meissner and Reinhardt officially formed Charm Industrial in February 2018. They brought in Meehan and another friend, Kelly Hering, both of whom Meissner had worked with previously at the satellite imaging company Planet Labs, as co-founders. Then the team got to work building the hydrogen plant in the yard of a coworking space before later moving their headquarters to an industrial area on the San Francisco waterfront.
Charm’s ambition was to build a machine small enough to be assembled at existing facilities that would use the gas — about the size of a 20-foot shipping container. While the pathway to turn biomass into hydrogen is well-studied and proven, there were a number of problems to solve in making it work at a demonstration scale. They had to design a custom reactor as well as a hopper to feed unwieldy bits of plant matter into the machine.
The startup made progress on the technology side of things, but when it came to logistics, they started hitting wall after wall. The economics of trucking farm waste to their reactor or delivering hydrogen to potential customers just didn’t make sense. That’s when Meehan tried to talk Charm’s primary investor out of giving the company more money.
But in the back of his mind, Meehan had an idea that might pencil out more favorably. He wanted to try splitting Charm’s machine into two modular devices. One would be placed directly on the side of a farm and be tuned to maximize the production of bio-oil, which can be transported in regular oil tanker trucks — a cheaper proposition than hauling around farm waste. The second machine Meehan likened to a “tiny refinery” that would reform the oil into hydrogen or other useful gases. It could be parked anywhere the gases might get used, like at a fueling station or an industrial plant.
Charm staff arranges bales of biomass. Courtesy of Charm Industrial
In early 2020, things started to change at Charm. Meehan was researching splitting the machine. Meissner left the company. And Reinhardt, now serving as CEO of both Segment and Charm, saw an intriguing request for proposals posted on the blog of another startup called Stripe, which sells online payment software. Stripe had pledged to spend at least $1 million on carbon removal per year, purchasing it at any price point in order to help the field mature.
Meehan realized that the bio-oil, which is about 43 percent carbon by weight, would meet Stripe’s requirements if they injected some of it underground instead of reforming it into hydrogen. He had already done some research on injecting the oil into waste disposal wells, in case the company ever ended up with extra bio-oil they needed to get rid of.
“Charm’s mission is to reduce global CO2 levels,” Meehan said about the quick pivot to focusing on bio-oil. “So we’re not tied to any technology or any process.”
Bio-oil is thick and black and resembles crude oil, lending a certain romance to the idea of injecting it back into the earth, like running the fossil fuel industry in reverse. “We’re putting oil back into the same formations that held it for hundreds of millions of years,” Meehan said.
Despite resembling crude oil, bio-oil isn’t very useful when burned directly. It has a low energy content and a tendency to harden over time. But that latter quality makes it perfect for storing carbon underground. Meehan said that after being injected, the oil will slowly solidify, leaving little danger of it being released back into the atmosphere. The bio-oil Charm could produce would be cheaper to inject than CO2 gas captured from the air or from a power plant, since CO2 has to be compressed into a form that can be pumped underground.
Bio-oil testing at Charm Industrial. Courtesy of Charm Industrial
Stripe was sold. After a rigorous review of 24 carbon removal proposals, and input from a panel of outside scientists, Stripe selected Charm as one of only four “high potential” projects it would fund. It paid Charm for 416 metric tons of carbon removal — about the amount produced by two railcars worth of coal — at $600 per metric ton, so roughly $250,000 total.
“We went from concept to customer in like, a few weeks, which was just wild,” Meehan said. “Had it not been for that I don’t think we would be pursuing it as a company.”
Things started moving fast. Other companies began to follow Stripe’s lead. Charm took its bio-oil concept and went on to win more competitive contracts. Shopify, an e-commerce platform, purchased carbon removal from Charm last September.* In January, after an extensive review of 189 proposals, Microsoft bought 2,000 metric tons of carbon removal from Charm. In a white paper justifying Microsoft’s purchases, the company identified Charm as one of only two proposals that proved they could reliably store carbon removed from the atmosphere for more than a thousand years.
Charm Industrial was now officially a carbon removal company.
The seriousness with which companies like Stripe and Microsoft approached making investments to reduce their carbon footprints was, in part, a deliberate rebuff of traditional carbon offsets. Rigorous scientific reviews and white papers are not exactly standard practice.
Most offsets that companies buy are designed to reduce emissions. For example, companies can pay to build a solar farm that replaces fossil fuel generation. They can pay to destroy methane leaking from a landfill. Or they can pay to protect a forest from logging.
However, there’s a catch: Those investments only work to offset a company’s continued pollution if they’re paying for something that never would have happened otherwise. If a renewable energy mandate, pollution regulations, or a conservation program would have spurred the project regardless of the offset market, then the company buying the offset has not really accomplished any emissions reductions. And carbon offsets have a long and well-documented history of overestimating the carbon benefits they claim to deliver.
“In our view, traditional offsets are not a high-leverage way to spend our dollars,” Nan Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe, told Grist in an email. “They are at best low-leverage climate solutions, and at worst, drive no climate impact.”
Hype is building around using carbon removal to compensate for emissions instead of traditional offsets, partly because carbon removal is less speculative. The benefits of a project that is strictly intended to suck carbon from the atmosphere and store it somewhere are easier to grasp. Or at least, that’s the idea.
But the success of Charm — which had never even tested its plan to put bio-oil underground before being declared one of the most promising companies out there — shows just how hard it is right now to find carbon removal projects that stand up to scrutiny.
Carbonplan, a nonprofit that assesses the integrity of carbon removal projects, analyzed all of the proposals submitted to both Stripe and Microsoft. It found that most applicants did not disclose enough information to fully validate their claims. Methods were vague, volumes of CO2 removed were calculated in a number of different ways, and it was hard to tell how much carbon removal a particular effort had already sold or promised to other buyers.
“Without stronger disclosures, it’s almost impossible for companies — or the public — to know with confidence whether these activities are working,” Carbonplan wrote in a recent blog post regarding the applications submitted to Microsoft.
Charm’s proposal wasn’t bulletproof, either. For example, Charm is using agricultural waste, which brings up questions about how carbon-intensive the farming methods that produced it were. “That’s a big complex world, and, I think they, by design, haven’t opened up all of those questions,” said Danny Cullenward, Carbonplan’s policy director. Meehan said that since Charm doesn’t grow its own biomass, it doesn’t incorporate farming methods into its analysis of net carbon removal.
But within the larger context of proposals, Charm stood out for doing something more durable. Most other projects involved storing carbon in trees and soils, which could easily send CO2 back to the atmosphere in a wildfire blaze or a bout of disease. Ryan Orbuch, a member of Stripe’s climate team, told Grist they believe that Charm will be able to store carbon for more than a thousand years by injecting it underground — on par with how long CO2 lingers in the atmosphere.
Shaun Meehan looks around at a transload facility, where liquid railcars are transferred to truck transport. Courtesy of Charm Industrial
Charm’s process was also more tangible, Cullenward said. Other proposals relied on currently difficult-to-validate scenarios, like forest management projects that claimed to increase existing trees’ capacity to store carbon. Whereas these forest management projects relied on a set of assumptions and calculations, Charm could demonstrate to potential buyers what it would do.
There are other ways society could scale up carbon removal besides selling it as an offset, but as long as that’s the model, it’s essential that these methods are measured transparently and accurately. Even assuming an ideal world where carbon removal is purchased solely to offset the hardest-to-eliminate emissions, there’s little room for error. If offsets aren’t achieving what they claim, or they’re going up in flames, total emissions will keep going up.
Charm proved its process was durable, measurable, and would certainly not occur unless someone were paying them to do it. But what Charm is doing also raises a more fundamental question about how to define carbon removal.
In some cases, the line between so-called “avoided emissions” and carbon removal is clear. Technology that captures carbon from the smokestack of a power plant and buries it underground avoids unleashing new CO2 into the atmosphere. Direct air capture technology that scrubs carbon dioxide directly from the air, on the other hand, sucks up carbon that’s already been emitted. When paired with CO2 sequestration, direct air capture offers carbon removal.
But Charm’s process blurs the line, according to Andrew Bergman, an applied physics doctoral student at Harvard University and one of the authors of a primer on carbon removal. Bergman told Grist he doesn’t consider what Charm is doing to be carbon removal, since by making use of agricultural waste that would have normally been burned or left to decompose, it is helping to “avoid” emissions from agriculture. To Bergman, Charm’s process would only be considered carbon removal if the company used crops grown specifically for bio-oil sequestration.
Daniel Sanchez, an engineer and energy systems analyst who runs the Carbon Removal Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed that Charm’s use of farm waste for bio-oil sequestration reduces agricultural emissions. However, Sanchez still considers the process to be carbon removal, since the plants physically remove carbon from the atmosphere, and Charm’s process makes some of that removal permanent. Plus, using plant waste for the process can be seen as a benefit, since it doesn’t create more competition for land.
Meehan said this is how Charm sees it — they’re taking CO2 that normally cycles between plants and the atmosphere and permanently removing it from that loop.
This debate may sound nitpicky, but for Bergman, there is a lot at stake: By allowing a company like Charm to profit by disposing of farmers’ waste, it creates a system that disincentivizes efforts to reduce agricultural emissions in the first place.
“If we package avoided agricultural emissions from waste biomass, which we should be mitigating, as ‘carbon removal,’ we’ll run into the same kind of issue we have with offsets that were going to be conserved anyway,” Bergman said. He was referring to research showing that many carbon offset credits for forest conservation were sold under false pretenses — the forests were never at risk of being logged. “In aggregate over time, we’ll be enabling the claiming of carbon removal credits that shouldn’t be allowed to exist, and those credits will permit more emissions.”
In one sense, it doesn’t necessarily matter today whether Charm is Bergman’s purist vision of carbon removal or not, as long as it’s reliable and long-lasting. “Up until the point that you are removing more than you are emitting,” Sanchez said, “the atmosphere sees no difference between carbon removal and avoided emissions.”
But even if the atmosphere sees no difference between carbon removal and avoided emissions yet, the Earth does. Carbon removal will be resource-intensive, requiring either land to grow trees and other plants, or energy, water, and minerals to scrub CO2 from the air and pump it underground. Leaning too heavily on it, rather than cutting emissions, risks stretching those resources dangerously thin, or failing entirely — and allowing for climate disaster.
The vast majority of startups fail, and there’s no guarantee Charm will make it. The processes underlying its business — producing bio-oil through pyrolysis, drilling wells, and underground injection — are all well understood. Once again, it’s the economics and logistics of scaling up that remain open questions.
Today, Charm’s solution is expensive — about as expensive as capturing CO2 from ambient air. But Stripe told Grist the company clearly showed potential to bring its costs down.
Meehan said Charm’s ultimate goal is to get its price down from $600 to $50 per metric ton of CO2 removed. The company’s grand scheme for getting there is primarily to scale up — as demand grows and Charm produces more bio-oil, it can bring down the cost of manufacturing the equipment and the overall cost of operations. The company is also looking to operate in states like Kansas and Oklahoma where the geology is suitable for injection wells, and where farm waste is abundant. By producing the oil closer to disposal wells, it can save money on transportation. Charm is also working to turn some of the bio-oil into a mixture of hydrogen and other gases called syngas that can be used to make green steel.
Government programs could also help Charm bring its costs down. A federal tax credit known as 45Q will eventually pay companies up to $50 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent sequestered underground. Right now it only applies to CO2 gas, but Charm hopes to lobby to get the definition expanded to include bio-oil. Similarly, the company would like to become eligible to generate credits under California’s low carbon fuel standard, a status that direct air capture facilities recently gained. Charm could then sell those credits to fuel producers to help them comply with California’s emissions standards.
Charm industrial staff work on the pyrolyzer. Courtesy of Charm Industrial
Right now Charm’s carbon removal service depends entirely on companies voluntarily paying for it. Demand didn’t end with Microsoft. Charm recently opened up shop for any interested parties to purchase carbon removal credits through markets like Sourceful and Aerial. Stripe has also made it possible for its software customers to direct a small portion of their revenues to fund carbon removal through Charm. Still, it’s unclear how far this kind of altruism will get the company without government regulations or a price on carbon.
In April, Charm announced that it had successfully fulfilled Stripe’s carbon removal purchase, pumping enough bio-oil into disposal wells in the Midwest to store 416 metric tons of carbon. Charm would not specify where the wells were. Reinhardt told Grist the company has sequestered more than 1,200 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent underground in 2021. By comparison, a direct air capture pilot plant in Iceland that began injecting CO2 underground in 2017, the only such facility of its kind to date, could store 50 metric tons of CO2 per year. (The companies behind the pilot plant, Climeworks and Carbfix, are building a new facility that can bury 4,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.)
When I last spoke with Meehan, Charm had just hired its 14th employee, and he was furiously busy trying to figure out how to keep up with demand for its services. Less than two years after that fateful meeting with the investor, his faith in Charm was restored, and then some: “I think we have a way to make this potentially the largest negative carbon company that’s ever existed.”
*This piece was updated to reflect that Shopify made a purchase from Charm. It is not an investor in the company.
U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry caused a stir over the weekend, telling the BBC that half of carbon emissions cuts in the coming decades will come from technologies “we don’t yet have.”
Kerry’s statement reignited a longstanding debate among climate hawks: Can we rely on tried-and-true technologies alone to meet emissions targets? How far can today’s solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles, and electric heat pumps get us without other technologies that have yet to prove themselves at scale?
Now a new report by the International Energy Association, or IEA, has added new data to the fray. For the first time ever, the IEA modeled what it would take for the world to achieve a net-zero emissions energy system by 2050 and still have a 50 percent chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
The IEA’s road map, which was released Tuesday, includes an unprecedented deployment of existing technologies over the next decade: Renewable energy and electric vehicles would be scaled up faster and more extensively than they have been in many previous net-zero models.
In this version of the future, the sale of new gas-powered cars ends everywhere in the world by 2035. Ninety percent of global electricity generation comes from renewable sources by 2050. Our cars and buildings and industrial processes become so efficient — thanks to lighter materials, energy-saving appliances, and innovations like waste heat recovery — that, by 2050, the global economy will be 40 percent larger than it is today, but use 7 percent less energy.
The IEA model allows for some fossil fuels to remain in use in 2050, though any leftover gas- or coal-fired facilities would have to capture their emissions within two decades. But even with some remaining uses for fossil fuels, the IEA definitively states that no new oil, gas, or coal resources are required to meet the world’s energy demand beyond those already being tapped today.
Unlike most existing road maps to net zero, the IEA’s model also involves humankind making significant behavioral changes. In fact, 55 percent of the emissions cuts the IEA outlines require at least some active engagement by everyday people, whether that’s installing a solar-powered water heater or switching to an electric vehicle. About 8 percent of emissions cuts come from more pervasive lifestyle changes, like shifting away from single-use plastics, driving less, flying less, and adjusting the temperatures of our homes to limit heating and cooling.
But even with these behavioral changes and a hard-to-fathom scale-up of existing technology in place, about half of the world’s energy-related emissions would remain unmitigated. In other words, the IEA’s analysis aligns with what Kerry told the BBC: To get to net-zero, we’ll need to scale up clean, continually running power sources like geothermal plants and small nuclear reactors, as well as develop better batteries that can store energy for months at a time. We’ll need trucks and ships and planes that can run on hydrogen fuel or biofuels. And we’ll need new industrial processes to produce essential materials like steel and concrete.
Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and energy systems analyst for the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank, said that the challenge is not proving that these technologies work — it’s making them commercially viable. (Hausfather was not involved in the IEA analysis.)
“It’s technologies that aren’t mature today — that aren’t cost effective compared to what we currently use, that will need to be innovated on and improved and brought into the market in a big way to reach our targets by 2050,” he told Grist.
Hausfather also pointed out that the IEA’s net-zero report actually relies much less on certain immature technologies than many previous models, because it finds that renewable energy and electric vehicles can be scaled up so quickly. By contrast, many of the models that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, analyzed for its 2018 report on limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius rely heavily on carbon capture, storage, and utilization technology to mitigate an average of 15 gigatons of carbon dioxide. The rapid transition envisioned in the IEA’s report requires less than half that amount.
Past efforts to analyze what it would take to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius have also been criticized for including enormous amounts of negative emissions technologies. This is where the “net” in “net zero” comes from — technologies that suck carbon out of the atmosphere balance out some level of inevitable residual emissions. But many past models also allow global temperature increases to overshoot 1.5 degrees C and rely on negative emissions to eventually cool the planet. The problem is that these technologies are still nascent and could require unsustainable amounts of energy and land to deploy at such a large scale. The IEA’s analysis does not allow for such risky temperature overshoot, and it ultimately requires only 1.9 gigatons of negative emissions, compared to the 3.5 to 16 gigatons included in IPCC models.
“This report reflects the fact that the world has been changing rapidly, that clean energy prices have been falling a lot faster than anyone predicted,” said Hausfather. “It’s still going to be an incredibly heavy lift to limit warming to one and a half degrees — and I personally wouldn’t bet on it.”
Cruise and cargo ships around the world are cleaning up their dirty smokestacks, installing systems that prevent harmful pollutants in their exhaust from escaping into the air. Yet much of that pollution is winding up in the sea instead. And so a solution meant to reduce smog, experts say, is leaving a potentially toxic trail in its wake.
Thousands of ships use exhaust cleaning systems, or “scrubbers,” compared with hundreds of ships just a few years ago, as companies face rising pressure to tamp down on their pollution. International regulators now require vessels to burn low-sulfur fuels at sea, while local authorities are cracking down on emissions close to shore. Scrubbers offer a middle ground, allowing ship operators to keep burning sludgy, sulfur-laden “bunker fuel” and still comply with air quality rules.
The problem is that those ships are expected to dump at least 10 billion metric tons of what’s known as wash water — the contaminated byproduct — into seas around the world every year, according to a first-of-its-kind study from the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research group.
About 80 percent of that wash water ends up close to shore, including near major cruise destinations in the Bahamas, Canada, and Italy as well as in ecologically sensitive areas such as the Great Barrier Reef, the ICCT’s study said. The wash water can be a nasty cocktail of carcinogens from the fuel oil, heavy metals that harm marine life, and nitrates, which can worsen water quality in shallow waters. Instead of flowing into the open ocean, where pollutants might disperse, much of the wash water often pours into places that function more like bathtubs.
“It means that every year, quite high concentrations will accumulate in these areas and will be growing and growing,” said Liudmila Osipova, the study’s lead author and an ICCT researcher in Berlin.
Separate scientific research has shown that scrubber wash water can be acidic and poisonous to some marine life, though the overall effect on coastal environments and communities isn’t fully understood. “We don’t know what kind of consequences that will have,” Osipova said.
Only a fraction of the global shipping fleet — roughly 8 percent — uses scrubbers. Other vessels have switched to cleaner-burning but more expensive petroleum products like “marine gas oil.” But scrubber adoption continues to grow, particularly among giant cargo vessels and cruise ships with huge appetites for fuel. The bigger the vessel, the bigger its scrubber, and the more wash water the system will ultimately discharge.
Most scrubber systems are “open-loop,” meaning they mix seawater with exhaust gas, filter it, then discharge the resulting effluent. “Closed-loop” systems treat and recirculate their wash water and dispel a smaller amount, but fewer shipping companies use them because they cost more to install and operate. Until ICCT researchers studied some 3,600 scrubber-equipped ships, there wasn’t a solid sense of how much polluted water these systems produce around the world or where it winds up. Some 700 more ships now use scrubbers since the research data was collected, so the volume of wash water is likely much higher than estimated, Osipova said.
A diagram of an “open-loop” scrubber system, in which ocean water and exhaust gas mix. The resulting wash water contains chemical byproducts that can worsen water quality and harm marine life. Grist / Amelia Bates
For environmental groups, the study compounds their broader frustration with the industry’s seemingly tepid efforts to address climate change. Cargo shipping is responsible for nearly 3 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Yet rather than pursue technologies to replace bunker fuel, some shipowners are spending millions of dollars to install equipment that addresses one problem — air pollution — but does nothing to advance the industry’s decarbonization efforts, said Dan Hubbell, manager of the Ocean Conservancy’s shipping emissions campaign in Washington, D.C.
“We’re facing a truly global crisis, and it’s the kind of thing that requires bold solutions,” Hubbell said. “A piece we’ve struggled with is the industry’s preference for short-term fixes.”
Proponents of scrubber systems pushed back against the ICCT study and other criticisms. The Clean Shipping Alliance, an industry group that includes the cruise giant Carnival, said the report’s estimates of 10 billion tons of wash water are “greatly exaggerated.” The alliance pointed to industry-funded research that suggests that wash water has the “same overall water quality” as the seawater it returns to. In a statement, Capt. Mike Kaczmarek, the alliance’s chairman, said that scrubbers have become “a successful bridging solution to carbon neutrality.”
Independent research had already raised flags about the effects of scrubber wash water on the marine environment. Last year, a study on ships in Belgium found their scrubber discharges to be acidic, with elevated concentrations of metals like nickel, copper, and chromium — all of which can hurt fish and other marine life. In April, the Swedish Environmental Research Institute found that wash water from North Sea ships has “severe toxic effects” on the zooplankton that serve as food for cod, herring, and other important fish species. Researchers suggested that ships’ scrubber systems might serve as a “witch’s cauldron,” meaning that chemical compounds brew in a hot, acidic environment and become more toxic together than they would if taken individually.
Kerstin Magnusson, an ecotoxicologist and co-author of the Swedish study, noted that scrubber wash water doesn’t affect all species the same, and it may be less toxic in certain environments than others. But research on the topic is still relatively limited, in large part because scientists have trouble getting their hands on wash water samples. “Ship owners don’t want us to collect it,” she said. “They think we are seeking to find adverse effects, but this is not the case.”
Given such uncertainty, governments worldwide are taking steps to protect the waters they control. Thirty countries and ports have banned or put limits on scrubber wash water in their jurisdictions, including major shipping countries like China, Singapore, and Norway, as well as authorities in charge of the Panama and Suez canals. In the United States, California and Connecticut have scrubber-related restrictions. And in Washington state, officials are considering a proposal to prohibit wash water in the Puget Sound, a busy cruise hub that’s home to threatened orca whales and Chinook salmon.
The Port of Seattle last year banned cruise ships from dumping wash water “out of an abundance of caution” to protect fish and wildlife habitats near the Seattle waterfront, said Alex Adams, the port’s senior manager of environmental programs. “Until we can learn more about the impacts of wash water discharges, we’re going to continue this prohibition,” Adams said. In response to the policy, most cruise ships now plug into the port’s shoreside electricity to avoid running their scrubbers.
Groups like Ocean Conservancy and Stand.earth are calling for a blanket ban on scrubber use within U.S. and Canadian waters. The ICCT recommends that the International Maritime Organization — the United Nations body that regulates the shipping industry — prohibit ships from using scrubbers to meet environmental protocols and phase out scrubbers on existing ships. That might encourage companies to get more of their vessels to run on low-sulfur fuels like marine gas oil until fossil fuel alternatives such as green methanol, hydrogen, and ammonia become viable.
Without tighter restrictions on wash water pollution, or stronger requirements to reduce ships’ greenhouse gas emissions, cruise and cargo ships are expected to continue installing scrubbers. That could lead to even more wash water getting dumped overboard. The way things are going, Osipova said, “We’ll just see more and more emissions of water pollution in the future.”
America’s favorite teenagers are back. Brood X, a group of 17-year “magicicadas” (yes, that’s short for “magic cicadas”) have started to emerge from the soil all over the Eastern U.S., marking the beginning of a cicada season that will eventually see billions of the bugs molting, screeching for mates, and — after just a few weeks — dying, leaving their carcasses strewn across lawns and roofs from New Jersey to Illinois.
It’s a once-every-two-decades bonanza that serves as a sometimes unwelcome reminder of the passage of time. “Periodical cicadas are the ‘bugs of history,’” said Gene Kritsky, a professor of biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati. He would know: Kritsky is a kind of entomologist-historian, writing books and articles with such tantalizing titles as The Tears of Re: Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt or “The Insects and Arthropods of the Bible.”
Cicadas’ regular schedules, Kritsky explains, are part of their charm. If you gave birth to a child during the last emergence of Brood X, he or she is now a teenager. Whatever else is happening in the world: a pandemic, a war, a presidential election — the cicadas will come every 17 (or, for some broods, every 13) years.
Adult cicadas dry their wings after emerging from living 17 years below ground.
U.S. Department of Agriculture / Agricultural Research Service
But some researchers believe that, as the world warms, those reliable schedules may be starting to shift. Cicadas are reliant on internal clocks: They spend their entire lives — up until those last few orgiastic weeks — underground, sipping nutrients from roots and counting the years until they can scuttle out of their tiny lairs. In year 17, when the ground is around 64 degrees Fahrenheit and soft from recent rain, these nymphs start to wriggle their fleshy, segmented bodies out of dime-sized holes in the ground.
Over the past several decades though, periodical cicadas have seemed to pop up earlier and earlier. Kritsky, who has combed through newspapers and diaries recording cicada emergence over the past century, says that before 1950, cicadas most often started their emergence between May 20 and 28; now they’re coming out in the month’s first couple of weeks. A preliminary analysis from Climate Central, a research and communications nonprofit, estimates that in April and May the areas of the U.S. frequented by Brood X are 8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than they were in 1970 — and 1.1 degrees F hotter than they were when the bugs last emerged in 2004. That’s more than enough to send them scurrying out of the soil ahead of time.
As temperatures warm, cicadas may also be getting their tiny antennae crossed, miscounting the years entirely. In 2017, a group of Brood X cicadas were sighted wriggling out of the ground four years early all across the Eastern U.S., joining a whole host of broods that seem to have mis-set their internal clocks. “Broods II, III, V, X, XIII, XIV, and XIX have all spun out accelerated populations four years early,” Kritsky said. “Those broods are over more than 20 states in the Eastern U.S. — and what’s the common factor that could trigger that? Increasing temperatures.”
Kritsky believes it could be because cicadas use fluid in trees to mark time. Under unusually warm temperatures, trees might bud and leaf early in a “false spring,” then bud and leaf again a few months later — tricking cicadas into thinking that more time has passed.
But the connection is far from proven. “It’s hypothetical at this point,” said John Cooley, a cicada researcher at the University of Connecticut. In the era of internet crowdsourcing — enthusiastic bug hunters can download an app called “Cicada Safari” to document the molting masses — he warns that both early cicada emergence and the accelerated populations could simply be a result of more reporting.
And that “only-emerging-every-13-to-17-years” thing also makes it hard to amass good data. “If you wanted a species to document climate change effects, periodical cicadas might not be your first choice,” said Louie Yang, a professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis. “The generation time is so outrageously long.”
Still, cicadas may provide other ways of thinking about the rapidly warming planet. The last time Brood X emerged, in May 2004, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 381 parts per million. Today, it’s around 420 parts per million and climbing. In 2038, when the children of this year’s cicadas first poke their heads out of the ground, will they be entering a world irrevocably changed by wildfire, heat waves, and spiking sea levels? Or one that is on its way back to some form of normal?
“Seventeen years is a pretty good unit,” Yang told me. Humans, he said, are famously bad at thinking about very big things (see climate change) or things that occur over a very long time period (see also: climate change). “We’re good at medium-sized objects and medium-sized time,” he explained. That makes cicadas, with their patient underground waiting and their sudden, chittering emergence, an excellent tool — a kind of yardstick that can be used to measure the future or the past.
“In the time of two or three cicada generations, our lives are quite different — and the planet is likely to be quite different,” Yang said. “It makes you think: Are we having the kind of positive impact that we want to have by the time this next cicada brood comes out of the ground?”
America’s favorite teenagers are back. Brood X, a group of 17-year “magicicadas” (yes, that’s short for “magic cicadas”) have started to emerge from the soil all over the Eastern U.S., marking the beginning of a cicada season that will eventually see billions of the bugs molting, screeching for mates, and — after just a few weeks — dying, leaving their carcasses strewn across lawns and roofs from New Jersey to Illinois.
It’s a once-every-two-decades bonanza that serves as a sometimes unwelcome reminder of the passage of time. “Periodical cicadas are the ‘bugs of history,’” said Gene Kritsky, a professor of biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati. He would know: Kritsky is a kind of entomologist-historian, writing books and articles with such tantalizing titles as The Tears of Re: Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt or “The Insects and Arthropods of the Bible.”
Cicadas’ regular schedules, Kritsky explains, are part of their charm. If you gave birth to a child during the last emergence of Brood X, he or she is now a teenager. Whatever else is happening in the world: a pandemic, a war, a presidential election — the cicadas will come every 17 (or, for some broods, every 13) years.
Adult cicadas dry their wings after emerging from living 17 years below ground.
U.S. Department of Agriculture / Agricultural Research Service
But some researchers believe that, as the world warms, those reliable schedules may be starting to shift. Cicadas are reliant on internal clocks: They spend their entire lives — up until those last few orgiastic weeks — underground, sipping nutrients from roots and counting the years until they can scuttle out of their tiny lairs. In year 17, when the ground is around 64 degrees Fahrenheit and soft from recent rain, these nymphs start to wriggle their fleshy, segmented bodies out of dime-sized holes in the ground.
Over the past several decades though, periodical cicadas have seemed to pop up earlier and earlier. Kritsky, who has combed through newspapers and diaries recording cicada emergence over the past century, says that before 1950, cicadas most often started their emergence between May 20 and 28; now they’re coming out in the month’s first couple of weeks. A preliminary analysis from Climate Central, a research and communications nonprofit, estimates that in April and May the areas of the U.S. frequented by Brood X are 8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than they were in 1970 — and 1.1 degrees F hotter than they were when the bugs last emerged in 2004. That’s more than enough to send them scurrying out of the soil ahead of time.
As temperatures warm, cicadas may also be getting their tiny antennae crossed, miscounting the years entirely. In 2017, a group of Brood X cicadas were sighted wriggling out of the ground four years early all across the Eastern U.S., joining a whole host of broods that seem to have mis-set their internal clocks. “Broods II, III, V, X, XIII, XIV, and XIX have all spun out accelerated populations four years early,” Kritsky said. “Those broods are over more than 20 states in the Eastern U.S. — and what’s the common factor that could trigger that? Increasing temperatures.”
Kritsky believes it could be because cicadas use fluid in trees to mark time. Under unusually warm temperatures, trees might bud and leaf early in a “false spring,” then bud and leaf again a few months later — tricking cicadas into thinking that more time has passed.
But the connection is far from proven. “It’s hypothetical at this point,” said John Cooley, a cicada researcher at the University of Connecticut. In the era of internet crowdsourcing — enthusiastic bug hunters can download an app called “Cicada Safari” to document the molting masses — he warns that both early cicada emergence and the accelerated populations could simply be a result of more reporting.
And that “only-emerging-every-13-to-17-years” thing also makes it hard to amass good data. “If you wanted a species to document climate change effects, periodical cicadas might not be your first choice,” said Louie Yang, a professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis. “The generation time is so outrageously long.”
Still, cicadas may provide other ways of thinking about the rapidly warming planet. The last time Brood X emerged, in May 2004, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 381 parts per million. Today, it’s around 420 parts per million and climbing. In 2038, when the children of this year’s cicadas first poke their heads out of the ground, will they be entering a world irrevocably changed by wildfire, heat waves, and spiking sea levels? Or one that is on its way back to some form of normal?
“Seventeen years is a pretty good unit,” Yang told me. Humans, he said, are famously bad at thinking about very big things (see climate change) or things that occur over a very long time period (see also: climate change). “We’re good at medium-sized objects and medium-sized time,” he explained. That makes cicadas, with their patient underground waiting and their sudden, chittering emergence, an excellent tool — a kind of yardstick that can be used to measure the future or the past.
“In the time of two or three cicada generations, our lives are quite different — and the planet is likely to be quite different,” Yang said. “It makes you think: Are we having the kind of positive impact that we want to have by the time this next cicada brood comes out of the ground?”
During the final debate of the 2020 election, President Joe Biden did something unheard of for a major presidential candidate: He vowed to end the use of fossil fuels. “I would transition from the oil industry,” Biden said, in response to a pointed question from then-President Donald Trump. “It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.”
It was a sharp rebuke of the oil, gas, and coal sector, and one that did not go unnoticed by Biden’s political rivals. (The Democratic candidate later claimed he was talking only about transitioning away from fossil fuel subsidies.) Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, tweeted that Biden’s promise amounted to a “transition away from Texas”; Trump himself argued that Biden would “destroy the oil industry.”
Now, 100 days into his presidency, Biden has accomplished many of his climate promises — he has rejoined the Paris Agreement, hosted a world summit on climate change, announced a new goal of lowering U.S. emissions by 50 percent by 2030, and laid out plans for a $2 trillion infrastructure bill that is actually (quietly) a climate bill. But has the president followed through on his plans to “hold polluters accountable” at home? Let’s take a look at Biden’s record on four major ways the federal government can cut down on fossil fuels.
Shutting down oil pipelines
On pipelines, Biden came out swinging by revoking a key permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported oil from Canada’s tar sands to Nebraska. In an executive order signed on day one of his presidency, Biden wrote that an Obama-era review of the project concluded the pipeline “would undermine U.S. climate leadership” and also pointed to the “urgency for combating climate change.”
But the administration has been relatively silent on other pipeline battles raging around the country, including over the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Line 3 pipeline expansion through Minnesota.
At a hearing earlier this month, the Biden administration had an opportunity to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, since the companies overseeing the project are operating without a federal permit. But an attorney from the Department of Justice declined to do so, telling a federal judge that the Army Corps of Engineers is still gathering information. “They actually had a very clear opportunity to take action and did not,” said Collin Rees, a senior campaigner for Oil Change International. “That’s been very disappointing.”
The only hint that the administration might have more of a fight in store for pipeline operators came from an interview with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm during a recent CNN town hall. In response to a question about the government’s stance on the Line 3 pipeline, another Canadian tar sands project that Indigenous and climate activists are begging Biden to shut down, Granholm said she believed it was “under review,” adding that she thought there was “great sensitivity to the Indigenous peoples who will be affected by it.”
Ending subsidies for fossil fuels
According to estimates from Oil Change International and the bipartisan Environmental and Energy Study Institute, the U.S. government pours about $20 billion a year into tax breaks, subsidies, and direct support for coal, oil, and gas. Biden has repeatedly promised to end that financial support, saying, “I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to Big Oil.”
But fossil fuel subsidies are tricky to root out — they are spread out across the entire government, and the president can only directly control subsidies that come from federal agencies, like the Department of Justice or the Department of Energy. Money that’s shelled out to Big Oil via the tax code will have to be cut off by Congress.
In an executive order on January 27, the president told the federal government to identify “any fossil fuel subsidies provided by their respective agencies” and then take steps to stop directly subsidizing fossil fuels. But that order did not come with a deadline, and so far the Biden administration hasn’t issued any updates on its progress.
On the Congressional side, a handful of Democratic members of the House have introduced legislation to end 11 of what they call the most “egregious” fossil fuel subsidies in the U.S. tax code, and Biden has also argued that eliminating fossil fuel subsidies could help pay for his $2 trillion infrastructure plan. But such a bill would still have to make its way through Congress — and the Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the Senate isn’t going to make it easy.
Source: Grist
Clayton Aldern / Grist
Banning new oil and gas leasing on public lands
Biden seems to have lost his spine when it comes to a campaign promise he made to ban new oil and gas leases on public lands. Although he put a temporary moratorium on new drilling leases during his second week in office while the Department of Interior conducts a review of the leasing program, there’s been no indication the administration intends to make the ban permanent. To the contrary, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has stressed that it is temporary.
The review could result in a few different outcomes. Some experts are advocating for reforms of the leasing program, which frequently sells off drilling rights for less than $2 dollars per acre, allows companies to sit on leases for up to 10 years, and brings in only a fraction of the revenue in royalties that drilling on state or private lands require. Structural changes, reformists say, could deliver higher revenues to the government and protect the environment.
But others are ready to hold Biden accountable to his initial commitment, and more. A large coalition of environmental groups has asked the administration for a more comprehensive review that would look at how to align the entire oil and gas leasing program with Biden’s climate goals. Kyle Tisdel, climate and energy program director of the Western Environmental Law Center, said this could take several years but would result in more durable solutions that would outlast Biden’s term in office.
“What we’re calling for is an end to leasing,” said Tisdel, “and then a management of how we decline public lands oil and gas development in a way that’s consistent with carbon budgets and the science and the timeline of the crisis.” Otherwise, he warned, “you’re going to get this chaotic decline based on the market economics of oil and gas.”
Regulating polluters
Trump rolled back dozens of environmental regulations during his term in office, allowing more emissions to spew from power plants and car tailpipes. It could take years to overturn many of these, but Biden’s team is moving quickly on a few key regulations of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
The administration is cooking up new federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, and is also planning to restore California’s right to set its own, stricter fuel standards, which are followed by 14 other states. This week, the Senate also used a little-known legislative loophole to overturn Trump-era regulations on methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas that leaks from oil and gas wells. If the House follows suit, that will revert limits on methane for the oil and gas industry to their much stricter Obama-era levels.
One of the most important climate regulations, however, will also be the trickiest to restore. Earlier this year, a court threw out Trump’s rules on emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants, giving the Biden administration a clean slate to write new regulation. But former President Barack Obama’s attempt to regulate those same power plants — which account for about 25 percent of the U.S.’s total carbon emissions — ran into trouble in the courts when a group of Republican-controlled states argued that it was an overreach of federal authority. Michael Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has said that the agency is working on new rules, but it will have to be careful to avoid falling into the same legal traps faced by the Obama administration.
In the long run, these regulations could do even more to slow down the fossil fuel industry than stopping pipelines or canceling subsidies. “What’s threatening to oil and gas is really the actions that are being planned on the power sector and the transportation front,” said Andrew Logan, senior director of oil and gas at the sustainable finance nonprofit Ceres.
Jenny Price, historian, artist, author, and Ivy League academic, thinks most environmentalists are sabotaging their own cause. Shouldering their tote bags through the organic aisle at the grocery store, they miss the bigger problem tearing the planet to pieces: the same system that is the source of their own affluence.
Price’s new book Stop Saving the Planet! An Environmentalist Manifesto, is a slim broadside, the sort of thing you can whip through in a few hours. Unlike her previous book, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, which is a carefully nuanced examination of the strange way Americans think about nature, this one is a furious polemic, leavened with humor. Price acknowledges, in passing, that the fossil fuel industry and its backers are the biggest reason environmentalists haven’t made more progress, but all the rest of the blame in this story goes to the environmentalists themselves.
Price’s basic argument comes from the long-established observation that many people see the environment as something distant and beautiful that they need to save, the mountains where they go backpacking, the jungle in a David Attenborough documentary. But in reality, Price argues, the environment is not just “out there”; it’s our food, the wood in our houses, and the metals in our computers. It’s “in here.” When people focus on saving the planet, it allows them to feel good about making tiny, token efforts without changing the fundamental tenets of the polluting system that fouls lakes, swallows cities in smog, and also gets your Amazon package delivered and supports your job. That is, the economy as we know it.
Of course, on some level most environmentalists realize that the environment is “in here” and that they are fundamentally a part of it. That’s why they recycle and compost and buy green products. On a video call as part of her book launch , I started by asking why those individual measures didn’t undermine her argument.
The interview is condensed and edited for accuracy and clarity.
Q. I think a lot of people would read this and say, “I understand the environment isn’t just “out there, I understand that I’m part of the environment, that’s why I recycle, that’s why I buy green products.” Why don’t you like those individual measures?
A. The little things aren’t saving the planet. When you change that light bulb that’s not beating back climate change. It’s sort of like one plus one equals 100. It’s meaningless. It doesn’t all add up.
The environment is really the only major global crisis that we assume you can solve from your kitchen. We don’t assume you can solve the Middle East crisis, or child poverty, or the immigration problem even though your daily decisions are very bound up with those problems. We have to stop believing that we can solve it from our kitchens and start working for big system changes.
Q. What’s wrong with people being proud of the little things they are doing to save the planet?
A. The “save the planet” approach allows affluent environmentalists, the people who contribute the most pollution and suffer the least, to continue to change environments horribly, atrociously, to create our stuff and wealth, but to think they are doing something about it. I’m not saying it’s all hypocrisy — I think there’s a lot of good intentions when people buy a Prius or recycle plastic, but good intentions aren’t good enough ultimately.
Instead of saving the planet I want people to think about changing the environment. I want people to not shy away from the fact that we have to change environments to live. An ant changes environments to live, a microbe changes environments to live. Don’t be afraid of saying you are going to change environments. It’s how you do it, not whether you do it.
Q.So up to this point I’m right with you. But once I accept that we need to change environments to live, I start asking how we work closely with industries to figure out how they can provide the materials we need without polluting, instead of shutting them down. But that’s just tweaking, incremental steps, and you want to take much bigger steps, right?
A. We are way past time where we can use our economy that maximizes profits and growth instead of health and well being to solve the problems that it creates. And yet what are the big solutions? Buy stuff, it’s green growth, it’s carbon trading, it’s market solutions.
Unless you change the fundamental structure of the markets, market solutions will never ever, ever work. And even if they do work to beat back climate change, they are not treating the root causes. We cannot go after the environmental crisis, problem by problem pollutant by pollutant.
Q. Wait, why not? That’s what we’ve done historically. You see massive pollution in the Industrial Revolution, and then you see all that coal smoke cleaned up over London. We cleaned up the Cuyahoga River in Ohio after it caught fire. It’s slow and inequitable, and we are still a long way from getting all the lead out of drinking water, but at least it’s no longer in every can of paint and gallon of gasoline. Aren’t we making progress?
A. The environmental regulations we have allow us to do marginal improvements, but they don’t address the root causes which are structural. Our economy, the engine of our society, is designed to ignore environmental and social costs. Sure, you can compare the black skies in Los Angeles from decades ago to today, and there has been improvement. But what we’ve mostly done is clean up pollution where most affluent people encounter it, and then stash it and concentrate it in low income areas. I think you have to ask whose quality of life is better? Are people who live in Cancer Alley, the strip between New Orleans and Baton Rouge where they have 150 petrochemical plants, do they think their quality of life is better than 50 years ago?
Q. We’ve talked so far about the first half of the book, and if the first half is “stop,” the second half is “start.” So what should people start doing?
A. What I’ve done is almost like a parody, but also a sincere riff on the standard listicle. You know, “10 easy things you can do to stop climate change from your kitchen,” and I’ve done “39 ways to stop saving the planet.” A lot of the things are about social change instead of individual change — joining groups, banding together. Some of it is to figure out where the worst messes are — invariably going to be in low-income areas and communities of color — and start cleaning them up. A really important one is to pay more attention to how you create wealth — rather than just paying attention to how to give it away, or use it to buy things. Then there are a whole bunch of suggestions for things to watch and read, suggestions for redefining things like environment, economy, efficiency, costs. And then there’s like, tell a freaking joke: Environmentalism is so righteous and pious, and it needs to embrace irony and humor as powerful tools.
