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Category: Climate & Energy

  • Biden’s first 100 days were big for clean energy. What about fossil fuels?

    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. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s first 100 days were big for clean energy. What about fossil fuels? on Apr 29, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Have you been doing environmentalism wrong?

    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. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Have you been doing environmentalism wrong? on Apr 28, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Have you been doing environmentalism wrong?

    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. 

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The First 100 – The prodigal U.S. returns

    A short-run weekly newsletter analyzing federal climate action during the first months of the Biden administration.

    Hi there, I’m Zoya Teirstein. It’s day 94 of the Biden administration, and this week, the president brought the world to the bargaining table.

    Joe Biden began his first 100 days in office with a slew of climate-related executive orders. He’s wrapping them up with a geopolitical Coachella for climate action.

    On Thursday, 40 heads of the world’s most powerful economies attended Biden’s virtual Leaders Summit on Climate Change. At the event, Biden announced a pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least half of 2005 levels in less than a decade as part of an updated non-binding commitment to the Paris Agreement.

    While Biden threw down the climate gauntlet before world leaders, his counterparts didn’t exactly scramble to pick it up. Most showed up to Biden’s summit without new or more ambitious commitments to slash emissions — though there were a few notable exceptions.

    Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced a new emissions reduction target of 46 percent compared to 2013 levels by 2030, up from 26 percent. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country will reduce its 2005 emission levels by 40 to 45 percent by 2030, up from 30 percent. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced a new partnership with the U.S. that will help mobilize investment in green technology. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro promised his country would go carbon neutral by 2050, 10 years sooner than its previous target. And Vladimir Putin said he would keep Russia’s emissions below the E.U.’s over the next 30 years, a pledge he made in a speech a day before the summit.

    Ultimately, Biden’s gathering was more of a comeback celebration than an international call to action. The president’s new climate target is ambitious by virtually any standard, and it’s one the White House hopes will restore the nation’s climate cred.

    America spent the past four years unraveling years of domestic and international climate progress, starting with former President Donald Trump’s announcement of his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement in early 2017. The U.S. isn’t new to the climate hokey pokey, especially as it has ping-ponged from Democratic to Republican administrations. Republican George H.W. Bush blew up the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when he refused to commit to specific emissions reductions. His son, George W. Bush, then withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.

    Biden is trying to signal that the U.S. has turned the page on climate inaction, but it’s unclear how he aims to actually accomplish his 2030 pledge. The only plan on the table that could even start the process of slashing emissions at the scale he’s promising is his recent $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, which has drawn staunch opposition from Republicans.

    In fact, despite countries’ myriad climate “commitments,” few nations have legally binding emissions reductions programs in place — and even fewer are on track to slash emissions at the rate necessary to avert climate catastrophe. “The huge gap between what we are doing and what actually needs to be done to stay below the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) target is widening by the second,” Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, testified before the House Oversight Environment Subcommittee on Thursday.

    In the coming months, there’s no shortage of opportunities for the international community to firm up its commitments to addressing climate change. The G7 and G20 meetings will take place in June and October, respectively. Then there’s the United Nations General Assembly meeting this fall. And finally, after skipping a year due to COVID-19, the U.N. will hold its next climate conference this November in Glasgow, Scotland.

    But Wait … There’s More.

    • Does the U.S.’s new climate goal pass muster? Biden’s pledge isn’t quite as large as the emissions cuts promised by the E.U. and Britain, which were announced in the days leading up to the president’s climate summit. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Tuesday that the United Kingdom would cut emissions 78 percent by 2035, and the E.U. finalized a deal on Wednesday that sets a target of reducing emissions 55 percent from 1990 levels by the end of the decade. Still, Biden’s pledge is one of the boldest goals announced by a wealthy industrialized nation … for now.
    • The Green New Deal gets a second wind. Progressives reintroduced the Green New Deal — the ambitious call to eliminate emissions, pursue environmental justice, and jumpstart a green economy — on Tuesday, two years after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey initially introduced it. The resolution doesn’t spell out how to achieve any of the above — and it doesn’t stand much of a chance of passing the upper legislative chamber. But that’s not really the point, is it?
    • The long battle over California’s vehicle emissions standards will come to a close soon. The Biden administration is moving to undo Trump-era policies that sought to prevent the state from setting its own standards. In fact, Biden is considering making some of California’s vehicle efficiency requirements the nationwide benchmark.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The First 100 – The prodigal U.S. returns on Apr 23, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Biden’s best shot to cut emissions in half might not be enough

    In the spring of 2015, nine months before world leaders assembled in Paris to hammer out a landmark agreement on climate change, President Barack Obama quietly announced his pledge to cut carbon emissions. The proposal was relatively modest: a cut in emissions by as much as 28 percent by 2025.

    If the U.S. has come close to meeting that goal (by the end of last year, emissions were 21.5 percent below 2005 levels), it was largely by accident. Obama’s plan to cut pollution from the nation’s electricity generation was foiled by Republican backlash and court rulings. Most of the country’s emissions cuts came from the rapid decline of coal and, more recently, the devastation and lockdowns stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. 

    Now, the country has a new pledge, announced as President Joe Biden gathered 40 world leaders in Washington for a two-day climate summit on Thursday. Biden wants the U.S. to cut greenhouse gas emissions 50 to 52 percent by 2030 — a goal on par with some of the most ambitious in the world. But it’s an open question whether the country can get it done.

    The Biden administration’s best hope for meeting that 50 percent reduction target appears to be his $2 trillion infrastructure package — a plan that still has to make its way through both houses of Congress before lawmakers try to pass it through the tangled budget reconciliation process. (It’s already been panned by conservatives as the “Green New Deal in disguise” and “a far left wish list.”) And, as currently envisioned, the package doesn’t include legally binding limits on carbon pollution; instead, it would dole out money to boost clean energy technologies, banking on the fact that emission cuts will naturally follow.

    “It’s a little weird to have an ambitious target in a world where there’s not policies that reflect that target,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the director of climate and energy at the environmental think tank Breakthrough Institute. “We hope that things like the infrastructure bill will get us there. But we just don’t know.” 

    Turning the corner

    U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions, million metric tons

    Source: Energy Information Administration / InsideClimate News
    Clayton Aldern / Grist

    Over the past two decades, policymakers have slowly come to realize that using a “stick” to cut emissions (such as a carbon tax which puts a penalty on using fossil fuels) is politically unpopular to the point of being — according to one Biden insider — actively dangerous. During its first few months in office, the Biden administration has gone all-in on what is sometimes called “quiet climate policy”: proposing wind and solar farms, 500,000 chargers for electric vehicles, and funding to develop new ways to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. 

    The problem is that it’s hard to say whether these interventions will be enough to drastically cut emissions. “The infrastructure plan to me is a downpayment,” said David Popp, a professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University. “By itself, it doesn’t necessarily convince people to change their behavior.” More electric car chargers than gas stations around the country would make it easier for Americans to drive an EV — but they still have to buy one. 

    “Without the ‘stick’ — without some national level policy that puts a cap on emissions — it’s hard to make a credible case that we’ll definitely be able to follow through” on the 50 percent goal, Popp said. 

    Biden’s infrastructure package, also known as the “American Jobs Plan,” does include a measure to limit emissions: a “clean energy standard,” that would require the country to get all of its electricity from clean sources by 2035. Hitting Biden’s new target might depend on it. If passed through Congress, the standard could set the country on a path to cut emissions from the power sector by around 80 percent by 2030, and account for almost half of the U.S.’s targeted reductions. 

    But the clean energy standard might prove tricky to maneuver through Congress. Democrats would need 60 votes to avoid a filibuster — without those votes, they’d be forced to use the arcane budget reconciliation process, which allows bills to be passed with only 50 votes if they’re related to taxing and spending. “It’s not clear that could even qualify as something that could pass under reconciliation,” said Popp.

    Some are still optimistic about the U.S.’s chances. After all, policy “sticks” don’t only come from Congress; the president also has power to cut pollution from cars and trucks, or clean up emissions from power plants. A study by the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland found that the U.S. could cut emissions by 51 percent by 2030, all with actions that could conceivably pass Congress or take only presidential power. That includes boosting incentives for the purchase of electric cars, using the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to impose limits on emissions from coal or gas plants, and increasing energy efficiency in buildings. And that’s not accounting for efforts by states and corporations to curb emissions. 

    Nathan Hultman, the Center for Global Sustainability’s director and one of the report’s authors, cautioned that it wouldn’t be easy. “You don’t have to assume every possible thing goes right to get to 50,” he said.  “But you do have to assume a lot of stuff goes right.” 

    New EPA emission limits could be short-lived, particularly if a Republican president takes over in 2025. A new administration looking to unravel Biden’s environmental legacy wouldn’t be able to reverse advances in clean energy (or “tear up power lines,” Hausfather said), but he or she could undo rules intended to keep strict limits on emissions, mirroring the Obama-Trump flip-flop. (Trump, on entering office, eviscerated many of the careful regulations the Obama administration had crafted to cut pollution; many of those rules could take years to reinstate.)

    Ultimately, just getting close to hitting the 50-percent target might still be OK, as long as the country gets on track to zero out emissions by 2050 in line with Paris agreement goals. International climate pledges are understood to be part performance, less an ironclad promise and more a way of signaling that a country is serious about slashing carbon pollution and wants to convince other big polluters — China, for example, or India and Japan — to do the same. 

    “What’s important is to reduce emissions as quickly as possible,” said Hausfather. “If we’re at 40 percent below 2005 levels instead of 50 percent it’ll still be a hell of a lot better than where we are today.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s best shot to cut emissions in half might not be enough on Apr 23, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Biden’s Earth Day climate summit: Here’s what’s at stake

    The Biden administration will attempt to win back international trust in the United States as a partner in tackling global warming during a two-day climate summit this Thursday and Friday. Forty countries have been invited to the virtual event, which begins on Earth Day and is expected to feature presentations on each country’s climate goals.

    After rejoining the Paris Agreement, the administration is under pressure to prove to the world that the U.S. is ready to take aggressive action on climate change and make up for lost time. The centerpiece of the event this week will be President Joe Biden’s announcement of a new “nationally determined contribution” or “NDC” — that’s Paris Agreement slang for a country’s official emissions reduction target. 

    Signatories to the Paris Agreement agreed to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre industrial levels, and no more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). But cooperation toward that goal has been severely lacking. While many countries have upped their targets since first signing the agreement, a United Nations analysis found that current NDCs will only result in a 1 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. Studies show that global emissions must be cut almost in half by that year in order to keep 1.5 degrees C within reach.

    Biden is widely expected to announce a target more in line with that goal — he will reportedly vow to cut U.S. emissions by around 50 percent below 2005 levels over the next decade. Sources familiar with the White House’s plans have also suggested he will unveil new funding to help poorer nations adapt to climate change and transition to clean energy.

    An emissions target alone is unlikely to convince other countries that the U.S. is changing course — the administration will have to present a credible plan for how to get there. The American Jobs Plan, Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal released in March, laid the groundwork with a clean electricity standard that would require utilities to produce 100 percent emissions-free power by 2035. But the administration is also cooking up several major policies that wouldn’t need congressional approval, such as new requirements for agencies to incorporate climate risks into lending of federal funds and new emissions limits on power plants and cars.

    Advocates are seizing on the high-profile event to push Biden and other countries further. More than 30 climate and environmental scientists from around the world signed a letter calling on nations to look beyond carbon dioxide and aim to reduce methane emissions, which hit a record high in 2020. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 86 times more powerful at heating the planet than carbon dioxide over the first 20 years it’s in the atmosphere.

    The nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund has called cutting methane emissions the “fastest way to slow global warming.” Along with other environmental nonprofit heavyweights like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resource Defense Council, the group has asked Biden to set a specific target to cut methane across the economy — primarily from natural gas infrastructure and animal agriculture — by at least 40 percent by 2030. The White House is reportedly considering a methane target. 

    Another campaign called Defend the Gulf is pushing Biden to reinstate restrictions on exports of crude oil that were lifted by then-President Barack Obama in 2015. The group says that there are more than 30 proposed oil, gas, and petrochemical export terminals in various stages of development along the Gulf Coast that could lock in dependence on oil and gas for decades to come.

    U.S. special envoy for climate John Kerry has been trotting the globe in recent weeks to initiate conversations on international cooperation and convince other nations to strengthen their targets even further. The results of these efforts have reportedly been mixed. Kerry failed to secure new commitments during trips to India and China. While China “agreed to cooperate” with the U.S. on climate, Chinese President Xi Jinping hasn’t even said whether he will attend Biden’s summit yet. But new commitments from Japan, Canada, and South Korea are still on the table. 
    This week’s summit is only the first in a string of international climate talks scheduled for this year leading up to the 26th United Nations climate change conference in November, which is this year’s deadline for nations to announce new NDCs. Other countries may hold off on announcing new plans until the G7 summit in June or the G20 summit in October.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s Earth Day climate summit: Here’s what’s at stake on Apr 20, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Biden’s Earth Day climate summit: Here’s what’s at stake

    The Biden administration will attempt to win back international trust in the United States as a partner in tackling global warming during a two-day climate summit this Thursday and Friday. Forty countries have been invited to the virtual event, which begins on Earth Day and is expected to feature presentations on each country’s climate goals.

    After rejoining the Paris Agreement, the administration is under pressure to prove to the world that the U.S. is ready to take aggressive action on climate change and make up for lost time. The centerpiece of the event this week will be President Joe Biden’s announcement of a new “nationally determined contribution” or “NDC” — that’s Paris Agreement slang for a country’s official emissions reduction target. 

    Signatories to the Paris Agreement agreed to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre industrial levels, and no more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). But cooperation toward that goal has been severely lacking. While many countries have upped their targets since first signing the agreement, a United Nations analysis found that current NDCs will only result in a 1 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. Studies show that global emissions must be cut almost in half by that year in order to keep 1.5 degrees C within reach.

    Biden is widely expected to announce a target more in line with that goal — he will reportedly vow to cut U.S. emissions by around 50 percent below 2005 levels over the next decade. Sources familiar with the White House’s plans have also suggested he will unveil new funding to help poorer nations adapt to climate change and transition to clean energy.

    An emissions target alone is unlikely to convince other countries that the U.S. is changing course — the administration will have to present a credible plan for how to get there. The American Jobs Plan, Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal released in March, laid the groundwork with a clean electricity standard that would require utilities to produce 100 percent emissions-free power by 2035. But the administration is also cooking up several major policies that wouldn’t need congressional approval, such as new requirements for agencies to incorporate climate risks into lending of federal funds and new emissions limits on power plants and cars.

    Advocates are seizing on the high-profile event to push Biden and other countries further. More than 30 climate and environmental scientists from around the world signed a letter calling on nations to look beyond carbon dioxide and aim to reduce methane emissions, which hit a record high in 2020. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 86 times more powerful at heating the planet than carbon dioxide over the first 20 years it’s in the atmosphere.

    The nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund has called cutting methane emissions the “fastest way to slow global warming.” Along with other environmental nonprofit heavyweights like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resource Defense Council, the group has asked Biden to set a specific target to cut methane across the economy — primarily from natural gas infrastructure and animal agriculture — by at least 40 percent by 2030. The White House is reportedly considering a methane target. 

    Another campaign called Defend the Gulf is pushing Biden to reinstate restrictions on exports of crude oil that were lifted by then-President Barack Obama in 2015. The group says that there are more than 30 proposed oil, gas, and petrochemical export terminals in various stages of development along the Gulf Coast that could lock in dependence on oil and gas for decades to come.

    U.S. special envoy for climate John Kerry has been trotting the globe in recent weeks to initiate conversations on international cooperation and convince other nations to strengthen their targets even further. The results of these efforts have reportedly been mixed. Kerry failed to secure new commitments during trips to India and China. While China “agreed to cooperate” with the U.S. on climate, Chinese President Xi Jinping hasn’t even said whether he will attend Biden’s summit yet. But new commitments from Japan, Canada, and South Korea are still on the table. 
    This week’s summit is only the first in a string of international climate talks scheduled for this year leading up to the 26th United Nations climate change conference in November, which is this year’s deadline for nations to announce new NDCs. Other countries may hold off on announcing new plans until the G7 summit in June or the G20 summit in October.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘It’s a historic moment’ — Pete Buttigieg on EV chargers, lead pipes, and the promise of infrastructure

    Pete Buttigieg has become the de facto hype man for Joe Biden’s newly released $2 trillion infrastructure plan. A great deal of the proposed spending — for road and bridge repairs, rail service expansions, public transit investments, electric vehicle charging stations — falls into the former South Bend mayor’s new domain now that he’s secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation. 

    Since the American Jobs Plan was released at the end of March, Buttigieg has been making the rounds on television news programs to sell the plan. Mostly he has been forced to defend it from semantic attacks over the meaning of the word “infrastructure.” 

    It’s no secret that the proposal is, at heart, about much more than road repair. It addresses all kinds of foundational needs required for a healthy and just society, including eldercare, internet access, and lead-free drinking water pipes. 

    “If you can’t count on a glass of clean, safe drinking water, you’re not free,” Buttigieg told Grist. “And you’re not able to live a life of your choosing.”

    Crucially, the Biden administration’s plan is also meant to toggle the U.S. economy out of self-destruct mode when it comes to climate change. The proposal contains pivotal climate policies, like new requirements for utilities to procure clean energy, improved incentives for homeowners and businesses to transition to renewable energy and electric cars, and a strategy to electrify homes. 

    Grist recently spoke with Buttiegieg about how the American Jobs Plan will tackle climate change and undo past harms — and what the word “infrastructure” might mean in the future. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

    Q. What do you think the most important measure in the Americans Jobs Plan is when it comes to tackling climate change?

    A. It’s hard to pick just one. A lot of it revolves around our energy infrastructure and our vehicle electrification future. This contains major provisions for incentives to encourage the adoption of American-made electric vehicles and charging infrastructure. We know even as the cost comes down, the range could still be a barrier to people going electric, and we really need to accelerate that. 

    More broadly I’d say it’s very important that we create alternatives to how people move around. It’s not just making sure vehicles are electric. It’s making sure people have alternatives to bringing two tons of metal along with them everywhere they go, if it makes more sense for them to get around on two wheels or on public transit. So we’re trying to make sure that we expand access to transit, and are doubling resources, in fact, across communities large and small, to have a better rail system in this country — which Americans have been wanting for a long time — and make sure we have a grid to back it up.

    Q. This bill calls for building 10 times the number of electric vehicle charging stations than exist today. What does that look like on the ground? And how do you make sure they aren’t just built in upper income neighborhoods, as has been the case so far?

    A. We’ve got to make sure that electric vehicles do not remain a luxury item. That’s part of why the purchase incentives are there, but it’s also part of where these charging stations go. You’ll notice throughout the American Jobs Plan a real focus on equity, especially because we know that in the past, transportation spending in the U.S. has actually made things worse, especially for Black and brown neighborhoods. 

    We get a chance to get that right this time. And so there’s a very conscious effort, including the Justice40 Initiative. The White House is calling on 40 percent of all of our work to go toward disadvantaged and excluded communities. That’s going to help us make sure that resources go out in a way that enhances rather than reduces equity.

    Q. How do you build 500,000 charging stations? Who’s in charge of that?

    A. We need to be working with a structure that creates incentives that are appropriate within the private sector, but isn’t afraid to be in the public sector. We really have to kickstart this industry. We can’t just let things play out along the timeline we’re currently on, or it’s not going to be fast enough to meet climate imperatives. 

    The deadline for getting to carbon neutral, the deadlines for tackling climate change, they’re not actually being set by politicians in Washington, they’re being set by science, they’re being set by the planet. Now the question is whether we actually do what it takes to keep up.

    Q. Why are charging stations and water lines infrastructure? And what else do you think could be included under that umbrella in the future?

    A. To me, infrastructure is the foundation that makes it possible for Americans to thrive. And that includes things like roads and bridges, but it also includes things like pipes. If you can’t count on a glass of clean, safe drinking water, you’re not free. And you’re not able to live a life of your choosing. So, fixing lead pipes, as the president is proposing, is absolutely an infrastructure investment — and, by the way, one of the best investments we can make in future generations. 

    Same thing with broadband, though broadband is a little newer. That certainly wasn’t being considered when Eisenhower was setting up the interstate system. But part of what it means to make good infrastructure choices is to think about the future and not just the past. The bottom line about these measures is that they’re needed, they’re supported by the American people, and they’re worth doing. 

    By its definition, infrastructure is something that’s always evolving. Right now I’m working to make sure folks understand that the national airspace is also part of our infrastructure that’s served by a lot of tangible, physical things like our system of airports and air-traffic control. I can see a future where that evolves further with things like drone deliveries, and further still with commercial space travel. But the needs we do know about — like the fact that digital infrastructure is as important a way of connecting as highway infrastructure in today’s economy — we’ve gotta act on.

    Q. This plan also includes $20 billion to reconnect communities that have been torn up by highway projects in the past. What does that mean? Does that just look like highway removal?

    A. Sometimes it does. So we know there are cases where a highway divided a Black neighborhood, for example, and people are cut off, simply by the highway being where it is, and it could, perhaps, go underground. That’s been done in some communities. But that’s not the only answer, and it’s not the right answer everywhere. 

    Sometimes it’s about adding rather than subtracting. Maybe you have a community where there’s a north-south corridor that cuts off the east side from the west side. So then what we need to do is create connections from east to west. I remember the mayor of Mount Vernon, a community in New York that’s a comparatively lower-income community, explaining to me that it’s sometimes easier for her residents to get into Manhattan than it is to go across town to go to the grocery at certain times of day. Taking into account community needs is part of what it means to have equity in our infrastructure spending. 

    Q. Does this package do enough to transform our transportation system to be climate friendly and resilient? And if not, do you think there’ll be another opportunity in this administration to ask for more?

    A. This is the biggest proposed investment in American jobs since World War II, and I would not expect an opportunity like this to come along again, perhaps in our lifetimes. It is rare to have this alignment, this perfect storm if you will, of public impatience, bipartisan interest, demonstrated need, economic conditions, and a very supportive president to actually get something big done. So I think that it’s a historic moment. I’m thinking of the transcontinental railroad, Eisenhower, and the interstate system — I think this is a moment like that, to really do what it takes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘It’s a historic moment’ — Pete Buttigieg on EV chargers, lead pipes, and the promise of infrastructure

    Pete Buttigieg has become the de facto hype man for Joe Biden’s newly released $2 trillion infrastructure plan. A great deal of the proposed spending — for road and bridge repairs, rail service expansions, public transit investments, electric vehicle charging stations — falls into the former South Bend mayor’s new domain now that he’s secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation. 

    Since the American Jobs Plan was released at the end of March, Buttigieg has been making the rounds on television news programs to sell the plan. Mostly he has been forced to defend it from semantic attacks over the meaning of the word “infrastructure.” 

    It’s no secret that the proposal is, at heart, about much more than road repair. It addresses all kinds of foundational needs required for a healthy and just society, including eldercare, internet access, and lead-free drinking water pipes. 

    “If you can’t count on a glass of clean, safe drinking water, you’re not free,” Buttigieg told Grist. “And you’re not able to live a life of your choosing.”

    Crucially, the Biden administration’s plan is also meant to toggle the U.S. economy out of self-destruct mode when it comes to climate change. The proposal contains pivotal climate policies, like new requirements for utilities to procure clean energy, improved incentives for homeowners and businesses to transition to renewable energy and electric cars, and a strategy to electrify homes. 

    Grist recently spoke with Buttiegieg about how the American Jobs Plan will tackle climate change and undo past harms — and what the word “infrastructure” might mean in the future. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

    Q. What do you think the most important measure in the Americans Jobs Plan is when it comes to tackling climate change?

    A. It’s hard to pick just one. A lot of it revolves around our energy infrastructure and our vehicle electrification future. This contains major provisions for incentives to encourage the adoption of American-made electric vehicles and charging infrastructure. We know even as the cost comes down, the range could still be a barrier to people going electric, and we really need to accelerate that. 

    More broadly I’d say it’s very important that we create alternatives to how people move around. It’s not just making sure vehicles are electric. It’s making sure people have alternatives to bringing two tons of metal along with them everywhere they go, if it makes more sense for them to get around on two wheels or on public transit. So we’re trying to make sure that we expand access to transit, and are doubling resources, in fact, across communities large and small, to have a better rail system in this country — which Americans have been wanting for a long time — and make sure we have a grid to back it up.

    Q. This bill calls for building 10 times the number of electric vehicle charging stations than exist today. What does that look like on the ground? And how do you make sure they aren’t just built in upper income neighborhoods, as has been the case so far?

    A. We’ve got to make sure that electric vehicles do not remain a luxury item. That’s part of why the purchase incentives are there, but it’s also part of where these charging stations go. You’ll notice throughout the American Jobs Plan a real focus on equity, especially because we know that in the past, transportation spending in the U.S. has actually made things worse, especially for Black and brown neighborhoods. 

    We get a chance to get that right this time. And so there’s a very conscious effort, including the Justice40 Initiative. The White House is calling on 40 percent of all of our work to go toward disadvantaged and excluded communities. That’s going to help us make sure that resources go out in a way that enhances rather than reduces equity.

    Q. How do you build 500,000 charging stations? Who’s in charge of that?

    A. We need to be working with a structure that creates incentives that are appropriate within the private sector, but isn’t afraid to be in the public sector. We really have to kickstart this industry. We can’t just let things play out along the timeline we’re currently on, or it’s not going to be fast enough to meet climate imperatives. 

    The deadline for getting to carbon neutral, the deadlines for tackling climate change, they’re not actually being set by politicians in Washington, they’re being set by science, they’re being set by the planet. Now the question is whether we actually do what it takes to keep up.

    Q. Why are charging stations and water lines infrastructure? And what else do you think could be included under that umbrella in the future?

    A. To me, infrastructure is the foundation that makes it possible for Americans to thrive. And that includes things like roads and bridges, but it also includes things like pipes. If you can’t count on a glass of clean, safe drinking water, you’re not free. And you’re not able to live a life of your choosing. So, fixing lead pipes, as the president is proposing, is absolutely an infrastructure investment — and, by the way, one of the best investments we can make in future generations. 

    Same thing with broadband, though broadband is a little newer. That certainly wasn’t being considered when Eisenhower was setting up the interstate system. But part of what it means to make good infrastructure choices is to think about the future and not just the past. The bottom line about these measures is that they’re needed, they’re supported by the American people, and they’re worth doing. 

    By its definition, infrastructure is something that’s always evolving. Right now I’m working to make sure folks understand that the national airspace is also part of our infrastructure that’s served by a lot of tangible, physical things like our system of airports and air-traffic control. I can see a future where that evolves further with things like drone deliveries, and further still with commercial space travel. But the needs we do know about — like the fact that digital infrastructure is as important a way of connecting as highway infrastructure in today’s economy — we’ve gotta act on.

    Q. This plan also includes $20 billion to reconnect communities that have been torn up by highway projects in the past. What does that mean? Does that just look like highway removal?

    A. Sometimes it does. So we know there are cases where a highway divided a Black neighborhood, for example, and people are cut off, simply by the highway being where it is, and it could, perhaps, go underground. That’s been done in some communities. But that’s not the only answer, and it’s not the right answer everywhere. 

    Sometimes it’s about adding rather than subtracting. Maybe you have a community where there’s a north-south corridor that cuts off the east side from the west side. So then what we need to do is create connections from east to west. I remember the mayor of Mount Vernon, a community in New York that’s a comparatively lower-income community, explaining to me that it’s sometimes easier for her residents to get into Manhattan than it is to go across town to go to the grocery at certain times of day. Taking into account community needs is part of what it means to have equity in our infrastructure spending. 

    Q. Does this package do enough to transform our transportation system to be climate friendly and resilient? And if not, do you think there’ll be another opportunity in this administration to ask for more?

    A. This is the biggest proposed investment in American jobs since World War II, and I would not expect an opportunity like this to come along again, perhaps in our lifetimes. It is rare to have this alignment, this perfect storm if you will, of public impatience, bipartisan interest, demonstrated need, economic conditions, and a very supportive president to actually get something big done. So I think that it’s a historic moment. I’m thinking of the transcontinental railroad, Eisenhower, and the interstate system — I think this is a moment like that, to really do what it takes.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘It’s a historic moment’ — Pete Buttigieg on EV chargers, lead pipes, and the promise of infrastructure on Apr 14, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Lobbying for good? New campaign asks Big Tech to push for bold climate action

    There’s no doubt that Big Tech has been talking a big climate game lately. In the last two years, Microsoft committed to running its operations entirely on renewable energy by 2025; Apple pledged to become carbon neutral across its supply chain in a decade; Amazon announced it would be putting 100,000 electric delivery vans on the roads by 2030; and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, committed to operating all of its data centers on carbon-free power round-the-clock within a decade.

    But while major tech companies are making genuine efforts to clean up their own climate pollution, they’re doing very little to lobby for pro-climate policies at the state or federal level, despite the fact that such advocacy could play a much bigger role in helping the United States meet its climate targets. Now, one organization is trying to change that by calling on tech industry employees to tell their bosses to step up.

    On March 31, ClimateVoice, a corporate climate advocacy nonprofit, launched the “1 in 5 Campaign,” which is asking the five biggest tech companies in the U.S. — Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook — to devote one-fifth of their lobbying dollars to climate policy in 2021. That would amount to a seismic shift for corporations that only devote a small fraction of their lobbying resources to climate issues today. ClimateVoice founder Bill Weihl, a former sustainability executive at Google and Facebook, believes that if major tech corporations want to show true climate leadership, there’s never been a better time for them to put their money and influence where their mouth is.

    “We’ve got a window politically,” Weihl told Grist. “We’ve got an opportunity in Washington where we could pass major climate legislation. Big tech companies have the resources and ability, if they choose to, to really dig in here and make a difference.”

    It’s certainly true that Big Tech has the resources. As of December 2020, the five largest U.S. tech companies had a combined market value of $7.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly a third of U.S. GDP. And while many sectors of the economy have suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, tech corporations have reaped record profits, further consolidating their power as hundreds of millions of people worldwide became more dependent on online shopping, video-conferencing platforms, and other tech services and products. 

    But to date, major U.S. tech corporations haven’t used their financial resources and political clout to push for bold climate policies, despite the fact that all of them have adopted internal climate goals and made climate action a centerpiece of their marketing and public relations strategies. Between 2019 and 2020, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook spent a combined $127 million on federal lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But a January report by the think tank InfluenceMap found that just 4 percent of the federal lobbying activity at those companies went toward climate issues. By contrast, Big Oil devoted nearly 40 percent of its lobbying muscle to climate policy in the same time frame — mostly to fighting against it. 

    InfluenceMap executive director Dylan Tanner says it’s possible Big Tech doesn’t prioritize climate lobbying because companies don’t see policies like clean energy standards or national carbon taxes “impacting them directly in the immediate future.”  Weihl suspects that “risk aversion” also plays a role, given the highly partisan nature of many climate policy debates. “Big companies are generally afraid if they take a strong stand on a controversial issue, somebody who’s not happy with that might do something that hurts their core business,” he said. 

    Amazon fulfillment center with solar panels on the roof
    Amazon boasts 68 solar rooftops on fulfillment centers and sort centers. Amazon

    To reach its goal of getting tech companies to commit a fifth of their lobbying dollars to climate this year, ClimateVoice is mobilizing tech industry employees, as well as students at universities that Big Tech regularly recruits from, using a combination of direct outreach, digital advertisements, and social media campaigns. Employees at the five tech companies ClimateVoice is targeting can sign a petition urging their employers to lobby for climate action in 2021. While signatories’ names are being withheld to avoid any employer retaliation, Weihl says that ClimateVoice is in touch with executives at each of the companies and will be “engaging with them regularly” to let them know how many of their workers have signed the petition and what those workers are saying. The campaign is employing “multiple levels of screening,” he says, to verify the employment status of tech workers who sign the petition, and it is offering an alternate version of the petition for members of the general public to voice their support.

    While the 1 in 5 Campaign hasn’t shared any numbers yet, so far, Weihl says that the response has been “really positive.”

    “We’ve had lots of people signing the petitions and sharing things on social media,” Weihl said. “Lots of responses by email from people asking what they can do to help.” 

    Representatives from Google and Microsoft both declined to comment on the 1 in 5 Campaign. A Facebook spokesperson said in an email that the company is “committed to fighting climate change” and supports the goals of the Paris Agreement, but did not address lobbying or the new campaign specifically. Neither Amazon nor Apple responded to Grist’s request for comment on the campaign.

    Whether pressure from anonymous tech employees will be sufficient to get these large corporate actors to change their lobbying practices remains to be seen. Anecdotally, recent employee pressure campaigns seem to have had an impact on Amazon, which made its 2019 climate pledge only after thousands of workers signed an open letter to Jeff Bezos calling for the release of a company-wide climate plan, and on Microsoft, which announced it would be restricting sale of facial recognition software to police departments last June following an open letter from hundreds of employees. 

    But the tech industry’s response to employee activism hasn’t just been a string of concessions: companies have also retaliated against some of their most prominent internal critics. Last April, Amazon fired two of the women who helped organize the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice for allegedly violating corporate communications policies by criticizing the company in public — retaliation that a National Labor Relations board investigation recently deemed illegal. 

    Lindsay Baker, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute and the former head of sustainability at WeWork, is unsure to what extent employee pressure campaigns versus other factors — such as peer pressure from competing tech firms — have motivated the recent slew of climate- and justice-oriented commitments from Silicon Valley. But in general, she thinks “employees getting involved works well in tech” given that top companies are competing fiercely to recruit the most talented individuals.

    “Having worked in a tech company in the sustainability realm, I can say it matters what employees think,” Baker said. “If they feel like there’s a genuine threat people will leave, they will act.”

    It’s for that reason that Baker is optimistic about the 1 in 5 Campaign’s prospects. At least one Google engineer who signed the petition shares her optimism. “Maybe we won’t get to the 20 percent mark, but I think any movement toward that is great,” said the engineer, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about company policies. 

    Like Weihl, the Google engineer sees a window of opportunity, albeit a slightly different one: Google recently announced that it would not make any political contributions this election cycle to members of Congress who voted against certifying the results of the recent U.S. presidential election.

    “That’s going to hopefully release capital,” the Google engineer said. “Why not deploy it to a more noble cause that represents employees and our customers?”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Lobbying for good? New campaign asks Big Tech to push for bold climate action on Apr 13, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Lobbying for good? New campaign asks Big Tech to push for bold climate action

    There’s no doubt that Big Tech has been talking a big climate game lately. In the last two years, Microsoft committed to running its operations entirely on renewable energy by 2025; Apple pledged to become carbon neutral across its supply chain in a decade; Amazon announced it would be putting 100,000 electric delivery vans on the roads by 2030; and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, committed to operating all of its data centers on carbon-free power round-the-clock within a decade.

    But while major tech companies are making genuine efforts to clean up their own climate pollution, they’re doing very little to lobby for pro-climate policies at the state or federal level, despite the fact that such advocacy could play a much bigger role in helping the United States meet its climate targets. Now, one organization is trying to change that by calling on tech industry employees to tell their bosses to step up.

    On March 31, ClimateVoice, a corporate climate advocacy nonprofit, launched the “1 in 5 Campaign,” which is asking the five biggest tech companies in the U.S. — Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook — to devote one-fifth of their lobbying dollars to climate policy in 2021. That would amount to a seismic shift for corporations that only devote a small fraction of their lobbying resources to climate issues today. ClimateVoice founder Bill Weihl, a former sustainability executive at Google and Facebook, believes that if major tech corporations want to show true climate leadership, there’s never been a better time for them to put their money and influence where their mouth is.

    “We’ve got a window politically,” Weihl told Grist. “We’ve got an opportunity in Washington where we could pass major climate legislation. Big tech companies have the resources and ability, if they choose to, to really dig in here and make a difference.”

    It’s certainly true that Big Tech has the resources. As of December 2020, the five largest U.S. tech companies had a combined market value of $7.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly a third of U.S. GDP. And while many sectors of the economy have suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, tech corporations have reaped record profits, further consolidating their power as hundreds of millions of people worldwide became more dependent on online shopping, video-conferencing platforms, and other tech services and products. 

    But to date, major U.S. tech corporations haven’t used their financial resources and political clout to push for bold climate policies, despite the fact that all of them have adopted internal climate goals and made climate action a centerpiece of their marketing and public relations strategies. Between 2019 and 2020, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook spent a combined $127 million on federal lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But a January report by the think tank InfluenceMap found that just 4 percent of the federal lobbying activity at those companies went toward climate issues. By contrast, Big Oil devoted nearly 40 percent of its lobbying muscle to climate policy in the same time frame — mostly to fighting against it. 

    InfluenceMap executive director Dylan Tanner says it’s possible Big Tech doesn’t prioritize climate lobbying because companies don’t see policies like clean energy standards or national carbon taxes “impacting them directly in the immediate future.”  Weihl suspects that “risk aversion” also plays a role, given the highly partisan nature of many climate policy debates. “Big companies are generally afraid if they take a strong stand on a controversial issue, somebody who’s not happy with that might do something that hurts their core business,” he said. 

    Amazon boasts 68 solar rooftops on fulfillment centers and sort centers. Amazon

    To reach its goal of getting tech companies to commit a fifth of their lobbying dollars to climate this year, ClimateVoice is mobilizing tech industry employees, as well as students at universities that Big Tech regularly recruits from, using a combination of direct outreach, digital advertisements, and social media campaigns. Employees at the five tech companies ClimateVoice is targeting can sign a petition urging their employers to lobby for climate action in 2021. While signatories’ names are being withheld to avoid any employer retaliation, Weihl says that ClimateVoice is in touch with executives at each of the companies and will be “engaging with them regularly” to let them know how many of their workers have signed the petition and what those workers are saying. The campaign is employing “multiple levels of screening,” he says, to verify the employment status of tech workers who sign the petition, and it is offering an alternate version of the petition for members of the general public to voice their support.

    While the 1 in 5 Campaign hasn’t shared any numbers yet, so far, Weihl says that the response has been “really positive.”

    “We’ve had lots of people signing the petitions and sharing things on social media,” Weihl said. “Lots of responses by email from people asking what they can do to help.” 

    Representatives from Google and Microsoft both declined to comment on the 1 in 5 Campaign. A Facebook spokesperson said in an email that the company is “committed to fighting climate change” and supports the goals of the Paris Agreement, but did not address lobbying or the new campaign specifically. Neither Amazon nor Apple responded to Grist’s request for comment on the campaign.

    Whether pressure from anonymous tech employees will be sufficient to get these large corporate actors to change their lobbying practices remains to be seen. Anecdotally, recent employee pressure campaigns seem to have had an impact on Amazon, which made its 2019 climate pledge only after thousands of workers signed an open letter to Jeff Bezos calling for the release of a company-wide climate plan, and on Microsoft, which announced it would be restricting sale of facial recognition software to police departments last June following an open letter from hundreds of employees. 

    But the tech industry’s response to employee activism hasn’t just been a string of concessions: companies have also retaliated against some of their most prominent internal critics. Last April, Amazon fired two of the women who helped organize the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice for allegedly violating corporate communications policies by criticizing the company in public — retaliation that a National Labor Relations board investigation recently deemed illegal. 

    Lindsay Baker, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute and the former head of sustainability at WeWork, is unsure to what extent employee pressure campaigns versus other factors — such as peer pressure from competing tech firms — have motivated the recent slew of climate- and justice-oriented commitments from Silicon Valley. But in general, she thinks “employees getting involved works well in tech” given that top companies are competing fiercely to recruit the most talented individuals.

    “Having worked in a tech company in the sustainability realm, I can say it matters what employees think,” Baker said. “If they feel like there’s a genuine threat people will leave, they will act.”

    It’s for that reason that Baker is optimistic about the 1 in 5 Campaign’s prospects. At least one Google engineer who signed the petition shares her optimism. “Maybe we won’t get to the 20 percent mark, but I think any movement toward that is great,” said the engineer, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about company policies. 

    Like Weihl, the Google engineer sees a window of opportunity, albeit a slightly different one: Google recently announced that it would not make any political contributions this election cycle to members of Congress who voted against certifying the results of the recent U.S. presidential election.

    “That’s going to hopefully release capital,” the Google engineer said. “Why not deploy it to a more noble cause that represents employees and our customers?”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • 7 million Californians live near oil and gas wells. This bill could change that.

    Despite its green reputation, California has a big fossil fuel problem on its hands: neighborhood oil and gas drilling. In California, there’s nothing preventing frackers or drillers from setting up shop right next to your home, school, or hospital — and indeed, this is the reality for 7.4 million Californians currently living within 1 mile of oil and gas drilling operations, who are disproportionately non-white and low-income. 

    Now, a new state bill called S.B. 467, slated for a hearing in the California Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water on Tuesday, may reshape the lives of frontline communities by eliminating fracking and instituting mandatory buffer zones between oil and gas extraction and places where Californians live, work, and study. These buffer zones, known as setbacks, have long been fought for by communities impacted by the oil industry.

    The oil and gas industry makes a huge impact on public health in California, especially for the frontline communities living the closest to oil and gas wells. These extraction sites release toxic pollutants into the air, including chemicals known to cause neurological damage, increased cancer risk, and reproductive harm, like volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxide, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, and others.  Proximity to oil and gas extraction sites has been linked to a range of health problems, including acute symptoms like rashes, migraines, and nosebleeds, as well as higher rates of asthma attacks, cancer, general hospitalization rates, high-risk pregnancies, and preterm birth. The COVID-19 pandemic adds another dimension of health risk: Exposure to pollution, in particular the fine particulate matter known as PM2.5, has been found to make the virus even deadlier, and conditions like lung disease that are linked to pollution from oil and gas extraction have been found to increase the risk of COVID-19 mortality. 

    “At this point, there’s no question that living near oil and gas drilling presents an unreasonable health harm,” Ingrid Brostrom, assistant director of Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, told Grist last summer.  

    The idea of setbacks — mandatory minimum distances between oil and gas extraction sites and homes, schools, and hospitals — as a public health measure to protect frontline communities is not new. Many other oil and gas producing states, including Louisiana, Maryland, Illinois, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and even Texas, have setback regulations for certain occupied areas. Last summer, an assembly bill that would have instituted 2,500-foot setbacks in California, A.B. 345, was killed by Democrats in the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water, the committee where the new bill is set for a hearing this week. 

    The new bill, which was introduced by state Senators Scott Wiener and Monique Limón, is more ambitious than its predecessor. Like A.B. 345, the bill would institute 2,500-foot setbacks for new and repermitted wells — affecting 16,724 wells and the 2.17 million Californians who live within that distance of them. In addition to instituting setbacks, S.B. 467 would ban new and renewed fracking permits across the state by 2022, as well as phasing out other kinds of oil extraction, including steam flooding, water flooding, and cyclic steaming. These bans would have a significant impact — while fracking only accounts for less than 2 percent of the state’s oil and gas production, cyclic steaming accounts for 21 percent, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

    “S.B. 467 is a meaningful effort to address the environmental health and racial harms caused by oil extraction,” said Wiener of the bill, noting that intensified oil and gas extraction methods like fracking and steam flooding are “just not consistent with where California says we want to go with leading on climate action.”’

    The bill would also develop a program to identify and train oil and gas workers for reemployment. Wiener says that the most obvious plan for a just transition for these workers would be in sealing abandoned wells and remediating oil fields. “We have a huge number of abandoned oil wells in California that need to be sealed, and then as we move away from oil extraction we need to remediate our oil fields.” said Wiener, “That’s just an enormous amount of capital work.” 

    Kobi Naseck of VISION, a coalition of California environmental justice organizations that have long advocated for setbacks in the state, told Grist that S.B. 467 “is one of the most ambitious oil and gas bills that’s ever come to the California legislature, and maybe any state legislature in the U.S.”

    Part of the reason that it has been such a challenge to get setbacks instituted in California is the influence of the oil and gas industry on the state’s politics. “Oil and gas has been one of the biggest industries in California for a really long time,” Alexandra Nagy, California director of  the environmental nonprofit Food and Water Watch, told Grist last August. “With that comes powerful interests and powerful spending.” An industry group called the Western States Petroleum Alliance is the biggest lobbying group in California by expenditures, and the top four oil industry lobbying groups pumped more than $10 million in lobbying dollars into California politics in 2020. 

    Democrats aren’t immune from this pressure. Five senators on the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water voted against A.B. 345 last year, including three Democratic senators: Bob Hertzberg, Ben Hueso, and Anna Caballero. Of these three, two received campaign donations from the oil and gas industry during the 2018 election cycle; Hertzberg received $26,800 in contributions, and Hueso received $20,600. Before voting down the bill, Huseo called it a “waste of time” while commenting on the Senate floor. 

    The committee currently consists of two Republicans and seven Democrats, including Limón, who introduced the new bill. While Caballero, who voted against A.B. 345, is no longer on the committee, Hueso and Hertzberg remain. The offices of Hueso and Hertzberg did not reply to a request for comment from Grist.

    The hearing this week is a key moment in the years-long fight against fracking and setbacks alike. “Californians, especially folks who are affected by oil and gas drilling in their neighborhoods, can’t wait another day. People are being poisoned in their homes right now, ” said Naseck, who added that the current lack of setbacks put all California residents at risk of oil and gas developers moving in next door. “It’s a really big deal not just for frontline communities but for everyone in California.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 7 million Californians live near oil and gas wells. This bill could change that. on Apr 12, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • 7 million Californians live near oil and gas wells. This bill could change that.

    Despite its green reputation, California has a big fossil fuel problem on its hands: neighborhood oil and gas drilling. In California, there’s nothing preventing frackers or drillers from setting up shop right next to your home, school, or hospital — and indeed, this is the reality for 7.4 million Californians currently living within 1 mile of oil and gas drilling operations, who are disproportionately non-white and low-income. 

    Now, a new state bill called S.B. 467, slated for a hearing in the California Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water on Tuesday, may reshape the lives of frontline communities by eliminating fracking and instituting mandatory buffer zones between oil and gas extraction and places where Californians live, work, and study. These buffer zones, known as setbacks, have long been fought for by communities impacted by the oil industry.

    The oil and gas industry makes a huge impact on public health in California, especially for the frontline communities living the closest to oil and gas wells. These extraction sites release toxic pollutants into the air, including chemicals known to cause neurological damage, increased cancer risk, and reproductive harm, like volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxide, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, and others.  Proximity to oil and gas extraction sites has been linked to a range of health problems, including acute symptoms like rashes, migraines, and nosebleeds, as well as higher rates of asthma attacks, cancer, general hospitalization rates, high-risk pregnancies, and preterm birth. The COVID-19 pandemic adds another dimension of health risk: Exposure to pollution, in particular the fine particulate matter known as PM2.5, has been found to make the virus even deadlier, and conditions like lung disease that are linked to pollution from oil and gas extraction have been found to increase the risk of COVID-19 mortality. 

    “At this point, there’s no question that living near oil and gas drilling presents an unreasonable health harm,” Ingrid Brostrom, assistant director of Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, told Grist last summer.  

    The idea of setbacks — mandatory minimum distances between oil and gas extraction sites and homes, schools, and hospitals — as a public health measure to protect frontline communities is not new. Many other oil and gas producing states, including Louisiana, Maryland, Illinois, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and even Texas, have setback regulations for certain occupied areas. Last summer, an assembly bill that would have instituted 2,500-foot setbacks in California, A.B. 345, was killed by Democrats in the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water, the committee where the new bill is set for a hearing this week. 

    The new bill, which was introduced by state Senators Scott Wiener and Monique Limón, is more ambitious than its predecessor. Like A.B. 345, the bill would institute 2,500-foot setbacks for new and repermitted wells — affecting 16,724 wells and the 2.17 million Californians who live within that distance of them. In addition to instituting setbacks, S.B. 467 would ban new and renewed fracking permits across the state by 2022, as well as phasing out other kinds of oil extraction, including steam flooding, water flooding, and cyclic steaming. These bans would have a significant impact — while fracking only accounts for less than 2 percent of the state’s oil and gas production, cyclic steaming accounts for 21 percent, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

    “S.B. 467 is a meaningful effort to address the environmental health and racial harms caused by oil extraction,” said Wiener of the bill, noting that intensified oil and gas extraction methods like fracking and steam flooding are “just not consistent with where California says we want to go with leading on climate action.”’

    The bill would also develop a program to identify and train oil and gas workers for reemployment. Wiener says that the most obvious plan for a just transition for these workers would be in sealing abandoned wells and remediating oil fields. “We have a huge number of abandoned oil wells in California that need to be sealed, and then as we move away from oil extraction we need to remediate our oil fields.” said Wiener, “That’s just an enormous amount of capital work.” 

    Kobi Naseck of VISION, a coalition of California environmental justice organizations that have long advocated for setbacks in the state, told Grist that S.B. 467 “is one of the most ambitious oil and gas bills that’s ever come to the California legislature, and maybe any state legislature in the U.S.”

    Part of the reason that it has been such a challenge to get setbacks instituted in California is the influence of the oil and gas industry on the state’s politics. “Oil and gas has been one of the biggest industries in California for a really long time,” Alexandra Nagy, California director of  the environmental nonprofit Food and Water Watch, told Grist last August. “With that comes powerful interests and powerful spending.” An industry group called the Western States Petroleum Alliance is the biggest lobbying group in California by expenditures, and the top four oil industry lobbying groups pumped more than $10 million in lobbying dollars into California politics in 2020. 

    Democrats aren’t immune from this pressure. Five senators on the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water voted against A.B. 345 last year, including three Democratic senators: Bob Hertzberg, Ben Hueso, and Anna Caballero. Of these three, two received campaign donations from the oil and gas industry during the 2018 election cycle; Hertzberg received $26,800 in contributions, and Hueso received $20,600. Before voting down the bill, Huseo called it a “waste of time” while commenting on the Senate floor. 

    The committee currently consists of two Republicans and seven Democrats, including Limón, who introduced the new bill. While Caballero, who voted against A.B. 345, is no longer on the committee, Hueso and Hertzberg remain. The offices of Hueso and Hertzberg did not reply to a request for comment from Grist.

    The hearing this week is a key moment in the years-long fight against fracking and setbacks alike. “Californians, especially folks who are affected by oil and gas drilling in their neighborhoods, can’t wait another day. People are being poisoned in their homes right now, ” said Naseck, who added that the current lack of setbacks put all California residents at risk of oil and gas developers moving in next door. “It’s a really big deal not just for frontline communities but for everyone in California.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In Europe, a backlash is growing over incinerating garbage

    This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    For decades, Europe has poured millions of tons of its trash into incinerators each year, often under the green-sounding label “waste to energy.” Now, concerns about incineration’s outsized carbon footprint and fears it may undermine recycling are prompting European Union officials to ease their long-standing embrace of a technology that once seemed like an appealing way to make waste disappear.

    The EU is in the process of cutting off funding for new incinerators, but there’s little sign most existing ones —currently consuming 27 percent of the bloc’s municipal waste — will close any time soon. And, even without EU financial support, new plants are in the works, many in southern and eastern European countries that have historically incinerated less than long-standing waste-to-energy proponents such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian nations. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, post-Brexit Britain is charging ahead with proposals for dozens of new garbage-burning projects.

    Without a more decisive change of course, critics argue, that adds up to an existential threat both to Europe’s promise to slash carbon emissions to net-zero by midcentury and its dreams of a “circular economy” in which reuse and recycling largely take the place of waste disposal.

    “Burning plastic in a climate emergency, that’s insane,” said Georgia Elliott-Smith, an environmental engineer and Extinction Rebellion activist who is suing the British government over its decision to exclude incinerators from its new emissions trading system. Plastic, hard to recycle and ubiquitous in garbage, is made from fossil fuel derivatives and emits carbon dioxide when burned, accounting for a substantial chunk of incineration’s climate damage.

    In a case scheduled to be heard in the High Court this month, Elliott-Smith contends Britain violated its Paris Agreement commitments by omitting the waste-to-energy sector from the market it created when it left the European greenhouse gas emissions trading system as part of its divorce from the E.U. While she also argues the new system is too weak to shrink Britain’s carbon footprint, including incinerators could, in principle, put a cost on their emissions.

    Sinking billions of pounds into new incinerators now could lock Britain into decades of garbage-burning and make it harder for cash-strapped local authorities to boost recycling and composting rates, she said. The country already burns nearly 45 percent of its waste — more than it recycles, the Channel 4 show Dispatches recently reported. “The way incineration works, it skews the economics of waste by its very existence,” Elliott-Smith said. “Once you build the beast, you’ve got to keep feeding it.”

    Worries that incinerators sicken those who live near them — disproportionately poor, and people of color — have long dogged the industry. Wealthy nations such as Sweden and Denmark, which rely heavily on waste-to-energy plants, say their sophisticated emissions treatment systems mean such concerns are misplaced. But critics note many nations lack the resources for the best pollution-control systems. Dangerous emissions such as dioxin and particulate matter sometimes go unreported, and enforcement is often porous, environmentalists say.

    The climate concerns are newer, crystallized in a report the consulting firm Eunomia produced for ClientEarth, an advocacy group. It found that British incinerators’ power generation was more carbon-intensive than electricity from natural gas, and second only to coal. Overall, European incinerators pumped out an estimated 95 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, about 2 percent of total emissions.

    That footprint helped prompt EU officials to drop incineration from a draft of important green investment guidelines, known as the “sustainable finance taxonomy,” expected to be formally adopted this month. Not only can trash-burning plants no longer get subsidies designated for environmentally beneficial projects, they have also been cut off from other major EU funding streams. And the European Parliament has urged member nations to minimize incineration.

    “It looks like things are really changing in Brussels,” said Janek Vähk, a coordinator at Zero Waste Europe, a network of advocacy groups. Leaders, in his view, have “started understanding that incineration is a big source of greenhouse gases.”

    For its part, the industry says it is unfair to compare its carbon emissions directly with those of plants whose main function is to generate power. “The primary reason why we exist is for waste treatment, not energy production,” said Agnė Razgaitytė, a spokeswoman for the Confederation of European Waste-to-Energy Plants, or CEWEP, an industry group. “So it’s not exactly comparable in the same way.”

    Without incineration, she said, landfill costs tend to rise, increasing the danger of European trash leaving the continent, and ultimately being burned in uncontrolled settings or littering beaches and waterways. And landfills have their own climate impact — any organic waste in them generates the potent greenhouse gas methane as it decays. What’s more, incinerator operators salvage metals from the ash left over after burning, allowing their reuse.

    “We’re at home in the circular economy,” Razgaitytė said. “We do give value to the waste that otherwise would be just lost.” No matter how much is recycled and composted, she added, there will always be something left over: “I don’t think the waste-to-energy sector as such is going out of business any time soon.”

    The EU’s shift comes after a building spree that doubled EU countries’ municipal waste incineration between 1995 and 2019, to 60 million tons annually. Such plants now provide power to 18 million Europeans and heat to 15 million, the industry says.

    Individual countries remain free to fund and commission new incinerators. Those plants still make money from waste-disposal fees and by selling electricity and, in some places, heat. In some countries, operators can still claim subsidies designed to support renewable energy, as long as they burn waste that has been collected in separate streams so recyclable or compostable material is not incinerated.

    Protestors Incinerator Edmonton North London
    Demonstrators protest the continued operation of the incinerator in Edmonton in north London. Stop the Edmonton Incinerator

    What’s more, Vähk warned, the EU’s aim for countries to landfill no more than 10 percent of municipal waste by 2035 will unintentionally bolster incinerators’ appeal. “There’s a lot of pressure on minimizing landfill,” he said. That’s worrying, “because we don’t want to move from landfilling to incineration.”

    It all comes as the EU is pushing to reduce waste, particularly plastic, by ratcheting up targets for composting and recycling, mandating that plastic bottles contain 30 percent recycled content by 2030, and banning — as of this July — single-use items such as cutlery, cups, and stirrers. The EU has also adopted a new “circular economy” plan that aims in the longer term to encourage better product design so reuse and recycling are easier.

    Continued incineration, critics argue, could threaten those goals. Once built, they say, incinerators cannibalize recycling, because municipal governments are often locked in by contracts that make it cheaper to get their rubbish burned than to sort it for recyclers.

    One nation now grappling with the legacy of its long embrace of incineration is Denmark. The country, one of Europe’s biggest waste producers, built so many incinerators that by 2018 it was importing a million tons of trash. The plants generate 5 percent of the country’s electricity and nearly a quarter of the heat in the local networks, known as district heating systems, said Mads Jakobsen, chairman of the Danish Waste Association, which represents municipal authorities and waste companies.

    Pushing to meet ambitious carbon-cutting goals, Danish lawmakers agreed last year to shrink incineration capacity by 30 percent in a decade, with the closure of seven incinerators, while dramatically expanding recycling. “It’s time to stop importing plastic waste from abroad to fill empty incinerators and burn it to the detriment of the climate,” said Dan Jørgensen, the country’s climate minister.

    But in focusing only on Denmark’s own carbon footprint, Jakobsen said, the country’s politicians had failed to consider what would happen to the waste Denmark turns away. And with loan repayments still due on many plants, he said, “I’m also concerned about the stranded costs. Who’s going to answer for those costs? Will it be the citizens in my municipality?”

    Two regions of Belgium are also seeking to reduce incineration capacity. But few other parts of Europe are following suit. Indeed, some countries are planning new plants. Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania landfill most of their waste, and will probably need more incineration capacity, said Razgaitytė. Italy and Spain are among the others that may also build new plants, she said.

    In central and eastern Europe, “there is very strong pressure and a lucrative market for new incinerators,” said Paweł Głuszyński, of the Society for Earth, a Polish advocacy group. Poland has about nine incinerators now, plus a similar number of cement plants that use processed waste as fuel, he said. Around 70 new projects are seeking approval, he said, including proposals to convert old coal plants to burn garbage instead. Poor enforcement in Poland means emissions of toxins such as dioxins and furans often reach hazardous levels, Głuszyński said, but tightening EU rules may help,

    Britain, too, seems intent on pushing ahead with an expansion of burning, with dozens of new projects under consideration. Collectively, they would double current incineration capacity.

    There are hints, though, that some of what’s on the drawing board may not materialize. Wales said last month it would put a moratorium on large new waste-to-energy plants, and consider an incineration tax. In February, Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s secretary for business, energy and industrial strategy, refused an application for a new incinerator in Kent, east of London, although he allowed expansion of an existing plant. In his decision, he said the project could hamper local recycling, reasoning that encouraged incinerator opponents.

    In Cambridgeshire, the leafy, well-off home of the University of Cambridge, plans for another plant stalled in the face of vocal opposition from residents and local politicians. But such decisions can raise uncomfortable questions. The North London Waste Authority, which manages waste for seven boroughs in the capital, plans to expand, and extend the life of, an aging incinerator in the neighborhood of Edmonton, which has a large Black and immigrant population and is one of the country’s lowest-income areas.

    “Why is (incineration) not good enough for Cambridgeshire, but it’s good enough for Edmonton, which is poor, racially diverse and already suffers with a lot of pollution?” asked Delia Mattis, an activist with the local Black Lives Matter group. “There’s racism in the planning.” Other groups, including Stop the Edmonton Incinerator Now, are also working to close the facility, which had been nearing the end of its life before the overhaul was proposed.

    The neighborhood — where men’s life expectancy is 8.8 years shorter, and women’s 5.7 years shorter, than in wealthier parts of its borough — “is like a nonstop conveyor belt of trucks” going to and from the incinerator, Mattis said.

    A report from Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative arm, found British incinerators are three times more likely to be sited in the poorest and most racially mixed areas as in the wealthiest, whitest ones.

    Whatever countries decide on incineration, cutting waste will also require addressing its source, by pushing producers to make less throwaway packaging, and longer-lasting goods, said Jakobsen, the Danish waste association official. “Better design, better production, more recyclable material,” he said. “That’s a huge task that has not been fully addressed.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Europe, a backlash is growing over incinerating garbage on Apr 12, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • In Europe, a backlash is growing over incinerating garbage

    This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    For decades, Europe has poured millions of tons of its trash into incinerators each year, often under the green-sounding label “waste to energy.” Now, concerns about incineration’s outsized carbon footprint and fears it may undermine recycling are prompting European Union officials to ease their long-standing embrace of a technology that once seemed like an appealing way to make waste disappear.

    The EU is in the process of cutting off funding for new incinerators, but there’s little sign most existing ones —currently consuming 27 percent of the bloc’s municipal waste — will close any time soon. And, even without EU financial support, new plants are in the works, many in southern and eastern European countries that have historically incinerated less than long-standing waste-to-energy proponents such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian nations. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, post-Brexit Britain is charging ahead with proposals for dozens of new garbage-burning projects.

    Without a more decisive change of course, critics argue, that adds up to an existential threat both to Europe’s promise to slash carbon emissions to net-zero by midcentury and its dreams of a “circular economy” in which reuse and recycling largely take the place of waste disposal.

    “Burning plastic in a climate emergency, that’s insane,” said Georgia Elliott-Smith, an environmental engineer and Extinction Rebellion activist who is suing the British government over its decision to exclude incinerators from its new emissions trading system. Plastic, hard to recycle and ubiquitous in garbage, is made from fossil fuel derivatives and emits carbon dioxide when burned, accounting for a substantial chunk of incineration’s climate damage.

    In a case scheduled to be heard in the High Court this month, Elliott-Smith contends Britain violated its Paris Agreement commitments by omitting the waste-to-energy sector from the market it created when it left the European greenhouse gas emissions trading system as part of its divorce from the E.U. While she also argues the new system is too weak to shrink Britain’s carbon footprint, including incinerators could, in principle, put a cost on their emissions.

    Sinking billions of pounds into new incinerators now could lock Britain into decades of garbage-burning and make it harder for cash-strapped local authorities to boost recycling and composting rates, she said. The country already burns nearly 45 percent of its waste — more than it recycles, the Channel 4 show Dispatches recently reported. “The way incineration works, it skews the economics of waste by its very existence,” Elliott-Smith said. “Once you build the beast, you’ve got to keep feeding it.”

    Worries that incinerators sicken those who live near them — disproportionately poor, and people of color — have long dogged the industry. Wealthy nations such as Sweden and Denmark, which rely heavily on waste-to-energy plants, say their sophisticated emissions treatment systems mean such concerns are misplaced. But critics note many nations lack the resources for the best pollution-control systems. Dangerous emissions such as dioxin and particulate matter sometimes go unreported, and enforcement is often porous, environmentalists say.

    The climate concerns are newer, crystallized in a report the consulting firm Eunomia produced for ClientEarth, an advocacy group. It found that British incinerators’ power generation was more carbon-intensive than electricity from natural gas, and second only to coal. Overall, European incinerators pumped out an estimated 95 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, about 2 percent of total emissions.

    That footprint helped prompt EU officials to drop incineration from a draft of important green investment guidelines, known as the “sustainable finance taxonomy,” expected to be formally adopted this month. Not only can trash-burning plants no longer get subsidies designated for environmentally beneficial projects, they have also been cut off from other major EU funding streams. And the European Parliament has urged member nations to minimize incineration.

    “It looks like things are really changing in Brussels,” said Janek Vähk, a coordinator at Zero Waste Europe, a network of advocacy groups. Leaders, in his view, have “started understanding that incineration is a big source of greenhouse gases.”

    For its part, the industry says it is unfair to compare its carbon emissions directly with those of plants whose main function is to generate power. “The primary reason why we exist is for waste treatment, not energy production,” said Agnė Razgaitytė, a spokeswoman for the Confederation of European Waste-to-Energy Plants, or CEWEP, an industry group. “So it’s not exactly comparable in the same way.”

    Without incineration, she said, landfill costs tend to rise, increasing the danger of European trash leaving the continent, and ultimately being burned in uncontrolled settings or littering beaches and waterways. And landfills have their own climate impact — any organic waste in them generates the potent greenhouse gas methane as it decays. What’s more, incinerator operators salvage metals from the ash left over after burning, allowing their reuse.

    “We’re at home in the circular economy,” Razgaitytė said. “We do give value to the waste that otherwise would be just lost.” No matter how much is recycled and composted, she added, there will always be something left over: “I don’t think the waste-to-energy sector as such is going out of business any time soon.”

    The EU’s shift comes after a building spree that doubled EU countries’ municipal waste incineration between 1995 and 2019, to 60 million tons annually. Such plants now provide power to 18 million Europeans and heat to 15 million, the industry says.

    Individual countries remain free to fund and commission new incinerators. Those plants still make money from waste-disposal fees and by selling electricity and, in some places, heat. In some countries, operators can still claim subsidies designed to support renewable energy, as long as they burn waste that has been collected in separate streams so recyclable or compostable material is not incinerated.

    Protestors Incinerator Edmonton North London
    Demonstrators protest the continued operation of the incinerator in Edmonton in north London.
    Stop the Edmonton Incinerator

    What’s more, Vähk warned, the EU’s aim for countries to landfill no more than 10 percent of municipal waste by 2035 will unintentionally bolster incinerators’ appeal. “There’s a lot of pressure on minimizing landfill,” he said. That’s worrying, “because we don’t want to move from landfilling to incineration.”

    It all comes as the EU is pushing to reduce waste, particularly plastic, by ratcheting up targets for composting and recycling, mandating that plastic bottles contain 30 percent recycled content by 2030, and banning — as of this July — single-use items such as cutlery, cups, and stirrers. The EU has also adopted a new “circular economy” plan that aims in the longer term to encourage better product design so reuse and recycling are easier.

    Continued incineration, critics argue, could threaten those goals. Once built, they say, incinerators cannibalize recycling, because municipal governments are often locked in by contracts that make it cheaper to get their rubbish burned than to sort it for recyclers.

    One nation now grappling with the legacy of its long embrace of incineration is Denmark. The country, one of Europe’s biggest waste producers, built so many incinerators that by 2018 it was importing a million tons of trash. The plants generate 5 percent of the country’s electricity and nearly a quarter of the heat in the local networks, known as district heating systems, said Mads Jakobsen, chairman of the Danish Waste Association, which represents municipal authorities and waste companies.

    Pushing to meet ambitious carbon-cutting goals, Danish lawmakers agreed last year to shrink incineration capacity by 30 percent in a decade, with the closure of seven incinerators, while dramatically expanding recycling. “It’s time to stop importing plastic waste from abroad to fill empty incinerators and burn it to the detriment of the climate,” said Dan Jørgensen, the country’s climate minister.

    But in focusing only on Denmark’s own carbon footprint, Jakobsen said, the country’s politicians had failed to consider what would happen to the waste Denmark turns away. And with loan repayments still due on many plants, he said, “I’m also concerned about the stranded costs. Who’s going to answer for those costs? Will it be the citizens in my municipality?”

    Two regions of Belgium are also seeking to reduce incineration capacity. But few other parts of Europe are following suit. Indeed, some countries are planning new plants. Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania landfill most of their waste, and will probably need more incineration capacity, said Razgaitytė. Italy and Spain are among the others that may also build new plants, she said.

    In central and eastern Europe, “there is very strong pressure and a lucrative market for new incinerators,” said Paweł Głuszyński, of the Society for Earth, a Polish advocacy group. Poland has about nine incinerators now, plus a similar number of cement plants that use processed waste as fuel, he said. Around 70 new projects are seeking approval, he said, including proposals to convert old coal plants to burn garbage instead. Poor enforcement in Poland means emissions of toxins such as dioxins and furans often reach hazardous levels, Głuszyński said, but tightening EU rules may help,

    Britain, too, seems intent on pushing ahead with an expansion of burning, with dozens of new projects under consideration. Collectively, they would double current incineration capacity.

    There are hints, though, that some of what’s on the drawing board may not materialize. Wales said last month it would put a moratorium on large new waste-to-energy plants, and consider an incineration tax. In February, Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s secretary for business, energy and industrial strategy, refused an application for a new incinerator in Kent, east of London, although he allowed expansion of an existing plant. In his decision, he said the project could hamper local recycling, reasoning that encouraged incinerator opponents.

    In Cambridgeshire, the leafy, well-off home of the University of Cambridge, plans for another plant stalled in the face of vocal opposition from residents and local politicians. But such decisions can raise uncomfortable questions. The North London Waste Authority, which manages waste for seven boroughs in the capital, plans to expand, and extend the life of, an aging incinerator in the neighborhood of Edmonton, which has a large Black and immigrant population and is one of the country’s lowest-income areas.

    “Why is (incineration) not good enough for Cambridgeshire, but it’s good enough for Edmonton, which is poor, racially diverse and already suffers with a lot of pollution?” asked Delia Mattis, an activist with the local Black Lives Matter group. “There’s racism in the planning.” Other groups, including Stop the Edmonton Incinerator Now, are also working to close the facility, which had been nearing the end of its life before the overhaul was proposed.

    The neighborhood — where men’s life expectancy is 8.8 years shorter, and women’s 5.7 years shorter, than in wealthier parts of its borough — “is like a nonstop conveyor belt of trucks” going to and from the incinerator, Mattis said.

    A report from Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative arm, found British incinerators are three times more likely to be sited in the poorest and most racially mixed areas as in the wealthiest, whitest ones.

    Whatever countries decide on incineration, cutting waste will also require addressing its source, by pushing producers to make less throwaway packaging, and longer-lasting goods, said Jakobsen, the Danish waste association official. “Better design, better production, more recyclable material,” he said. “That’s a huge task that has not been fully addressed.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Clean energy bonanza: Biden’s budget tries to undo Trump’s damage

    For four years straight, President Donald Trump tried to gut the budgets of federal agencies focusing on climate and the environment. The former president proposed canceling clean energy research, cutting federal support to prevent flooding, and winnowing down crucial federal agencies. In 2019, he even went so far as to ask Congress to slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, by a whopping 31 percent — returning it to spending levels not seen since 1993. 

    Now, President Joe Biden is poised to go in the exact opposite direction. On Friday, just two weeks after Biden announced his climate-friendly infrastructure plan, the White House released its “skinny budget” — a sort of budgetary blueprint for where the president hopes to spend money in the coming year. (Think of it as a planned allowance for federal agencies.) And the $1.5 trillion proposal couldn’t be more different than those of the past four years. 

    While Trump’s 2020 budget proposal didn’t mention the word “climate” once, Biden’s plan mentions it 146 times. It asks Congress for $14 billion “across nearly every agency” to advance clean energy and zero out U.S. emissions by 2050. The president hopes to direct $10 billion toward clean energy innovation and research, $1.7 billion toward energy efficiency in homes and buildings, and $600 million to electrifying federal vehicles, including at the U.S. Postal Service.

    The budget also aims to bolster agencies that were left in tatters after the Trump administration. The EPA lost nearly 1,000 employees during the Trump years; the Biden administration plans to restore those positions and boost EPA funding by 21 percent. If the budget is enacted, the EPA will receive $11.2 billion in total — more federal funding than ever before. 

    “We are very encouraged by the Biden administration’s budget outline,” said Michelle Roos, the executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of EPA alumni formed in reaction to the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks, in a statement. “The EPA’s budget has declined or remained stagnant for decades, so the 2022 budget proposal is an excellent first step in rebuilding funding and strengthening the agency.”

    The White House is also signaling an end to the “America First” foreign policy that characterized Trump’s approach to climate. The Biden team is asking Congress to approve a $1.2 billion contribution to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations-backed fund that funnels money to help developing countries adapt to climate change and expand solar and wind power. Even that, however, may not be enough: The U.S. has not contributed to the fund since 2017, and currently owes $2 billion of its initial $3 billion promise. Policy experts also warn that the current U.S. pledge is far too small for what’s needed. 

    And the budget faces many hurdles ahead. The $1.5 trillion proposal for 2022 represents a 16 percent increase in funding compared to 2021, and that’s on top of President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act. With all those zeroes stacking up, even fairly progressive Democrats may start to get sticker shock. Congress never adopts a president’s spending plan in full, instead using it as a starting point for discussion and debate. That’s why — despite President Trump’s best efforts — some funding was maintained for clean energy research and the EPA during his administration. 

    For now, however, the skinny budget is the latest entry in President Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach to tackling climate change. “Responding to the climate crisis depends on helping communities transition to a cleaner future,” wrote Shalanda Young, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a letter to Congress announcing the plan. “This moment of crisis is also a moment of opportunity.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Clean energy bonanza: Biden’s budget tries to undo Trump’s damage

    For four years straight, President Donald Trump tried to gut the budgets of federal agencies focusing on climate and the environment. The former president proposed canceling clean energy research, cutting federal support to prevent flooding, and winnowing down crucial federal agencies. In 2019, he even went so far as to ask Congress to slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, by a whopping 31 percent — returning it to spending levels not seen since 1993. 

    Now, President Joe Biden is poised to go in the exact opposite direction. On Friday, just two weeks after Biden announced his climate-friendly infrastructure plan, the White House released its “skinny budget” — a sort of budgetary blueprint for where the president hopes to spend money in the coming year. (Think of it as a planned allowance for federal agencies.) And the $1.5 trillion proposal couldn’t be more different than those of the past four years. 

    While Trump’s 2020 budget proposal didn’t mention the word “climate” once, Biden’s plan mentions it 146 times. It asks Congress for $14 billion “across nearly every agency” to advance clean energy and zero out U.S. emissions by 2050. The president hopes to direct $10 billion toward clean energy innovation and research, $1.7 billion toward energy efficiency in homes and buildings, and $600 million to electrifying federal vehicles, including at the U.S. Postal Service.

    The budget also aims to bolster agencies that were left in tatters after the Trump administration. The EPA lost nearly 1,000 employees during the Trump years; the Biden administration plans to restore those positions and boost EPA funding by 21 percent. If the budget is enacted, the EPA will receive $11.2 billion in total — more federal funding than ever before. 

    “We are very encouraged by the Biden administration’s budget outline,” said Michelle Roos, the executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of EPA alumni formed in reaction to the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks, in a statement. “The EPA’s budget has declined or remained stagnant for decades, so the 2022 budget proposal is an excellent first step in rebuilding funding and strengthening the agency.”

    The White House is also signaling an end to the “America First” foreign policy that characterized Trump’s approach to climate. The Biden team is asking Congress to approve a $1.2 billion contribution to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations-backed fund that funnels money to help developing countries adapt to climate change and expand solar and wind power. Even that, however, may not be enough: The U.S. has not contributed to the fund since 2017, and currently owes $2 billion of its initial $3 billion promise. Policy experts also warn that the current U.S. pledge is far too small for what’s needed. 

    And the budget faces many hurdles ahead. The $1.5 trillion proposal for 2022 represents a 16 percent increase in funding compared to 2021, and that’s on top of President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act. With all those zeroes stacking up, even fairly progressive Democrats may start to get sticker shock. Congress never adopts a president’s spending plan in full, instead using it as a starting point for discussion and debate. That’s why — despite President Trump’s best efforts — some funding was maintained for clean energy research and the EPA during his administration. 

    For now, however, the skinny budget is the latest entry in President Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach to tackling climate change. “Responding to the climate crisis depends on helping communities transition to a cleaner future,” wrote Shalanda Young, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a letter to Congress announcing the plan. “This moment of crisis is also a moment of opportunity.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Clean energy bonanza: Biden’s budget tries to undo Trump’s damage on Apr 10, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Can a pipeline company defy a governor’s orders? Gretchen Whitmer is about to find out.

    As governor, Gretchen Whitmer vowed to provide clean and affordable drinking water for the Great Lakes state of Michigan. Last year, she implemented a statewide moratorium on water shutoffs to provide relief during the COVID-19 crisis, allocated $500 million dollars for improving water infrastructure, and in November stood by a campaign promise when she ordered Enbridge Energy to shut down its Line 5 pipeline, which carries crude oil and natural gas liquids under the Great Lakes from western Canada to Michigan and on to eastern Canada.

    Whitmer’s order gave Enbridge until May 12 to shut down Line 5. But the company has so far refused to comply, leading to a showdown between the biggest mover of oil in the United States, Enbridge, and one of the country’s emerging political leaders on climate, over land in her own state.    

    A review by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources last year found that Enbridge has repeatedly violated requirements laid out in the 1953 easement that allowed it to build the pipeline, with infractions varying from not having the required support on the lake bed to inadequate corrosion control. Whitmer said in a press release that Enbridge “failed for decades to meet these obligations under the easement, and these failures persist and cannot be cured.” 

    Her order to shut down the pipeline follows years of concern from researchers, activists, and policymakers that Line 5 could seriously threaten Great Lakes fisheries and drinking water. The National Wildlife Federation found that the pipeline has spilled over 1 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids in an estimated 30 spills to date. “Every day that pipeline lays on the lakebed, we’re a day closer to a catastrophe,” said David Holtz, an activist and coordinator for Oil and Water Don’t Mix, a coalition of Michigan organizations fighting to shut down Line 5 and support a clean energy transition. 

    There are also climate change concerns. To keep Line 5 operating, Enbridge has announced plans to build a protective tunnel over the part of the pipeline that crosses under the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet. One of several permits for the tunnel construction was granted in late January this year. If it is completed, Enbridge would be allowed to use the pipeline for the next 99 years. But environmentalists and scientists argue that a long-term infrastructure plan to keep distributing and using fossil fuels runs counter to Whitmer’s 2050 carbon-neutrality goal and could derail U.S. climate change targets more broadly. Each day, the pipeline transports up to 540,000 barrels of fossil fuel.

    Line 5 is facing opposition from another front as well: The Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians is applying to have the Straits of Mackinac federally designated as a “Traditional Cultural Property” after it found what looks like artifacts of a 10,000-year-old caribou-hunting culture. This designation would require the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Public Service Commission to consider the cultural significance of the land before approving Enbridge’s final permits for the protective tunnel. 

    A diver for the National Wildlife Federation inspects Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac in 2013. National Wildlife Federation

    “[Activists] have really come a long way” in their fight against Line 5, Holtz said. “We’ve put together the biggest, broadest, toughest citizens’ campaign Michigan has ever seen when it comes to an environmental issue.” 

    Since Whitmer’s closure order in November, Enbridge has sued the state of Michigan on the grounds that it doesn’t have authority over the company because Enbridge is regulated federally by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA. Enbridge has also stated outright that it will defy the governor’s orders. “We do not plan to shut down Line 5 unless ordered by a court or PHMSA, which we view as highly unlikely,” a spokesperson for the company told Grist. Among its stated reasons for refusing to shut down are concerns over energy security for Michigan and Canada and the increased environmental impact from alternative modes of transporting propane. The pipeline supplies between 55 to 65 percent of Michigan’s propane needs. 

    Fifteen Republican members of Congress — including Michigan’s Tim Walberg and Jack Bergman, and Wisconsin’s Glenn Grothman — sent President Biden a letter in March asking for support to keep the pipeline operating. A member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Minister of Natural Resources Seamus O’Regan, said that keeping Line 5 operational is “non-negotiable.” And Ohio and Louisiana also asked to intervene in favor of keeping Line 5. Ohio receives oil from the pipeline, but it’s unclear what Louisiana’s stake is. 

    In most cases, property disputes like this are straightforward, explains Nick Shroeck, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Detroit Mercy. But the standoff between Whitmer and Enbridge is unique because it’s multi-jurisdictional, he says, and because of the massive amount of oil the pipeline carries and any potential disasters. 

    For the shutdown to go into effect, a state or federal court would need to rule in Whitmer’s favor. If the case is sent to state court, Shroeck said, Enbridge could appeal that decision, therefore sending it to a federal court of appeals, whereafter it could be years before a decision is reached. In the meantime, Enbridge would be able to continue operating without penalty. 

    The U.S. portion of the pipeline that crosses under the Mackinac straits is the worst possible location in the Great Lakes for an oil spill. A 2016 study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that because of the turbulent waters and switching directions of the current, a Line 5 oil spill could potentially contaminate more than 700 miles of Great Lakes shoreline. 

    In early March, Whitmer released an energy security plan that addresses how to get propane to Michiganders without Line 5. It includes strategies to prevent price gouging and increase bill assistance for vulnerable families; use government resources to develop alternative sourcing options; monitor and address disruptions in the energy industry; and maximize energy efficiency while reducing the cost to Michigan consumers. 

    Enbridge told Grist it found Whitmer’s plan “wholly inadequate for replacing the propane or energy supply Michiganders currently depend on.” Activists, however, are more supportive. “The only real crisis that we have to worry about with Line 5 energy sources is if it’s shut down because of [a] pipeline rupture, and there’s no orderly plan,” said Holtz, of the group Oil and Water Don’t Mix. 

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Can a pipeline company defy a governor’s orders? Gretchen Whitmer is about to find out.

    As governor, Gretchen Whitmer vowed to provide clean and affordable drinking water for the Great Lakes state of Michigan. Last year, she implemented a statewide moratorium on water shutoffs to provide relief during the COVID-19 crisis, allocated $500 million dollars for improving water infrastructure, and in November stood by a campaign promise when she ordered Enbridge Energy to shut down its Line 5 pipeline, which carries crude oil and natural gas liquids under the Great Lakes from western Canada to Michigan and on to eastern Canada.

    Whitmer’s order gave Enbridge until May 12 to shut down Line 5. But the company has so far refused to comply, leading to a showdown between the biggest mover of oil in the United States, Enbridge, and one of the country’s emerging political leaders on climate, over land in her own state.    

    A review by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources last year found that Enbridge has repeatedly violated requirements laid out in the 1953 easement that allowed it to build the pipeline, with infractions varying from not having the required support on the lake bed to inadequate corrosion control. Whitmer said in a press release that Enbridge “failed for decades to meet these obligations under the easement, and these failures persist and cannot be cured.” 

    Her order to shut down the pipeline follows years of concern from researchers, activists, and policymakers that Line 5 could seriously threaten Great Lakes fisheries and drinking water. The National Wildlife Federation found that the pipeline has spilled over 1 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids in an estimated 30 spills to date. “Every day that pipeline lays on the lakebed, we’re a day closer to a catastrophe,” said David Holtz, an activist and coordinator for Oil and Water Don’t Mix, a coalition of Michigan organizations fighting to shut down Line 5 and support a clean energy transition. 

    There are also climate change concerns. To keep Line 5 operating, Enbridge has announced plans to build a protective tunnel over the part of the pipeline that crosses under the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet. One of several permits for the tunnel construction was granted in late January this year. If it is completed, Enbridge would be allowed to use the pipeline for the next 99 years. But environmentalists and scientists argue that a long-term infrastructure plan to keep distributing and using fossil fuels runs counter to Whitmer’s 2050 carbon-neutrality goal and could derail U.S. climate change targets more broadly. Each day, the pipeline transports up to 540,000 barrels of fossil fuel.

    Line 5 is facing opposition from another front as well: The Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians is applying to have the Straits of Mackinac federally designated as a “Traditional Cultural Property” after it found what looks like artifacts of a 10,000-year-old caribou-hunting culture. This designation would require the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Public Service Commission to consider the cultural significance of the land before approving Enbridge’s final permits for the protective tunnel. 

    A diver for the National Wildlife Federation inspects Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac in 2013. National Wildlife Federation

    “[Activists] have really come a long way” in their fight against Line 5, Holtz said. “We’ve put together the biggest, broadest, toughest citizens’ campaign Michigan has ever seen when it comes to an environmental issue.” 

    Since Whitmer’s closure order in November, Enbridge has sued the state of Michigan on the grounds that it doesn’t have authority over the company because Enbridge is regulated federally by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA. Enbridge has also stated outright that it will defy the governor’s orders. “We do not plan to shut down Line 5 unless ordered by a court or PHMSA, which we view as highly unlikely,” a spokesperson for the company told Grist. Among its stated reasons for refusing to shut down are concerns over energy security for Michigan and Canada and the increased environmental impact from alternative modes of transporting propane. The pipeline supplies between 55 to 65 percent of Michigan’s propane needs. 

    Fifteen Republican members of Congress — including Michigan’s Tim Walberg and Jack Bergman, and Wisconsin’s Glenn Grothman — sent President Biden a letter in March asking for support to keep the pipeline operating. A member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Minister of Natural Resources Seamus O’Regan, said that keeping Line 5 operational is “non-negotiable.” And Ohio and Louisiana also asked to intervene in favor of keeping Line 5. Ohio receives oil from the pipeline, but it’s unclear what Louisiana’s stake is. 

    In most cases, property disputes like this are straightforward, explains Nick Shroeck, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Detroit Mercy. But the standoff between Whitmer and Enbridge is unique because it’s multi-jurisdictional, he says, and because of the massive amount of oil the pipeline carries and any potential disasters. 

    For the shutdown to go into effect, a state or federal court would need to rule in Whitmer’s favor. If the case is sent to state court, Shroeck said, Enbridge could appeal that decision, therefore sending it to a federal court of appeals, whereafter it could be years before a decision is reached. In the meantime, Enbridge would be able to continue operating without penalty. 

    The U.S. portion of the pipeline that crosses under the Mackinac straits is the worst possible location in the Great Lakes for an oil spill. A 2016 study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that because of the turbulent waters and switching directions of the current, a Line 5 oil spill could potentially contaminate more than 700 miles of Great Lakes shoreline. 

    In early March, Whitmer released an energy security plan that addresses how to get propane to Michiganders without Line 5. It includes strategies to prevent price gouging and increase bill assistance for vulnerable families; use government resources to develop alternative sourcing options; monitor and address disruptions in the energy industry; and maximize energy efficiency while reducing the cost to Michigan consumers. 

    Enbridge told Grist it found Whitmer’s plan “wholly inadequate for replacing the propane or energy supply Michiganders currently depend on.” Activists, however, are more supportive. “The only real crisis that we have to worry about with Line 5 energy sources is if it’s shut down because of [a] pipeline rupture, and there’s no orderly plan,” said Holtz, of the group Oil and Water Don’t Mix. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can a pipeline company defy a governor’s orders? Gretchen Whitmer is about to find out. on Apr 7, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Has Eugene, Oregon, found a ‘superpower’ for climate action?

    This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    Tyee Williams has been on the frontlines of climate change as a wildland firefighter. He helped battle the Pine Gulch Fire, one of three record-setting fires in Colorado last summer and fall — all scorching examples of how the climate crisis is intensifying wildfires in the Western U.S.

    Back home in Eugene, Oregon, Williams is on another vanguard of the climate fight: a push for the city to cut fossil fuel consumption. That work includes pressing the Eugene City Council to revamp its operating agreement with the local gas utility, Northwest Natural, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  

    In testimony before the city council in February, Williams shared his experience, which included digging a fire line to protect natural gas infrastructure. “On one side I could see the glow of the wildfire, and on the other hillside I could see flares from the gas wellheads from fracked gas,” Williams said during a virtual public meeting. To him, the connection between fossil fuel emissions and worsening wildfires is clear. “As someone who will have jobs created by Northwest Natural, I would like to say, I’m not appreciative of it.” 

    The current operating agreement with Northwest Natural is set to expire in May. Renegotiations, however, are stalled, in part because the city is pushing to include funding for its ambitious climate plans in the contract. Natural gas accounts for about 40 percent of fossil fuel use in the city, so the city sees reducing gas burning as a key to reaching climate commitments. By tying climate action funding to the gas company’s operating agreement, the city is testing a new tool for municipalities across the Western U.S. looking to phase out fossil fuels.

    The contract dispute between Eugene and Northwest Natural is over the utility’s franchise agreement, which grants it the ability to bypass certain bureaucratic hurdles: for example, filing a permit or getting an inspection every time it installs a new hookup. The expiration of the agreement doesn’t mean gas customers will suddenly have their gas shutoff. But it would mean the gas company will face more red tape, and Eugene will miss out on the approximately $1.4 million the gas company pays each year under the agreement. 

    One of the main sticking points in the negotiations, which started in 2019, is a carbon fee program proposed by the city. It would add at least $740,000 per year to existing franchise fees charged to Northwest Natural, and would primarily fund residential energy efficiency programs. It would also pay for carbon offsets and investments in renewable natural gas — gas from non-fossil fuel sources like landfills and feedlots. Eugene asserted that the fund is a condition of any new contract, while Northwest Natural argued that the fund should be separate from the franchise agreement.

    Climate and environmental justice advocates see the negotiations as part of a just transition away from fossil fuels. “We can’t just say we don’t want natural gas,” said Aimee Okotie-Oyekan, the environmental and climate justice coordinator for the Eugene-Springfield chapter of the NAACP. “We need to be building the alternative.” The carbon fee program would pay for home improvements like insulation, which reduces energy consumption and lowers bills.

    person with bullhorn in front of people lying down
    Avery Temple of the climate justice advocacy group Breach Collective speaks during a March protest outside the offices of Northwest Natural, the Eugene, Oregon, gas utility. The “die-in” represented deaths due to fossil fuel pollution. Robert Scherle

    Throughout the ongoing contract disputes, Northwest Natural has maintained its infrastructure can be part of climate solutions, particularly with renewable natural gas. “No matter the outcome of discussions with the City of Eugene, we are moving forward with our vision of a carbon-neutral pipeline by 2050,” Kim Heiting, Northwest Natural’s senior vice president of operations, wrote in an email. 

    But Eugene isn’t content waiting for an uncertain future of cleaner gas. In 2014, the city passed an ordinance to reduce fossil fuel use to 50 percent of 2010 levels by 2030. Despite overall emissions reductions in recent years, natural gas emissions in the city continue to grow. Not reaching an agreement with Northwest Natural could lead to protracted court fights, increased energy bills for customers, and more work for city staff as they deal with an influx of permits, but Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis said that isn’t what she worries about most. “My biggest concern is that we’re facing a climate crisis,” she said. 

    Standing firm against the gas company is about climate leadership, Vinis added. “That’s why we want to succeed — this is an important pathway, and we’d hope other cities would follow.” Policy experts see Eugene leading the way for other municipalities, like King County, where Seattle is located, by providing an example of how to leverage franchise agreements as a tool for climate action, said Eric de Place, the director of the nonprofit Sightline Instititute’s Thin Green Line program, which fights fossil fuel infrastructure expansion in the Northwest. Making gas companies pay for climate resilience as a condition of franchise agreements “is a superpower when it comes to decarbonization,” he said. “It changes the nature of the conversation dramatically.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Has Eugene, Oregon, found a ‘superpower’ for climate action? on Apr 2, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • How Britain’s ‘build back better’ plan went very, very wrong

    Retrofitting homes is a key pillar of Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan to “build back better” from the COVID-19 recession. The president urged Congress on Wednesday to mobilize $213 billion to “produce, preserve, and retrofit” more than a million homes for affordability and efficiency. In addition to creating jobs, energy efficiency measures like insulating roofs and walls and installing electric heating will save people money on their utility bills and reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s buildings.

    But the Biden administration would be wise to look across the pond for a cautionary tale before rolling out any such program too quickly.

    Last summer, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration unveiled its own “build back better” economic stimulus package, which centered around a $2 billion program to retrofit England’s homes. The program was supposed to fund energy efficiency and clean heat upgrades in 600,000 homes, getting the country closer to net-zero emissions while creating 100,000 jobs, but it was canceled last week after a shambolic six-month run that may have killed more jobs than it spurred.

    “When it comes down to improving the energy efficiency of our homes, this is about the worst thing the government could have done,” Andrew McCausland, the director of a British contracting company, told the i, a daily newspaper. “It has destroyed confidence in the building business in taking on this work in the future.” 

    Through Johnson’s Green Homes Grants program, or GHG, most U.K. homeowners and landlords could receive up to about $6,900 to help pay for insulation, electric heating systems, and various other energy-efficient fixes like new windows, doors, and heating controls. Low-income homeowners were eligible for up to nearly $14,000. 

    The trouble began shortly after the grants became available at the end of September. In order to apply, building owners had to obtain a quote from an accredited installer, but few existed. Installers said they were reluctant to go through the time-consuming and expensive process of getting accredited without a longer-term assurance that there would be work. The program was designed to run only through March 2021. 

    McCausland told the Guardian he spent $8,200 and an estimated 160 hours of unpaid work to get his employees accredited. Others said that navigating the process, which involved multiple certifications, was overly complicated, making it especially difficult for small companies with no administrative staff. 

    Building professionals’ wariness was understandable — they had been burned before. In 2015, the U.K. government canceled a similar energy efficiency retrofit program after just two years, resulting in a steep drop in demand for this kind of work. 

    On November 18, Johnson announced he would extend the Green Homes Grants program for another year, through March 2022. But installers were still unconvinced. Several testified to the Environmental Audit Committee of the British Parliament that a much longer-term commitment was needed to provide the certainty that the industry, and particularly small installers, needed to make the investment in accreditation.

    By January, a parallel catastrophe was unfolding. A Guardian investigation found that the administration of the program, which was being handled by an American consulting firm called ICF, was in chaos. When the program first began, installers reported losing business as homeowners put projects on hold while they applied for the grant. Now homeowners were waiting months to hear back about their applications. There was no Green Homes Grants customer service number to call — all communication was conducted via email. Multiple installers said they had hundreds of customers interested in retrofits, but only a few dozen whose applications had been approved. 

    Program administrators often rejected quotes for being too high, asking applicants to provide more details or seek out additional estimates. On December 24, the program sent notifications to thousands of applicants that said it was unable to verify their identity, and that their quotes were too high. Many homeowners dropped their retrofit plans altogether. Installers were incensed that their work was being devalued and that they were losing customers. 

    Installers were also going into deep debt waiting for their checks. Once their applications were approved, homeowners received vouchers for the portion of the retrofit the government agreed to cover. They would then hand those off to installers, who could redeem the voucher after completing the work. Bhumit Chandi, a business owner in the suburbs of London, told the Guardian in January that he had installed 16 systems and hadn’t been paid for any of them, putting him nearly $120,000 in the hole.

    “Chaos is an understatement for what is going on,” another installer, Eddie Gammage of EDG Installations, said at the time. “We haven’t received any payments at all yet for seven jobs we have completed. I have had to lay people off.” 

    In evidence submitted to the Environmental Audit Committee of the British Parliament, another installer wrote that the Green Homes Grant program had hurt his business more than COVID-19. He said that his revenue had decreased by at least 40 percent, while administration and costs were up by 300 percent. He was considering cutting staff, and reported that his company’s cash flow would be negative for the first time in years. “Our credibility with customers has never been at such a low point due to mistakes with the GHG communication with customers,” he wrote.

    As if things weren’t bad enough, in February, Johnson’s government delivered a major blow to the program. Though it had extended the deadline to apply for a grant through 2022, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Minister of State for Business, Energy and Clean Growth, said that unspent funds from the original $2 billion would not be rolled over after March 2021. Instead, the program would have a new budget of just $440 million. By mid-February, only $130 million worth of vouchers, or about 6 percent of the original budget, had been approved. 

    Last week, after months of investigating the Green Homes Grants, the Environmental Audit Committee of Parliament published a damning assessment of the program. It wrote that the government had “failed to consult industry adequately,” that the plan had set an impossible timeline, and that administration of the grants had been “nothing short of disastrous.”

    The committee demanded that Johnson’s government overhaul, extend, and fully fund the program “to provide a genuine long-term stimulus to the domestic energy efficiency sector. The scheme should not be scrapped or quietly wound down.”

    But just five days later, the program was abruptly canceled. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng announced that a separate, much smaller energy efficiency program administered through local municipalities would be extended for another year, but that March 31, 2021 would be the last day homeowners could apply for Green Homes vouchers. As of last Saturday, less than half of the 96,000 applicants to the program thus far had been issued vouchers — far from the 600,000 homes the program was supposed to reach. The government expects  to fund just $413 million worth of retrofits by the program’s end.

    A fact sheet for Biden’s American Jobs Plan says that energy efficient homes should be paid for through “targeted tax credits, formula funding, grants, and project-based rental assistance.” The U.K.’s Green Homes Grant debacle shows that rolling out these sorts of incentives without a long-term commitment to funding, input from the industry, and competent administration risks doing more harm than good.

    “The tragedy is not so much that the scheme is cancelled, but that it wasn’t planned well in the first place,” Chris Stark, chief executive of the U.K.’s independent Climate Change Committee, wrote on Twitter.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Britain’s ‘build back better’ plan went very, very wrong on Apr 1, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • This machine in Texas could suck up companies’ carbon emissions — if they pay

    To burnish their green credentials, companies have long paid to plant trees or protect forests in the hopes that nature will absorb their greenhouse gas emissions. Shopify, the Canadian company that runs e-commerce sites, wants to take a more hands-on approach — by paying a Texas venture to pull carbon dioxide from the sky and store it underground.

    Shopify struck a deal this month with Carbon Engineering, which is about to start building a sprawling “direct air capture” facility in West Texas with its partner 1PointFive. Their plant, expected to be the largest of its kind, will use huge fans to draw in air and churn out pure CO2. Shopify has agreed to “buy” 10,000 metric tons of the gas that will be permanently sequestered in deep rock formations.

    The initiative comes as corporations are redoubling promises to address climate change. Tech firms, airlines, and oil-and-gas giants have all recently pledged to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050 — a loosely defined strategy which generally means they’re working to cut new emissions and reverse past pollution. Climate scientists say the world must now do both to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century.

    As part of those efforts, companies as wide-ranging as Microsoft, Audi, ExxonMobil and Stripe are investing in businesses developing cutting-edge technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away. Selling CO2-removal by the ton offers a way to fund these enormously expensive ventures while allowing companies to claim credit for (eventually) trimming their carbon footprints.

    “We firmly believe these types of frontier technologies are going to be a necessary part of the climate solution,” said Stacy Kauk, director of Shopify’s sustainability fund. Along with the deal it struck to remove 10,000 tons in Texas, the ecommerce software company is buying 5,000 metric tons of carbon removal from Climeworks. The Swiss firm is expanding its direct air capture plant in Iceland and developing a new one in Norway.

    Carbon Engineering’s working pilot plant in Squamish B.C.
    Carbon Engineering

    Shopify aims not only to curb its own carbon footprint from powering and heating its buildings and employees’ travel — nearly 8,000 metric tons in 2019 — but also to jumpstart broader demand for carbon removal projects by being an early adopter. “As direct air capture gains traction, we’re hoping this purchase, plus other purchases from other companies, will start to scale this service and drive down costs,” Kauk said.

    The strategy is likely to catch on with other large businesses and heavy polluters, particularly in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like airlines and steel manufacturing, according to experts. Still, they stressed that these projects shouldn’t replace efforts to slash emissions directly from flying jets, shipping goods, powering buildings, or running factories. 

    “We need to make sure that we don’t dilute the stringency of an emissions reduction target of a given company,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate in the World Resources Institute’s global climate program in Boston.

    Offsets tied to direct air capture may have certain advantages over, say, planting trees. To start, there’s less guesswork around how much carbon is actually pulled from the sky using big machinery. And gas that’s sequestered deep underground is less likely to escape into the atmosphere than from a forest or wetland, where wildfires, plant disease, and human activity can set CO2 loose.

    Projects that remove carbon and permanently store it may also avoid a key criticism of other types of offsets: that they don’t do much for the climate. For instance, a company can pay a nonprofit to protect swaths of the Amazon rainforest from deforestation; the company then claims credits for the CO2 that isn’t emitted as a result of its investment. But if the land isn’t likely to be developed anyway, then it’s impossible to say whether there’s any real benefit.

    In Carbon Engineering’s case, the carbon removal and sequestration will only happen if someone pays to do it, said Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute who is based in Seattle.

    The direct air capture plant in Texas will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. At full scale, the facility could capture 1 million metric tons of CO2 every year, according to Carbon Engineering. The Canadian firm is licensing its technology to 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management, based in Santa Monica, California. 

    an artist rendering of the direct air capture plant showing a large building with big fans on top
    Artist rendering of what Carbon Engineering’s large-scale Direct Air Capture plants will look like.
    Carbon Engineering

    Much of the captured carbon will be injected into old wells in the Permian Basin to force up remaining oil. But interested customers like Shopify can separately pay for “pure sequestration,” meaning the CO2 would go into long-term storage wells in deep rock formations, according to Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering. The service is “a way of allowing anybody to buy negative emissions,” he said.

    Construction on the giant fans is expected to start this year, with operations slated to begin in late 2024. Oldham said Occidental is working to find nearby sites for storing CO2 and obtain permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates this type of well. Shopify has paid a deposit for the 10,000 tons and will hand over the rest of the money once the carbon is actually removed, said Kauk from Shopify. (She and Oldham declined to disclose financial details. Kauk said only that Shopify is investing $5 million annually to address climate change, of which at least $1 million is devoted to capturing and permanently storing atmospheric carbon.)

    Current estimates put the price of sucking carbon from the sky at about $600 for every metric ton of CO2. Oldham said he expects it to drop to around $100 to $150 per metric ton once more facilities are built. 

    Despite the potential advantages, using direct air capture to reduce a company’s carbon emissions still raises questions and concerns, Broekhoff and other experts said.

    United Airlines, for instance, recently announced plans to make a “multimillion-dollar investment” in 1PointFive, which is leading construction of the Texas facility. United said the investment will help to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. But the airline isn’t buying a share of pure sequestration; it’s backing the entire venture. So it’s unclear how much United’s money leads to “additional” carbon removal, since the project is already underway. It’s also hard to say when, or by how much, this support will translate into actual emissions reductions.

    “Investments are critical, but let’s not imagine that investing in and testing the technology is the same as actually using that technology toward climate goals,” said Simon Nicholson, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington, D.C. In a blog post, Nicholson and colleagues said the United announcement should be “applauded” as well as the subject of  “careful scrutiny.”

    Given the high cost and technical complexity of these projects, there’s also the risk that some facilities won’t be built or operate as planned. If companies invest now and subtract the captured carbon from their current footprints, they may wind up overestimating the actual results.

    a man stands in front of a big machine that fills an entire industrial space
    Carbon Engineering’s pilot plant pellet reactor and associated equipment.
    Carbon Engineering

    So that outsiders can gauge whether carbon removal projects are delivering on their promises, developers should provide detailed, standardized, and accessible data, according to CarbonPlan, a nonprofit in California. But that’s not currently happening, researchers there said. CarbonPlan recently evaluated dozens of proposals for nature-based and technical solutions and said it couldn’t independently validate claims owing to “missing, incomplete, or duplicative” information.

    “Without stronger disclosures, it’s almost impossible for companies — or the public — to know with confidence whether these activities are working,” CarbonPlan’s researchers wrote.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • This machine in Texas could suck up companies’ carbon emissions — if they pay

    To burnish their green credentials, companies have long paid to plant trees or protect forests in the hopes that nature will absorb their greenhouse gas emissions. Shopify, the Canadian company that runs e-commerce sites, wants to take a more hands-on approach — by paying a Texas venture to pull carbon dioxide from the sky and store it underground.

    Shopify struck a deal this month with Carbon Engineering, which is about to start building a sprawling “direct air capture” facility in West Texas with its partner 1PointFive. Their plant, expected to be the largest of its kind, will use huge fans to draw in air and churn out pure CO2. Shopify has agreed to “buy” 10,000 metric tons of the gas that will be permanently sequestered in deep rock formations.

    The initiative comes as corporations are redoubling promises to address climate change. Tech firms, airlines, and oil-and-gas giants have all recently pledged to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050 — a loosely defined strategy which generally means they’re working to cut new emissions and reverse past pollution. Climate scientists say the world must now do both to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century.

    As part of those efforts, companies as wide-ranging as Microsoft, Audi, ExxonMobil and Stripe are investing in businesses developing cutting-edge technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away. Selling CO2-removal by the ton offers a way to fund these enormously expensive ventures while allowing companies to claim credit for (eventually) trimming their carbon footprints.

    “We firmly believe these types of frontier technologies are going to be a necessary part of the climate solution,” said Stacy Kauk, director of Shopify’s sustainability fund. Along with the deal it struck to remove 10,000 tons in Texas, the ecommerce software company is buying 5,000 metric tons of carbon removal from Climeworks. The Swiss firm is expanding its direct air capture plant in Iceland and developing a new one in Norway.

    Carbon Engineering’s working pilot plant in Squamish B.C. Carbon Engineering

    Shopify aims not only to curb its own carbon footprint from powering and heating its buildings and employees’ travel — nearly 8,000 metric tons in 2019 — but also to jumpstart broader demand for carbon removal projects by being an early adopter. “As direct air capture gains traction, we’re hoping this purchase, plus other purchases from other companies, will start to scale this service and drive down costs,” Kauk said.

    The strategy is likely to catch on with other large businesses and heavy polluters, particularly in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like airlines and steel manufacturing, according to experts. Still, they stressed that these projects shouldn’t replace efforts to slash emissions directly from flying jets, shipping goods, powering buildings, or running factories. 

    “We need to make sure that we don’t dilute the stringency of an emissions reduction target of a given company,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate in the World Resources Institute’s global climate program in Boston.

    Offsets tied to direct air capture may have certain advantages over, say, planting trees. To start, there’s less guesswork around how much carbon is actually pulled from the sky using big machinery. And gas that’s sequestered deep underground is less likely to escape into the atmosphere than from a forest or wetland, where wildfires, plant disease, and human activity can set CO2 loose.

    Projects that remove carbon and permanently store it may also avoid a key criticism of other types of offsets: that they don’t do much for the climate. For instance, a company can pay a nonprofit to protect swaths of the Amazon rainforest from deforestation; the company then claims credits for the CO2 that isn’t emitted as a result of its investment. But if the land isn’t likely to be developed anyway, then it’s impossible to say whether there’s any real benefit.

    In Carbon Engineering’s case, the carbon removal and sequestration will only happen if someone pays to do it, said Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute who is based in Seattle.

    The direct air capture plant in Texas will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. At full scale, the facility could capture 1 million metric tons of CO2 every year, according to Carbon Engineering. The Canadian firm is licensing its technology to 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management, based in Santa Monica, California. 

    an artist rendering of the direct air capture plant showing a large building with big fans on top
    Artist rendering of what Carbon Engineering’s large-scale Direct Air Capture plants will look like. Carbon Engineering

    Much of the captured carbon will be injected into old wells in the Permian Basin to force up remaining oil. But interested customers like Shopify can separately pay for “pure sequestration,” meaning the CO2 would go into long-term storage wells in deep rock formations, according to Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering. The service is “a way of allowing anybody to buy negative emissions,” he said.

    Construction on the giant fans is expected to start this year, with operations slated to begin in late 2024. Oldham said Occidental is working to find nearby sites for storing CO2 and obtain permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates this type of well. Shopify has paid a deposit for the 10,000 tons and will hand over the rest of the money once the carbon is actually removed, said Kauk from Shopify. (She and Oldham declined to disclose financial details. Kauk said only that Shopify is investing $5 million annually to address climate change, of which at least $1 million is devoted to capturing and permanently storing atmospheric carbon.)

    Current estimates put the price of sucking carbon from the sky at about $600 for every metric ton of CO2. Oldham said he expects it to drop to around $100 to $150 per metric ton once more facilities are built. 

    Despite the potential advantages, using direct air capture to reduce a company’s carbon emissions still raises questions and concerns, Broekhoff and other experts said.

    United Airlines, for instance, recently announced plans to make a “multimillion-dollar investment” in 1PointFive, which is leading construction of the Texas facility. United said the investment will help to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. But the airline isn’t buying a share of pure sequestration; it’s backing the entire venture. So it’s unclear how much United’s money leads to “additional” carbon removal, since the project is already underway. It’s also hard to say when, or by how much, this support will translate into actual emissions reductions.

    “Investments are critical, but let’s not imagine that investing in and testing the technology is the same as actually using that technology toward climate goals,” said Simon Nicholson, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington, D.C. In a blog post, Nicholson and colleagues said the United announcement should be “applauded” as well as the subject of  “careful scrutiny.”

    Given the high cost and technical complexity of these projects, there’s also the risk that some facilities won’t be built or operate as planned. If companies invest now and subtract the captured carbon from their current footprints, they may wind up overestimating the actual results.

    a man stands in front of a big machine that fills an entire industrial space
    Carbon Engineering’s pilot plant pellet reactor and associated equipment. Carbon Engineering

    So that outsiders can gauge whether carbon removal projects are delivering on their promises, developers should provide detailed, standardized, and accessible data, according to CarbonPlan, a nonprofit in California. But that’s not currently happening, researchers there said. CarbonPlan recently evaluated dozens of proposals for nature-based and technical solutions and said it couldn’t independently validate claims owing to “missing, incomplete, or duplicative” information.

    “Without stronger disclosures, it’s almost impossible for companies — or the public — to know with confidence whether these activities are working,” CarbonPlan’s researchers wrote.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This machine in Texas could suck up companies’ carbon emissions — if they pay on Mar 29, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Report: It’s time for the U.S. to research solar geoengineering

    To avoid the most disastrous sea-level rise, storms, heat waves, and drought, the best available science says that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in half in the next decade or so and brought to net-zero by the middle of the century. 

    But even if global leaders acted to cut emissions at that breakneck pace — which none currently has — many of those catastrophic outcomes could still occur. The science of human-caused climate change is unequivocal, but the science of projecting how bad things will get, how quickly, is soaked in uncertainty.

    It’s possible that the dangers will reach a critical juncture where the world may want to consider another tool with the potential to save millions of lives: solar geoengineering, also described by scientists with the more careful and lengthy phrase “climate intervention strategies that reflect sunlight to cool the earth.”

    Deliberately changing the atmosphere to try to cool down the planet is deeply uncomfortable to think about, and many would prefer that no one did. But for the past two years, a committee of 16 people with various expertise in the physical sciences, economics, policy, law, and ethics have been sitting with that discomfort as they met regularly to develop an American research agenda for this nascent and highly controversial field of science. 

    The result of those many hours of discussion and debate is a more than 300-page guide for the U.S. government to spend at least $100 million on a new solar geoengineering research program. It was released on Thursday by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, a nonprofit that acts as an independent advisor to the federal government.

    The strategies under consideration include shooting particles into the atmosphere to increase the amount of sunlight reflected back into space and seeding cirrus clouds with particles that thin them to allow more heat from the earth to escape. These interventions could reduce global average temperatures quickly but temporarily, potentially staving off dangerous extreme weather and other effects of climate change. However, they also may inflict harms of their own and would be akin to a Band-Aid, not having any effect on the underlying cause of temperature rise — the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. 

    a diagram that illustrates three different solar geoengineering methods
    Illustration of the basic mechanisms involved in Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, Marine Cloud Brightening, and Cirrus Cloud Thinning.
    National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine

    No one involved with the report recommends that the U.S. or anyone else prepare to do solar geoengineering now, or ever. The report argues that there has not been nearly enough research on the subject to make informed decisions one way or the other.

    The committee, which was funded by several government agencies and philanthropic foundations, had two assignments: First, to identify what kind of research is needed to improve understanding of the potential benefits and risks of these interventions. Second, to make recommendations for systems of oversight that would ensure solar geoengineering research is appropriate, safe, and transparent; invite public engagement; and address any social, ethical, and legal concerns.

    Many environmental advocates have suggested that even researching solar geoengineering normalizes the idea, making it far more likely to come to fruition. Bill McKibben, writing recently in The New Yorker about a geoengineering experiment proposed by Harvard scientists, warned that such research is a distraction from the more urgent work of cutting emissions. “It’s an ominous moment in the planet’s history — and one we should back away from for now,” he wrote. (Editor’s note: McKibben is a member of Grist’s board of directors.)

    But part of the thinking behind the new report is that this research is already happening, said Marion Hourdequin, an environmental philosophy professor at Colorado College and one of the committee members. Except it’s happening in an ad hoc, fragmented way, across many disciplines, and with varying degrees of public engagement. 

    It’s also largely funded by philanthropy, which is not accountable to the public the way a government agency is. Between 2008 and 2018, U.S. solar geoengineering research received approximately $18 million from private sources and $7 million in federal dollars.

    “A research program would help draw together different strands of research and hopefully put researchers from different disciplines in conversation with one another,” said Hourdequin, “That can help ensure that we’re asking the right questions, and that the overall approach is informed by consideration of issues of justice, equity, ethics.”

    Another committee member, Lynn Russell, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said that a national research program could address a number of important questions, not just about geoengineering but also about climate change. Right now, clouds are one of the least understood factors in climate change research. “We have a lot of conflicting results about how cloud cover will change as the planet warms,” she said.

    Two possible interventions that could cool the planet involve altering clouds. In addition to thinning cirrus clouds, scientists have also proposed spraying a fine mist of seawater into clouds over the ocean to brighten them, allowing them to scatter incoming sunlight. Russell said research into cloud brightening could inform scientists’ understanding of “how much global warming will increase temperatures, and how soon, and where.”

    The report lays out a five-year research plan — which is not intended as a path to deployment. It recommends spending $100 million to $200 million over that period, to be overseen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which already coordinates research across federal agencies. In a separate report released earlier this month, the National Academies already advised the Global Change Research Program to shift its focus away from studying the effects of climate change to research that will help society prepare for the risks.

    The geoengineering report recommends a menu of basic scientific research into the atmospheric processes that would govern the proposed interventions, the possible effects interventions would have on the climate and environment, and the technical requirements for each strategy. Experiments that involve the release of particles outdoors should be subject to additional oversight, engagement, and permitting, and pursued only if there is no other way to make the same observations. The social and ethical dimensions of this research should also be studied, and a continuation of the committee’s work — further deliberation about what research it needed and how it should be governed — is recommended.

    “There needs to be a lot of feedback between the findings and what to do next,” said Russell. To enable that feedback, the committee recommends mechanisms of transparency like a code of conduct, a public registry of research, data and information sharing among researchers, and public engagement processes. Solar geoengineering is international in scope and effect, and so international collaboration should be a priority, with the research regularly reviewed by a diverse group of stakeholders, including from the nations and communities most vulnerable to climate change.

    A key facet to this feedback process is the inclusion of exit ramps, described in the report as criteria and protocols to end a research program. Based on what is learned, scientists, advisory boards, and policymakers can either decide to continue with certain lines of study, and provide more funding, or perhaps decide that the risks are simply too high, and scale it back. Hourdequin said that’s a departure from how research and innovation traditionally occur, where it’s often not until a technology has been developed that society gets to decide how and whether to use it. 

    The recommendations in the report attempt to braid social perspectives throughout the research process, she said, “so that the questions that are most salient to policymakers, to various publics, to different countries around the world — those actually inform the kinds of questions that researchers are asking, and help frame the way in which research on solar geoengineering unfolds over time.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Report: It’s time for the U.S. to research solar geoengineering

    To avoid the most disastrous sea-level rise, storms, heat waves, and drought, the best available science says that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in half in the next decade or so and brought to net-zero by the middle of the century. 

    But even if global leaders acted to cut emissions at that breakneck pace — which none currently has — many of those catastrophic outcomes could still occur. The science of human-caused climate change is unequivocal, but the science of projecting how bad things will get, how quickly, is soaked in uncertainty.

    It’s possible that the dangers will reach a critical juncture where the world may want to consider another tool with the potential to save millions of lives: solar geoengineering, also described by scientists with the more careful and lengthy phrase “climate intervention strategies that reflect sunlight to cool the earth.”

    Deliberately changing the atmosphere to try to cool down the planet is deeply uncomfortable to think about, and many would prefer that no one did. But for the past two years, a committee of 16 people with various expertise in the physical sciences, economics, policy, law, and ethics have been sitting with that discomfort as they met regularly to develop an American research agenda for this nascent and highly controversial field of science. 

    The result of those many hours of discussion and debate is a more than 300-page guide for the U.S. government to spend at least $100 million on a new solar geoengineering research program. It was released on Thursday by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, a nonprofit that acts as an independent advisor to the federal government.

    The strategies under consideration include shooting particles into the atmosphere to increase the amount of sunlight reflected back into space and seeding cirrus clouds with particles that thin them to allow more heat from the earth to escape. These interventions could reduce global average temperatures quickly but temporarily, potentially staving off dangerous extreme weather and other effects of climate change. However, they also may inflict harms of their own and would be akin to a Band-Aid, not having any effect on the underlying cause of temperature rise — the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. 

    a diagram that illustrates three different solar geoengineering methods
    Illustration of the basic mechanisms involved in Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, Marine Cloud Brightening, and Cirrus Cloud Thinning. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine

    No one involved with the report recommends that the U.S. or anyone else prepare to do solar geoengineering now, or ever. The report argues that there has not been nearly enough research on the subject to make informed decisions one way or the other.

    The committee, which was funded by several government agencies and philanthropic foundations, had two assignments: First, to identify what kind of research is needed to improve understanding of the potential benefits and risks of these interventions. Second, to make recommendations for systems of oversight that would ensure solar geoengineering research is appropriate, safe, and transparent; invite public engagement; and address any social, ethical, and legal concerns.

    Many environmental advocates have suggested that even researching solar geoengineering normalizes the idea, making it far more likely to come to fruition. Bill McKibben, writing recently in The New Yorker about a geoengineering experiment proposed by Harvard scientists, warned that such research is a distraction from the more urgent work of cutting emissions. “It’s an ominous moment in the planet’s history — and one we should back away from for now,” he wrote. (Editor’s note: McKibben is a member of Grist’s board of directors.)

    But part of the thinking behind the new report is that this research is already happening, said Marion Hourdequin, an environmental philosophy professor at Colorado College and one of the committee members. Except it’s happening in an ad hoc, fragmented way, across many disciplines, and with varying degrees of public engagement. 

    It’s also largely funded by philanthropy, which is not accountable to the public the way a government agency is. Between 2008 and 2018, U.S. solar geoengineering research received approximately $18 million from private sources and $7 million in federal dollars.

    “A research program would help draw together different strands of research and hopefully put researchers from different disciplines in conversation with one another,” said Hourdequin, “That can help ensure that we’re asking the right questions, and that the overall approach is informed by consideration of issues of justice, equity, ethics.”

    Another committee member, Lynn Russell, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said that a national research program could address a number of important questions, not just about geoengineering but also about climate change. Right now, clouds are one of the least understood factors in climate change research. “We have a lot of conflicting results about how cloud cover will change as the planet warms,” she said.

    Two possible interventions that could cool the planet involve altering clouds. In addition to thinning cirrus clouds, scientists have also proposed spraying a fine mist of seawater into clouds over the ocean to brighten them, allowing them to scatter incoming sunlight. Russell said research into cloud brightening could inform scientists’ understanding of “how much global warming will increase temperatures, and how soon, and where.”

    The report lays out a five-year research plan — which is not intended as a path to deployment. It recommends spending $100 million to $200 million over that period, to be overseen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which already coordinates research across federal agencies. In a separate report released earlier this month, the National Academies already advised the Global Change Research Program to shift its focus away from studying the effects of climate change to research that will help society prepare for the risks.

    The geoengineering report recommends a menu of basic scientific research into the atmospheric processes that would govern the proposed interventions, the possible effects interventions would have on the climate and environment, and the technical requirements for each strategy. Experiments that involve the release of particles outdoors should be subject to additional oversight, engagement, and permitting, and pursued only if there is no other way to make the same observations. The social and ethical dimensions of this research should also be studied, and a continuation of the committee’s work — further deliberation about what research it needed and how it should be governed — is recommended.

    “There needs to be a lot of feedback between the findings and what to do next,” said Russell. To enable that feedback, the committee recommends mechanisms of transparency like a code of conduct, a public registry of research, data and information sharing among researchers, and public engagement processes. Solar geoengineering is international in scope and effect, and so international collaboration should be a priority, with the research regularly reviewed by a diverse group of stakeholders, including from the nations and communities most vulnerable to climate change.

    A key facet to this feedback process is the inclusion of exit ramps, described in the report as criteria and protocols to end a research program. Based on what is learned, scientists, advisory boards, and policymakers can either decide to continue with certain lines of study, and provide more funding, or perhaps decide that the risks are simply too high, and scale it back. Hourdequin said that’s a departure from how research and innovation traditionally occur, where it’s often not until a technology has been developed that society gets to decide how and whether to use it. 

    The recommendations in the report attempt to braid social perspectives throughout the research process, she said, “so that the questions that are most salient to policymakers, to various publics, to different countries around the world — those actually inform the kinds of questions that researchers are asking, and help frame the way in which research on solar geoengineering unfolds over time.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Report: It’s time for the U.S. to research solar geoengineering on Mar 26, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Corporate climate pledges earn failing grades from investors

    A group of more than 500 investors is shining a spotlight on the companies most responsible for climate change — and least prepared to change course. On Monday, the initiative, known as Climate Action 100+, released scorecards for the top carbon-emitting companies, spanning sectors like oil and gas, electric utilities, cement, airlines, steel, and chemicals. The group, which manages more than $50 trillion in assets, found that despite the barrage of corporate climate plans in the past year, most of those promises are still largely hollow.

    The companies were assessed across nine categories of accountability; first and foremost, whether they had committed to achieving net-zero — a point where they are no longer contributing to the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere — by 2050 or sooner. Only about half of 159 companies passed that test.

    In theory, getting to net-zero by 2050 could help the world achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and avert catastrophic warming. But in reality, success hinges on the pace and scale of action along the way. Even for the companies that have committed to going net-zero, Carbon Action 100+ found that their definitions of the goal varied, with only half accounting for the full scope of their emissions. Even fewer corporate plans contained short- and medium-term targets that passed muster under the report’s criteria.

    Take BP, for example. The British oil company, which is now rebranding itself as an “integrated energy company,” has advertised its “net-zero ambition.” However, BP’s net-zero plan doesn’t cover all of the emissions that come from burning the oil it produces. And while BP has some semblance of short, medium, and long-term targets, none of those targets are ambitious enough to help the world limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). For oil companies, that’s par for the course.

    Climate Action 100+ looked at more than emissions targets, assessing companies on whether they’ve disclosed specific strategies for achieving them, as well as the transparency of their lobbying activities and trade group memberships. While BP committed to conducting its lobbying to support policies that will help achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, for instance, the company does not publicly disclose its lobbying activities, making it impossible to see if it’s keeping that promise.

    Pretty much every company failed one test — making an explicit commitment to align their capital expenditures with their emissions targets. These are their major, long-term investments, like plans to build new power plants or drill new oil wells. “The capital expenditure indicator doesn’t surprise me one bit, because this is new disclosures that we’re asking for for the first time,” said Adam Matthews, an investment officer for the Church of England Pensions Board, during a press briefing. 

    Part of the point of this “benchmarking” analysis, which Climate Action 100+ expects to do annually, is to clearly communicate what exactly investors expect of companies. Matthews said he expects the capital expenditure benchmark to look considerably different on the next report, “because it’s hard to ignore when you’ve got $54 trillion knocking on your door.”

    The strategy appears to be working so far. The Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog organization, recently reported that investor pressure from Climate Action 100+ led the top two carbon emitting electric utilities in the U.S., Duke Energy and Southern Company, to disclose more information about their trade associations. Still, important details are missing, the watchdog group writes, such as information about the companies’ direct lobbying activities, which include advocating for policies that would slow climate action. Those exceptions did not elude the Climate Action 100+ assessors, who gave both utilities failing marks on the metric of “climate policy engagement.”

    The investor group plans to expand its criteria to include a “just transition” in the next report, assessing whether each company has disclosed the impacts of transitioning to a lower-carbon business model on its employees and the communities it operates in. Some investors with Climate Action 100+ are pursuing complementary strategies on their own, like filing proposals with companies demanding specific disclosures and commitments. Those proposals will be voted on during the companies’ annual general meetings this spring. While the investors in the group have shared goals, ultimately it’s up to each member to decide whether they take further action, such as pull their investments, if companies don’t step up.

    “This is an ambition that can’t be dodged, delayed, diluted,” said Anne Simpson, director of board governance and sustainability for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, during the press briefing. “We’ve got to be clear about the net-zero ambition, and then we’ve got to hold companies accountable.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Corporate climate pledges earn failing grades from investors on Mar 22, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Students find obscure law that could make university fossil fuel investments illegal

    College students fighting to get their schools to stop investing in fossil fuels have stumbled on a new idea that could bring fresh attention to their cause: Those investments might be illegal.

    Students with the group Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard filed an official complaint with the Massachusetts attorney general’s office last Monday alleging that Harvard’s investments in oil, gas, and coal violate the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, or UPMIFA, a state law that regulates how nonprofit institutions can spend their endowment funds. The move follows in the footsteps of Boston College students who filed a similar complaint with the attorney general’s office in December. 

    “Our hope is that attorney general Maura Healey, if she chooses to take action on this, will hold Harvard accountable for its dangerous fossil fuel investments,” said Sofia Andrade, a sophomore at Harvard and one of the organizers of Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard. “And our hope is that this sends a powerful signal to other institutions about what investments are acceptable.”

    In the 56-page complaint, the students write that under UPMIFA, Harvard’s endowment managers are bound by three duties: to consider the “charitable purpose” of the institution in its investments, to invest with “prudence,” and to invest with “loyalty.”

    They allege that by investing in industries that have led disinformation campaigns about climate change, lobbied against climate action, and sold products that threaten the prospects for “a more just, fair, and promising world” — as is written in Harvard’s mission statement — the school is undermining its own students’ and faculty’s work toward a sustainable future. They also write that Harvard’s fossil fuel investments threaten its own physical property by exacerbating flooding and sea-level rise.

    Ted Hamilton is a Harvard alumnus and lawyer for the Climate Defense Project, a nonprofit that supports climate activists, who helped both the Harvard and Boston College students craft their complaints. He said another key claim in the complaint is that fossil fuel stocks have not only performed poorly in recent years but are also financially risky. The reserves of oil, gas, and coal these companies hold are what give them value, but if the world is going to avoid climate catastrophe, those reserves cannot be tapped and will become what are known as stranded assets. “So you’re not being a careful investor, you’re not acting prudently by betting that this sector is going to continue to be profitable, just because it has for decades,” Hamilton told Grist. 

    Harvard declined to comment on the complaint. Last year, the school announced it would begin transitioning its investment portfolio to “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which would apply to all companies that Harvard invests in, rather than single out the producers of fossil fuels. There’s no agreed-upon definition for what net-zero means in the financial sector, and Harvard hasn’t yet landed on a methodology. 

    Harvard University President Laurence Bacow has emphasized that the school will engage with companies to reduce their emissions rather than divest from them. The school recently disclosed that it has no direct holdings in companies that explore for or develop fossil fuels, and that its exposure to fossil fuels through indirect investments, based on available data, made up less than 2 percent of its portfolio at the end of 2020. Still, with an endowment of $41.9 billion, that’s around $838 million.

    Hamilton said Harvard’s net-zero-by-2050 target is irrelevant to the idea that these investments are illegal today. “The legal violation is occurring now and needs to be cured now,” he said. “So many other universities have already demonstrated that it’s quite simple to divest from fossil fuels, that it’s not really acceptable for Harvard to keep delaying.”

    The students’ complaint was signed by climate scientists, local elected officials, Harvard faculty and alumni, and more than two dozen environmental organizations. What happens next could have broad implications, since UPMIFA is a uniform law that every state in the U.S., except for Pennsylvania, has adopted. 

    “An investigation or any sort of action on this by the attorney general of Massachusetts has the potential to help shape climate investment law, for lack of a better term, across the entire country,” said Ben Franta, a law and doctoral student at Stanford University and a Harvard alumnus. 

    When Franta was a PhD student at Harvard in 2014, he, along with Hamilton and a few others, attempted to directly sue Harvard for its investments in fossil fuels, arguing that they amounted to a mismanagement of charitable funds. The case was dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ status as students did not give them the standing to make such charges. But this new complaint puts all the evidence in the lap of someone who does have that standing — the attorney general.

    Plus, it has the support of another important figure — Bevis Longstreth, a lawyer and former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission whose work helped inform the creation of UPMIFA in 2006. In fact, Longstreth is also the mastermind behind the students’ new strategy: About five years ago, he wrote up a legal memo arguing that divestment from fossil fuels could be justified by UPMIFA, and sent it around to several state attorneys general, asking them to issue official guidance on how endowment managers should handle the risks associated with these investments. None took up the issue. But Hamilton and his colleagues at the Climate Defense Project, who also saw the memo, did.

    “This is exactly what I thought ought to happen, at least if the attorney general will do something about it,” said Longstreth. A representative for attorney general Maura Healey’s office told Grist it received the complaint and would review it but did not provide further details about its course of action. 

    “It doesn’t take a genius to know that the world of fossil fuels is dying,” said Longstreth, “and it’s dying very fast, and it’s stupid to wait around until it’s dead before you sell your securities.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Students find obscure law that could make university fossil fuel investments illegal on Mar 22, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A border tax could clean up international emissions — or spark a trade war

    When Donald Trump stormed into the White House in 2017, he brought with him highly unorthodox ideas about how the U.S. should trade with the rest of the world. Under his “America First” trading policy, the new president instituted heavy tariffs on things like steel, washing machines, and solar panels — raising prices for imported goods, irritating trading partners around the world, and even sparking a U.S.-China trade war. By 2019, his Treasury Department was bringing in $79 billion from tariffs: double the amount from just two years earlier.

    Now, even after President Joe Biden campaigned on a platform of restoring international relationships, the Biden administration might be looking to institute some tariffs of its own — but this time, with the overheating planet in mind. According to an agenda recently released by the U.S. Office of the Trade Representative, the new administration is considering a “carbon border tax” or “border adjustment,” which could hike up the price on imports from countries that, in the view of the U.S., aren’t sufficiently addressing climate change. In Biden’s climate platform, he similarly vowed to impose “fees” on goods from countries “that are failing to meet their climate and environmental obligations.”

    In theory, that kind of border tax or tariff would put pressure on other world leaders to cut carbon emissions; it could also protect U.S. corporations as they ramp up clean energy production. But it could also be tricky to implement — and if, done poorly, could spark yet another trade war.

    The basic idea behind taxing carbon at the border is fairly simple. If a country has some sort of price on carbon domestically, the thinking goes, it should apply that same price to imports — whether of oil, steel, cement, or washing machines. That keeps cleaner domestic products from getting undercut by imports from abroad (an effect called “carbon leakage”), and motivates other countries to clean up their act. A $30 per ton carbon tax on domestic goods would become a $30 per ton tax at the border: easy peasy.

    “That’s the textbook, ‘Econ 101’ version,” said Todd Tucker, the director of governance studies at the Roosevelt Institute, a New York-based think tank. A ton of steel worth $600 from China, for example, could jump in price to $660 under a $30/ton carbon tariff. (Producing a ton of steel releases, on average, two tons of carbon dioxide.)

    Several countries are already starting down this path. The European Union has a price on carbon through its cap-and-trade system, and is planning to release plans for what it calls a “carbon border adjustment” in June. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, meanwhile, has suggested using his role as president of the Group of Seven industrialized countries to push for coordinated carbon border taxes among members.

    This approach would come with complications for the U.S. The country doesn’t have a domestic carbon tax or cap-and-trade program; multiple failures to pass such policies at the federal or state level have pushed lawmakers to look at other options to squash greenhouse gas emissions. That could make it difficult for Biden to justify any sort of program that ratchets up the price on imports — how can the administration subject other countries to a standard that it can’t meet itself?

    “It’s kind of perplexing to me that the Biden administration is floating this idea of a carbon border tax when there isn’t currently a national carbon price in the United States,” said Shuting Pomerleau, a climate policy analyst at the Niskanen Institute.

    There are potential ways around that problem. Bentley Allan, associate director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, said that the U.S. could use an internal carbon price tied to stricter regulations for sectors like transportation, industry, and power generation. It would be akin to what’s known as the social cost of carbon, a value that estimates the damages from carbon pollution (which the Biden administration recently raised to $51 a ton). That could help justify the border tax even if the U.S. doesn’t have an official price on carbon emissions across the country.

    For allies motivated to act on climate change, that could be enough. “If you’re the Europeans, you’re just thankful that Trump is gone,” said Allan. “And you’re thankful that you have a president that’s going to do something.”

    But other countries whose exports get hit with the border taxes might not see it that way. China, for example, the U.S.’s number one trading partner and the world’s largest emitter, could bring complaints to the World Trade Organization, which prohibits protectionist tariffs and could authorize China to retaliate. (After Trump instituted heavy tariffs on foreign steel, China and the European Union launched WTO challenges and retaliatory taxes against many U.S. imports, including soybeans and bourbon.)

    That’s the problem with a potential carbon border tax: At best, it could help protect critical industries during a difficult switch to green energy; at worst, it could spark a trade war that would slow efforts to cut emissions.

    “A trade war with China is not good for decarbonization,” Allan said. “They’ve done really excellent work in driving down the cost of wind and solar. To turn around and try to exclude them from the global economy at this point … it could be bad for decarbonization, because we’d have to try to recreate those cost reductions.”

    For now, the U.S. is moving slowly; experts say we shouldn’t expect a full carbon border tax proposal for at least another year or so. But the Biden administration will be facing increasing pressure in the coming months, if not to release its own proposal, at least to clean up its act enough to avoid tariffs that could be coming from the European Union, the U.K., or Canada. Biden’s special international climate envoy, John Kerry, was in Brussels last week and urged E.U. leaders to hold their carbon border tax proposal until after the next U.N. climate meeting in Glasgow in November. That would at least give the Biden administration the better part of a year to develop its own strategy.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A border tax could clean up international emissions — or spark a trade war on Mar 17, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • After championing greener building codes, local governments lose right to vote

    This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    The private consortium that oversees the model building codes for much of the United States and parts of the Caribbean and Latin America stripped local governments of their right to vote on future energy-efficiency codes earlier this month.

    The decision came more than a year after the construction and gas industry groups that wield heavy influence at the International Code Council, or ICC, objected to aggressive new energy codes for which government officials had voted.

    The change, though technical and wonky, marks what environmental advocates say is one of the most consequential roadblocks to decarbonizing the U.S. economy. It also illustrates the limits of both the new Biden administration’s powers and the causes for which activists can mobilize public support. Local governments, members of Congress, environmentalists, and architects overwhelmingly opposed the proposal.

    Under the new system, the building codes that govern energy systems and insulation ― once subject to a vote by the city and state governments tasked with implementing them ― will instead fall under a separate “standards” process that, despite soliciting input from local officials, will give industry more control over the outcome.

    The ICC said it would create a new body to help oversee the process and give government officials “the strongest voice on the committee,” promising “one-third of the seats” on that entity to “government regulators.” It’s unclear which groups would occupy the other two thirds.

    “Well, my sense is the committee will be comprised of people who have an interest in energy efficiency and building science,” Dominic Sims, the ICC’s chief executive, said in a phone interview. “So, I don’t know that there’s that big of a separation between people.”

    The committee is a significant departure from the old process, which allowed government officials from across the country — including representatives from cities’ sustainability and energy departments — to register to vote on the codes.

    Sims said it would actually hasten the transition away from fossil fuels.

    “I will say this: The impetus and the discussion around this issue is not just about the last 12 months,” he said.“Each code cycle, it’s been different. There’s been winners and there’s been losers. That sort of unevenness has not produced quick enough results, or else we’d be at net-zero already.”

    But city officials saw the move as a way for “private industry to maximize profit” and warned that it could encourage governments to shift away from using the ICC’s code.

    “This is a classic example of leaving the fox to guard the hen house,” said Kim Havey, the sustainability director for the city of Minneapolis, who cast a vote in the last code-making cycle. “City leaders and their supporters will be meeting to discuss our options. One may be to ask the White House and Congress to throw the ICC in the compost bin of history and create a new oversight body to develop an energy code that works for the benefit of the people and our planet.”

    The American Institute of Architects called the decision “a step backwards for climate action” that “will no doubt erode progress towards the modern codes that are desperately needed to heal our planet.”

    Industry groups that supported the change cheered the March 4 announcement as a victory. The American Gas Association said it “supports the new framework released today by the International Code Council and believes that the new standards process is inclusive of the stakeholders needed to help ensure reasonable, viable efficiency improvements for the built environment.” The National Association of Home Builders called it “an important change that we expect to result in a model energy code that meets the needs of consumers, builders, building officials and energy efficiency advocates.”

    In late 2019, hundreds of new government officials registered to vote with the ICC, drawing scrutiny from industry groups ― particularly the National Association of Home Builders and the American Gas Association. The last two rounds of codes, which are voted on every three years, had made only paltry 1 percent energy efficiency increases, so cities across the country enlisted more officials from sustainability, energy, and building departments to cast ballots.

    Prior to 2019, most officials had been unaware that they qualified to vote in the highly technical process but were seeking new ways to slash emissions from buildings, the top source of climate pollution in most cities. Buildings use roughly 40 percent of all energy produced in the U.S. for heating, power, and cooking appliances, and generate a proportional share of the country’s planet-heating gases.

    The government officials were clear about what they wanted. By a margin of 3 to 1, the voters whose ballots were tallied in December 2019 approved a slate of new measures to increase energy efficiency of the latest codes by up to 14 percent and require builders to include the circuitry needed to hook up electric vehicle chargers and fossil-fuel-free appliances.

    “Many local governments don’t have their own building code authority, so they are really relying on this process,” said Amy Turner, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. But now, she said, “it certainly seems that the ICC is setting the stage for an enhanced voice to be given to these trade groups.”

    Tower cranes crisscross the sky in Seattle, Washington. Karen Ducey / Getty Images

    The measures sought to codify a trend already underway. More than half of homes built from 2010 to 2017 use electricity for space heating, water heating, cooking, and clothes drying, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. In February, Seattle became the latest city to start phasing out natural gas hookups in new buildings, following San Francisco and New York City.

    The European Union already requires all buildings constructed in 2021 to be “nearly net-zero.” While industry groups warned that the stricter energy codes U.S. cities voted for risk raising the costs of building new homes, governments and advocates say adding energy efficiency retrofits to existing structures is even most expensive and politically challenging. For example, New York state proposed carve-outs earlier this year for landlords to circumvent New York City’s landmark law requiring big buildings to slash energy use in what advocates dubbed “a giant giveaway to real estate.”

    Weeks after the 2019 vote, industry groups started to push back, arguing that the new mandates were too costly. The National Association of Home Builders, which had previously called low participation rates among government officials “a real problem,” said the record turnout now amounted to “voter manipulation.” The Leading Builders of America, another construction trade group, accused “special interests” of campaigning to “manipulate” the process. The American Gas Association appealed to the ICC to overturn many of the approved code requirements.

    The ICC had long boasted that its governmental voting process left “the final determination of code provisions in the hands of public officials who, with no vested financial interest, can legitimately represent the public interest.”But it ultimately overturned some of the measures, including the requirement to ready new homes for electric vehicle chargers.

    “We had more appeals than we have ever had, enough that it postponed the publication of our energy code by about six months,” Sims said. “That’s kind of telling.”

    The ICC’s appeals board failed to find evidence to support challenges to the voters’ eligibility. Instead, the board, which included a longtime member of the National Association of Home Builders, proposed its own solution: Switching the energy code to a standard and limiting how much input government officials could have.

    “We thought maybe this topic needs to be a standard and needs to be developed through the standards methods, which would be more deliberative,” Anne Anderson, a member of the appeals board, told HuffPost in February.

    The proposal proved divisive within the ICC but narrowly passed in various committee votes. In January, when the ICC held a public hearing on the proposed change, opponents outnumbered supporters as city officials and architects pressed the nonprofit for answers on why this required an urgent change and pleaded for the executive board to abandon the plan.

    “Please, please reconsider,” Kevin Burns, the mayor of Geneva, Illinois, said during his testimony.

    “What’s the point of disenfranchising the voices of thousands of governmental members when this process has been so successful?” Christopher Chwedyk, a representative for the American Institute of Architects, asked during the hearing. “This is 100 percent unacceptable.”

    Construction workers build new housing at a development in Laurel, Maryland. Craig Hudson for The Washington Post / Getty Images)

    Federal officials had limited power over the process since ICC codes are largely enshrined into state laws. But the proposed change attracted scrutiny from the nation’s capital.

    Representative Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and chairman of the powerful House Committee on Energy and Commerce, pressed the ICC to explain why the National Association of Home Builders wields unique power over the group’s byzantine code-making bureaucracy. In a tweet the morning of Wednesday, March 3, he said he had “deep concerns over” the ICC’s “plan to silence state and local voices in the building energy code process.”

    Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Representative Peter Welch of Vermont, both Democrats, said in a letter sent to the ICC that same day that the existing system has “resulted in substantial energy savings over time” and warned that the proposed change “will likely derail and slow this progress.”

    The Biden administration echoed the concerns at the end of February. In a letter to ICC leadership, Kelly Speakes-Backman, the Energy Department’s acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, asked the code-making group to “not proceed with these proposed changes until these questions and concerns can be adequately addressed.”

    The ICC responded a day later, saying its proposed changes were “time sensitive.” A delay would be detrimental to “the adoption of the suite of I-Codes” for 2024, Sims wrote, referring to the various building codes the ICC creates. “Therefore, if the development process is to change, the process will need to be in place to realize a timely release.”

    After the ICC’s decision, Welch called on the council to “reverse its decision and refocus on a forward-looking codes process that values a consensus based approach, driving energy efficiency and resiliency for the future.

    “This decision is bad for local communities, the environment and green jobs,” Welch told HuffPost. “The ICC has decided to shelve the voices of local officials and the communities that they represent at the request of private entities looking out for their bottom lines.”

    The Energy Department said its “position remains consistent to what was outlined in the February 25 letter to ICC.”

    Unlike the hearing in January, the March 3 executive board meeting, where the ICC deliberated its final decision on the energy codes, took place behind closed doors. Sims said the 18-member executive board voted with “almost unanimity” to approve the changes. An ICC spokeswoman said it was 16 to 2.

    “We need a broader consensus and we need a more energy-efficient code,” Sims said. “We need to walk and chew gum.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After championing greener building codes, local governments lose right to vote on Mar 15, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The First 100 – Biden blows the door open to offshore wind

    The First 100

    A short-run weekly newsletter analyzing federal climate action during the first months of the Biden administration.

     

    Shannon OsakaGreetings! I’m Emily Pontecorvo, and today is Day 52 of the Biden administration. As the new president passed the halfway mark of his first 100 days in office, he opened the door to offshore wind.

    Fun fact: The wind off the United States’ shores could generate more than double our current electricity demand, according to the International Energy Agency.

    Despite that huge potential, offshore wind has been slow to take off in the U.S. The Trump administration was cold to the industry, and enmeshed the first major offshore wind proposal, Vineyard Wind, in environmental reviews and permitting delays. But on Monday, Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, released its final environmental impact statement for Vineyard Wind. The project would plant 62 turbines capable of powering 400,000 homes about 15 miles off of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

    By completing and releasing the Vineyard Wind review so quickly, the administration has effectively greased the path forward for the industry. Vineyard Wind is one of 12 offshore wind projects currently proposed along the East Coast, and the BOEM estimates that around 2,000 turbines could be spinning in the Atlantic Ocean by 2030.

    First 100

    A week after stepping into office, Biden committed via executive order to doubling U.S. offshore wind capacity by 2030. By some calculations, Vineyard Wind will single-handedly accomplish that goal once it’s built.

    There will be a 30-day public comment period before the BOEM reaches a final decision on permitting the Vineyard Wind project, which will also need approvals from the Army Corps of Engineers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If it clears those hurdles, the project could begin construction later this year.

    The industry hailed the Biden administration’s accelerated review process as a sign that, well, the wind is now at its back. Liz Burdock, head of the nonprofit group Business Network for Offshore Wind, told Politico the “announcement provides the regulatory greenlight the industry needs to attract investments and move projects forward.” The industry also received a boost in December with the extension of an investment tax credit that was passed as part of the omnibus spending bill.

    While the Biden administration makes friends in the wind industry, it may be stirring up friction with fishermen. Fishing industry groups were unhappy with the Vineyard Wind review, despite both Massachusetts and Rhode Island setting aside millions to compensate them for any losses associated with the project. The next development in the federal queue, the South Fork Wind farm off the coast of Montauk, New York, is currently stalled by negotiations with fishermen, as well as a legal battle with wealthy Long Island residents over the cable that would connect the turbines to the grid.

    But Wait … There’s More.

    After ping-ponging between the House and Senate, the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package finally arrived on Joe Biden’s desk, where he signed it on Thursday afternoon. While the bulk of the money in the American Rescue Plan is earmarked for economic recovery and public health, a few climate-friendly measures are included:

    • $30.5 billion to rescue public transit agencies, which have been devastated by the pandemic. Expanding public transit is an essential tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
    • $4.5 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program, which helps low-income families pay their energy bills and provides funding for home repairs and improvements that help reduce energy consumption.
    • $350 billion to state and local governments that could go to anything from water infrastructure to climate change resilience to broadband projects, which bridge the digital divide that threatens vulnerable communities when extreme weather strikes.
    • $100 million in funds to the Environmental Protection Agency “to address health outcome disparities from pollution and the COVID-19 pandemic.”

    Much more is expected in the way of climate and clean energy policy in an infrastructure package the administration is cooking up. The question is whether legislators can put together a bill with bipartisan support, or if they’ll again have to sneak massive legislation through via budget reconciliation.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The First 100 – Biden blows the door open to offshore wind on Mar 12, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.